by Falon Gold
“I know that, but he sent a message through a cab driver for me to stay away from work, for God’s sake.”
“Yeah, but as I said, I think he wanted you to calm down… or at least miss him. He obviously still cares or he’d have left you stranded altogether at that store. Now, he’s calling for you to come home. Doesn’t that tell you something?”
“Yes, it does. He needs a file,” I spit.
Derek sniggers.
“Seriously, Malisa, you really think he could’ve built his company into the empire it is without being able to find a file? I can imagine him pulling chunks of his hair out though when he couldn’t reach you for days, and I can promise you that he’s regretting leaving in a hurry more than you regret getting involved with him.”
“That’s a lot of regret,” I reply derisively.
“I saw the way he looked at you. He’s suffering like hell. What are your plans for the time being? You won’t stay down long if you’re true to your upbringing, and you’ll want to go back to work soon.”
I haven’t given that much thought to my future since it took a wrong turn on Sunday.
“I don’t know anything, Derek, besides staying in Colorado for however long it takes me to stop crying.”
“Laying low, nursing a broken heart until it’s less damaged, huh? You know if you stay in one place long enough, he’ll find you.”
“Mr. Ford is too busy to look for me. Why would he when there are several gold diggers masquerading as ditzy socialites who won’t think twice about spending his money, and they won’t give him a hard time while doing it?”
“How many people do you know like Ford who chooses the easy way? He wouldn’t be the man he is if he… Damn! Let me stop. I sound like I want to date him.” Derek starts to laugh, and pulls a few more snickers out of me.
“Anyway, Derek, I’m just taking some time for myself, and I don’t think you want to date someone laying low while nursing a broken heart caused by another man. But we can definitely be friends. God knows I need one of those.”
He groans into the line, “Damn! I knew I’d been friend-zoned. I shouldn’t have left you Saturday night.”
I grunt. “Apollo had blocked any moves you were going to make just by being there.”
“You love him, don’t you?”
I nod, then realize that he can’t see me. “I wish I didn’t, but I do.”
“Well, Malisa, I’ll be glad to be your friend and take you out anyway. You need a shoulder to cry on, and I can’t turn away a damsel in distress.”
“Thanks, but you’re a state over. I think letting me cry on your shoulder is well out of your way. And aren’t you working?” That’s at least one thing that I remember from our conversation Saturday night. Too bad my memory isn’t spotty when it comes to Apollo.
“Yes, I’m on a job, but I have my own plane, a Cessna, so I’m mobile at all times as long as there’s a runway. The person I’m surveilling will be here for another few days, so I could take you to breakfast and be back before my target gets up for lunch, which is usually when he wakes up after gambling away his wife’s money and throwing it at strippers.”
Derek’s offer is sweet… and it could provide a distraction from me moping over Apollo every minute of the day and night.
“Alright, you convinced me. I’ll pick you up at the airport around nine and take you to a little diner that I used to love while growing up here. Although, I’m not sure if it’s still open. The owners were old when I was little.”
He laughs, like I expected he would, his lightheartedness infectious and pushing away a little more of the gloom that’s determined to surround me.
“But all I can promise you, Derek, is that we’ll find something to eat, even if I have to cook it myself.”
“Now, you’re talking, Malisa. I can’t remember the last home cooked anything I had. I’m gone from home so much I think I have airplane ass.”
“What does airplane ass look like, Derek?” I ask, between peals of laughter.
He stops chuckling, suddenly, like he’s seriously considering the question.
“I don’t know to tell you the truth.” He really was considering it, which just makes me laugh even harder.
A pecking on the window behind me traps my laughter in my throat. Completely startled, I jerk my head around in the direction of the knock. A white man stands at the rear of the Jeep, with his hand perched on top of something strapped to his hip and a brown Stetson hat on his head. The sunlight reflects a badge pinned to the center of his hat. Then I notice his brown uniform and patrol car parked behind mine.
I squeal, “Oh God, it’s the cops!”
“What’s happening, Malisa?” Derek asks, worriedly.
“Hold on, and I’ll find out,” I say hurriedly, then roll down my window. “Yes, officer?”
“Ma’am, the owner of this motel that you’re parked in front of isn’t sure if you’re planning to rob the place or not.”
“What? No!” I jerk the phone from my ear and extend it out the window. “I just pulled over to take a call. I didn’t want to be a hazard on the road.” For various reasons, most of which I intend to keep to myself.
“That’s fine, but you’re going to have to pull over somewhere else. Mr. Lindsey is old and easily spooked,” the sheriff says, dryly.
I guess he’s taken several phone calls from a spooked Mr. Lindsey.
“Okay, officer, thank you,” I respond quickly—happy that I won’t be spending a night in jail under suspicion of attempted robbery.
Then I slam the phone back to my ear.
“Derek, I have to go. Call me when you arrive in the morning.”
I look in the side mirror at the cop who’s still watching me, while I put the truck in gear.
“Okay, Malisa, but text me and let me know you got to your parents’ safely or I’ll be worried about you, like everyone else seems to be.”
“Okay. Bye, Derek.”
I toss the phone in the passenger seat and drive away slowly, then speed up when I’ve left the cop in the distance. He appears in my rearview mirror seconds later, half a mile away. Now, I’m the one that’s spooked. Maybe he still thinks I’m a lone cat burglar targeting motels with aging owners in the snow-covered countryside.
Man, loving Apollo has taken me to some low places, I think and laugh nervously.
The last few minutes of my trip to home are uneventful, thankfully. When I finally arrive, the long driveway is filled with cars up to the side of the house. My first instinct is to believe that my parents are having a party. I hope they have enough room and food for one gate-crashing daughter who’s parking behind the last car in the driveway, leaving room for only one more. The rest of the guests arriving late are stuck with parking beside the road in the frozen drainage ditch.
I send Derek a quit text that I’ve made it home, then toss the phone in my purse, to collect with my other things. I get out of the Jeep, stuffing the keys in my jacket’s pocket, just as the cop’s car drives into the driveway then parks behind me.
Holy hell!
I stand, as frozen as the drainage ditch, beside the rental truck. The sheriff gets out of his cruiser and shoves the Stetson on his head. I wait, horrified that he’s coming to arrest me anyway, except I haven’t done anything wrong.
He starts walking in my direction.
“Ma’am, do you know these people?” he asks, with a very distrustful expression on his face.
I start to wonder if this is a prime example of racial profiling. Why can’t a black girl have parents who’ve owned a two-story, brown-bricked home for the last twenty-six years?
Since I want to know who I was going to file a discrimination report on in the local sheriff’s office in the morning, I start to scrutinize the officer. I’ve already mentally filed away the short, blond buzz cut and medium-sized ears that I managed to see before he put his hat on.
As he gets closer, the rest of his features come into view; piercing blue eyes, a chiseled jaw l
ine with cleft chin, straight nose on top of lush, pink lips, hulking shoulders over long legs that fill out his uniform nicely and puts him in the above average height category.
Something begins to nag at my conscience about his face. I swear I used to see a softer version of it five times a week at school and just about every weekend, whenever my parents babysat Blake for his parents. They were frequently jet-setting to one warm place or another without their son.
“Blake,” I shriek, thoroughly shocked that he’s anywhere near Arrow.
He promised to ship out with the Army and never return, after a heated argument with his parents. Yet, he’s here, stopping in his tracks, and frowning at me.
“Malisa?” he whispers, just as shook as I am.
I nod. He walks closer to stare down into my face like I’m some damn lab specimen. I stomp my foot, when it seems like he’s never going to accept that it’s really me. Maybe the makeover was a bad idea, after all.
“Blake, it’s me!”
His face splits wide with a grin. “Yeah, it’s you who still gets pissy quick.”
Then he opens his arms wide and lunges for me. I lunge toward him, more than ready to exchange my sisterly hug for his brotherly one, which we often gave each other whenever his parents dumped him like a load of dirty laundry on my parents’ doorstep.
His arms tighten around me. “I missed you, big city girl.”
“I missed you too, Blake, though I assumed you’d still be off somewhere other than here.”
He releases me and steps back, before I’m ready. Being in his arms or my parents’ is the same as being home. I wanted to be home so badly, to find the glue that would mend the broken pieces of my heart back together. Besides Apollo, my family are the only ones with that power.
Blake straightens the brown jacket that matches the slacks of his uniform.
“I was stationed in Japan, until my father had a stroke two years ago. I almost didn’t come back, but they begged me to.” He shrugs. “So here I am. A military cop in a small-town sheriff’s position, responding to nuisance callers and sometimes finding lost women by accident.”
I cock an eyebrow in confusion.
“Sorry about your father, and who was lost?”
“You were, Malisa. I came to file a missing person’s report for Lydia and Frank Owens. Your boyfriend called here Sunday night to see if you were here, after going on vacation. When Lydia and Frank had to say no, they got worried. I had to wait twenty-four hours before I could officially file a missing person’s report. When you didn’t turn up last night, I came to do the paperwork this morning, but you were always good at taking care of yourself.”
Oh damn! My parents called the cops, and the cop that showed up is Blake!
I twist at the waist, taking in all the cars littering the yard that probably belong to the rest of the family.
“I don’t have a boyfriend, and this is a damn search party,” I mumble, as I swivel back around to Blake.
If my missing-in-action status has gotten around this fast, I can only imagine how fast the troubles in my personal life will spread.
“Yes, Malisa, this is a damn search party and it’s good to know that you’re still intelligent. Now that you’re here, I can get reacquainted with my sister who disappeared then showed up out of thin air looking like a model. Your boss has been calling here like an overeager bloodhound who said he was your boyfriend, by the way. Any cop with his salt can tell he had some guilt in you going AWOL.” Blake’s eyes roam over me. “What in the hell have you done to yourself, Malisa?”
Yep, Blake is still the same brother that I never had, teasing me about everything right and wrong with me. A silly grin spreads across my face. I’m sort of glad that the stupid antics of his didn’t disappear with time, and I’m sort of not glad.
“I had a makeover, Blake.” And it cost me someone dear in the process who’s still claiming to be my man.
He shifts his weight to one foot and begins to rub his clean-shaven jaw absentmindedly, while propping a hand on his supporting hip.
“Well, I liked the glasses and pigtails better, but if this is what you prefer…” He waves a hand in front of me, dismissively. “…fine by—”
“You found her, Blake!” my mother screams from behind me.
I turn around just in time to see her descend the three steps of her raised front porch, at a breakneck pace. She has more gray sprinkled through the edges of her shoulder-length hair than I remember. It’s flying out around the carbon copy of my face, except my mother has always been pretty. Her features never seemed to look right on me, and I often called myself her ugly duckling. She hated that and often told me off about cutting myself down.
I didn’t stop doing it, until she threatened to spank me at the ripe old age of thirteen. She always promised I’d grow into a beautiful woman one day. Well, I don’t know if that will ever happen, but I’m definitely not her ugly duckling anymore.
I prepare for her embrace, by opening my arms wide. She crashes into me, and nearly takes us both down to the ground.
“My baby has come home! I’ve been so worried about you,” she says, before stepping back to run her hands down my arms. She’s smiling hard enough to crack her face, or at least add one more laugh wrinkle around her mouth. “Now, where have you been? And what did you do to yourself? My baby girl is gone. And why are you sad?”
“Surprise,” I say dryly instead, still not ready to tell all. At least not in front of Blake, who’ll just crack a joke at my broken heart’s expense.
Chapter Ten
Lydia purses her lips. “Surprise yourself, Malisa. Now answer my questions.”
I point toward the front door of the house. “Can I go inside first? It’s cold out here.”
The light jacket lets the wind frisk my body every time the hugs stop. Lydia’s mouth twists to the side. She plants her hands on her curvy hips draped in designer jeans enclosed in flat, black riding boots, as if she has to think about letting her only daughter through the front door of her home.
“Mama!” I shriek.
“She’s pissy again,” Blake grumbles, good-naturedly, from behind me.
Lydia starts to giggle. “I don’t have to tell you to go in your own house, sweetheart. Tell your father hello before he chokes his brother, Tommy, who’s teasing Frank about you being abducted into a white slavery ring. It doesn’t matter how much Tommy emphasizes white slavery, it just passes right over Frank’s head. Blake and I will bring in your bags to your old room.”
I’d stirred up a real hornet’s nest with just switching off my cell phone for a few days, and now the whole damn family is here. My father has two brothers and three sisters, most with kids of every age of their own. My mother, like me, is an only child. Like most kids with no siblings, Lydia wanted more children to raise on my father’s pediatrician income, but it wasn’t meant to be.
Hence Blake being loved like he was born from my parents, and it doesn’t matter to them that he’s white. We were both taught to judge people for their actions, not their skin color, and we were both subjected to Lydia’s rare spankings and regular punishments when we did something wrong.
I walk toward the house, which still looks the same after being renovated inside and out just before I left for college. I enter the front door quietly, laughter and chatter escaping from the den’s doorway just off the left of the great room that I’m walking through. The den should’ve been a guest bedroom, but with four bedrooms upstairs at the top of the staircase that’s climbing up the wall on my right, my father got a man cave instead.
The wide doorway in front of me opens into a long, narrow kitchen, which was the most cheerful place in this house when I lived here. On each side of the double farm sinks are two bay windows that let sunlight pour in, nourishing my mother’s plants spread throughout most of the first level. They’re just as old as me and Blake. Their vines grow haphazardly from tables positioned behind the couch and against the walls.
If everyo
ne that visits here knows what’s good for them, they’ll treat those plants like human beings and avoid them like the plague. Mama treats them like they’re her children, and we do well when we respect that. I take a deep breath and stand still in the middle of the deep burgundy, Victorian furniture that is for show, but not for sitting. I absorb the love that’s flooding the house right along with the sunlight.
“Daddy!” I yell. All the noise in the den ceases.
“Malisa!” he yells back.
Uncle Tommy steps into the opened doorway of the den first, laughs, and then looks back over his shoulder. “How many other people call you daddy, Frank... besides Lydia,” he quips, then turns to stare at me.
I just smile back. Tommy Owens will never change, a wannabe comedian with no filter that’s hilarious to everyone but my father, who walks up behind Tommy finally. Frank’s wide shoulders droop in relief when he sees me.
“My baby girl,” he whispers.
For a moment, daddy and I only see each other. Neither of us could ever do anything wrong in the other’s eyes. This drove my mother crazy, especially when he wouldn’t help her discipline me as a child.
“That’s not my little niece anymore, Frank,” Tommy says suddenly, breaking the spell. “That’s a woman.”
Frank’s head swings to the side to glare down at Tommy, who’s a head shorter and a whole house lighter than my father.
“Shut up, Tommy.” My father gives his usual response to anything his brother says, which is usually a joke at my father’s expense.
It’s not uncommon for all my father’s siblings to have already worked his nerves in the first few minutes of their visits, but he’d kill for all of us.
Frank elbows his way past Tommy, who chuckles wildly, as he collides with the wall outside the den. Daddy’s arms embrace me in a bear hug that often swallows up the receiver. My father’s bulky frame is intimidating until you discover the gentle giant beneath his chocolate skin. He lets Blake and I get away with murder countless times, until my mother found out about whatever we’d done, then there was hell to pay. Usually, Frank went down in flames right along with us. But he’s the only one who can swing her moods back to peaceful.