She smiled, and their glass rims made a bell-like sound as they touched them together. “This is like something—well, out of a movie,” she said.
The waiter returned with salads, set them down with a flourish and immediately vanished again.
The guy certainly knew when to get lost, Brody thought with approval, and his tip was getting bigger with every passing moment.
“This is delicious,” Carolyn said, after spearing some salad with her fork and taking a cautious nibble.
Brody laughed. “You sound surprised.”
She blushed prettily. God, he loved it when she blushed. “It’s… I’ve never been on a date like this.”
“That was the idea,” Brody said. “Don’t look now, but I’m trying to impress you.”
“Well,” Carolyn said, “you’re succeeding.” She looked at him from under her eyelashes, and a corner of her highly kissable mouth twitched. “What comes next?”
Brody pretended to be puzzled. Took another sip of his wine instead of answering. But he was thinking, You do, if I have anything to say about it.
Carolyn, so quiet before, in the car, seemed bent on conversation now. “The Bluebird has been closed for years,” she said, looking around. Her expression was nostalgic. “Tricia has a lot of old pictures of it. But surely the projector doesn’t actually work—”
“We’ll see,” Brody said.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CAROLYN WAS AMAZED, and not just by the romantic dinner, the delicate dessert to follow, or the way the popcorn machine seemed to come on all by itself, like magic.
That Brody had even thought of something like this, let alone gone to all the trouble and expense to make it happen, blew her away.
They lingered in the candlelight until it was fully dark outside, and then Brody pulled back her chair, waited for her to stand and escorted her grandly back to Kim and Davis’s car.
They drove over a couple of humps in the ground and stopped beside one particular rusted post, with a speaker attached.
“Don’t move,” Brody told her, with a twinkle in his eyes, “I’ll be right back.”
She turned to watch as he returned to the snack bar.
Sound crackled through the dented speaker on the pole outside the driver’s side window, and light spilled across the darkened lot. Once, the Bluebird Drive-in would have been packed with all sorts of vehicles on a Saturday night, every space filled, every speaker clipped onto a car window, but tonight, apparently, it was theirs alone.
True to his word, Brody returned in a couple of minutes, carrying a silver wine cooler overflowing with fresh popcorn in the curve of one arm.
He opened the car door, handed Carolyn the popcorn and got in.
Imagining what buttered popcorn might do to the gypsy skirt, she set the cooler between them, on the console. When she closed her eyes, she felt dizzy, but the instant she opened them again, she was fine.
“I didn’t have time to hunt down any of those cardboard buckets they usually serve this stuff in,” Brody explained, with a nod at the popcorn, turning and fiddling with the speaker.
Music swelled into the car, accompanied by a few stereophonic screeches, and Brody winced as he adjusted the volume.
Only then did Carolyn look toward the movie screen, now awash in motion and color and light and opening credits.
One name jumped out at her.
Gifford Welsh.
Gifford Welsh, the man who’d single-handedly ended her brief and happy career as his daughter’s nanny.
Shock washed over her, like water charged with electricity, stunning the breath from her lungs and making every nerve in her entire body sting like molten wax.
This must be what it’s like to be struck by lightning, she thought.
More nausea and another spate of dizziness followed the shock and for a moment, Carolyn was afraid she might distinguish herself by throwing up a second time, in front of the same man.
“Oh, my God—” she whispered, incapable of more.
Brody had deliberately chosen a movie starring Gifford Welsh.
And why would he do such a thing? Because he’d heard all that stupid gossip about her supposed affair with the actor, that was why. He’d set her up, suckered her in with that romantic dinner in the specially refurbished snack bar—maybe the lovemaking had been part of the joke, too—and for what? To play a cruel, sophomoric prank?
“Oops,” she heard Brody say, somewhere in the pounding void of furious humiliation that surrounded her. “Carolyn, I—”
Carolyn shoved the car door open, trembling, blinded not by tears but by injured rage. She scrambled out and immediately caught the toe of her shoe in the hem of the gypsy skirt—the beautiful gypsy skirt—and heard the fabric give way with a terrible ripping sound.
Over it all, on the gigantic screen, Gifford’s face loomed, big as a building.
He was laughing, of course.
Carolyn lifted the skirt in both hands and ran, tripping over the rough ground, finally kicking off both shoes and leaving them behind.
“Carolyn!” Brody shouted after her, his voice gruff. “Wait!”
She didn’t, couldn’t wait. She couldn’t be rational.
This was what she got, she thought hysterically, for believing she could be Cinderella, even for one night.
Brody caught up to her, took a firm hold on her arm, held her up when she would have lost her footing and taken a tumble.
“Listen to me,” he said.
Carolyn was breathing hard, coming back to herself, and feeling even more wretchedly embarrassed than before.
Brody used the side of one thumb to brush a tear from her cheek; until then, she hadn’t known she was crying.
“Shh,” he murmured, and pulled her close to him.
Carolyn struggled at first, but then she clung. She buried her wet face in his once-white shirt, smeared foundation and mascara and lipstick all over the front and let the sniffles turn to sobs.
And still Brody held her. “I’m sorry,” he said quietly, his breath brushing past her ear. “Carolyn, I’m so sorry—”
Carolyn, I’m so sorry. The words echoed through her memory, spoken by different voices.
Her mother: Carolyn, I’m so sorry, but I just can’t take care of you anymore….
Social worker after social worker: Carolyn, I’m so sorry, but the Wilsons—the Jeffersons—the Crosbys— think you’d be better off in a different foster home….
And, finally, Gifford Welsh: Carolyn, I’m so sorry. I thought you felt the same way about me as I do about you….
“I wasn’t involved with Gifford Welsh,” Carolyn said now, her voice and her breathing as uneven as the ground around them. “I was the nanny. I looked after his daughter, Storm, and I loved that child and I had to leave her because he came on to me, while his wife was away, and—and—”
“Carolyn,” Brody repeated, gripping her shoulders and resting his chin on top of her head. “Take it easy. It’s okay. Everything is okay.”
But another wave of fury crashed over her then, and she pushed back from him. “I can’t believe I trusted you again, after what you did before. What am I to you, Brody? Just another notch on the bedpost? Well, here’s a flash for you, cowboy—I’m a real person, with feelings!”
Brody didn’t say her name again. Didn’t say anything at all. He just looked at her, his hands hanging loose at his sides, that damned movie looming huge behind him like some Hollywood version of the Second Coming, and odd squeaks of dialogue and music piping from the rusty speaker disintegrating behind them.
A part of Carolyn stood back from it all, detached, silently observing that by now Brody was probably expecting her head to start spinning around on her shoulders or something.
“I want to go home,” she said, with hard-won dignity, after a few moments of awkward silence.
“Okay,” Brody said, his voice hoarse now. “Let’s go.”
He took her arm, squired her back to the car and got her settl
ed in the front seat, all without a word.
Getting in on his side, he rolled down the window, unhooked the speaker and gave it a hard toss. Then he started the car and they drove off, leaving the movie playing to an audience of ghosts and the lights burning in the snack bar.
The popcorn spilled into the backseat when they went over a bump, and Carolyn looked down at the gypsy skirt.
It was ruined, of course.
A metaphor for the evening.
A metaphor for her life.
So much for Cinderella. Brody wouldn’t be around to try a glass slipper on her dainty little foot anytime soon, that was for sure.
Carolyn waited for Brody to ask if she’d seen her shrink lately, or maybe forgotten to take her medications, but he didn’t say anything at all.
“I might have overreacted a little,” she finally said, hollowed out by all that searing anger, when they pulled up in front of Natty McCall’s house.
“Ya think?” Brody asked mildly, and without a trace of humor.
He got out of the car, walked around to her side, opened her door.
Barefoot, except for her ruined panty hose, she clasped her purse—by some miracle, she’d managed not to lose it—to her bosom and walked as regally as she could across the sidewalk and the grass to the stairs leading up to her apartment.
Brody saw her to her door, but despite the lack of space on the tiny landing, he somehow maintained a little distance between them. A muscle bunched in his jaw, but the expression in his eyes was one of pain, not anger.
“You’ll be all right now?” he asked, like he wasn’t sure it was safe to leave her in her own company.
Carolyn bit her lower lip, nodded. “Yes,” she said.
He held out one hand, palm up, and for just a second, Carolyn thought it was an attempt to make peace. Fortunately, she realized he wanted her house key before she made an utter idiot of herself all over again by giving him her hand instead.
Brody unlocked the door for her, pushed it open. Handed the key back once she was over the threshold, and facing him.
Winston, who’d most likely been watching from the windowsill, jumped down with a solid thump of cat meeting floor, but he didn’t hiss at Brody the way he normally would have done, or bristle out his tail.
He actually purred, and looped himself around the man’s boots a couple of times in greeting.
Brody didn’t acknowledge Winston; he was gazing straight at Carolyn. His throat worked, and the pain in his eyes, visible even though she had yet to turn on the overhead light in the kitchen, matched the dull ache lodged in the center of Carolyn’s chest.
“Good night, then,” he finally said.
“Good night,” Carolyn choked out, with great ef fort.
Then Brody turned to leave, and Carolyn shut and locked the door between them. Flipped on the lights.
Winston meowed, looked up at her.
She made herself take a good look at the gypsy skirt.
Yep, it was in tatters. A total loss.
Numbly, Carolyn went into her bedroom, exchanged Cinderella’s ball gown for jeans and a T-shirt and boots and returned to the kitchen.
“I’ve done it now,” she told Winston, rummaging in the cupboards for the box of ginger tea. Her stomach was doing flip-flops.
Winston leaped back up onto his windowsill. “Reow?” he asked.
She patted his head, smiled sadly. Her eyes felt swollen, though she hadn’t cried that much, and she probably had makeup smeared all over her face, and heaven only knew what her hair looked like by now, but none of those things mattered, because it was the same old story. Déjà vu all over again.
She’d been a sucker for a fantasy, allowed herself to believe in fairy tales. For just one night, she’d wanted to be a princess.
Was that so wrong?
Carolyn forgot about the ginger tea, opened another cupboard door and began taking down souvenir mugs, one by one.
Disneyland. The Grand Canyon. Independence Hall. The Alamo.
She’d never been to any of those places, but she could have described a family vacation to each one of them, complete down to the weather what meals she’d eaten at which restaurants. There would have been lots of pictures to anchor the memories, and choosing which one to put on the front of the annual Christmas card would certainly be a challenge.
At least she hadn’t sent herself postcards, she thought ruefully, her eyes burning with another crop of tears.
In all, there were over two dozen mugs in her pitiful collection.
She’d been—all by her lonesome—to exactly three of the places represented: Boise, Idaho, Virginia City, Nevada, and Reno. Not even Las Vegas, for Pete’s sake, but Reno.
It was pathetic.
Well, she was through pretending. Through with fairy tales. Through trying to be anybody other than Carolyn Simmons, the foster kid all grown up, with no family and no history and certainly no happy vacations to look back on.
Not that she felt sorry for herself—if anything, she was angry.
Maybe Brody had set her up tonight, and maybe he hadn’t.
Either way, she’d acted like a maniac, and he’d avoid her from now on.
Which was probably a good thing.
Carolyn picked up the cup from Disneyland, recalled buying it in a thrift shop somewhere in her totally unremarkable travels and dropped it into the trash can, where it made a satisfying clunk sound.
Winston looked at her curiously, but did not seem overly concerned by her strange behavior.
That made one of them.
She dropped in the mug from the Grand Canyon next, and, striking its counterpart from Disneyland, it shattered.
By the time she’d finished, she had three cups to her name.
They were nothing fancy, but at least they commemorated places she’d actually been to once upon a time.
She’d always heard that breaking dishes could be therapeutic, and it seemed there might be something to that theory, because she’d begun to feel just a touch better than she had before, even though her head still ached and her stomach was still twitchy.
It was a rite of passage, getting rid of those cups, Carolyn decided, briskly lifting the heavy trash bag out of the bin, tying it closed and carrying it down to the larger bin next to Natty’s detached garage.
Step one to becoming the real Carolyn Simmons.
Whoever the heck that was.
CONNER WATCHED with a wry expression in his eyes as Brody took a beer from the ranch-house fridge, popped the top and poured some down his throat.
The kitchen was dimly lit—Tricia was in bed, probably asleep, and Conner had answered the knock at the back door muttering, hair all messed up and clad only in a pair of sweat pants.
“What happened to your shirt?” he asked, taking in the large, colorful smudge on Brody’s chest. A pensive frown followed. “Or is that my shirt?”
“Carolyn’s face rubbed off on it,” Brody replied, raising the beer can in a grimly humorous salute.
Conner helped himself to a beer of his own and padded over to the table where generations of Creeds, men as well as women, had carried on late-night conversations like this one.
“Sit,” he said to Brody.
Brody took time to grab a second beer, for backup, before he sank into a chair.
“How did Carolyn’s face happen to rub off on your— my—shirt?” Conner asked mildly. Brody saw amusement in his brother’s eyes, along with a generous amount of sympathy. That last part pissed him off.
“It isn’t your shirt,” Brody bit out. “I bought it two years ago, in San Antonio.”
“Whatever,” Conner said affably. Then he sighed and went on. “I’ve figured this much out on my own—the big movie date must have been a bust for some reason,” he said, “but you’re going to have to help me out with the rest, if you want me to understand.”
Brody drained the first beer, reached for the spare, decided to wait until some of the carbonation in his stomach fizzled out an
d drew his hand back empty. Shoved it through his hair. He’d stopped by the lodge after the debacle with Carolyn to pick up Barney before heading for the home-place, and that poor dog probably thought he’d fallen in with a crazy man.
Not that he seemed particularly shaken up, old Barney, bunking in with Valentino over by the stove as he was. The two of them just fit on the dog-bed, and they were both sound asleep.
Must be nice, Brody thought, figuring he’d never sleep again.
Conner snapped his fingers a few inches in front of Brody’s nose. “Talk to me,” he said. “You got me out of a warm bed, with an even warmer woman, and you owe me a reason.”
Brody chuckled. “You want me to tell you what happened,” he said.
“Basically,” Conner answered dryly, “yeah. That would be a start.”
“I’ll be damned if I know,” Brody answered. “One minute, we were having a great time, Carolyn and me. Wine, fancy food, a waiter—we had everything but a string quartet playing smooch music. Then it came time to watch the movie, and all hell broke loose.”
Conner’s expression was skeptical to say the least. “Come on, Brody. You’re not seriously trying to tell me you don’t know what happened? You were there, damn it.”
“Must have been the movie,” Brody said, reconsidering that second beer. Might as well down it, he thought. He wouldn’t be driving back to River’s Bend tonight anyway. Nope, he and ole Barney, they were spending the night.
“What was wrong with the movie?”
“It starred Gifford Welsh,” Brody said.
“Oh, my God,” said Tricia, from the doorway to the hall.
She was barefoot, dressed in one of Conner’s shirts and pregnant out to here.
“I tried to tell her it was an accident,” Brody explained, “but she just lost it. Started babbling on about gossip and how she never had an affair with the guy—”
Tricia threw both hands up in the air, for emphasis. “Honestly, Brody,” she exclaimed. “Do Conner and I have to watch you every minute?”
He reddened a little, and stiffened his spine, avoiding Conner’s gaze because he knew he’d see laughter there. “How was I supposed to know she’d go off like that? Decide I’d chosen that movie on purpose…?”
The Creed Legacy Page 27