by Lisa Preston
“Is something else on your mind, Lena? Here, we can be comfortable talking about anything.”
“Girl stuff. The man I’ve been seeing.” Hoarseness covered something like shame or unbearable stress.
Caroline had the distinct feeling of almost seeing the light with her subordinate’s hints. Now Lena whispered something about people who snipe at others, building themselves up by tearing others down. She guessed the woman on the other side of the table was guessing, too, making a leap of logic.
Scooping the last bit of dark chocolate sauce onto her fork, Caroline made it plain. “He’s married?”
Lena winced as she admitted the truth with a nod. She’s blushing, Caroline decided, looking at Lena long enough to watch the woman’s color deepen.
The metal chair scraped the tile floor like fingernails on a chalkboard as Lena tucked herself all the way into the table. “Have you ever known someone you experienced the ends of the spectrum with?”
“That would be my first husband,” Caroline replied promptly. She was not normally given to a lot of girly chat and sharing with acquaintances and less-close friends, but neither was she the sort of woman who shuns someone seeking friendship or connection. In her few days on the job so far, Caroline paid due attention to the wavy line between personal and professional, friends and personnel. She wanted to mention Lena to Bella, gauge the response. Her guess was that Bella didn’t actually know Lena well. Bella was just so friendly and had been in this little town so long, she seemed to have a passing acquaintance with everybody.
Lena nodded, then blinked as though remembering something she’d forgotten. So, Caroline wondered, had Bella told Lena about Caroline’s first life, how her husband had stolen Maddie, slipped away for two decades and how Caroline nearly went mad with pain? No, Bella didn’t tell. The place a child holds in a mother’s heart was universal, yet personal, not a thing to thrust in front of others, but a gift to keep close.
Lena had things to say, however. She was searching. Wait, Lena was talking about trying to get close to her boyfriend’s wife.
“Lena, you’re saying you pretended to befriend her?”
“No, I sort of … well, in a way. Kind of. Said hi, asked her about her day and stuff, that sort of thing.”
“Why?”
“You know, sort of the ‘enemy of my enemy’ thing. I mean, the friend of my friend. I mean … you know what? I don’t know what I mean. But I did try with her, even though it was a risk to be her friend.” She looked down, away.
Before Caroline long considered the woman’s words and attitude, she set down her fork. “Are you happy with what you’re saying?”
“No, okay?” Lena acquiesced, needing to ask as well. “But don’t judge me, all right?”
“Why ever shouldn’t I?”
Startled by the response, Lena hesitated. “You shouldn’t judge anybody. No one should.”
“Who told you that? It’s simply not true, at any rate. We assess people and situations all day, every day, and we’re better for it every time we make good assessments.” Caroline lifted her chin, not high enough for rudeness, but sure of her argument.
Lena brought a pink box of Emma’s cookies in to share the next day, leaving it in the bank’s little employee break room. She fluttered her hands, offering the treats to any takers, and the tellers descended on them like crows.
“That was lovely,” Lena said in an aside to Caroline as she turned to go back to her desk. “A little after-work relax time is such a great recharge.”
An uncomfortable admission or two over dessert notwithstanding, Caroline thought.
“The teacher’s pet already, I see.”
Caroline turned and saw her head teller frowning by the coffeepot. She couldn’t let Shirley’s smirking comment about the head of the loan department go unnoticed. She summoned Shirley to her private office and braced herself to hear another version of the friction between Shirley and Lena.
“It’s best to maintain a professional decorum,” Caroline began. “There’s no special treatment or favors. Let’s put an end to any griping. Your work is fine here and Lena’s is fine.”
“Right.” Shirley’s curtness begged for more soothing.
“Let it go, all right? I’m aware that she was a teller under you and that you applied for the promotion, but she is the new head of the loan department. It is her job, not yours. You will have other opportunities.” She waved the woman to her office door, ready to be free of a sulking presence.
“Well, my qualifications are real, not that I’m stacked,” Shirley said. Caroline whirled but was cut off with the rest of Shirley’s blurt. “I didn’t get my job on my back.”
Caroline blinked. “Pardon?”
“Oh, nothing.”
“Oh, there’s no ‘nothing,’ you can be sure. Please sit down.” Caroline wanted to let her prior warning stand, but she had to add to it now. She stepped past Shirley. Her glass office wall displayed meetings to every teller, every customer in line for service, unless the blinds were closed, which invoked more gossip than any meeting should.
“I’d rather not.”
Caroline felt her face redden. This was double-tough, this being the boss bit, with problem employees. She indicated her visitor’s chair. “Shirley, I am not entertaining debate over your preferences on the matter. Take a seat.”
Shirley rolled her eyes but obeyed when Caroline pointed again and closed the door.
“Please explain your comment.”
“Lena carries on with the boss, that’s all.” Shirley’s blurt sounded petulant, a child crying no fair. “She’s only got online degrees from diploma mills anyway.”
Well. Across the lobby was Harold Brayton, perhaps Lena’s sometimes lover. His office blinds were open, but he sometimes closed them. Caroline leaned back and stared at Shirley, then glanced to ensure no one else had heard through her office door. No, tellers were counting and stamping papers, the loan officer was bent over two folders’ worth of papers, and one customer waited in line.
“You will not speak of any affair again, at all, while you work for me. You will not. Are we clear?”
Her head teller stiffened. “Yes.”
Caroline wanted to dismiss the information even as something unknown niggled in her mind. So. So, Lena had gotten the plum job, but if Shirley’s mean-spirited whispers about Lena and the boss were true, an affair with the boss was involved. She tried not to view the other woman with new eyes. She’d have to allow the right amount of intimacy and friendship within a working relationship.
“It’s a coven in there,” she told Malcolm when he asked how her job was going.
He roared. Their lives were organized, but it had taken so long to get to this point. Why was it such a challenge for so many people to get matched up? She thought about interpersonal competition and all that was hidden.
By Friday afternoon, Caroline was ready for the workweek to be over and thought the weekend wouldn’t be enough time to recover. She’d hoped to get away for a lunch with Bella, but they never set a time and Caroline worked through. When she saw Bella enter the bank lobby, Greer in tow, it was the high point of her day. She stepped out of her office, almost running into her boss.
“Oh, excuse me,” they said together.
He did a double take, his gaze switching between the customers who’d just entered and his new branch manager. Then Harold Brayton nodded and headed for his office.
“Hey, what’s the matter with you?” Bella asked Greer, grabbing his arm to keep him with her.
Caroline turned and looked fully at mother and son. Greer had stopped dead, resisting his mother when she tried to tow him along farther into the bank.
“Greer?” Bella said. “Come say hi.”
“Hello, Greer,” Caroline called. He was such a sweet boy. She and Bella talked about how adorable it was that he wanted to be just like his dad, just like his big brothers. He was a helper. Bella told her he’d recently taken it upon himself to help out
with laundry, for instance. How darling was that?
Bella leaned to hand Caroline an envelope, while Greer tugged on his mother’s other hand, pulling for the door. “Music ideas from Frankie. Cake thoughts from Emma.”
“Thank you.” Caroline brightened, a moment of personal pleasure outshining work. She glanced at Greer and frowned. The boy’s face was ashy, sweaty. Was he overwarm in that camo jacket over his jeans and T-shirt? Caroline wondered if he’d been getting car sick on the drive.
Greer yanked free of Bella and ran out of the bank.
“Goodness. ’Bye,” Caroline said as Bella flew out the door after her boy, calling an apology over her shoulder.
As she headed back to her office, Caroline’s laughter fused with amazement at how Bella had it in her to raise a youngster. She and Malcolm were beyond child-bearing, though they’d discussed the idea for the sake of thoroughness. He’d have liked to have had them, he said, when he was younger, but not now. They were in their mid-fifties and it was too late. She agreed. Maddie was her first and last child, plenty old enough to be a mother herself. Caroline waited for a grandchild without pressuring her daughter on the subject.
Someone touched her arm and she turned to see her boss.
“You know them?” he asked, his baritone voice lower still as he gestured to the empty lobby where the woman and boy had come and gone.
“Oh, yes, that was my good friend Bella and her son Greer.”
He paused, nodding thoughtfully. “Bella. Greer.”
“Yes, the Donners. My daughter is married to one of her adult sons, Doug.”
“She’s got adult kids and that boy … Greer.” He nodded again. “I could use a hand with things like raking leaves and lawn mowing. Odd jobs. Good work for a kid.”
“Well, he’s only eight but we could ask,” Caroline said. She waved out the window, where Bella sprinted past, now trying the other direction to find her son.
CHAPTER 8
Bella peered into store windows as she speed-walked down the sidewalk, looking for Greer. As soon as she’d cleared the bank’s doors, her last glimpse was of her son scurrying like a bunny down the street and taking the next corner.
She stood at an intersection, casting about in every direction. Where in the world had he run off to? The park? Emma’s bakery? One of his buddies’ homes? The latter thought left her summoning a mental checklist of the boys who lived in town, whom he knew less well than the playmates who lived nearer their rural home. Once she found Greer, she could dial in on what she wanted to work on, which was why he’d run off in the first place.
His teacher had called two weeks earlier because she suspected a forged signature on the note she’d sent about Greer falling asleep in class. Bella felt her annoyance bubbling over, irritation spitting out. She’d kept the evenings quiet, put him to bed early, but he was still hard to get up in the mornings and frankly, a bit of a toad.
Walking down the next block, peering into storefronts, and wracking her mind, she decided to give up the foot chase and go back to her car.
Had five minutes passed? Ten? She tried not to slip into full-blown worry mode. She’d surprised him at school, picking him up instead of him taking the bus home. He didn’t know she’d had a call from his teacher. Arriving just before school let out, she learned he’d been surly, earning demerits in class that morning. And that afternoon. And the day before. She’d planned to talk to him and spend time with him, just the two of them.
He’d been a bit neglected, perhaps, with so much going on in the family. Some weekends it was a full house with everybody’s lives wide open. There had been so much going on. Ben and Ryan were trying to get approved as a foster family. Clara and Wes were talking about buying a condo in Kauai. Doug and Maddie returned to Vancouver Island at intervals for her to work at a remote First Nations dig. Emma was half in, half out, always talking about the dying bakery. Caroline and Malcolm’s coming wedding was a huge distraction. Frankie was on the verge of scoring some kind of major gig, stuck in Los Angeles for an eternity. And some weekends, it was just her and Ardy and Greer. Sometimes she thought Greer was trying to turn himself into a little Donner man early. She wanted to keep her last little boy as a real little boy a bit longer.
Bella paused, foot on the car’s brake before swerving into the nearest parking space.
Greer stood with his back against the trunk of a Sitka spruce at the edge of the town’s park, one hand gripping the front of his shirt at his sternum. The tree’s lower limbs were pruned away for traffic visibility, but the upper branches reached down, sheltering the one she’d named in her womb.
Ardy would have blessed naming the child anything imaginable, he was so happy to be reconciled, to raise this one under the same roof. Their years as the best divorced couple had done everything to prepare them to rear this last boy. Life fell beautifully into place, wrinkle-free. Theirs was an existence as perfect as it gets, raising their young son as middle-aged parents. She studied the boy now and her smile faded.
Greer looked odd. Ready and watching, yet trying to be unnoticed.
“Am I in trouble, Momma?”
“No, Greer, you’re not in trouble.” She reached for him, and although he didn’t return the gesture, he didn’t pull away when she took him by the hand.
He was near tears. “I shouldn’t have left you. I’m sorry.”
“Okay. Why did you run off like that?”
“I don’t know.”
“Can you give me a better answer?”
He looked down. “I thought I was going to be sick.”
She held the back of her hand against his forehead. A bit warm.
He let her lead him all the way to the car and didn’t protest when she opened the door and shut him inside. Before getting into the driver’s seat, she counted to five, trying to consider everything. Handling his running off, well, it didn’t need to be a big deal. But she didn’t want to miss anything either. They’d missed things with their older kids, back when those kids were … children. Oh, they’d missed things. Think of Emma. But just look at her now, lovely and long past winning her battle with sugar and fat. These days she lorded it over her old seduction, took pleasure in offering pink boxes of delights, watching flaky, powdery treats get snatched up. But childhood? Poor Emma. And poor Ben and poor Frankie too, in different ways. With Greer, they’d done everything right.
“I’d like an explanation, Greer.”
It was as though he was pretending not to hear her, but different somehow, like a desperation of sorts or an unnamed distraction had grabbed his attention, his very being. Or was she making excuses for him in her own mind? Parents did that, failed to see bad behavior for what it was.
Bella frowned and touched her son’s shoulder. “Talk to me.”
Greer shook his head.
“That’s a really poor answer, Greer. It’s not respectful.” She got nothing. She couldn’t tolerate this bolting and sulking business for long. What in the world was going on in his little head? “Put your seat belt on.”
He obeyed. She took him to their doctor’s office and waited the hour and a half it took to break in on their pediatrician. In minutes, the doctor pronounced Greer the healthiest boy he’d seen all year.
At home, she pointedly left her seat belt on and clasped her palm over his small hand when he reached to release his buckle. “Are you keeping something from me?”
His eyes went wide and his body seemed to coil. Ready to pounce—no, flee. His lips never parted.
Bella tightened her hand over his seat belt buckle. “Tell me. Now.”
When he reached for the car’s door handle and looked like he’d try to worm out of his seat belt, she released the buckle and held his shirt collar with her right hand, twisting to seize the waistband of his jeans with her left.
“Greer, I think you are keeping something from me and I don’t want you to keep anything from me. Tell me. Tell me now.” She watched him swallow, watched him weigh his choices. “Do you have a
secret?”
He wouldn’t look at her.
Aha. She prompted again, softening the grip of her right hand into a stroke while hooking the fingers of her left hand through his jeans’ nearest belt loop. Laying it on about how they were not getting out of this car until he talked and how he was not to keep things from her or Papa, she kept her voice light, but insistent. “You know exactly what your papa would say about this, young man. In this family, we talk to each other.”
He studied his knees.
Well, dammit. “Greer, you may nod your head yes or shake your head no. I am going to ask you something and you will answer me immediately. Yes or no. Do you have a secret?”
He ducked his chin down, barely raising it to qualify as a nod.
“Let’s go inside.” She released her hold and waved him inside, keeping an eye on him, but her voice light as they went inside.
“Okay, mister. Let’s hear it.”
He looked at her, wordless.
“Greer, this secret you’re keeping from me? Now you have to tell me.”
He swallowed, looked away, then turned away.
She grabbed his shoulders, spun him to face her, snapped her fingers in his face. “Who told you this secret?”
He shot glances around the great living and dining room. She pointed to the sofa, and after he sat, snuggled in beside him, wrapping both arms around his tense body, kissing his hair. “Sweetie, you can tell me anything, always. I promise. And we always keep our promises, don’t we?”
“We keep our promises.” He sounded like a robot.
She frowned at his odd tone. “Please tell me now who told you a secret.”
Her little son croaked, then peeped a syllable. “Doug.”
She cocked her head, thinking.
He sat up straight, nodding, his face red. “Doug told me a secret. And I won’t tell anyone.”
She pursed her lips. Well, he kind of had her now with Doug and Maddie on the island—she called it her island—unreachable for a while. She hugged him again, told him he could go, then watched him slink out of the room, frowning when he headed for his bedroom instead of the barn or anywhere outside to play.