Lightning Storm

by Anne McAllister

  ‘Addie’s sure gonna be glad to see you,’ Scott told her as they got underway. ‘She’s been wantin’ to come home forever. When she comes home we’re gonna play trucks, and I’m gonna play her piano instead of her havin’ to play for me, and I’ll play her lots of games of Snap before I go to school. D’you play Snap?’ He cocked his head with sudden interest, as though sizing up a potential partner.

  ‘I am a whiz,’ Torey told him. ‘It sounds like you and Addie have a grand time.’ It sounded like they were together every waking moment. Where was Jake? And his wife?

  ‘We do,’ Scott replied. ‘We played together every morning ‘til she had her operation.’

  ‘Every morning?’ Torey probed. How convenient for Jake—a built-in babysitter. It figured. Still no sense of responsibility. She edged slightly away from the taut blue jean clad thigh only centimetres from her own.

  ‘Yeah, I miss her,’ Scott let out a Jong, agonised sigh, and Torey found herself wanting to giggle. ‘It’s good you’re here ‘cause you can teach her to walk with her new knee. Dad said nobody else knew how. You must be pretty smart,’ Scott reflected. ‘Besides bein’ pretty,’ he added. ‘My dad thinks you’re—’

  ‘Show Torey where you go to school,’ Jake interrupted, and Scott’s attention veered as he pointed out the low tan buildings they were just passing on the left.

  Your dad thinks what? Torey wondered, but she wondered in vain for the next thing Scott said was, ‘Addie said you had a farm. Can you milk a cow?’ and her descriptions of the farm that she and Paul had been buying kept them going conversationally until Jake pulled into the parking lot outside a Spanish style building with a splash of burgundy coloured bougainvillaea climbing the walls and said, ‘Here we are. Calling in all bets. Is your money on the kitten or the cow?’

  Torey laughed. ‘How about just a monumental fit of impatience? That ought to just about sum it up if I know Gran.’

  ‘About time,’ Addie Harrison said, her normally steady voice wavering slightly as she looked her beloved granddaughter up and down. ‘Don’t just stand there. A hug hasn’t broken me yet.’

  And Torey, tears shimmering, flew into her grandmother’s arms, sinking to her knees before the wheelchair and laying her head against Gran’s breast. For the moment Jake Brosnan totally disappeared. There was only Addie in the room—Addie who had sized Paul up the day of the wedding and nodded her head. ‘You’ll do, young man,’ she had said. ‘I couldn’t have picked a finer one than you.’ Torey felt her grandmother’s arms tighten around her, a hug of welcome, a hug of comfort. She knew Addie, too, was remembering her last visit to Galena when Torey and Paul had been married just a year. ‘You’re a lucky woman,’ she had told her granddaughter then. ‘He’s a keeper, just like your grandad was. Seeing marriages fall apart right and left, I’m just so glad all’s well with you.’

  Torey sniffed and dabbed ineffectually at her eyes, pulling back slightly and looking up into the dear, familiar eyes, suddenly aware of other people in the room. Gran’s eyes smiled into hers a second longer before lifting to share her joy with other eyes. Jake’s.

  Torey struggled to her feet, feeling awkward, wishing the eyes watching her were anyone’s other than his. But when she glanced at him she saw neither the indulgent amusement or mocking grin that she anticipated, but a look of tenderness that unnerved her. Hurriedly she looked around for Scott.

  He reappeared with a glass of lemonade in his hand. ‘You done cryin’ now?’ he asked. ‘Dad said to scram while you ...’

  ‘Dad should have said to keep your mouth shut too,’ Jake said gruffly, rapping his knuckles softly on the boy’s fair hair.

  ‘Nonsense,’ Addie said. ‘Out of the mouths of babes and all that.’

  ‘Exactly what I’m afraid of,’ Jake retorted, grinning.

  ‘Has Jake helped you get settled in?’ Gran asked Torey.

  ‘Oh, uh, yes. I really don’t need much help,’ Torey said quickly.

  ‘I’m sure Jake must be very busy’—with whatever he was “involved in” now, she thought—‘and I can easily ! manage without him.’

  ‘Well, I can’t,’ her grandmother said flatly. ‘I don’t know what I would do without Jake.’

  Torey groaned inwardly. All she needed was to hear what a paragon Jake Brosnan was.

  ‘He shops for me, he weeds for me, he walks Maynard for me,’ Gran catalogued. ‘He can fix plumbing and change fuses and...’

  ‘And I’m housebroken, too,’ Jake said with an almost sheepish grin. ‘She’s president of my fan club,’ he explained, winking at Gran.

  ‘With a membership in the thousands, I’m sure,’ Torey said more sharply than she intended. After all he probably didn’t put the make on little old ladies. Gran’s infatuation with him, at least, could be excused.

  ‘Oh, at least,’ he answered airily. ‘Want to sign up?’

  ‘I’m afraid I’m a bit more choosy than that.’

  ‘Victoria!’ Addie exclaimed, shocked, and Torey felt her cheeks redden. Why couldn’t she just be polite and indifferent to him? Why did she have to leap at his baited hooks like some dumb fish? It was as though nothing had changed from seven years ago. Could she never stop acting like a besotted adolescent around him?

  ‘Excuse me,’ she apologised demurely. ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’ She cast a desperate glance towards the door, not completely disguising her wish to bolt through it and get away from him, when she heard Jake say to her grandmother, ‘My fault, really, Addie. I shouldn’t tease.’

  Just what she needed, him taking the blame for her own rudeness. Damn the man! Torey shoved her hair back over her shoulder and said with forced lightness, ‘Scott says that you two play together in the mornings.’

  ‘Every day,’ Gran agreed. ‘He keeps me on my toes.’ She ruffled the small boy’s hair. ‘We have a good time, don’t we?’ she said to Scott.

  ‘Super,’ Scott agreed. ‘And can she cook! Did she make you those good raisin cookies when you were little?’ he asked Torey.

  ‘Definitely,’ Torey told him. ‘Even mailed them to us after we were married...’ Her voice drifted off, oddly reluctant to talk about her marriage to Paul in front of Jake. He seemed to watch her so intently. When Scott had asked about milking the cows, in the car, and she had been explaining about their farm, Jake’s whole body had tensed rather like Maynard when he spotted an intruder. She sensed the same thing now, a tautness and an intensity that unnerved her.

  ‘We’ll make some more when I get home,’ Addie promised. ‘And Torey can help. Would you like that?’

  ‘What about Dad, can’t he?’

  ‘I have to work,’ Jake said, and Torey wondered what he was doing these days. Seven years ago he had been a graphic artist for a large advertising firm. She remembered once plucking up enough courage to ask him a direct question, was he a flight test engineer like Mick? And he had laughed. ‘Hardly,’ he had said. ‘I draw breath mints.’ She had stared, astonished, and he had laughed again with a scorn that she didn’t think was entirely directed at her, and then he shrugged, explaining, ‘I draw ads. I’m an artist—of a sort.’ And apparently he didn’t think much of the sort of artist he was. Finding out, though, had shed some light on one of his more curious habits. Very often that summer she had seen him on the beach with a sketchpad in his hand. Sometimes he would be down early, close to the shore watching the birds darting through the tide; at other times she would see him watching a volleyball game, making quick rapid strokes on a pad of paper; and now and then she found him on the crest of sand above the high tide mark where he could see the line of surfers far out, a hand shading his eyes as he glanced from the tiny figures on their boards to the sketches he was making. Those were the times, she knew, when drawing breath mints was the farthest thing from his mind. Was he still drawing them? she wondered.

  ‘Jake is an illustrator,’ Addie explained. ‘Children’s books, mostly.’ She motioned to Scott to fetch one off her bedside table. ‘I sent Debbi
e’s little girl his latest last Christmas.’ And Scott handed Torey a copy of Tracy’s favourite, most dog-eared book, one that Auntie Torey had read to her several thousand times.

  ‘You’re that James Brosnan?’ she asked, astonished.

  Jake’s cheekbones flushed, and he cleared his throat with a nervousness that almost made her smile. He seemed nearly as uncomfortable acknowledging this as he had the breath mints! ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Your books are wonderful,’ Torey told him, and there could be no doubting the sincerity in her voice. The one she was holding was an Irish folk tale retold by an excellent children’s author and illustrated in droll water colours and pen-and-ink drawings with just enough caricature to muse without the distortion that would mask the humanity of the characters. It was a very long way from breath mints, and Torey could scarcely believe that the Jake Brosnan she had known was the man who had drawn them.

  ‘Thanks.’ He ducked his dark head in the way of a small boy receiving an unaccustomed compliment, and when he lifted it he was grinning. ‘Change your mind about the fan club?’ he asked irrepressibly.

  Torey laughed. ‘I’ll think about it.’

  ‘That’s promising,’ Gran said. ‘I think you should press your advantage, Jake. Take her to dinner.’

  ‘What? But, Gran, I ...’ Torey began.

  ‘Great idea,’ Jake said. ‘D’you like pizza?’

  ‘Yes, but...’

  ‘Oh boy, pizza!’ Scott exclaimed.

  ‘You don’t need to...’

  ‘Of course he doesn’t need to. He wants to,’ Addie said authoritatively.

  ‘But...’ But Torey could see that she was getting nowhere at all. They were all three grinning at her, and Scott was bouncing up and down saying, ‘Please, please, please,’ as though it was a mantra, and so she shrugged and said, ‘Why not?’ thinking that perhaps Debbie had been right after all. Maybe she had played right into her mother’s hands. There was one thing certain—resisting Jake Brosnan was going to be a much greater challenge than ignoring Vince Liebfried and Harlan Nelson. But if she didn’t she was, indeed, a fool. The last thing she needed in her life after a wonderful man like Paul was a shallow, bedhopping heartbreaker like Jake Brosnan!

  ‘We’ll be by to get you in the early afternoon,’ Jake promised Addie, and bent down to give her a kiss.

  Torey felt it as if he had given it to her. The warm, hard lips had seared her flesh, branding her for all time, on a hot mid-August night seven years ago, and she had repressed it all not long after. But now the memory flooded back. The feelings, the emotions, the desire all poured into her mind, and she gripped the end of Gran’s bed, her knuckles whitening with the strain of not reaching out for him.

  ‘Torey?’ Gran looked at her with concern. ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘Hmm? Oh, oh yes, fine,’ Torey mumbled, sucking in a long draught of air. ‘Just a bit of jet lag, I expect.’

  ‘Very likely,’ her grandmother agreed, but she still regarded her granddaughter curiously. ‘Don’t keep her up ‘till all hours, Jake,’ she warned, eyes twinkling.

  ‘No,’ he agreed. ‘We’ll go to bed early.’ He shot Torey a teasing grin that dared her to comment on his outrageous statement, and she opened and closed her mouth like a fish before she managed to splutter one.

  ‘Say goodbye to Addie, Scott. We’ve got to feed your father soon. He’s obviously getting light-headed.’

  ‘Light-headed, am I?’ Jake grinned as he herded Torey and Scott towards the truck. ‘Why? Because I want to go to bed with you?’

  ‘Jake!’

  ‘Well?’ He was gazing at her unrepentantly, and she thought, how like the Jake of old that was. In those days he had made no bones about lusting after first one and then another of the bikini clad girls who swished up and down the beach. But then, at least, he had been free to do so. Now he seemed to have conveniently misplaced his wife!

  ‘I don’t want to go to bed with you!’ she hissed, grateful that Scott had run ahead. ‘Just because I’m a widow doesn’t mean that I am automatically in the market for a man.’

  ‘Did I say you were?’ He held the door for her, shutting it after Scott clambered up beside her, and she thought how ironic it was that they could be having an argument about her going to bed with him while he was acting a perfect gentleman and they were going out for pizza with his son!

  ‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ she snapped when he opened the driver’s side door and swung into the cab beside her.

  ‘Not now, perhaps,’ he agreed, his gaze resting momentarily on Scott. ‘But don’t consider the subject dropped.’

  ‘It is dropped.’

  ‘Then I’ll just have to pick it up again,’ he said, his, blue eyes unsettling as they raked over her, ‘at a more convenient time.’

  The truce, if you could call it that, lasted until the waitress took their order and Jake gave Scott a fistful of pennies to ride the mechanical horse that was provided for the amusement of the younger diners. Then Jake stretched out lazily in the chair across from Torey, his loafer clad foot grazing her ankle under the table. ‘Now then, about our discussion,’ he began, sipping from his glass of beer and making Torey feel like a rabbit trapped by a very hungry wolf.

  ‘We have nothing to discuss,’ Torey said, thanking God that he had never looked at her like this seven years ago. If he had, the silly girl she had been would have fallen at his feet.

  ‘Scared?’ he teased.

  ‘No.’ Annoyed was more like it. Who did he think he was? And didn’t his wife care, for God’s sake, if he went around propositioning every girl he met? Well, Torey admitted, perhaps she didn’t. There were women like that around, women who wanted their freedom too. And maybe Jake had found himself one of them. ‘Just wondering,’ she said sweetly, ‘how your wife fits into this little seduction scheme?’

  Jake jerked upright. ‘My wife?’

  ‘Well, perhaps you don’t have to have a wife to have a son,’ Torey went on, ‘but I should think it would be easier that way.’

  Jake took a long swallow of beer. ‘It was,’ he said flatly. ‘I don’t have a wife now. We’re divorced.’ He glared at Torey as though it were somehow her fault. ‘You thought I was coming on to you like that while I had a wife tucked away somewhere?’ he demanded.

  Torey shrugged, feeling defensive and not knowing why. ‘It seemed likely,’ she said stonily.

  ‘Why?’ His voice was as icy as his eyes.

  ‘Sleeping around just seemed your style,’ she said indifferently, swirling the beer in her glass, staring at the golden liquid and avoiding his frosty gaze.

  ‘What the hell do you know about my style?’ he bit out.

  ‘You’d be amazed.’ He would, too.

  ‘What’d Addie say to you, for God’s sake? I never...’

  ‘Not Gran,’ Torey said. ‘Gran thinks you’re God’s gift to women apparently. Who am I to disillusion her?’

  ‘Who else then?’ Jake was completely disconcerted now. He eyed her narrowly, and she wished the pizza would come before he took a bite out of her.

  ‘Let’s just say, I’ve had a bit of experience too.’

  ‘It’s not my fault you met some bastard in your past,’ Jake said.

  ‘It is if the bastard was you.’

  ‘What?’ He choked on his beer.

  ‘Oh, it wasn’t entirely your fault,’ Torey said. ‘I was a silly, naive child, I admit it. Actually I suppose I should thank you for it. I mean, I went home and began going out with Paul again and...’

  ‘What in bloody hell are you talking about?’

  Torey looked over at him, seeing confusion in the hooded eyes. ‘You really don’t remember, do you?’ she sighed. ‘Well, I guess my name was legion that summer.’ And probably plenty of summers since, she thought cynically.

  ‘What summer? When?’

  The waitress slapped a pizza down between them and Torey looked around to call Scott, but Jake shook his head. ‘Don’t. He likes it cold
just as well, and he’s bound to have a few pennies left. What summer are you talking about?’ He reached across the table to grip her wrist in his hand. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘Seven years ago. I was out here spending the summer with my grandparents. You were living in an apartment on The Strand with a guy named Mick...’ Her voice trailed off at the tightening in Jake’s features.

  ‘Go on,’ he said tersely.

  Torey shrugged helplessly. ‘I had a crush on you. Typical teenage stuff. I wasn’t very sophisticated, and you were.’

  Jake’s mouth twisted. He was staring hard at her, as though trying to remember her from another age.

  ‘All summer long I trailed around after you. Worshipping from afar mostly.’ Torey managed a shaky laugh, wishing that she’d never started this. Whatever had made her think that it would be easier to deal with him if he knew? She took a gulp of beer in hope that it would steady her. ‘Your friend Mick was very perceptive. He knew how I felt, and once he invited me along on a double date. Him and a stewardess named Cathy or something—’

  ‘Christy,’ Jake supplied abruptly. He shut his eyes and bent his dark head. ‘I remember,’ he said slowly. For a long moment neither of them said a word. The clatter of pinball and the whirring noises of the video games stretched between them like an ocean. ‘Mick must’ve been out of his mind,’ he said finally, shaking his head.

  ‘He thought he was doing me a favour,’ Torey said. ‘He didn’t realise that I wasn’t exactly in your league.’

  Jake shook his head wryly. ‘God, what a mess.’ He cut a piece of pizza and handed it to her on a plate. Torey took it and concentrated on the pizza, remembering that awful night with a clarity she hadn’t achieved in years, and one glance at Jake’s face told her that he had his memories too.

  Mick had recruited her at the last moment to go to a concert when Jake’s current date couldn’t come. ‘We’ve already got the tickets. Hey, really, J.B. won’t mind,’ he had said, giving her an encouraging grin. He knew she was crazy about J.B.—he was a quieter, more observant type than his roommate when it came to other people. There was no doubt he could have a ‘good time’ as much as any of the other swinging bachelors who lived near the beach, but she had never seen him pursue his amusements as frenetically as J.B. seemed to. And she was far enough gone over J.B. to believe him. If he thought she could keep J.B. interested for an evening, who was she to say no?