by Peggy Webb
Bea
From: Belinda
To: Bea, Janet, Catherine, Clemmie, Joanna, Molly
Re: Celebrate
I GOT A JOB!!! I’m Reeve’s new nanny, and I’ll be making more money than a schoolteacher! Bea, he’s not an old Friday fart, and Janet, I’m not about to let him pick my plums. I don’t know how old he is, but he’s really nice, and his kids are adorable. There’s this great old woman living here – Quincy – who used to the nanny, I think, but she feels more like family than anything else. It’s all so cool. And I’m very happy.
Xo
Belinda
She turned off her email, but she was too wound up for sleep. For one thing, she felt a little guilty that she’d neglected to tell her friends that the job was just temporary, but then they’d get all worried again, Janet and Catherine would start in about college and Clemmie would want to drive from Peppertown and get her.
Belinda went to window and leaned her head against the glass. Miraculously, she found herself thinking not about her job but what it would be like if Reeve came up the driveway, got out of his car, and then stood there in the moonlight looking up to catch a glimpse of her.
A girl can dream, can’t she?
Chapter Four
Reeve got up the next morning before anybody in the house was stirring. He went quietly down the stairs, carrying his suitcase and telling himself how much he liked early-morning solitude. Nobody around to muddle his thinking. Nobody around to clutter the tidiness of his house. Nobody around to distract him.
Downstairs he tiptoed into his children’s bedrooms and kissed their sleeping faces. Always when he flew out before they awakened, he left chocolate kisses on their pillows. In each bedroom, he pulled the kisses out of his pockets and placed them gently on Mark’s and then Betsy’s pillows. Then he went outside and got into his car.
He sat behind the wheel, letting the engine warm up and gazed back at his house. Something drew his attention upward. There was a face at the window, a lovely face surrounded by bright shiny hair. Belinda Diamond.
The engine idled while he continued to stare at the face in the upstairs window.
Suddenly the window flew open, and her delicate hand fluttered toward her bow-shaped lips. Like a small bird, her hand floated gracefully downward, dropping the kiss in the direction of his car. Unconsciously he caught the kiss and pressed it against his own lips.
The engine idled louder, catching Reeve’s attention. What was he doing? Had he lost his senses?
He tore out of the driveway as if the hounds of hell were barking at his heels. Belinda was still at the window. He didn’t have to look back to know; he could feel her there, watching him with her big dark eyes, waving that lovely expressive hand.
He touched his lips again.
An image of Sunny floated up before him—Sunny with her bright hair and her bright laughter, Sunny with her charm and her laughing eyes. She had always seen him off. She used to walk down the staircase with him, arm in arm. At the doorway she would stand on tiptoe and kiss him goodbye. It was a ritual he’d cherished.
Her image began to fade, and in its place came the face of Belinda with her impertinent mouth and her mysterious eyes, Belinda with her rhinestoned stockings and her red spike-heeled shoes. She was outrageous and unconventional, a woman whose education had been on the back roads and in the beer joints and the cheap rooming houses of the world. And yet... twice she had blown him kisses in a manner as eloquent as any finishing-school lady, kisses he foolishly coveted and secretly longed for.
What was happening to him? It was a damned good thing he was going to San Francisco. As soon as he got back, he would drive Belinda Diamond to downtown Tupelo and let her out on Main Street, just as he had promised. With the money he was planning to pay her, she would be set for a long time, certainly long enough to find a decent job.
And then she wouldn’t be his concern anymore. Once again she would be a stranger to him, and his life would go on as it had before she came, its carefully structured schedules hiding whatever flaws there were in the fabric of his daily routine.
o0o
After he had checked into his hotel in San Francisco, the first thing he did was call home. It was a part of his routine. The children needed to hear his voice and he needed to hear theirs. It would be mid-afternoon back home, almost time for their snack.
He dialed his home number and waited.
“Hello, there. I mean, Lawrence residence.”
Reeve’s hand tightened on the receiver. Belinda’s voice brought her into his room as plainly as if she had made the trip to San Francisco with him.
“Where’s Quincy?” He knew he was being rude, but he excused himself by claiming flight fatigue. His lack of manners had nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that he had hoped a thousand miles would take Belinda Diamond out of his life, at least temporarily.
“She’s a dragon.”
“She’s a what?”
“Well, you see, it started raining along about noon, and I decided to build a castle in the den. So we set up the card table and draped it with a sheet, and Betsy decided the castle needed a dragon, and since I was the queen and she was the princess and Mark was the dashing knight in shining armor, Quincy had to be the dragon.”
“That explains it, of course.” Reeve couldn’t disguise the indulgent tone of his voice. When Belinda told a story, she had a way of involving the listener, so that right now, standing in the middle of his generic hotel room with its standard puffy comforter on the bed and its ubiquitous white towels hanging on the bar in the bathroom and its strip of paper certifying that the toilet was sanitary, he was caught up in Belinda’s make-believe castle.
The fantasy made him homesick. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been homesick.
“Quincy’s down on the floor now, growling. Do you hear her?”
Belinda must have held the receiver out toward the castle, for Reeve caught the sounds of laughter and a deeper, more guttural sound that must have been Quincy’s dragon.
“Did you hear her?” Belinda sounded breathless and cheerful. He wondered if she was wearing stockings with rhinestone hearts on the sides.
“She sounded right fierce to me.”
Belinda’s laughter pealed through the receiver, the happy sound filling his drab hotel room, making it seem less lonely. “I’ll tell her you said that.”
“Please do. Tell her if she keeps on making such a good dragon, I might have to increase her salary.”
Reeve was feeling more cheerful himself. He hadn’t engaged in frivolous small talk in years.
“My, my, it’s just grand to hear your voice,” Belinda said.
That sobered Reeve quickly enough. It would be best not to foster any false hopes she might have. “May I speak with my children, please?”
“Oh...” Her voice was colored with disappointment. There was a brief pause, and then her voice came back to him as perky as ever. “Well, naturally that’s why you called. I knew that all along—Mark!” she called, then another pause. “He’s coming. He just had to park his horse. Oh, wait till you hear about the moat we’re planning to build around the castle. It was all Mark’s idea. We’re going to... Wait a minute. Here’s Mark.”
His son came on the line and Belinda Diamond was gone. Suddenly the emptiness of his hotel room struck Reeve, and a great lonesomeness settled in the pit of his stomach.
Reeve spent the next ten minutes listening to his children’s happy chatter, and it wasn’t until he had hung up the phone that he remembered he had never found out about the moat. He could just picture it: Belinda digging a trench in his Persian rug, and his children dumping in buckets of water. Quincy, of course, would be standing by with the mop, laughing her head off. She had always encouraged rowdiness in his children.
Reeve smiled. What did a Persian carpet matter? Happy children were the most important thing. And from the sounds of things, they were certainly happy with their new temporary nanny.
&n
bsp; o0o
Reeve called home again that evening. He didn’t usually make two calls home in the same day, but he figured these were unusual circumstances. After all, Belinda was new to the job, and he would be foolish not to make sure that her first day without him around had gone smoothly.
When she answered the phone, he smiled. He went on smiling as long as she kept saying into the receiver, “Hello? Hello? Is anybody there?”
“It’s Reeve.”
“Reeve.” She sort of sighed his name.
“I just called to...” His mind drifted off again. To hear your voice, he thought. To make myself smile. To feel your presence in this lonesome hotel room.
“Yes?”
“...to see how the children are.”
“They’re wonderful, of course. All bathed and fed and tucked into their beds, right on schedule. Well, almost. We were a little late with the baths on account of Mark’s moat getting out of hand.” She paused for breath, and Reeve hung on to the receiver, waiting for the sound of her voice. “See, we got kind of carried away cutting up all that blue paper for the water, and then Betsy decided it was hot in the castle under the table, and Quincy brought an oscillating fan out of her room, and the paper started blowing everywhere—I’m afraid some of it might still be lurking around in the top bookshelves.”
Reeve had a wonderful time imagining the four of them chasing after the paper moat. They would have been laughing like crazy. He wished he’d been there.
“You’re awfully quiet, Reeve. Does this mean I’m fired?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Are you having trouble on your end of the phone?”
“No. Why?”
“Because all of a sudden you seem to be roaring.”
Of course he had been roaring. Just the thought of firing Belinda Diamond was enough to make him bellow like a bull. How anybody could be heartless enough to fire the woman was beyond him.
“You’ll have to excuse me, Belinda. I must have had a frog in my throat.” He cleared his throat for effect. It was clearly time to end this conversation. “Keep up the good work, Belinda.”
“Will you call again?”
There was a long silence. Then Reeve said, “Yes, I’ll call again.” Another silence in which the sound of their breathing mingled over the long-distance line. “I’ll call every day—to check on the children.”
“Oh. Well, goodbye. Sweet dreams, Reeve.”
He spent so long thinking about sweet dreams that she had hung up the phone before he could say goodbye. It was just as well. Things were getting out of hand in San Francisco as surely as they had in Tupelo.
Maybe it was his age. Maybe thirty-five was too old to cope with bringing up two children and dealing with a succession of nannies.
He stretched himself across his bed and stared up at the ceiling. Wouldn’t it be nice if everything back home were settled into such a perfect routine that he didn’t have the constant worry of keeping everything in control with his bare hands and the force of his iron will?
o0o
The next morning when Reeve awoke, the first thing he thought of was calling home. He picked up his watch and looked at the luminous dial. It was a good time to call, but he decided to wait a few hours.
Right before his luncheon meeting he slipped upstairs to his room and dialed home. Quincy answered, and disappointment washed over him.
“Mr. Reeve! You ought to see the children. Happy as pigs in the sunshine. That Belinda Diamond is somethin’ else, I tell you. Hmm-mm.”
She said all that before he even had a chance to do more than identify himself.
“Quincy,” he said, “Quincy—”
But she rattled on. “Miss Belinda’s been showin’ the children how to cook.” Her booming laughter sounded over the line. “You ought to see this kitchen. Looks like a cyclone hit it. Chocolate everywhere.” She laughed again. “The children haven’t had this much fun in a month of Sundays.”
“May I speak to them?” Reeve asked when Quincy paused for breath.
“They’re all up in the tree. Let me see which one is closest to the ground.”
Reeve heard her heavy footfalls, then the sound of her voice yelling, “Miss Belinda! Telephone!”
Quincy got back on the line. “She’s a-comin’. Now don’t you worry about a thing. Just go on and have a high time out there. I’m getting along with Belinda just like a house on fire. Here she is.”
Funny how the sound of a voice could put a shine on the entire day. Reeve found himself smiling from the minute Belinda said her first lilting hello.
“Hello? Hello? I’m so out of breath. Can you hear me, Reeve?”
“I hear you.”
“We’ve been climbing a tree.”
“Yes, I know.”
“It was Mark’s idea. That son of yours is quite lively.”
“I suppose you climbed the tree, too?”
“Well, naturally. You don’t think I’d let your children try something before I did. I had to check and see if all the limbs were sturdy enough.”
“And were they?”
“Well, I got down in one piece except for a little scratch on my arm.”
“Did you hurt yourself?”
“Shoot, no. Betsy kissed it and made it better.”
“I see.” Reeve imagined kissing Belinda’s arm to make it better. He could almost smell the roses on her skin. His breathing got shallow, and he forgot what he’d been going to say next.
Fortunately Belinda didn’t notice his silence. She talked on, as cheerful as a salesman in a car commercial, and all he had to do was listen to her stories and the musical sound of her voice.
o0o
The four days he was in San Francisco, calling home twice a day got to be a habit. And it was funny how often he hoped Belinda would be the one who answered the phone. As Quincy would say, “That just goes to show...” He didn’t try to figure out what it went to show; he just drifted along, enjoying knowing that Belinda was making his children happy and that she was happy herself, and counting the days till he would be home.
o0o
Belinda was the first to see his car coming up the drive. “Reeve’s home!” she yelled, and went racing through the front door and down the porch steps.
When he stepped out of the car, so handsome with the late-afternoon sun shining in his hair, she came to a screeching halt. Dear Lord in heaven, what was she thinking of? Fixing to jump into her boss’s arms like he was Charlie Crocket come home on payday with a bonus in his pocket? Even Charlie hadn’t much liked her habit of jumping all over him with big hugs and kisses. She could just imagine what Reeve Lawrence would do. Why, he’d disappear into himself like an oyster, leaving nothing but the hard shell for her to deal with.
She stopped beside the gardenia bush, put her hands behind her back and tried to look proper. Thank goodness he couldn’t know that her skin was all a-tingle and her heart was pumping and her body felt warm and glowy, like she had been sitting in front of a good hot fire.
“Hello, Belinda,” he said the minute he was out of the car. That was all he said, just hello, then stood there looking at her.
Belinda Stubaker, she warned herself, just you remember he’s your boss.
“Reeve, it’s good to have you home.” She was proud of herself for sounding so calm and ladylike.
“It’s good to be home.”
He walked toward her and caught her elbow, and she shivered inside like dynamite had been set off next to her heart. He had been gone so long she had forgotten what being next to a powerful man felt like.
She managed to contain herself till they got inside the house, and then she was rescued by Mark and Betsy. While they hugged and kissed their daddy, Belinda sidled off and sank into a chair where she pressed her knees together and folded her hands tightly over her stomach. She thought she was going to be sick. Now, wouldn’t that be embarrassing?
Any other person would be jumping for joy at the return of a boss who was fixin
g to pay you a lot of money. And she had at first. Jumped for joy, that is. But not necessarily because of her salary. Now all she could think about was that in the next twenty minutes or so, Reeve would pay her off and load her bag into his fancy car and drop her off somewhere on Main Street. She hoped she could act happy about the whole thing.
Mark and Betsy were both talking at once, and every now and then she could tell Reeve was adding his two cents’ worth just by the rumble of that rich voice, but she didn’t have any idea what they were saying. She was too busy trying to figure out how to act grateful when her heart was fixing to break in two.
“Belinda.” She jumped at the sound of her name. Lordy, she was getting fidgety. Reeve walked to her chair and stood over her like some great Greek god. She could hardly get her breath. “Will you come with me to my office, please?”
She opened her eyes wide and noticed that Quincy was disappearing down the long marble hallway with Betsy and Mark. She wanted to call after them to stop, come back. As long as they were in the hall, she would be spared going into that office for her walking papers.
“Certainly,” she said, sounding far more sophisticated than she had any right to sound. Maybe being in such a fancy house was rubbing off on her. Her daddy had always said she was a quick study and a great mimic.
In his office, Reeve motioned her to the same chair she had sat in the last time. Then he got behind his important-looking desk and sat in his chair, big enough for two. There was no mistaking his intent. Clearly he was the boss and she was the hired help.
Belinda waited. She knew about being patient. Hadn’t she spent many hours of her childhood waiting in her daddy’s car in one strange town or another while he walked the streets looking for a job?
“Quincy and the children have made quite a case for you,” Reeve said finally.
“I didn’t know I was on trial.”
Reeve laughed. Belinda thought that was a good sign.
“You know this job was only temporary.”
“I know. My suitcase is all packed and ready.”
Reeve spent another long while in the study of his steepled hands. Thin lines etched themselves around his mouth.