And then it had all fallen to pieces.
When she’d picked up Ethan at the woman’s house, Mrs. Gillion had informed her that she had to have a gallbladder operation immediately. Rachel had come home feeling particularly defeated. She’d had absolutely no idea who she could get on such short notice to take care of Ethan. He wasn’t exactly the sunniest child to cope with. She’d felt as if she were out of options and, for the time being, out of hope.
Kirk was outside on his porch, repairing a broken front step, when she had pulled up in her car. He noticed her mood immediately, even at that distance. Abandoning his chore, he crossed over to her property and was at her car door when she opened it.
“What’s the matter, Funny Face? You look like you have the weight of the world on your shoulders.”
“Not quite,” she murmured, getting out.
Ethan scrambled out of the car. “Hi, Kirk!” he shouted before bolting for the house and the bathroom.
“Hi,” Kirk called after him, then looked at Rachel. “Is it Ethan?”
She sighed. “In a way. Mrs. Gillion has to have an operation.”
As far as he knew, Rachel wasn’t related to anyone named Mrs. Gillion. Was she talking about a friend? And what did it have to do with Ethan? “That sounds like a title for a Movie of the Week.”
He managed to make her smile with that. In the past few days, Kirk’s mood had softened somewhat. In her heart, Rachel knew that they were getting to him, she and Cameron and Ethan. They were easing him back into civilization and away from the jungles of his mind.
“Close, but not quite.” She leaned against the car, not quite ready to go inside. Maybe if she discussed the situation with Kirk, an idea would come to her. “Mrs. Gillion is the woman Ethan stays with until I can pick him up on my way home from the college.”
Mrs. Gillion had the disposition of a kindly grandmother. A kindly, unflappable grandmother. The unflappable part was an invaluable attribute. It was absolutely necessary in order to get along with Ethan.
“And now she has to have an operation.”
It wasn’t hard to fill in the blanks. “And you don’t know what to do with Ethan.”
It made Ethan sound like a thing instead of a person. She was glad he was inside and couldn’t overhear them. “In a nutshell, yes.”
Kirk was silent for a moment, debating the wisdom of what he was about to suggest. He really wasn’t accustomed to sharing his space, or his time. But this was Rachel, and she was clearly in need. This much he could do for her.
“I can watch him.”
She looked at him, surprised by the offer. And by what she knew it meant. “On a regular basis?”
“Until Mrs. Gillion gets back on her feet.” The hedge against any hint of permanency came automatically. Then he shrugged. “But sure, why not? He can stay with me until you get home.”
She was afraid to let her relief bubble up just yet. This was almost too good to be true. “Won’t he get in your way?”
He watched the way the breeze flirted with the edges of her hair, and felt an urge to do the same. He kept his hands at his side.
“There’s nothing to get in the way of,” Kirk reminded her. “It’s not as if I were doing anything at the moment except puttering around, fixing a few things here and there.”
“It’s about time you had a little time to yourself,” she protested, but there wasn’t a great deal of conviction in her voice. Hope, despite the safeguards she tried to impose, was taking root quickly. She’d gone from having no options to having one that opened up a host of greater possibilities. “You sure you won’t mind?”
“I’m sure.”
Overwhelmed, relieved, Rachel threw her arms around his neck and hugged him. “God, but you are a lifesaver, Kirk.”
Her choice of words roused a memory, a very painful memory. But the warmth of her quick embrace blotted out the stab of pain.
Very gently, he drew her back so that he could look at her. “I’m going to get used to this hugging, Funny Face,” he said teasingly.
Rachel left her arms around his neck a moment longer. A sliver of pleasure was dancing through her that had nothing to do with his having come to her rescue. She wasn’t quite ready to give it up just yet.
“Good.” Slowly she let her arms drop to her sides, her eyes on his. Her pulse was beating just a little faster than was normal. “A person can never be hugged enough.” Impulsively she turned toward the front door. “C’mon, let’s go tell Ethan. I think for once he’s going to be happy with a decision I made.”
Lacing her fingers through Kirk’s, Rachel eagerly walked into the house. “Ethan,” she called. “Ethan!”
She ran into her son at the entrance to the kitchen, directly off the living room.
The moody look on his face brightened when he saw that his mother had brought Kirk with her. His eyes slid warily toward his mother. “Yeah?”
He’d lose that wariness someday soon, she thought. An edgy impatience surrounded her silent promise.
“Ethan, Kirk’s going to be watching you after school until Mrs. Gillion’s back on her feet.”
“Watch me?” Ethan’s voice held a hard edge.
Kirk picked up his cue from Ethan’s tone. “Not unless you do tricks.” He saw the slight glint of humor in the boy’s eyes, and knew he’d guessed correctly. “Otherwise, I expect you to be helping me.”
“Helping?”
Kirk nodded. The cracked wood on the front step was only one thing that needed seeing to. “I’m doing a few repairs on the house—”
Rachel grasped at the implied meaning behind his statement. “Then you’ve made up your mind to stay?”
Funny Face, if you knew, the last thing you’d want me to do is stay.
“No.” He watched as the light slowly receded from her eyes, and felt a pang because he had caused it. But he knew that there would be even greater remorse for both of them if he stayed. He wasn’t the boy she remembered. “But you can’t sell a fixer-upper for a good price, and I might as well get the most I can.”
Rachel nodded, trying not to appear as disappointed as she felt. It was silly to feel that way. She’d known he wasn’t one to be pinned down to one place for long. Still, there was a part of her that hoped...
She pushed all that aside. What would be, would be. Right now, Kirk was helping her out with Ethan, and that was the important thing.
Kirk laid a hand on the boy’s thin shoulder. “I’ll need help. You up to it?”
Rachel could have sworn Ethan puffed up a bit. He was struggling not to look pleased or excited, but both pleasure and excitement were evident in his body language.
“Can I use a hammer?”
Kirk lifted a shoulder and let it fall, indicating that he was open to the situation. “If you prove that you can handle it the way it’s supposed to be handled, I don’t see why not.”
Ethan’s eyes all but shone. “Cool.”
Despite how well this was evolving, Rachel knew that she had to put in some ground rules at the beginning. “I’ll want homework done during that time, just as you’re doing now. Or better, actually.” Homework, as light as it was in the third grade, was a bone of contention she and Ethan went round and round about almost every night.
“Yeah, yeah...” Ethan’s tone was rude and dismissive. But when he raised his eyes to Kirk’s, he sighed. “Yes, ma’am,” he added.
Rachel had to consciously work at keeping her mouth from dropping open. She looked from her son to the man standing indolently at her side.
Another miracle to be attributed to Saint Kirk, she thought incredulously.
* * *
If she had had any doubts that the new situation would work, they were soon erased. Each day, at exactly 2:15, Kirk would walk to the elementary school, which was located at the end of the development. There he would wait on the outskirts of the playground area until Ethan emerged from the school.
Kirk had told Rachel that Ethan was almost always the first on
e on the grounds. Shooting through the doorway, Ethan would hurry over to Kirk like a homing pigeon, eager to pick up where they had left off the day before.
In time, Ethan had even allowed some of the eagerness to show. Rachel was beginning to pick up latent signs at home. Nothing she could directly point her finger at, just small, telling signs.
It was nothing short of a miracle, Rachel thought, with the flood of gratitude that always accompanied the realization.
Her eyes shifted wearily to the papers on her desk. She’d need another miracle, she mused, to get this stack read and graded tonight.
Tired, Rachel leaned back in her swivel chair and stretched her arms overhead, trying to work out the kinks in her back.
If she closed her eyes and inhaled deeply, she could swear that she could still smell the cherry pipe tobacco her father used to favor. This had been his den once. He had sat here, night after night, grading papers just as she was doing now. He’d taught math at the community college in Costa Mesa.
The apple didn’t fall far from the tree, she thought with a smile.
Except in Kirk’s case, of course. From the little bit she’d known of his parents, predominantly garnered through hearsay, Kirk was completely different from the people who had given him life.
He never really spoke of them, and that, she thought, could be part of the problem he was harboring now. In fact, she was almost sure of it. He was doing such wonders with Ethan, she wished she could return the favor and help him somehow. But Kirk had never been an easy man to do anything for.
All she could do, she thought with a sigh, was be patient and be there. And hope that someday he’d choose to really confide in her.
The sigh sent the top paper on the stack closest to her wafting from her desk to the floor. With a grunt, she leaned over and picked it up. She’d been at this since dinner. It had been rather a quiet meal. She and Ethan had eaten alone. Kirk had left right after she arrived home tonight, saying he had something to take care of.
He had a perfect right to be busy, but she couldn’t help wondering what he was doing.
And couldn’t help missing him, she thought. As had Ethan. Her son had easily grown accustomed to having Kirk in the house from the time he arrived home from school until almost bedtime.
Well, not tonight. Tonight they’d had to make do without Kirk’s company. She’d done some long-overdue yardwork, and then, after dinner, she’d left Ethan alone in the family room, communing with his video games, while she surrounded herself with test papers in her den. Time had slipped away from her. When she had gone to tell Ethan it was his bedtime, she’d found him asleep on the floor, the control pad clutched in his lax fingers.
A twinge of guilt had pricked at her conscience as she picked him up and carried him upstairs to his room. They needed to spend more time together, she thought. Except that he didn’t seem to want it. Even tonight, without Kirk, the conversation had eventually dwindled to nothing.
And there seemed to be so little time to spare these days.
Feeling oddly sad, she had returned to her den and tackled a second stack of test papers.
The papers seemed to have a life of their own, she thought accusingly. It was almost as if they were multiplying capriciously when she wasn’t looking. From where she sat, there seemed to be no light at the end of the tunnel.
Just like her life, she thought, looking up at the ceiling as if she could see into Ethan’s room which was directly overhead.
The words on the paper were beginning to swim before her eyes. Served her right for giving essay questions, she thought as she rubbed the bridge of her nose. Next time, it would be multiple-choice.
Rachel rose and rotated her shoulders. The kinks refused to leave. Feeling mentally drained, she looked out the window. The den was at the front of the house, and her window faced the end of the driveway. Moonlight was casting a silvery beam along the path. It seemed to flow out to the street, beckoning to her to follow it.
Maybe a little night air would invigorate her. It certainly couldn’t hurt. If she kept at this another five minutes, she was going to lay her head on the desk and fall asleep.
It took Rachel only a moment to make up her mind. The debate wasn’t even close.
The May night was warm when she stepped outside. The gentle breeze drifted by her like an enticing, seductive kiss. This wasn’t a night to spend alone, she thought sadly.
But those were thoughts that belonged to the young woman she’d been, not to the single mother with a demanding career she had become.
This was silly. She was indulging a side of herself she seldom even acknowledged. There was nothing to be gained by feeling sorry for herself, or by wishing for things that couldn’t be.
Straightening, she decided to go back inside, but just then she saw someone approaching in the distance. As she watched, she realized that it was Kirk.
She waited until he was closer before she spoke. “Restless?”
Kirk looked her way, surprised to find her outside. It was after eleven. He’d been too restless, as she had noted, to remain at home. He’d tried to walk off his agitation, and had succeeded only marginally.
He shrugged away her question, not wanting to get into it. She would ask too many probing questions if he let her. “I like to walk around at night. It’s so...” His voice drifted away.
“Peaceful?” she supplied.
The word peace and he had only a nodding acquaintance. It was difficult to summon it when he wanted to describe his feelings. A corner of his mouth rose.
“Yes.”
He was by nature a loner, she reminded herself. And they had been taking up a good deal of his time, she and Ethan.
“Then I’m intruding.” She meant to withdraw politely, but she couldn’t quite manage to get herself to do it.
Kirk laughed as he came up the steps to join her. “Like you don’t normally.”
Since he was smiling, she took it that he thought of her intrusion as a good thing. Did he think of her she wondered, as something other than a friend? She felt a little foolish hoping, but she couldn’t help herself.
“Do I? Intrude?”
It wasn’t an intrusion, exactly. More like an invasion. And usually, despite himself, he welcomed it. She had a way of scattering his dark thoughts until they were like so many rain clouds breaking up in the face of the sun.
Kirk leaned a hip against the post, studying her face. “You’ve been intruding in my life, Funny Face, ever since you moved in next door.”
She wrapped her arms around herself as she thought back. “I remember that day. I was so mad at my father for moving us here, for taking me away from all my friends.” It all returned to her on a wave of nostalgia. The anger she had felt, the fear of the unknown that had haunted her. “I was sure I was going to shrivel up and die here after leaving San Francisco.”
Her face was a showcase of emotions. They ebbed and flowed across her face like a never-ending tide. He could have watched her all night. “Pretty deep thoughts for a seven-year-old.”
She sniffed as she raised her chin. Only her eyes sparkled with humor. “I was six, and very mature for my age.”
He laughed, remembering an entirely different Rachel. “Yeah, that was why you always threatened to hold your breath until you got your way.”
She spread her hands wide as she lifted her shoulders. “Hey, it worked, didn’t it? You and Cameron always let me tag along.”
Cameron had once referred to them as a modern-day version of the three musketeers—with a handicap named Rachel.
“We felt sorry for you.”
She ignored his teasing tone, or pretended to. In reality, it warmed her immensely, just as it always had. “Whatever. But you couldn’t have felt sorrier for me than I felt for myself that day we moved here.” Her eyes shifted to her face. “And then I looked up as I got out of my father’s car and saw you staring down from the second-story window.”
“I remember.” He could picture it in his mind a
s clearly as if it had happened only a few hours ago, instead of over twenty years in the past.
“You looked solemn.”
His father had just ended a drunken all-night binge by passing out on the floor. He had tried to hit him again for daring to talk back, but Kirk had been too fast for him and had gotten out of the way. His father had fallen over, thrown off balance by the force of his swing, and passed out where he lay.
When Kirk had heard the moving van pull up, he had just been thinking of running away from home and taking his mother with him. He had still been young and naive enough at eight to think that she loved him enough to come with him when he fled. At that age, he hadn’t realized the full extent of her emotional entanglement with his father’s dark moods and demands. Nor had he known the full extent of her apathy toward him.
He hid all this from Rachel now, just as he had always hidden that corner of his life from her. “That’s because I was looking down at you as you got out and thinking to myself, here comes trouble.”
She didn’t believe him. That would have been too lighthearted a response for the boy she’d known. “Know what I thought when I looked up at you?”
“No, what?” He expected to hear something trivial or possibly sexist. At six, Rachel had thought herself superior to every boy she encountered, including her brother.
Her expression grew serious. “That you were the saddest boy in the whole world, and that I was going to find a way to make you happy.”
It had been an odd premonition that had floated through her. Or perhaps it had been fostered by her undying belief that everyone should be happy. Whatever the source, she had felt motivated when she saw him, and her thoughts about never speaking to her father for having done this horrible thing to her had vanished instantly.
Kirk arched a very skeptical brow. “At six?”
She nodded, unfazed by the disbelief that was evident in his eyes. “I told you, I was a very mature six.” She felt Kirk’s eyes on her and tried not to shift in nervous anticipation. “What are you looking at?”
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