Father of Two

by Judith Arnold

  “Those windows?” he asked as she entered. He tilted his head toward the windows that overlooked her back yard.

  “Yes.” Suspicion pinched her. Surely he must have some ulterior motive in all this. He was a lawyer, skilled in the art of seduction. Maybe he’d figured he could seduce her most effectively by squeezing sealant into the cracks in her window frames. “Murphy, what’s going on here?” she asked, deciding she loathed him as heartily as she had the first day she met him.

  He’d been studying the windows, but he responded to her question by turning and giving her an innocent look. “What’s going on is—”

  “I know. You’re caulking my windows. When we made this bet, we wagered that whoever won would get to do anything he wanted with the other one. I can’t believe this is what you wanted to do.”

  He didn’t protest, didn’t rationalize, didn’t waste his breath swearing that fixing her windows was the fulfillment of a life-long dream. Instead, he lowered the metal caulking gun and extended his hands toward her. She resisted the urge to recoil, but she didn’t step closer, either.

  “I saw you this morning and you looked like shit,” he said. He wasn’t smiling anymore. His gaze was earnest, his open-palmed hands implying that he had nothing to hide. “So I farmed the kids out—Erin is sleeping over at a girlfriend’s house, and Sean is spending the night with one of his buddies. I didn’t think you’d want to have to deal with them—and I sure didn’t want them putting you in an even worse mood. I thought we’d do this and it would make you feel better. That’s all.”

  “Why would you want me to feel better?”

  He chuckled at that. “I like you, Gail. Hasn’t that sunk in yet?”

  Not: I want you. Not: I crave you. Not: I want to throw you on the floor under a desk and have my way with you.

  I like you.

  When was the last time a man had said something so simple to her, and sounded as if he meant it? When was the last time she’d trusted a man the way she longed to trust Murphy?

  She toyed with a few responses. She could tell him she didn’t like him, but for the moment that no longer seemed true. She could tell him that if he really liked her he wouldn’t pressure her into a physical intimacy that would be doomed to failure. She could tell him that the only men she liked were men she felt safe with, and safe was one of the few things she didn’t feel with Murphy.

  But right now...she did feel safe with him. As long as they were caulking windows in a brightly lit kitchen, as long as she believed he really wanted to make her feel better, as long as she didn’t have to pretend with him, or fight him, or defend herself against him...

  For as long as it took to pay off her gambling debt to him, she could trust him. She could let herself feel safe.

  Chapter Twelve

  CAULKING THE WINDOWS took an hour. Gail and Murphy worked well together, probably because they could focus their energies on windows instead of legal conflicts or child-care wagers, or Murphy’s sexual designs on Gail. He smeared on the gooey white sealant and she wiped the excess off—although he worked with such a deft touch, there wasn’t much excess for her to wipe.

  She’d turned on her kitchen radio, and they listened to ‘Seventies rock music as they worked. When she caught Murphy singing “Staying Alive” along with the Bee Gees, she shot him a bemused grin. She never would have guessed that he would know the lyrics to a disco tune.

  He didn’t apologize. He just returned her smile and sang louder.

  What had happened to the hot-shot lawyer? The conceited advocate in the thousand-dollar suits? The man who insisted that lawyering was all about seduction? He certainly wasn’t here in her kitchen, wielding the caulking gun and segueing smoothly from the Bee Gees to the Eagles, to Fleetwood Mac, to Steely Dan.

  “How do you know the words to all these songs?” she asked.

  “I know everything, Gail,” he bragged, but his whimsical smile undercut his bragging. The pale smear of caulk on his chin, and the thicker stripe of it across his forearm where he’d shoved up his sleeves, made him look less like the king of all he surveyed than like an average handyman, albeit one with a face and a build that were anything but average.

  “I suppose your knowledge of everything would also explain why you’re such a pro at caulking windows.”

  He squirted a thin line of white paste into the space between a pane of glass and the wood frame. “Actually, I know about home maintenance from experience.”

  “In a former life, were you a repairman?”

  “I spent the better part of my childhood keeping my mother’s house from falling apart,” he said, dabbing a bit of caulk into a corner and leaning back to assess his work. “She didn’t have money to pay for people to come and fix things, so I learned how to fix them for her.”

  Gail took a minute to consider what Murphy was telling her—not just how he’d learned to seal windows but something much more vital. He was opening to her, offering up his personal history. Until recently, she would have told herself she didn’t give a hoot about his background. But tonight she did, and she wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.

  His tone was so casual, she had to keep her voice light as well, so he wouldn’t think she was making a big deal of his revelation. “Was your mother’s house old?”

  “Not old enough to be special,” he told her. “Just old enough to be falling apart.”

  “Where was your father?” It was an unforgivably nosy question, but if Murphy didn’t wish to answer, he’d figure out a way to sidestep it.

  He tamped a bit of caulk into the corner with his thumb, then wiped his hand on a sheet of paper towel. “My father,” he said with a faint smile, “was what you’d call a ‘handsome devil.’ Good looking and charming as all get out, and I’ll bet he was dynamite in bed, given how much my mother adored him. But when it came to the day-to-day stuff, paying the bills, keeping the house from collapsing on our heads, well...let’s just say he was charming and good looking.”

  “Not too handy, huh.”

  “He had a passionate life-long romance with whisky,” Murphy said. “When I was nine, he got behind the wheel after having spent the evening screwing around with the love of his life, and he never made it home.”

  “Oh, Dennis.” A fierce wave of guilt slammed into her. She shouldn’t have pushed him to talk about something so dreadful. It was none of her business. She hadn’t intended to open an old wound, but somehow she had, and she felt terrible about it. “I’m sorry.”

  He laid down the caulking gun and stared at her, his mouth curving into an enigmatic smile. What could he be smiling about? He’d just told her something so tragic, so wrenching—

  “That’s the first time you’ve ever called me Dennis,” he murmured.

  She returned his gaze. His smile was enigmatic, rich with hidden meanings. It plucked her nerves as if they were the strings of a harp, and they vibrated in shimmering chords inside her. “I feel bad for you. That must have been so awful.”

  “Ah. So I’m Dennis when you’re pitying me?” She sensed amusement mixed in with irony in his expression.

  He didn’t seem to want her sympathy, so she took his cue and lightened up. “I pity you all the time, Murphy,” she assured him. “It was really your mother I was feeling sorry for.”

  He laughed, evidently pleased with her retort. “Glad to know where I stand. Please feel free to pity me whenever you want. My mother doesn’t need it. She’s a tough old bird.” He squirted another tiny dab of caulk into another corner. “She still lives in that ugly old house in Bridgeport. I offered to buy her a new house, but she wouldn’t move.”

  “Do you have any siblings?”

  “Younger sisters,” he told her. “Twins. It’s a family tradition.”

  Gail smiled, relieved that they weren’t talking about his alcoholic father anymore. “Do they live in Bridgeport, too?”

  He shook his head. “One’s a film editor in California, and the other runs a bed-and-breakfast with her husban
d in Maine.”

  “Quite a bunch of achievers, aren’t you.”

  “Mom wouldn’t tolerate anything less.” He stepped back and surveyed his work. “I’d say we’re done. What do you think?”

  The windows might be done, but Gail wasn’t, not with Murphy. She desperately wanted to know more. She wanted to know everything about this man who’d arisen from humble beginnings to accomplish so much, this son of a charming drunk and a fierce matriarch, who had apparently inherited the best of each parent and evolved into a charming, fierce parent. As much as she’d dreaded paying off her debt to him tonight, now she wasn’t ready for him to tear up her chit and call the bet settled. Murphy posed too many challenges to her, too many risks, but she didn’t want him to leave. Not yet.

  “I don’t know about you,” he said, as if he’d heard her unspoken wish, “but I’m starving. What do you say we pick up a double-topping pizza and make pigs of ourselves?”

  “All right,” she said, too eager for her own peace of mind.

  He spent a few minutes meticulously closing tubes and packing the supplies back into the bag, then bent over the kitchen sink and scrubbed his face, arms and hands. Drying off with a couple of squares of paper towel, he called over his shoulder, “Grab your purse and let’s go.”

  She grabbed her purse and went, wondering why the sight of a man washing up at the kitchen sink made her feel so warm inside. Not just any man, she amended. Murphy.

  ***

  THEY WOUND UP back at his place to eat the pizza. Partly this was because he had cold beer at his apartment and partly because they’d also rented a video to watch while they ate, and his TV was bigger than hers. The video rental outlet was just two doors down from the pizza parlor, and when Murphy had suggested that they browse in the video shop while their pizza was being made, Gail thought that seemed like a good way to pass the time.

  She hadn’t anticipated that they would get into a fight over lawyer movies. “I’m telling you, The Verdict is ten times better than any of the Grisham movies,” he argued.

  She didn’t point out to him that he might feel a natural affinity for that movie because it was about Irish-Americans—something a man named Murphy, with children named Sean and Erin, would relate to—and the hero had a drinking problem. “The Firm was brilliant,” she asserted.

  “You just like The Firm because it portrays high-power money-making law firms as corrupt.”

  “Did I say Schenk, Murphy and Lopes is corrupt?”

  “I’m sure you’ve thought it a million times,” he said, although he was laughing too hard for her to take the accusation seriously.

  They compromised by renting Adam’s Rib and retiring to the broad leather couch in Murphy’s living room with the steaming box of pizza, two cold beers, a couple of plates, a stack of napkins and the movie. His apartment seemed eerily calm without the children in it. The last time Gail had been there, the rooms had bustled with hysteria over spilled milk, loose teeth, missing nannies and a risqué Barbie doll. Tonight the atmosphere was tranquil, silent except for Murphy and Gail, the pop of beer bottles being opened and the whirr of the VCR fast-forwarding through the static at the beginning of the tape.

  “I haven’t seen this film in ages,” Gail confessed.

  “Neither have I. Spencer Tracy wins, doesn’t he?”

  “As I recall,” Gail said archly, “Katherine Hepburn wins.”

  “This is going to be fun,” Murphy said with a chuckle, obviously relishing the prospect of yet another argument with Gail. The movie poised to start, he kicked off his sneakers and eased a gooey wedge of pizza onto a plate for her. He took a slice for himself, then hit the “play” button on the remote and sank comfortably into the plush upholstery, looking more relaxed than anyone had a right to feel in the company of a woman with whom he’d locked horns on a case and locked lips in a clinch.

  The strangest part, Gail pondered as she leaned over her plate and took a dainty bite of her pizza, was that she felt relaxed, too. She ought to be keeping her guard up with him. She knew not to trust him, knew that he might choose at any moment to attempt a seduction—he’d see it as his professional duty, if nothing else—and if he did, he’d destroy her equilibrium. She didn’t know how to defend herself against him, which was why she needed to keep all her defenses on full alert. Yet lounging in his living room with an old movie on the VCR and a fresh pizza in a wilting cardboard box on the coffee table... It simply wasn’t conducive to distrust.

  “So, tell me why you haven’t been sleeping lately,” he said.

  She glanced suspiciously at him. “Who says I haven’t been sleeping lately?”

  “You looked lousy this morning. Haggard. Like someone racked with insomnia.”

  She sighed. “Too much work,” she said. “Not enough time.”

  “Tell them to give you fewer cases. You’re entitled.”

  “I’d have enough time for my other cases if Leo would give me a break,” she complained, then bit her lip. Discussing Leo’s change of heart with Murphy wasn’t a wise strategy.

  Murphy shrugged. “He’s a frisky fellow, isn’t he.”

  “Too demanding.”

  “He got what he wanted out of the Gazette.”

  “What he wants out of the Gazette is a million bucks. But as soon as I get the settlement papers from you, I’ll get him to sign and he’ll leave me alone until his next crisis.”

  “I kind of like him, myself,” Murphy conceded. “The guy’s got guts.”

  “Great. The next time he wants a million bucks, I’ll send him to you. You can be his best good lawyer in Arlington. You can defend him pro bono—like I do.”

  Murphy chuckled. “The way they pay you folks in the Public Defenders Office, you’re pretty much handling all your cases pro bono. Someday, maybe you’ll come to your senses and get a real job.”

  “The day I came to my senses was the day I decided to sign up with the P.D.’s office,” she said, then turned to watch the video. She didn’t want to talk shop with Murphy, or to discuss how grossly underpaid she and her colleagues were.

  He directed his attention to the video, too. “Judy Holliday was something,” he murmured as the effervescent blond comedienne sashayed into the scene.

  Gail wouldn’t have expected Murphy to be taken by the blowzy blabbermouth Holliday played. She would have thought he’d go for the Katherine Hepburn type, cool and composed and totally in control of her world—the exact opposite of how Gail usually felt. “Hepburn and Holliday are both good actresses,” she said.

  “Hepburn’s too starchy,” he said. “She’s a know-it-all.”

  “Like you,” Gail teased, then bit her lip. She wasn’t used to teasing Murphy. Generally, he was the teaser and she was the teased.

  He grinned slyly. “I may be a know-it-all, but I’m not starchy.” He took a slug of beer, then kicked his feet up on the table a safe distance from the pizza, and settled back against the leather cushions. “Hepburn in this movie reminds me too much of my ex-wife.”

  Once again, Gail was taken aback by his willingness to expose his personal history to her. “Is your ex-wife starchy?” she asked.

  “She’s got that sort of haughtiness.” He gestured with his beer bottle toward the screen. “That ‘Aren’t I sublime?’ attitude that Hepburn always has.”

  “Is your ex-wife sublime?” Gail felt no envy. She was simply curious to learn more about the woman Murphy had married.

  He eyed Gail, as if to make sure the subject didn’t make her uncomfortable, and then laughed. “She thinks she’s sublime.” He sipped his beer, then shrugged. “She’s pretty and polished. When she married me, she thought it was a grand rebellion. I was the poor kid from the slum, you know? Juggling scholarships and jobs, determined to get ahead. I was her noble savage.”

  “I can believe the savage part,” Gail joked. Murphy laughed. “So, what happened? She discovered you weren’t noble, after all?”

  “The opposite, actually. I think I got too resp
ectable for her. She’d always known I was planning to make good, to work my way up the ladder and into a life of luxury. I didn’t marry her for her money, and I never took a dime from her or her rich parents. But I told her I’d grown up poor and had no intention of spending the rest of my life poor, and she told me she was turned on by my ambition. I guess once I’d reached the upper rungs, though, she wasn’t turned on anymore. So she asked for a divorce.”

  Murphy’s story interested Gail much more than the divorce trial playing itself out on the video. “Just like that?” she asked, licking a string of melted mozzarella from her fingers. “That sounds kind of—I don’t know. Petty.”

  “It felt petty to me at the time,” Murphy said. “But I couldn’t see the point of fighting to make her remain my wife. If she didn’t want to stay with me, I wasn’t going to force her. Call it pride.” He shrugged and reached for another slice of pizza. “As long as I had access to the kids whenever I wanted, I could accept the divorce. Now, of course, I have all the access I could dream of. Her decision to move to Seattle might just be the best thing that ever happened to me.”

  Unsure of how she felt about such a child-happy man, Gail turned back to the screen. Tracy and Hepburn were shouting at each other. She found her mind wandering to thoughts of Murphy’s children, their constant squabbling, their precocious chatter, their demanding presence.

  Why didn’t babies and children make her insides melt into mush? she wondered. Why did she fail to think that having and raising children was the best thing that could happen to a person? Granted, she’d enjoyed playing in the sand with Erin last week, but...but why was she immune to the warm-fuzzies when it came to kids?

  Murphy didn’t seem warm and fuzzy, she acknowledged. Even when he talked about the twins, he remained clear-eyed and objective. His voice didn’t go soft and quivery, and he obviously didn’t think his children were perfect. He only thought that having full custody of them was wonderful.

  Gail wished she could think it was wonderful, too.

  “So, what about you?” he asked.