My Hero

by Mary McBride

  “'96, wasn't it, Charlene?”

  “Thereabouts. It was '97 when the goats lost all their hair.”

  Actually, Chuck was doing a pretty good job controlling his hysteria, she thought. She, on the other hand, was almost drawing blood from the insides of her cheeks not to mention the mounting urge to pee in her pants.

  “Your goats lost all their hair?” Gordon exclaimed.

  “Sure did,” Cal drawled. “The ones who lived, anyway.”

  Hearing that, Gordon glanced off warily at the surrounding landscape.

  “Well, speaking of goats,” Holly chirped, “we'd best get back to ours, sugar.” She pulled Cal by the arm. “Pretty close to milking time.”

  “I'd like to find out more about this incident,” Chuck said with some urgency. “You mentioned the Naval Air Station in Kingsville?”

  They were almost back to the T-bird. Cal called back, “Yep. But you won't find out squat. They'll only tell you it never happened. Same for the plutonium canister that came through the skylight at the high school in Honeycomb. That never happened either. Well, so long. Nice meetin' you gents.”

  He opened the door for Holly. Under his breath he said, “Get in. Jesus, woman. Greek and Creek. I'm going to lose it in about two seconds.”

  Five minutes later back in Ruth's cathedral of a kitchen, Cal poured two tall glasses of orange juice, then drank half of his while Holly was in the bathroom. He hadn't laughed like that in nine months. Maybe not in his entire life. Ruthie, if she ever found out about this afternoon's incident with the realtor, would kill him, slice and dice him and put him in a blender, but it would be worth every painful second. Even now he couldn't stop grinning.

  She was something else, this little Holly Hicks. Texas in a martini glass with a twist of Manhattan. A margarita in a goblet from Tiffany & Co. A chili pepper in silken skin. Smart as a whip and playful as a kitten.

  He felt goofy, wearing this grin. Like a kid, instead of a man who should've known better. Like a man who once again had a semblance of control over events in his life. When she walked into the kitchen, his heart kicked in a couple of extra beats.

  “That was fun,” she said, taking the glass he offered her. “We make a pretty good team.”

  “Here's to you, Charlene.” He angled his own glass toward her in a toast. “Where'd you learn to lie like that?”

  “I'm a writer,” she said. “It just comes naturally. And it's not really lying. It's just…oh, I don't know. Improving on reality.”

  “You'd be great undercover.”

  Her green eyes sparkled, her mouth curved deliciously and her strawberry blond curls almost jingled. “Really?”

  “Really,” he said. “You're a natural.”

  “I loved your disclaimer from the Navy. That's what sold them.”

  Cal shook his head. “Nah. It was the goats.”

  They started laughing again.

  “That poor man from Chicago,” Holly said. “He's probably halfway to Houston by now in search of a Geiger counter.” She reached out her hand to touch his arm. “I wish I could be a fly on the wall when Chuck makes his call to some poor baffled admiral in Kingsville.”

  Just that moment Cal felt a little like a fly on the wall himself, watching two happy people, seeing the perfect moment when the man would draw the laughing woman close, lift her chin, and study her mouth for a moment before he kissed her. If he did, he probably wouldn't need to come up for air for a week.

  “Can she?” he heard Holly ask. He realized it was the tail end of a question he hadn't even heard.

  “Can she what?”

  “Your sister can't possibly discover that it was us, can she?”

  He shrugged.

  Her mirth subsided. It was like watching someone sober up. “Well, if she does find out, tell her it was my idea. I won't be around to suffer the fallout.”

  The mere mention of her temporary status here seemed to close the lid on their little joke. It wasn't really a date, after all. It should have been, he thought.

  “You probably want to take a look at some of those photo albums,” he said.

  “And don't forget the yearbook. I'd love to use a shot of you when you were two or three, and then your senior picture. They're pretty standard footage in a show like this.”

  Cal finished his orange juice and put the glass in the sink. “Well, let's go take a look,” he said, even as he thought he'd changed beyond all recognition, on the inside anyway, from the images she was about to see.

  In his room, the sofa bed greeted them, all tidily made and tucked in tight after Holly had slept in it two nights before. He kept forgetting he'd slept with her last night, the first night of deep, dreamless, restorative sleep he'd had since the assassination attempt. Nice as it was, he wished he hadn't wasted the entire night just sleeping.

  “What's in all these boxes?” she asked, pointing to the wall where they were stacked like sandbags in a World War I bunker.

  “My worldly goods,” he answered. It made him sound like such a Sad Sack that he immediately laughed. “Junk mostly. If you want my high school yearbook, you've got your work cut out for you, kid. It's someplace in there.”

  “You want me to just start hunting?”

  “Sure. Be my guest.”

  Cal reached under the bed for one of his ten-pound weights, then sat doing a series of curls while he watched Holly open the first box that Diana had paid some movers to pack up and ship out of her life. He wondered if his ego was in one of them, dried and pressed between the pages of a book, or balled up like an old moth-eaten sweater.

  “Watch out for booby traps,” he muttered. “My ex-wife packed those.”

  At the moment, Holly felt less like an intrepid journalist and more like a furtive spy as she dug her way through Box Number Two. The first box had held a mildly interesting assortment of corduroy throw pillows, bath towels in a dark slate gray, and a white terrycloth bathrobe with an intriguing splotch of pink nail polish on one of the lapels. She knew it was nail polish because she'd sniffed it.

  From his seat on the edge of the sofa bed, Cal had asked, “What are you doing?”

  “Trying to figure out how a man gets ‘Love That Pink’ on the lapel of his bathrobe.”

  She couldn't tell if the resultant sneer on his face was from the effort of lifting the weight or a fairly clear memory of how the enamel stain had been acquired.

  “Don't sniff my clothes,” he said. “That's pretty sick, don't you think? What are you—part bloodhound?”

  “God, maybe I am,” she said, folding the robe and laying it back in the box. “Haven't you ever noticed how different men's things smell from women's?”

  “Pheromones,” he said, changing the barbell to his other hand and bracing his elbow on his leg.

  “No. It's more than that. And it's more than just cologne and perfume. Men's things always smell like sawdust and shoe polish and autumn leaves.”

  “I never noticed.”

  “Oh, I did. I used to live with a man in Cincinnati…” She continued despite his raised eyebrow. “And some mornings after he'd left for work, I'd open a couple of his dresser drawers, not to snoop, but just to breathe in that masculine fragrance.”

  “What happened to him?” he asked a bit sourly.

  “Well, it was more what happened to me. I got downsized to a station in Columbus, and that was the end of that.”

  After that she'd gone on to the second box, which held more slate gray bathtowels, an ancient boombox, and several shoeboxes jammed with cassettes. If she'd expected to find the collection heavy on Country and Western, Holly was very wrong. Not a picker or a twanger in the lot. It was jazz for the most part. Dave Brubeck. Charlie Parker. Wynton Marsalis. One box contained classical tapes. Beethoven and Mozart and Brahms. Oh, my.

  “No yearbook yet?” Cal asked.

  “Not yet.” Holly tugged open the flaps on Box Number Three. “More towels,” she said. “You must've taken a lot of showers.”

 
; “The gray ones?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Those were a wedding gift from President Jennings and the First Lady, I think.”

  “Oh, wow,” she breathed, lifting the top one carefully, almost reverently, from the box.

  “They're towels, Holly, for chrissake.”

  “Well, still…” She pressed the thick terry fabric to her nose only to hear Cal growl, “Will you quit smelling my stuff!”

  She put the towel back, then eased her fingers more deeply into the box. “What's this?” Pulling out a framed picture, the first thing she noticed was that the glass was cracked. The second thing she noticed was Cal's handsome face and those deep blue eyes, so full of pleasure and warmth. Although he was looking directly at the camera, it was easy to tell that his thoughts were solely on the woman who stood within the circle of his arms. The lovely Diana, with her lion's mane of lovely hair and—what do you know?—her long nails painted “Love That Pink.”

  “What's that?” Cal asked.

  Holly cleared her throat. “I think it's a wedding picture.”

  He stretched out his free hand. “Let me see it.”

  “It's broken,” she said, reluctant to hand it over for some odd reason.

  “No kidding.”

  “The glass, I mean.”

  He wiggled his fingers. “Let me see.”

  Holly handed it to him with a sigh, and then watched him as he gazed at it. There was no wistfulness in his expression. There was no anger, at least none she could detect. If she had to find a word to describe his visible emotion, it would have been regret. Ah, but what Cal Griffin regretted was a mystery still to be fathomed.

  While he contemplated the photograph, she poked around in the box some more—touching the Presidential towels, which impressed the hell out of her even if they didn't make much of an impression on Cal. She ran a finger across the script of the monogram, which was a large G flanked on each side by the smaller letters, D for Diana and C for Calvin. Now that was being married, having your initials entwined with someone else's on forty-dollar bath towels. From the President, no less.

  “It's a halfway decent frame,” he said. “Sterling, probably. Do you want it?”

  Holly shook her head. She'd never be able to look at the silver rectangle without seeing the striking couple originally inside it.

  “Okay.” He turned to his left, then smoothly lobbed the photograph into the wastebasket beside the blue recliner, sinking a perfect three-pointer. The broken glass broke a little more, making a tinkling sound in the metal receptacle.

  “Oh.” The tiny cry broke unbidden from her throat.

  “Where's that yearbook?” he asked, suddenly sounding impatient. “Did you find it yet?”

  “No,” she said. “Not yet.”

  He set the heavy weight down with a thump, then turned his wrist to look at his watch. “You hungry?”

  Was she? Up to her elbows in Calvin Griffin memorabilia, Holly hadn't even thought about food. But now that she did think about it, she was famished. “Starving.”

  “Okay. You press on with the hunt, and I'll go make us a couple sandwiches.”

  “Sounds good.” She closed the Presidential towel box, shoved it aside, and reached for Box Number 4.

  Two dozen boxes, two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and a quart of lemonade later, Cal said, “You might be better off checking for a copy of the yearbook at the high school or the library.”

  She didn't seem to hear him. Or if she had, she was ignoring his suggestion. Christ. You'd think the woman was searching for treasure in King Tut's tomb the way she carefully handled and inspected every artifact of his life. Towels seemed to hold as much interest for her as retired shoulder holsters, busted handcuffs, and outdated credentials. His boyhood collection of matchbox cars intrigued her. The battered Frisbee with the USMC eagle, globe and anchor might have been made of platinum for the cry of delight it elicited.

  As far as Cal was concerned, it was all pretty depressing. The things he'd kept over the years for their sentimental value no longer touched him now. It was as if they'd belonged to somebody else—some other little boy who saved his allowance for minuscule '55 Chevys and '651?2 Mustangs, some other gung-ho recruit on leave at Laguna Beach, some other fool who'd married and been showered with monogrammed towels.

  He did enjoy sitting and watching Holly, though, so he didn't object when she said, “Just two more boxes. I won't bother if you're tired of all this.”

  “Go ahead,” he said, and then before he even knew his mouth was still open and operative, he added, “I like watching you, just being with you.”

  Her eyes widened, and she took in a quick little breath, as if she were about to reply, but then she waved her hand and swallowed whatever it was she'd been about to say.

  Cal couldn't help but grin. “I didn't say it was a damn date, Holly. I said I like being with you. In a professional manner of speaking.”

  “Well, in that case, I like being with you, too.” She smiled and turned back to the wall of boxes.

  Did she? Did she like him? Or want him? Up until nine months ago, he never would have questioned a woman's attraction to him. That was a given, like the sun coming up in the east and the proverbial bear shitting in the woods. If her smile had been one of affection or relief, Cal couldn't quite tell. But now that he'd begun, he forced himself to press ahead.

  “Maybe we should try a date sometime,” he said with a chuckle, “since we get along so well professionally.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Or we could call this a date, and then we'd have our first one practically out of the way.”

  She threw a glare over her shoulder, but Cal could see the green light of possibility in her eyes. That would have to do for now. He was content to savor the possibility of Holly Hicks rather than risk her rejection.

  It wasn't a date, but whatever it was went on until late that evening. Holly never did find the yearbook. Instead, in the very last box, she found a small leather jewelry case, where—among assorted medals, old coins, cuff links, and studs—she saw the separate halves of a gold wedding band.

  “I wondered where that went,” Cal said, looking into the velvet-lined box over her shoulder.

  Holly picked up one half circle, then gave a surprised little yelp when its rough edge bit into her fingertip.

  “Let me see that.” Cal took both halves and ran his finger across the ends. “I thought maybe I'd lost it last September, but they must've cut it off in the emergency room and given it to Diana.”

  “It could probably be soldered together again,” she said.

  “Why?” He dropped the pieces back into the case.

  He'd seemed a little blue after that, so to cheer him Holly had suggested they take a walk, maybe keep their eyes peeled for traces of titanium. While they walked, they laughed as they relived their victory over the evil agents of real estate. It was nice, strolling pasture after pasture beside him, and when she stumbled over an exposed mesquite root and he reached for her hand, it felt natural somehow and Holly didn't pull away.

  Then the walk blended into a beer to cool off, and the cocktail hour moved seamlessly into the dinner hour when they defrosted some of Ruth's fabulous leftovers and opened a bottle of wine and chatted like new friends if not old. It was midnight before she knew it.

  “I had fun today,” Holly said when Cal parked the T-bird in Ellie's dark driveway.

  “Good.” He was quiet a second, just staring ahead through the windshield, and then he said, “You know, if this were a date, I could kiss you good night.”

  A part of her just wished he'd grab her and do it. The other part responded, “But it's not a date.”

  “Yeah,” he said with a sigh. “Well, then, this isn't a kiss.”

  And it wasn't. It was heaven. Pure, unadulterated, genuine heaven. Well, Heaven South. Pure, unadulterated, genuine and hot. How he turned and gathered her so smoothly, so completely in his arms was a mystery. One moment she was on the p
assenger side of the car, and the next she was in his arms, against his chest, practically a part of him. His mouth was as sure and competent as the rest of him, and while his kiss just took her breath away, she was vaguely aware of wine, Calvin Klein cologne, and wisps of sawdust and shoe polish and autumn leaves.

  My God.

  If she kissed him back, she wasn't aware of it. A tiny moan throbbed in somebody's throat, and it could have been hers but she wasn't quite sure. Somebody's heart was crashing against her ribs, but it wasn't clear whether it was inside or out. Hers or his. All she knew for certain was she could have stayed there all night, all week, forever. She could have made a career out of being kissed like this.

  Then, because her eyes were glazed, it took her a moment to realize it was over, the kiss that wasn't a kiss, and that Cal was smiling at her, his face a few inches from hers.

  “Good night, Holly Hicks,” he whispered. “Thanks for the best day I've had in a long time.”

  He walked her up to Ellie's front door, and thank God he didn't not kiss her again because Holly's knees couldn't have stood it.

  Inside, she leaned against the door, listening to the rich rumble of the T-bird's engine followed a moment later by what she could only describe as a sort of juvenile squeal of the tires as the car turned out of the driveway and roared up the street. And somewhere, over the engine's roar and the loud laying of rubber and the pounding of her heart, she was certain she heard a high-pitched yee-hah.

  Hollis Mae Hicks was back in Texas, and she was in big trouble.

  Chapter Nine

  The next morning Holly woke to church bells and sunshine sifting through lace curtains. She sighed and stretched while her gaze drifted like a drowsy bee from cabbage rose to cabbage rose, while her mouth slid into a dopey, dreamy smile that seemed to originate somewhere in the vicinity of her toes and work its way up the length of her body. That kiss, that incredible, heart-stopping, flag-waving, soul-searing kiss was still reverberating through her.

  She'd never known a man like Cal Griffin.

  She hadn't known that many men, period. Men had never been a priority in her life. They were ships passing in the night on the great ocean of her career. Holly almost laughed out loud. Okay. So it was a melodramatic metaphor, but it was true all the same. If she twisted the metaphor a bit, men were icebergs looming up every so often, scraping her hull, threatening to sink her. Or they were blips, faint ones mostly, on her radar screen. She simply didn't pay much attention to the opposite sex.