The louder she said it, the more right she thought it made her. She’d always been able to outshout him.
“Are you going to unlock the door?” Cody asked. Honestly, Clark had forgotten he was there. “I have to use your facilities. It was a long trip, and I’d like to freshen up a bit. You do have an espresso machine, correct?”
“No, Cody. I’m sure there’s no espresso machine or any other necessities that you or I might require. If those hotels had a single vacancy, I wouldn’t even consider staying here.” She lifted a slender shoulder and looked at Clark. “But we don’t have a choice. When you’re ready to be reasonable, I’m ready to discuss Huck’s future with you.”
Clark turned and went up the stairs, unlocking the door. He didn’t want to hold Cody up from getting refreshed.
He held the screen door open as Cody walked in. Then he spoke to Dana as she went by. “I’m ready.”
“You need to stop acting like a jerk, first of all. And secondly, you need to stop saying that I walked out on you, like that was some kind of character flaw on my part.” She did the rhinoceros allergy thing again. “No one would blame me for leaving under the circumstances that I was living in. Not to mention, there’s not a single person in the entire world who would think that I should’ve given up the opportunity that had fallen in my lap. And I couldn’t do that with a small child. Plus, if I’d known how my figure would suffer with pregnancy and childbirth, I can guarantee you that wouldn’t have happened, either.”
Clark bit his lips in order not to say anything. He was pretty sure she hadn’t said anything that was open for discussion yet.
“I don’t think we need to go through a judge. As long as you can be reasonable. I’ll take Huck back to New York with me. And you can come see him, as long as you give me a two-week notice. And not too often, because I don’t want to have to spend all of my time entertaining you.”
“As per our custody agreement, I was granted full custody. If you want to try to change that, you will have to contact the court, because I’m not giving it up. You’re welcome to come see Huck any time you want to, and you don’t have to give me any notice. But I’m not letting him go. And I’m pretty sure there’s not a judge in the state who would say I should have to.”
Actually, he wasn’t sure about that. Even the judge in their case probably wouldn’t have ruled that he got full custody over Dana, if Dana had wanted anything. But she hadn’t. So there’d been no contention, and he’d gotten it all. All of Huck. He was still paying her alimony, and he’d had to refinance his house, because she got half of that too.
“I should’ve known you wouldn’t be reasonable about this. I came here thinking that we could actually talk like adults for once, but I should have known better.” Her eyes narrowed, and her lips pursed. “That’s fine. If you want to fight about it, we can fight. Cody’s father is a New York City lawyer. I’m pretty sure none of the attorneys you’ll find in this hick state will be able to outmaneuver him.”
She could be right about that. He lifted a brow and his shoulder ever so slightly, and she huffed one more time before walking by him into the house.
He hadn’t seen nice Dana yet today. Probably the next time they talked, nice Dana would be out, and he’d wonder to himself why they couldn’t have at least gotten along long enough to stay married and raise Huck. It was almost like she had a split personality. He never knew which Dana was going to show up on which day.
At times like this, with nasty Dana, he wondered what he’d ever seen in her and how he managed to get married to her. But she did have a good side. She could even be sweet, if not exactly funny. Volatile always, though. He’d kinda blamed himself, but he wondered if maybe it wasn’t really him that set her off.
He was about to walk in after her when Marlowe pulled in. He could see her car kinda pause at her house, like she was going to pull in there out of habit. Then she gassed on it a little more, driving by her driveway and pulling into his.
He hoped she was holding up okay. A visit from Dana was probably about the last thing that she needed. But she’d always seemed to rub along okay with Dana, so hopefully they would this time too. Since Marlowe had her ladies’ meeting tonight, she wouldn’t have to put up with her.
His stomach recoiled at the thought. He didn’t want to have to spend the evening alone with Dana and Cody. But it looked like that’s what was going to happen. Along with Huck. Kylie would be there too. Having the children would be nice.
He walked to the car’s passenger side as Marlowe brought it to a stop. Opening the door, he helped Kylie out.
“Whose car is that? Are there more people staying here too? Did someone else have a tree fall on their house?” Kylie looked at the odd car in their driveway, then up to him, her face part question, part assurance that he would know all the answers. He wished he did. All the answers to his own questions.
Like, was there some kind of curse in their family that made them incapable of picking out nice wives? Were he and his brothers destined to be divorced and alone? How could they all pick out bad women? It had to be them, right?
“No. It’s Huck’s mom.” His eyes met Marlowe’s over the top of her car before she opened the door for Huck.
“Yay! Mom’s here? Did she move back in? Are you and Mom going to live together now? I’ll have a real family, with my mom and dad really living together, like everyone else in my school.”
Kylie had been climbing out, but she stopped and looked at the ground.
Clark supposed there wasn’t too much in a kid’s life that was worse than being different than everybody else. He couldn’t fix it for Huck, and he couldn’t fix it for Kylie either. Although right now, Kylie was sad, probably more because Huck had forgotten about her - she was the same as him - than she was about the fact that she didn’t have a dad.
Clark was pretty sure she got sad about that at times, too.
“Hey.” He touched Kylie’s chin with one finger, lifting it up, so her big blue eyes met his. “As long as you’re friends with Huck, you’re going to have to remember men are notoriously forgetful and inconsiderate. You might as well just expect it.”
Kylie’s lips pressed together and curved down a little bit before she grinned a little-girl grin. Her head nodded. “You’re right. Huck’s immature and clueless, but I like him anyway. He’s the best friend I have.”
Huck had already jumped out of the car and had taken about two steps toward the house. But he wasn’t so far away that he couldn’t hear Kylie. He stopped and spun around and ran around the car, with a puppy-dog face only little boys could have. “I’m sorry. I forgot. You have a mom but no dad. I don’t have a mom who lives with me. We’re kinda the same. But,” he tilted his head just a little, “we’re the only ones. Right? Everybody else in our class has a mom and a dad?”
Kylie’s brows drew together, and normally Clark would let them just have their conversation. But he kind of wanted to make a point. So he spoke.
“Huck, you might as well just figure it out now, no one else’s life is as perfect as what they seem. Everybody has problems. They’re just not your problems.”
As he figured, Huck’s face kinda scrunched up, like he was thinking about it. But most of Clark’s words went over his head.
“Okay,” he said, with as much unconcern as he’d said anything else. Happy unconcern. That was Huck. Clark didn’t roll his eyes, but he kinda felt like it because that was probably men in general, at least most of the time.
“Mom’s inside, right? Can I go see her?”
“Sure. She’s waiting on you.”
“I have a snack in the refrigerator for you two, and I’ll get it out just as soon as you both go up and change your clothes.” Marlowe had stopped on the walk where they were talking. “Kylie, I put your extra things that Uncle Clark brought from our house in Uncle Chandler’s room where you slept last night. As long as we’re here, that will be your room, unless,” Marlowe’s eyes went to his, “unless Uncle Clark needs us
to move somewhere else.”
Kylie had a big, happy grin, and her eyes shot to Clark’s. He ruffled her hair and jerked his chin. “Go change your clothes. Everything’s good.”
Marlowe waited until the screen door shut behind Kylie.
“Is everything okay? Nothing has changed, has it?”
He didn’t see any point in hiding anything from Marlowe. “She wants custody now and wants to take Huck to New York City and be a mom.”
“Seriously? For five years, she’s barely known he’s alive, and now she wants to take him home with her? Just like that? Like tomorrow?” If possible, Marlowe seemed more upset about it than he was.
“I don’t know if I asked that question. I asked that it would make me a homophobic racist, probably.”
“Seriously? She’s still calling you names? I thought she would have grown out of that by now.”
“Yeah. I guess most of us learned in kindergarten stuff like that wasn’t nice. But maybe that was some of my old-fashioned values coming out.”
“No way. She was spouting off about that again too?” Marlowe’s teeth gritted together as she huffed out a deep breath as though trying to control her temper. “You weren’t kidding that nothing has changed.”
“Yeah. Same old, same old, only now she wants Huck.”
“You aren’t going to let her have him, are you?”
“Did I tell you she got married?” Clark knew it wasn’t exactly answering her question, but Marlowe wouldn’t care. Not now anyway. He knew she’d be more concerned about him than herself over this anyway.
She gasped, and he assumed he hadn’t. Probably a deliberate oversight on his part. Since he hadn’t wanted to think about it.
“She did? Did you just find out?”
“No. It was a couple months ago.”
“I’m your best friend, and you didn’t think that was something you needed to tell me?”
“I never wanted to talk about it.”
“Please don’t tell me that you still love her.” Marlowe’s face lost some of her anger, and true distress took its place.
“I don’t think so. I mean, no. No, I really don’t.”
“It sounds like you’re trying to talk yourself into that. I mean, I won’t think any less of you if you still love her. I’ll question your sanity, maybe, but they do say love is blind. And in your case, if you still love Dana, it must be deaf and dumb as well.”
Chapter 8
Marlowe almost slapped a hand over her mouth. She couldn’t believe she’d said that.
“I’m sorry. That was rude. I know you still have feelings for her.”
It wasn’t hard to apologize, but it was harder than she thought to state that he still had feelings for Dana like it was okay. She had never been bothered by Clark’s relationship with Dana before in her life. Why, all of a sudden, had she pulled into the drive, and seen Dana’s car after getting the text that Clark had sent her, and felt like...smacking someone?
It was very much unlike her, and those feelings were definitely not welcome.
If this was still the adrenaline working through her body, she couldn’t wait for it to leave.
Maybe she should drink more water.
Clark ran a hand through his short hair. “No, you’re absolutely right. Why didn’t you tell me how she was? Why did you let me marry her?”
“You never asked.”
Clark dropped his hand, then he just kind of stared at her.
“Seriously? You couldn’t have told me?”
“How do you think that would’ve gone over if I’d said, ‘hey, Clark, I think Dana’s a mistake?’” She spread her hands out in front of her. “You would’ve hated me, but you would’ve gotten over it. If Dana had found out? I would never have had a relationship with her. And that was the more important thing to me. I didn’t want your girlfriend and eventual wife to hate me, because that would have meant I would never have seen you again.”
Clark stared at her, his eyes opening and closing slowly. He probably didn’t even realize it, but she could see the wheels in his head turning, rolling what she had said around, then testing it out. It was obvious he had never thought anything like that before.
“But if I’d asked? You’d have said something?”
She sighed and looked away for a minute. That was tricky. “Probably not. Not unless you’d asked me before you and Dana got together. I would probably have given you my honest opinion then. But once you guys were together?” She shrugged her shoulders with her hands out. “I couldn’t say anything. I couldn’t warn you. You wouldn’t have appreciated it, and you know she’d have blocked me from your life.”
He nodded, one lip pulled back.
Her chest felt woozy, like she was standing too close to the edge of a high cliff. And she wasn’t sure exactly what that meant. It was almost like hope had blossomed there, but she was afraid to believe in it. But hope for what, she wasn’t sure.
“How long until you have to leave for your ladies’ aid meeting?”
Her brows went up. The very fact that he was using the correct name for her meeting showed that he wasn’t himself.
“Gable?” She waited until he turned to look at her, stopping in the middle of the walk.
“Yeah?”
“Do you want me to stay?”
His eyes brightened before he looked away and shook his head, turning and continuing up the walk. She kept step beside him, but her mind raced. She didn’t have to go. She was pretty sure he didn’t want her to. Probably he didn’t want to have to spend the evening with Dana and her husband, even with the kids between them.
“No. I don’t want you to miss out on your meeting. I know you guys do good in the community, and with the tornado in Trumbull yesterday, I’m sure there are some things that you could be doing. They might even be thinking of helping you.” They both glanced over at her house. Clark’s tone changed, concern entering it. “How did that go today? Did you get everything done that you needed to?”
She nodded. “Pretty much. I think someone’s going to be out over the weekend. Which surprised me. I didn’t think I’d get anything accomplished until at least next week, since today is Friday. But they want to be on it, I think. Everything’s going to work out.”
“Good. I’m glad. I’m not trying to rush you out of my house. You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you want, but did they give you a time frame?”
“I can stay as long as I want to?”
He paused with his hand on the doorknob, looking down and meeting her eyes. “Yeah. You can stay as long as you want to.”
He wouldn’t even joke with her, which bothered her.
“Now, Clark.” She tried again, batting her eyes and slapping gently at his arm. “What would the neighbors think?”
His serious face broke into a grin, the first one of the evening so far. Score.
He looked around at all the open fields surrounding them and the road that cut through them. Theirs were the only houses in sight.
“I don’t think the neighbors will care.”
“You might be right about that.” She knew he was. But she giggled. “I’m pretty sure the folks in town will have a heyday with what we’re doing anyway. If my house gets fixed, and I stay here, that’ll pretty much send them over the edge. We might get kicked out of the ladies’ aid society and the single dad support group.”
“I guess it won’t matter.”
That was a comment that was completely unlike Clark, and she put a hand on his arm, serious this time. “Why are you so down?”
“She’s married. And she wants custody. She’s got a New York lawyer. I don’t stand a chance. The dad never does.”
Her stomach flattened and deflated. She couldn’t argue with that. She didn’t know any single man who’d fought his wife for custody and won. The woman always won.
She didn’t drop her hand from his arm. “I mean, I know you got it before, but it’s because she didn’t want him.”
“Exactly.
I have custody, and we work out her visitation on our own.”
“I know. And you’ve always tried hard to accommodate her – not that she wanted to see him that often – so that she didn’t get mad and try to go back and take it from you.”
Clark’s lips flattened and he nodded.
Why a judge considered a child to need his mother more than his father, Marlowe couldn’t say for sure. She wasn’t married and obviously didn’t have a real family with Kylie, but Clark filled the role of a father, and it was very different from her role as the mother. They worked together, and they complemented each other. Neither one was more important than the other.
“Isn’t there some way...” Her voice trailed off.
They stood there for about four seconds. Slow seconds that ticked by almost audibly, in slow motion. In that same slow motion, almost an out-of-body experience, their eyes drifted back to each other and kind of hooked there.
Maybe if they hadn’t been best friends for her entire life, she would’ve had a problem trying to figure out what he was thinking.
As it was, she was pretty sure he knew exactly what popped into her brain at the exact same time it popped into his.
For some reason, she was very aware of her breath as it drew in slowly, flowed back out slowly, in slowly, back out slowly. Very aware of Clark’s swirled brown eyes, darkening and changing, and his own slow breaths as they went in and out and in and out in slow-motion time with hers.
Maybe there was a breeze; there usually was. The scent of spring was all around them. Damp earth, fresh air. New growth and all that she loved coming to life in rural Missouri. She was aware of it all but wasn’t thinking about it. Because the idea that had popped into her brain was so outrageous, so unthinkable, so perfect.
Absolutely perfect.
It would solve everyone’s problems.
And Clark was thinking it, too.
Finally, his head shook ever so slightly, and his hand reached up to touch her arm, although it only brushed it before it dropped back down to his side like even that was now off-limits because of the awful thought that had entered their heads. “No. No. I couldn’t ask that of you.”
Best Friends in the Show Me State Page 7