by Amanda Tru
Three twenties into her wallet, and all but two bills used up, Ronni had a new revelation. “Hank, do you have any bills?”
“Yeah, sure, why?”
“Trade me for mine? I might have enough for everyone if you have some ones or fives.”
He beckoned her to follow. Down the hall, past the craft room, through the door at the end, and into his bedroom, she assumed. It didn’t look much like the rest of the house. Here, Ronni could see why he called Peg a hoarder. He must not have cleared it out as much as the rest.
From the back of the closet, he pulled out a small fireproof safe. Large, calloused thumbs with only the faintest traces of grease stains rolled a combination around until the latch slid right and the lid flipped up. Cash—a ton of it. Hank pulled off the top layer and began counting. “How many are you missing? Don’t know why I didn’t think of this before. If it didn’t take so long—”
“I don’t mind the loss of the money, Hank. I can afford it. I don’t have many people to buy gifts for, so just let me do this!”
After a sidelong glance, he counted out twenty one-dollar bills and passed them over. She handed him a twenty. He shoved it in his pocket and locked the safe up again. “If you need it, code’s 3-2-3-3.”
“Why would I need to get into your cash? That’s crazy? You don’t go around giving out your safe codes!”
“Never know,” he countered. “Something could happen, and you’ve used most of your money for this. I never like knowing that people don’t have enough on hand.”
And you didn’t offer to replace what I’d used. Compromise? Ronni didn’t ask. She just waved the wad of bills at him and called, “Thanks!” before dashing out of the room. Call her a coward, but seeing that concession did a number on her attempted resolve to resist him. Just wish I knew if it was necessary. He really is a fascinating man… for a mechanic.
As the sun dropped out of sight, the dining room light became inadequate. Ronni moved her origami operation to the breakfast bar, and Hank jumped at the chance to clear that table. She started to ask, but the bill she worked with wouldn’t fold like she wanted.
She’d just made the last tuck and began to pull out the star points when hands rested on her shoulders. How can something so casual feel so intimate? And why is it that every time I convince myself I’ll be able to shove him into that friend category, he sends my senses reeling? This was supposed to be a business trip. Just a business trip. And in thirty-six hours, it’s become… what?
“You hungry?”
Ronni could almost feel the words on her neck as Hank murmured them into her ear. All she had to do was turn her head. Don’t! But her weaker self did. Two inches—max. Probably closer to one. If she leaned closer by much, she could—
“Ronni?” That smile. He knew exactly what he was doing. “I asked—”
“Starving.” Her head nearly collided with his chin as she jumped from the barstool. “Stew?”
That’s when she smelled it. Definitely not stew. Her eyes scanned the kitchen and saw nothing, but the unmistakable scent of sizzling steak reached her anyway. Hank rotated her. “Go wash up. Steak’s getting cold.”
The dining table had been laid, candles—the works. Oh, my… he really did read some of those romances… and learned from them. Call her stupid, pathetic, desperate, infatuated, even. She kissed his cheek and dashed. Half a second later, her stomach rumbled. Please don’t have heard that.
His chuckle assured her he had.
The guest bath door was less than a dozen feet from the dining room table. Ronni chose to dash to “her” apartment and take a moment to brush her hair. Flour rubbed into her t-shirt gave her the excuse to throw on her sweater, too. She’d made it almost to the door when an idea struck. Her tinted moisturizer would only take a moment. A quick swipe of blush… it wasn’t much… Again, she made it to the door before the mascara wand worked its magic, and she found herself racing back.
He’d be irritated, she decided. No man wants to wait around for his steak to get cold while a woman makes herself presentable. Still, she felt better about it, and would worry about what that meant… later.
Heaping plates of steak, baked potatoes, and steamed green beans greeted her when she burst back through the door. Hank eyed her. Ronni gave a weak smile. “Looks amazing.”
“I could say the same about you.”
As natural as it felt to say, “I just had to change out of that dirty shirt,” Ronni stopped herself just in time. It sounds too much like the old, “This old thing?” Pathetic. Instead, and in a rare move at that, she did what her mother taught her and simply said, “Thank you.”
Hank caught up her hand before she’d settled in and prayed over the food. That simple gesture couldn’t have been more natural, but the way he held on, the way he gazed at her for a moment, the smile… Ronni forced down a lump of uncertainty and gave him a weak smile in return.
“It takes a strong woman to accept a compliment.”
Silverware became fascinating at that point. Somewhere between the first bite and the last, she saw it. A twenty-dollar bill lying to the left of her napkin. At that moment, she saw red—then black. A storm of fury whipped up inside her that she didn’t even want to control.
His chuckle didn’t help. “Wondered when you’d see it.” When she didn’t look at him, he spoke her name… twice. After that, he tried her whole name. “Veronica… look at me.”
“I can’t—”
“C’mon. Look at me. I want to explain.”
Fine. Her looking was glaring—no two ways about it. And as hurt as she was, Ronni didn’t care. Hank hardly reacted at all, and the little he did wasn’t that of a man cowed.
“I want that twenty back—folded. Will you do that for me? Make me something out of it?”
“Did Peg put up with this controlling streak of yours?”
That only earned her another chuckle. One that, much to her disgust, she liked far too much. “Peg would never let me control her.” At Ronni’s quirked eyebrow, he added, “Oh, sometimes she let me think she did. I usually figured it out pretty quickly.”
“Bet that got your goat.”
“Naw…” he speared a green bean and contemplated it before stabbing another. “Couldn’t complain about what I did myself. I never let her control me, either.”
Candlelight flickered between them. Instrumental Christmas music played—so softly she hadn’t heard it until that moment. “O, Holy Night.” And Hank waited for an answer.
“I’ll be happy to fold your money for you, Hank.” She picked up her knife. “But not until I’ve finished this steak. It’s amazing!”
“Thank the Lord for George Foreman.”
Forty-five wrapped gifts, two boxes of hot chocolate mix jars, and a basket of cookie bags filled the dining room table. Red, green, pink, silver—every package wrapped within an inch of its life. Ronni stood close, hands gripping the back of a chair, her eyes shining like a kid at… well, Christmas.
“Isn’t it beautiful?” She adjusted a gift tag—the one hanging from a putter the girls had bought him, convinced he needed to take up golfing. “Is this what it’s like at your house every year? Piles of presents and the anticipation of everyone’s excitement?”
Hank hadn’t thought of it that way. Sure, he liked to see the kids delight in this gift or that, but Christmas was also work, stress, and uncertainty. No need to disillusion her with it, though. “Mostly.”
“Makes me wish I had taken a chance on a few guys I knew back in my thirties. Maybe we would have made it. I could have a grandkid by now—or almost.”
Maybe he shouldn’t say it, but a thought had begun to percolate that afternoon, and Hank decided to serve it up and see what she thought. “I’ve been wondering. Do you think if you had met someone you really loved… do you think you might have pushed him away?”
“Probably not.” Was it his imagination, or did she grip the chair tighter? “It’s why I never gave things much of a chance. It seemed ris
ky once I found out where things stood.”
“Surely, you’ve known some guy long enough.”
The way Ronni shoved off the chair and stalked away made him flinch. Before he could ask about it, she plopped down on the couch and turned to him. “Got any Christmas movies? I’m not ready for bed.”
As Hank listed them, he wondered which she’d choose. “White Christmas, The Polar Express, While You Were Sleeping, It’s a Wonderful Life, and Die Hard.”
“Die Hard. Definitely. Alan Rickman was brilliant in that.” While he dug for the DVD, she answered his question. “Yes, I’ve known men long enough in theory, but since it hasn’t happened…” She shrugged. “I probably put them off. The me you met yesterday morning is the me most people at work know, and that’s where I meet most people—or did. There is church now, but people don’t know what to do with someone my age who hasn’t ever been married.”
As he slipped the disk into the player and grabbed the remote, Hank grumbled about that one. “Always hated the way churches bought into the world’s idea of everyone getting some label or another and then expecting them to stick with ‘others of their kind’ like some kind of racist hangover from back when people thought like that.”
“Some still do.”
Hank rose and fumbled with the remote while he pondered where to sit. First choice would be right next to Ronni. Maybe she’d get the hint if he did. Then again, her reaction to him not sitting close might give away her thoughts on that. When the screen lit up, his time to think had gone. He backed up and plopped down next to her, his arm sliding across the back just like he always did and before he even realized he’d done it.
To keep it from being too much of a big deal, he asked her about what she’d said. “Some still do what?”
Bruce Willis appeared on screen with the teddy bear before she sighed and relaxed against the back of the couch. “Try to keep their own racial or cultural group from being tainted by any they consider lesser-than. It can be religious, political, or ideological, or plain racial and ethnic.”
He’d just started to say he hadn’t seen much of that in Juniper Springs and ask if she thought it was his cluelessness or their insular community when she relaxed against his arm and sighed. “And I’ve put a damper on your date with all this. Let’s just enjoy the movie.”
And I’ll enjoy knowing you figured it out and didn’t resist.
When the L.A. police’s RV blew up, Hank paused the movie. “Popcorn?”
“Butter?”
He nodded. “Parmesan cheese?”
When Ronni hesitated, he almost assured her he’d be fine without it. However, she nodded. “You don’t have brewer’s yeast, do you?”
“Do I want to know what that is?” He did, but she didn’t need to know that.
Ronni shoved him away. “Go make popcorn. I’m going to stretch.”
Between pouring the popcorn in the air popper and reaching for the butter, Hank saw her lean forward and make the first fold of the twenty-dollar bill on the coffee table. It was his first hint of hope.
Just before Alan Rickman’s slow-motion fall to his death, Piston hopped up on the couch. She took one look at Hank with his arm around Ronni and promptly curled up in Ronni’s lap. After one more look at Hank, she purred. Ronni couldn’t help but laugh. Sides shaking, tears streaming—should’ve skipped the mascara—she began petting the cat and decided they’d have to be friends.
“What else,” she gasped out, “do you do after that?”
Background noise—that’s what the movie became. Hank scratched Piston’s ears and gave Ronni a look she couldn’t decipher. “I’ve learned you never argue with Piston. You’ll lose, and she’ll gloat.”
“There’s nothing worse than a gloating cat, I suppose.”
Credits rolled, but neither of them moved. If anyone had told her on Monday morning that she’d be curled up with a cat and a man who intrigued her more every minute and in Juniper Springs by Tuesday night, she’d have laughed. She’d also have suggested a mental evaluation. Probably in that order. And I didn’t even know Juniper Springs existed.
A wild, irrational thought kept poking its way into her consciousness. She blamed cabin fever combined with a snowstorm-inspired sort of Stockholm syndrome for it. Regardless, that thought refused to leave. I could ask him if I could rent out that room once a month for a few months—if I get the contract.
That, with every hour, had become a big, fat, bloated, pregnant if. She’d stew about it if she gave herself a chance, so Ronni opted for self-preservation tactics and looked up at Hank. Big mistake. His gaze never wavered. Her entire torso went on a bumblebee flight—bobbing, twirling, flopping, swirling. Could I ever risk a relationship with a mechanic, who lives in a small ranch house, in the middle of nowhere, with probably no retirement portfolio to speak of, no common interests, and a family that would probably hate how different I am from their mother?
“Best date I’ve had in a long time. Thank you, Ronni.”
Something about the words felt off, but that look in his eyes had her discombumblebeed. He winked, and it wiped away the cloud of fuzzy confusion. “How long?”
Another wink. “Oh… almost four years, I’d say.”
Only his comfortable insertion of his wife into most conversations could have made Ronni willing to risk it. Still, the words came out in a whisper she hadn’t meant to affect. “When did Peg go home?”
Did he pull her just a smidge closer? Ronni thought so. His hand squeezed her arm a bit as he murmured, “Four years ago this coming March.”
Hank choked on “March.” Is he even ready for it? Forget me, is he ready for it? Maybe even considering it is selfish. That thought amended almost before she stopped thinking it. No “maybe” about it.
“If you’re wondering if I’m ready to ‘move on,’ as they say, the answer is no. I’ll never be ready. Heather put it this way, though. She said, ‘Daddy, you’ll never be ready to move on, but that doesn’t mean you won’t be ready to include someone else someday. And that’s good.”
She’d heard that argument—that when someone dies and you remarry or have another child, or make a new friend, it isn’t replacing… it’s adding to your life. Is it really, though?
The fire crackled, Piston purred, Hank just sat there, his arm around her, gazing off into… the flames? At his picture of him and Peg? Their knees nearly touching?
The longer they sat, the less her mind could be trusted to be rational. She needed out of there. Now. The folded bill nearly burned her from where she’d tucked it between her leg and the couch. Time to do it. He wouldn’t make too much of it… would he?
Ronni stretched and rose. “I should get some sleep if you’re waking me up at three.”
“Am I?” Hank stood as well. “We don’t need to leave until about a quarter till. The wind’s down. Should only be a fifteen or twenty-minute ride at most.”
That prompted a smile that his Peg would have understood. “I’m a woman, Hank. I need a few minutes to get cute.”
A look she couldn’t decipher shifted his features. Uncertainty swirled that bumblebee into a dangerous flight path. As a diversion, she thrust the heart into his hand and turned to go. “Goodnight, Hank.”
When he didn’t catch her arm and stop her, disappointment welled up, but she managed to stamp it down. However, as she reached for the doorknob at the garage, he called out. “Ronni?”
Foolish, perhaps, but she couldn’t turn around. “Yes?”
“Thank you. See you soon.”
Instinct told Ronni that if she looked back, he’d come. To the door. Maybe hold her. Twice that evening, he’d assured her he was praying about her potentially botched deal. Of course, he didn’t call it potentially botched, but even if he had, she would have felt it was kinder than how she saw it. Dreams squashed and buried under six tons of snow and a worthless airplane.
Ronni jerked open the garage door. “Night.”
Her room nearly stifled her. Ronni turned
the thermostat down to sixty-five and even cracked a window for a moment. Bet he keeps the thermostat at sixty-five all summer. What is it with guys and their determination to defy nature?
The journal she’d left abandoned on the end of the bed beckoned her. Change first. But as she went to pull her sweater over her head, she realized two things. First, that her only other appropriate-for-bed shirt was covered in flour and sugar, and second, she couldn’t sleep without something on. Not with Hank coming to wake her, and she had no intention of not knowing what that might be like.
Thanks to a body trying to shove her into perimenopause, night sweats meant she could soak her only other clean and warm clothes. That left her trudging back through the garage and requesting the loan of a T-shirt. “Anything’ll do. I just—”
Hank disappeared into the laundry room and returned with a “World’s Best Dad” shirt in hand. “Here you go. Just washed it yesterday morning.”
Maybe it was her return, or perhaps he’d regretted not hinting at something more personal before, but Hank fumbled for her hand. Ronni swallowed down fears she didn’t know she had. He leaned his forehead against hers. “Mind if I pray?”
To her utter disgust, she became the woman she swore she’d never be. She melted. “Please.”
He could have prayed an ax murderer would come and chop her to bits, and Ronni wouldn’t have known it. Instead, she squeezed that hand with both of hers and scooted out of there before she said or did something she’d regret.
It took five minutes to go through her routine before she snuggled into bed and flipped to that list. Each one seemed more important and more insipid than the last. Mind warring against heart? Mind should always win, right? Isn’t there something about how messed up our hearts are? Maybe that’s depraved souls. Probably. Jesus gives us new hearts. Maybe mine is telling me what He’d say. But do I trust it?
Again, she read the list.
1. Intellectual equality—any man I date must not be significantly more or less intelligent than I am.