Flower Girl Bride Page 8

  “You didn’t mean to leave your son waiting here until after ten o’clock?”

  He shook his head, his frustration palpable. “It couldn’t be avoided. I told you that.”

  “Don’t worry about it. I guess it couldn’t be helped.”

  “I said I’m sorry.”

  I raised my hand to stop him. “No, it’s fine. Really.”

  “Don’t…do that.” His voice sounded so strange, and he appeared to be gritting his teeth.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Quit playing the martyr. If you’re mad, be mad. If you have something to say, then say it.”

  At first I just stared at him, but then I straightened my shoulders. “I’m mad.”

  “You have every right to be. When I called, I didn’t know I would be so late.”

  “Another call wouldn’t have been too much to ask.”

  Luke nodded. “Point taken. I just got caught up in the problems, and I wanted to prove I could handle them.” He paused, flexing his jaw. “But none of that matters. I should have been here.”

  Pushing back from the counter, he brushed his hands together as if he considered the matter settled. Maybe I should have left it at that. He’d admitted he was wrong, and that should have been enough for me. But I never could let sleeping dogs lie when I could make my point better by nudging the little pooches with my foot.

  “I would think your job is pretty demanding.”

  He smiled as if he appreciated the change in subject. “You’ve got that right.”

  “You probably work a lot of hours.” Though I’d kept my comment carefully vague, Luke’s smile disappeared, and he raised an eyebrow.

  “Enough,” he answered, equally vague.

  I considered stopping there; really I did. But I’d seen so much questionable parenting while working with at-risk children, parents who just couldn’t be bothered to attend to their children’s basic needs. I might have a chance to make a difference in this one child’s life, and I just had to do it.

  “How many days a week would you say you work late?”

  His hands gripped the edge of the counter this time, and he trapped me in his narrowed gaze. “Just what are you getting at, Cassie?”

  I shrugged as if the subject were something far more casual than a little boy’s emotional stability. “Sam said usually when you’re working late, he stays at his grandparents’ house.”

  “He loves it at Grammy and Papa’s.”

  “I’m sure he does. It’s just that—”

  “What, do you have trouble with family members providing day care? You’re probably one of those proponents of institutionalized day care centers. You’re convinced my child will suffer socially if he’s not corralled with twenty other four-year-olds and required to nap each day at one-fifteen.”

  I started shaking my head before he was finished. “No, that’s not it.” I did have some definite ideas about child care and quality preschool instruction, but it might not be good to impart all of my knowledge at once.

  “Then what is it?” He braced his arms so stiffly, it was as if he expected a blow rather than my words.

  “I just wonder, if you’re working late all the time, then maybe you’re putting your career first while leaving your parents to raise Sam.”

  Why did it feel as if suddenly all the nighttime sounds from outside had disappeared at once? Luke turned so his back was to me, but his jaw was tight, and I was almost certain I saw a vein ticking at his temple.

  The silence unnerving me, I tried again. “It’s just that I see this happen in my job. Parents work hard so that their children will have more, and what they really need is more time with their parents.”

  “That’s what you think, huh?” He said it with a chuckle, but when he turned back to me, his expression was about as far from smiling as it could come without surgical assistance.

  That combined with the anger that radiated from him in waves had me taking a step back from his penetrating gaze. He didn’t step forward, didn’t take an intimidating stance of any sort, but I still was tempted to back out of the room because I probably wouldn’t like whatever he was about to say.

  “Do you have any idea how many people feel obligated to give me suggestions about raising Sam? Poor, lonely widower. He couldn’t possibly have a clue how to raise his own son.”

  Recognizing I’d stepped over the line, I lifted my hands wide. “Look, I was just trying to…”

  “Help.” We both said it at the same time, but it sounded feeble coming from my mouth.

  “For three years now, I’ve had people coming out of the woodwork like termites going to a two-by-four feast, every one of them wanting to help. My parents, my in-laws, people at church, strangers at the grocery store. Everybody’s got a tip for the poor widower.”

  He paced away from me, his arms crossed, only to whip around and face me again. “Sam is my son. It’s my job to decide how to raise him.”

  “Of course he’s your son.”

  “And yet everyone on the Michigan coast of the Big Lake thinks he knows more about what my son needs that I do.”

  I had no doubt that this “everyone” he spoke of was referring to me, but at least he hadn’t singled me out.

  “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have…” I let my words trail off because we both knew what I shouldn’t have said.

  He nodded as if to acknowledge my apology. “But it gets even worse,” he continued. “Now I not only have parents offering me their gems of experience, I’m supposed to be grateful when I get tips from people who don’t even have kids.”

  Again he didn’t name me. He didn’t have to. He was right. Whether or not he’d messed up tonight—and I still was convinced he had—I had no business making assumptions about his whole life with his son. Just because I’d seen some examples of poor parenting at my school didn’t mean I knew anything about Luke and Sam.

  “Really, Luke, forgive me. I had no right.”

  Luke just raised his hand to stop me and stepped past me into the great room. “I’m the one who gets him up every morning and puts him to bed every night,” he said without looking back. “I know that Sam would rather take a long walk off a short pier than eat his green beans and that he prefers to sleep with a monkey named Sunshine.”

  “Sunshine?”

  He turned to face me, looking more tired now than angry. “It’s just this stuffed monkey with matted gray fur. A real eyesore.”

  “I thought he was talking about missing the sun outside, not a toy named Sunshine.” I shook my head, finally laughing at myself when I should have been chortling all along instead of taking myself so seriously.

  “You see what I mean? I’m Sam’s dad. I know him. I know the important things, like that he’s afraid of the dark and daddy longlegs and that he has accidents if he doesn’t go to the bathroom right before—”

  “Oh, my gracious,” I interrupted him, already rushing for the stairs.

  “Let me guess. He talked you into letting him get a drink.”

  I’d climbed the first few steps, but I turned back to him, frowning. “No. Two.”

  “Well, better join Noah and the animals in the ark because another great flood is coming.”

  As it turned out, there was no sign of a second Noah or any animals traveling two by two. Sam wasn’t even in his bed when I reached his room at a flat-out run. He’d made it back to the bed, given fair warning by my herd-of-buffalo approach, but the boy just couldn’t manage to scramble under the covers before I threw the door wide.

  I flipped on the light, crossed my arms and drew my eyebrows together, waiting.

  “Did Daddy come?” His gaze darted to the side as he said it.

  “You know he did, Sam.” I didn’t add you little stinker to my comment, but I was too busy trying to replay my conversation with Luke. What had we said that might permanently damage a child? Some of it had stung even my pride, and I was technically an adult.

  “I’m here, buddy.” Luke
said from behind me. He didn’t bother to call Sam on his stretch of the truth, and he didn’t apologize for anything his son might have overheard, either. “It’s late, though. You need to go to the bathroom, and then we need to get home.”

  Funny, I don’t know why, but I expected Sam to balk, to beg to stay another night and spend another day playing with me. So it surprised as much as stung me when he stood up on the bed and held out his arms for his father to take him. In three long strides, Luke was with him, but instead of lifting him immediately, Luke tugged at the sleeve of the oversize T-shirt, covered in tie-dyed frogs.

  He glanced back at me. “Where are his clothes?”

  “I washed them. You can take that home and return it later.”

  “That’s all right. Where are his things now?”

  “In the dryer. I’ll get them.” I hurried from the room as if he was chasing me. I didn’t have to pretend I didn’t understand why he needed Sam’s clothes right away and didn’t want to take mine: he didn’t want any reason to come back here.

  Once a sleepy Sam had taken a restroom break and was back in his own clean things, Luke gathered his son in his arms and strode down the hallway.

  I followed after him. “It was great having you here, Sam.”

  “Thank you,” the boy said, already snuggling sleepily into the comfort of his father’s arms. They were at the bottom of the steps when Sam’s head popped up again. “Tell Princess goodbye for me, okay?”

  “I will.”

  Luke glanced back at me, his silence speaking louder than his words ever could. Here I’d been trying to tell him how to care for his child, and we both knew I still hadn’t mastered Pet Care 101.

  I kind of hoped he would smile, would see the humor in the situation, even if I was having a hard time finding it myself. He didn’t. Instead, he continued across the room to the slider, only turning back to me when his hand was on the door. “Thanks for spending the day with Sam.”

  I cleared my throat. “It was my pleasure.”

  He tapped the side of his head against Sam’s mop of hair. “Say bye to Miss Cassie.”

  “Bye, Miss Cassie.”

  Sam lifted his hand for a sleepy wave and then let it fall back on his father’s arm. His smile was the last thing I saw as Luke carried him out the door. The sound of the slider clicking closed had a disconcerting finality to it.

  After they disappeared around the side of the house, I stared out at the deck, its stained cedar planks golden in the artificial light. The wooden structure appeared larger now that it was empty except for a few groupings of tan and navy patio furniture. The laughter and smiles that had populated the deck and the rest of this house for the last several days were starkly absent.

  But it was more than the empty house that made me feel so vacant inside. I missed the noise, the activity and the laughter that came with Luke Sheridan and his rambunctious son. After tonight, I would probably see neither of them again, and it was mostly my fault.

  “How’s my precious princess doing?”

  I grinned into the portable phone Wednesday afternoon, only a little disappointed that it was an international call I’d answered rather than a local one. I shouldn’t have expected any different. If Luke were going to call, he would have done it by now, instead of leaving me for the last two days to relax my body, bake my skin and generally go out of my mind with trying to avoid sessions of introspection. This was supposed to be a time for respite, not an episode of “Cassie Blake—This is Your Life.”

  Though my grin had long since faded, I remained determined to stay cheerful. “How’s your princess doing? That depends. Are you talking about me or the cat?”

  “Both, of course.” Aunt Eleanor’s laughter warmed me, even through four thousand miles as the jumbo jet flies.

  “But for now tell me about my kitty. Jack made me wait forever before I could check in with you.”

  If that wasn’t the definition of irony, I didn’t know what was. This was the third time she’d phoned me since they’d left for Paris. If she called any more often, she would have to mortgage her mansion to pay the cell phone bill.

  “She’s fine. Really.”

  Well, she wasn’t dead. I knew that anyway. In fact, Princess was sitting in the doorway to my guest suite that minute, watching me chatting on the phone and putting away the rest of my clean laundry in the bureau drawers.

  For a cat that despised me, she sure spent a lot of time watching me. That morning my heart had skipped a few important beats when I’d awakened to find her sitting on the end of the bed, just watching. But then didn’t most of the big cats study their prey before they attacked?

  Eighteen days and counting.

  “Cassandra Eleanor, are you listening? I’m paying a pretty penny for all this dead air.”

  I cleared my throat. “Oh. Sorry. Now what were you saying?”

  “I asked if she was eating okay.”

  “She’s eating.” She hadn’t exactly done it in my presence, but there did appear to be a good-sized dent in each little mound of food when I threw out the leftovers. That was proof as far as I was concerned, unless an industrious ant colony had figured out a way to score three squares a day.

  “Is she getting enough water?”

  “Sure.” At least I hoped so.

  “Have the two of you finally become friends?”

  How was I supposed to answer that one without lying? I might have gotten out of the habit of attending church, but that didn’t mean I didn’t believe in the Ninth Commandment.

  “We sure are getting to know each other better,” I said finally. Whew, that was a close one.

  “Wait,” Eleanor said. “You said ‘depends.’ If Princess is fine, then what’s the matter with you?”

  Now that would be hard to determine without a team of counselors and a truckload of chocolate truffles thrown in for good measure. But I only said, “I’m fine, too.”

  “Have you gotten any sun?”

  “Yes, and I have enough freckles to prove it.”

  “Not too much, right? You’re wearing your sunscreen?”

  “Always.”

  “And a hat.”

  “Sometimes.”

  I smiled again. My aunt and I had shared many conversations like this one, and it was great to see that even an ocean couldn’t stop her from mothering me.

  “Have you seen any more of Sam this week?”

  My breath hitched. She was good, my aunt. She’d started a fishing expedition, using Sam as the lure and not even mentioning Luke. Well, I could be a slippery fish when I wasn’t in the mood to be caught.

  “Sam had a sleepover here. We had a great time.”

  “Oh really,” she said in a tone that convinced me I was dangling from a hook even as we spoke.

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m just surprised Luke let Sam stay over. He doesn’t usually let anyone get close to his son. He doesn’t appreciate everyone’s well-meaning advice, either. Even Yvonne has learned to keep her opinions on parenting to herself unless Luke asks for them.”

  Well, that little tidbit had arrived a few days too late to help me at all. “Oh,” I said before I could stop myself.

  “What does ‘oh’ mean? Did Luke tell you to mind your own business, too?”

  “Of course not.” No, not in so many words.

  “Look, Aunt Eleanor, Luke is a nice enough man, and if I were in the market…”

  I let my words fall away. If I were in the market, what? Would I have been completely intrigued by him? Would I have been equally disappointed he hadn’t called? As I was now, for example.

  “But you’re not in the market.”

  “No, I’m not.”

  She took that blow to her matchmaking plans with much more aplomb than I expected. If such a thing were possible, I would think my aunt had overdosed on aplomb today.

  We said our goodbyes, and I hung up the phone, casting the house into its strange summer silence again. It was too late in
the day to hear the warblers singing and too early for the cicadas to begin their noisy nighttime dance.

  Why I had ever looked forward to three weeks alone in the sun and sand, I couldn’t say. The Lake Michigan water was too cold in June to soothe my soul. The sand between my toes only chafed my skin, and running across the beach in the heat of the day felt like a barbecue for toes. Even the sunsets—okay, the sunsets were beautiful enough to convert an atheist and give him the call to the ministry the same day, but that was beside the point.

  So what was the point, that I hated being alone? No, that couldn’t be it. I was a veteran of aloneness. To the outsider, I probably made it seem downright festive. I just missed activity, I guessed. The sheer busyness of my life had served as wonderful insulation from thoughts and feelings, and here without it, I felt exposed.

  Now don’t get me wrong. I’d fought off this need to look inward the best I could. I’d watched Elvis in Blue Hawaii and Sidney Poitier in To Sir, with Love—two of my absolute favorites.

  I’d also caught up all the laundry, dusted, vacuumed and cleaned all the bathrooms, even the ones I’d had to traipse around the place to locate. My aunt’s wood blinds, the ones that filtered some of the morning sun on the east-facing windows, had probably never been as clean as they were after my attack with first the feather duster and then the lemon oil.

  No wonder Princess just followed me from room to room, watching me perform like a domestic goddess and Olympic speed skater all rolled into one, but a gal had to do what a gal had to do.

  I was running, all right. I had to if I planned to stay ahead of this sense that God was using this silence, this water, this place to make me take an internal inventory. Was this how Jonah felt when he was avoiding God’s command to work in Nineveh? Would I end up in a whale’s belly, too, if I didn’t stop running?

  Okay, I’d lost it after all. Just the image of me sitting in a puddle of whale digestive juices waiting to be spit back out made me grin. There wasn’t a whale to be found in Lake Michigan, and a forty-pound salmon might try the whole swallowing thing, but he wouldn’t get the job done.