First Time, Forever, page 7
“Oh.”
“That little Jesse is so dumb he didn’t know who Yoda was.”
“It’s a good thing he had you to show him,” Kathleen said, deadpan.
“You got that right. Do we have wrapping paper?”
“Wrapping paper?”
“I found those posters I used to have in my room. The dumb Dumbo ones. I might wrap one of them up for the kid. He likes Dumbo things.”
Kathleen found she had the funniest little smile in her heart as she helped Mac wrap up all his old posters for Jesse.
In her spare moments at the store, she sorted through a small collection of toys and picked out a tiny dump truck to give Jesse from herself and a matching cement truck to give him from his dad. She put together a bag of hot dogs and buns and potato chips, and tucked them into the store fridge.
“Where are the balloons?” she asked a preoccupied Ma Watson.
“Balloons? Right on the top peg above the birthday candles. I used to have them lower, but I don’t like putting things in the eye range of children. They bug their parents for them.”
“I think that’s actually the strategy of bigger stores,” Kathleen told her.
For some reason, that seemed to distress Ma even more. “Oh,” she said. “That’s terrible. If they ever do that in my store, I’ll—” She stopped and looked at Kathleen. “Oh, dear,” she said. “Oh, my dear.”
“Ma, what is the matter? I feel like I’m not working out for you. If there’s something I need to change, please tell me.”
Ma looked as if she was going to say something, and then changed her mind. “Tell me what you need balloons for,” she said. “A party? Is Mac having a birthday?”
“No, not for a while. Evan’s going to have a party for his little boy. He invited Mac and me out to his place.”
“Oh, that is wonderful. You and Evan. And Mac, of course. And Jesse. But Jesse’s birthday isn’t until, let’s see, July. No, that’s the other Jesse. Jesse Atkins is August.”
“You know everyone’s birthdays?” Kathleen asked, astounded.
“Of course,” she said proudly. “You know, people can shop for groceries cheaper in Swift Current or Medicine Hat. They come in here because we know them.”
Kathleen smiled. “That’s exactly why I wanted to move to a small town.”
Ma Watson stared at her, looked down at her feet and then burst into tears. Kathleen looked after her in distress as Ma hurried from the room and firmly closed the door that joined the store to her private apartment.
Ma still hadn’t reappeared at closing time, but she had shown Kathleen how to close up and had given her a key, so she did.
She loved the drive to Evan’s farm, the landscape so different from the sea and mountainscape of Vancouver. But her uneasiness about the incident with Ma wouldn’t leave her.
Evan came out to meet her. “What’s wrong?” he asked, taking the packages from her.
“What makes you think anything’s wrong?”
“That wrinkle is the Grand Canyon at the moment.”
Uneasily she related the story to Evan.
She noted that as unhappy as she was feeling about the situation, she still managed to notice how his muscles rippled when he picked up those bags of groceries.
“Jeez, and I thought you hated my farm.”
She looked around. White buildings with green trim, miles of rolling country around them.
“I love your farm,” she said.
“Okay. So Ma was talking about birthdays, and then she started to cry?”
“Yes. I feel terrible, Evan. I know she’s sorry she hired me.”
“Kathleen, you are reading this wrong. I think Pa Watson must have taken a turn for the worse. Ma isn’t from a generation that talked about how they felt. She’s from the stiff upper lip school of thought. It’s probably just all too much for her. I bet the doctor told them not to expect another birthday, or something like that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“All right. If it makes you feel better, I’ll stop and talk to her when I drop Mac off tomorrow. She’s known me all my life. She might tell me what’s wrong, but not want to burden a stranger.”
“Thanks, Evan.”
“No problem. Now lighten up. You’ll be like having Eeyore at a birthday party.”
“Oh, darn,” she said in a slow, deep voice. “My balloons always pop.”
They started laughing. Lordy, this man made her laugh, made her feel as if champagne ran through her veins instead of blood.
She looked again at the landscape. It was almost a moonscape. Gently rolling land, with scrubby grass beginning to grow, but not a tree in sight.
“Do you find it depressing?” he asked.
“The landscape?” she said surprised. “Not at all. I find it quite beautiful in its own way.”
“And what way is that?”
“It’s like no one has messed with it. It’s probably looked pretty much like this since the beginning of time. I bet the Indians rode ponies after buffalo through here.”
He told her then, about the centuries old grasslands they were on. “Most of this land has never known a plow. It’s grazing land, and not great grazing land at that. A man has to have a lot of acres to feed a few cattle. But I like it. It’s big and untamed and I like it.”
Inside his house, she understood immediately what Mac meant when he said it was a “guy” house. Though it was obvious that some quick surface cleaning had been done recently, she could tell the state of Evan’s house was not high on his priority list. It made her feel the funniest little pang for him and for his little boy. It was as if this house craved softness—someone to care about it, the smells of bread or cookies baking. And that’s how Evan seemed, too, as if under all that strength, under all that hard masculinity, he needed something soft.
Mac and Jesse were playing fort in the living room. They had used sofa cushions and bedroom blankets and chairs from the kitchen and had built themselves a tent and a system of tunnels.
It reminded her, poignantly, that Mac was in that funny place somewhere between being a little boy and a big one.
“I wasn’t having fun,” he told her, crawling out from under a blanket. “Evan told me I could knock off work a little early if I looked after Mr. Stinky. He likes forts, don’t you, Mr. Stinky?”
“Mac, don’t call him that!”
“Auntie Kathy, he likes it!”
“I like fowts,” Jesse announced. Unfortunately, because he couldn’t pronounce his r’s very well it came out sounding more like farts than forts, which just cracked Mac up.
Mac made a horrible noise, with his lips against his arm.
“Mac!” Kathleen said.
But Evan touched her arm, and shook his head. She followed his gaze, and saw Jesse was howling with laughter, rolling on the floor holding his sides. She took in the look on Evan’s face, and there was such wonder there.
She realized, a little sadly, that for some reason, little Jesse did not laugh often.
“How do you like your hot dog,” Evan asked her, “Rare, medium or burned?”
“Medium.”
“Damn. That’s the hard one.” He went outside and she could see him lighting an outdoor fire pit.
Kathleen surreptitiously looked around with interest. She felt puzzled. Was this not where Evan had lived with his wife? If it was, all signs of her were gone.
There was not a picture on the wall, or a feminine touch anywhere.
“Decorations by Zen,” Mac said to her in a whisper.
“Mind reader,” she said.
He laughed, and ducked back under the tent with Jesse. Their shouts and laughter came out only slightly muffled, and she realized she had not heard Mac laugh that much lately, either. And that she had missed it very, very much. She took a chair and just listened to them laugh and let it wash away the part of her that was worried about Ma Watson.
After a while, she realized Jesse was peeking out at her. After studying her for a long time he came out from under the blanket. He went down the hall and came back a few minutes later. Shyly he handed her a little toy truck, purple where it had paint left on it, two wheels missing.
“This is my twuck,” he said. He watched anxiously while she looked at it.
“Pretend to put it in your pocket, Auntie Kathy. He’ll really yell about that.”
“I don’t want him to yell,” she said smiling, and handing Jesse back his truck. He accepted it with obvious relief, inspected it and smiled at her. “What a nice truck.”
Evan came in, called them to the table.
They ate hot dogs that were only slightly burned. Jesse had to have his mustard squeezed in a squiggle just like Mac’s. Mac told horrible jokes, and Jesse squealed with laughter. She laughed just because of Jesse’s reaction and because it felt so good to be here, with the boys laughing and Evan smiling indulgently, obviously enjoying his son and her nephew very much.
At the end they had cake and ice cream and Evan put a single candle on the cake.
“Blow it out, Jesse,” he called. “Goodbye to diapers.”
They all clapped and cheered as Jesse blew out the candle.
Evan relit it. “Goodbye to your pipe!”
Jesse looked a little more uncertain about that one, but he blew out the candle. He opened his presents, inspecting the new trucks solemnly. But the posters from Mac were what won his heart and made him smile.
“I’ll help you put them up tomorrow,” Mac told him gruffly.
They all went outside afterward and Jesse threw his soother and a token diaper into the fire pit. Then Mac showed her the calves that had been recently weaned from their mothers and told her that it was one of his jobs to feed them. The calves obviously associated him with food because they came running when he appeared at the fence.
He looked very pleased by that.
It began to get cooler as the sun went down, and Evan suggested Kathleen go back to the house with Jesse. Mac and he would do a few chores. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”
She did, and was busy doing the dishes, Jesse standing on a chair beside her playing in the suds, when the phone rang. She hesitated and picked it up.
“He’s out doing chores—oh, wait, I think I hear him coming. Just a sec. Evan, phone.”
He came in through the door, and picked up the phone. She could tell right away something was wrong. He turned his back to her, and his conversation was curt and monosyllabic.
She could hear a growing edge of impatience in his voice.
Finally he said, “Look, I have company right now. Could we have this discussion another time? I beg your pardon? Is it a woman? I think you know it’s a woman. She answered the damn phone.”
He listened for a minute and then said in a quiet tone that did not disguise his fury, “You want to know what? She’s a hooker all the way from Vancouver. We’re having a wild party. I let the dogs clean the plates, and Jesse plays with barbed wire because I’m too mean to buy him toys. Got it?”
He slammed down the phone, kept his back to her for a moment and then turned to her slowly.
“I’m sorry. I lost my temper. I should have never said that.”
She stared at him, her mouth open. “A hooker?” she finally whispered. “Me?”
“I just said that because Mac told me you hook rugs. Sorry. It was a lousy thing to say. Sometimes I just start spouting. A fault. One that probably won’t make me look very good in court.”
“In court? Who was that?”
“Jesse’s grandparents, Dee’s folks. They phone now and then and accuse me of being a lousy parent. They suspect I don’t feed him, or keep him clean because my house is overrun with women and I have wild pot parties.”
“Well,” she said. “Close. It was a potty party.”
He tried to smile, but didn’t quite pull it off. “They’ve requested a home study on me, a preliminary to starting legal action for guardianship of Jesse.”
She gasped. “Evan! They can’t have a hope.”
He shrugged, rolling his shoulders, as if trying to lift a burden off them. She wanted to rub the anxiety away.
“They’ve talked about this before. I’m not completely blameless. When I first met Dee, I was hardly a parent’s vision for their daughter’s future. But they don’t want to believe I’ve changed, and I don’t have the time nor energy to convince them. Besides, I think if I was okay, they might have to start looking at Dee, and ultimately at themselves. Who wants to do that?”
“Do you have a lawyer?”
“Yeah. She says as long as I keep my nose clean, I should be okay.”
“Should?” she whispered, wanting to erase the worry line that had appeared on his forehead.
“I’d have a better chance if I were married.”
“That’s unfair.”
He smiled, but it was deeply cynical. “So, who expects life to be fair?”
The phone rang again.
He closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. “They forgot to tell me they wished it was me instead of their daughter,” he guessed, and picked up the phone. “Yeah?”
His tone changed instantly. “Ma? What?” He listened, turned his back to her again. “Yeah, okay,” he finally said, hanging up the phone. He stood very still for a long time before he turned back to her.
“This has turned into a really lousy party,” he said. “That was Ma Watson.”
Kathleen felt dread spreading over her. “And?”
“She knew you were here. She didn’t want you to be alone when you heard.”
“Heard?”
“They sold the store. The deal was finalized a few minutes ago. It wasn’t listed or anything. It was a buyer who was interested last year and came back.”
Mac came in, holding Jesse’s hand. Jesse’s little blue jeans had a dark, wet stain down the front of them. “I tried to tell you this idea was stupider than stupid,” Mac said, then looked from her face to Evan’s and back again. “What’s the matter?”
“Somebody bought the store,” Kathleen told him.
“The store where you work?” Mac asked.
“Yes.”
“Does that mean you don’t have a job?”
She looked to Evan.
“They want to give you a month’s notice. She said you could stay in the house as long as you need to. They’ll pay for you to go back to Vancouver.”
“Yippee!” Mac howled.
Kathleen turned away. She felt Evan’s hand on her shoulder, and looked up at him. She could see the concern in his face.
She tried to smile. He had enough on his plate right now. She said bravely, in her very best Eeyore voice, “I told you my balloons always pop.”
Chapter Five
Kathleen swam out of a deep sleep and groped for the phone.
“Hello?” she asked groggily.
“Hi.”
“Evan?” She came slowly awake, looked at her clock. It was after two in the morning.
“I’m sorry to wake you. I’m having a little problem.”
So was she. That it felt so much like a dream to wake up to the deep timbre of his voice, that she couldn’t really be sure if she was awake or sleeping. “What?”
He held the phone away and she could hear Jesse shrieking in the background.
“Oh, my God,” she said, coming awake in a flash. “What on earth—”
“Remember the ceremonial torching of the soother? Not such a hot idea, no pun intended.”
“He’s making that noise about a soother? It sounds like—”
“I know. It sounds like I’m killing him. If I had neighbors the police would be here. I’d be getting hauled out in cuffs. That wouldn’t look so good on the court report.”
“It takes them two hours to come,” she reminded him, marveling at the thread of good humor in his voice, despite the noise in the background.
“That means they would have been here half an hour ago.”
“Oh, Evan.”
“I’m going to ask you the biggest favor of my life. I’ll never ask you for anything else.”
“What?”
“Have you got a key to the Outpost? Can I get in there and buy a soother? I didn’t want to bother Ma. Pa’s sick again, and she sounded about done in herself when I talked to her earlier.”
“How could I say no to that? Should I meet you there? Half an hour.”
“I bet I can make it in twenty minutes.”
“Evan, I have to tell you something.”
“That I owe you my life?”
“Besides that.”
“You want my firstborn son? Take him.”
She liked his voice on the other end of the phone, snuggled deeper under her blanket, let herself savor it. It felt sensual somehow to be talking on the phone in the middle of the night to the best-looking man in Hopkins Gulch. And not at all dangerous, since she would be leaving soon.
“I want you to know,” she said firmly, “that you are going to do just fine if it comes to a court case. I think you’re about the world’s best daddy.”
She wouldn’t have been able to say that to his face, or if she were staying, either, but the phone gave her a strange sense of intimacy that she never wanted to let go of.
Pathetic old maid that she was.
She reminded herself he wouldn’t be enjoying this moment quite as much as she was, since he wasn’t in bed and since she was competing with a child screaming in his other ear.
There was a long pause on the other end of the line, and then his voice hoarse, he said, “That’s about the nicest thing anyone ever said to me, Kathleen. I’ll pick you up. Twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes was not a fair amount of time to give a woman approaching thirty-five to get ready for anything. She had to be content with running a brush through her hair, scrubbing her face, brushing her teeth. She pulled a button-up sweater shirt and a baggy pair of slacks over the baby doll pajamas she wore to bed and went out into the night.
She was not sure she had ever seen a night so magical—stars in Vancouver competed with all the other lights, got lost somewhere. But here the universe looked enormous, the stars glittering in shining abundance. It made her think thoughts of larger things.
