Mr. Good Enough, page 26
“I just got out of a dysfunctional relationship with a cat.” She sounded cranky, almost near tears.
“What happened?” Maybe she’d done it for him, and she was just missing the cat.
He gave himself a little shake. It wasn’t about the cat, and he knew it. So he gripped her tighter, hanging on until he had to let go. She smelled like paint and earthy woman. He’d never be able to smell either again without thinking of her.
“He didn’t like being alone. He was an angel while I was there, but as soon as I left the house, he shredded my furniture or broke something and then yesterday he peed all over my mattress and worse, and then when I got home he coughed up a hair ball on me. Stupid cat was worse than an abusive boyfriend.”
If he squeezed any tighter, she might pop. “You want me to take care of the cat?”
“I handled it, thanks.” With a sigh, she pulled away from him and started around the building. She was wearing her thin painting shirt again. She must’ve been freezing. “I want to go home.”
“You got something to sleep on at home?” If the cat peed on her mattress, it probably smelled nasty.
Plus, if he took her to her parents’ house, he’d get more time with her. More time to convince her he could make her happy. That he could be all she needed.
“I’ll be fine.”
She didn’t sound fine. She sounded worn down. “I can take you to your parents’ place. They have extra beds.”
She shot him an irritated glance. “Knock it off.”
“What?”
“Quit trying to fix things. Maybe I can’t take care of a cat, but I can take care of myself.”
“Just trying to help.”
“Try something else.”
What else did he have? He was drowning. “You know, the cat thing wasn’t your fault.”
“Yeah, yeah. I’m the victim.”
She was breaking his heart. “There’s this guy on my crew, Hector. We had a Christmas party last year, and he brought his wife. She’s big into working with animal shelters, so she spent most of the party talking about dogs and cats and other animals. The lady swore up and down that picking a dog’s easy, but picking a cat’s like dating. You have to make sure you’re compatible before you make a commitment. You and Horatio weren’t meant to be. Ruby read those signs from the universe wrong. It’s her fault.”
“It’s my fault for being a sucker.”
They reached her car. When she gave him her keys, he took her hand as well. “You’re not a sucker. You’re a good person.”
She tilted her head up at him. “I heard you yesterday. With Scilla and Tiffy.”
He started. Where had she been hiding? Had he said something wrong? “You did?”
“I was in the kitchen. Linda was too.”
“Oh.”
Maddie shivered. He reached for her car door with his free hand. She needed to get out of the cold. But she stopped him. “It took a lot for her to come out of the kitchen this morning,” she said. “A lot.”
“She said something?”
Maddie looked past him toward the shop and pulled her hands back. “Let’s just say today was a really good sign for you.”
She still believed in him. He smiled down at her. “Hey, I thought I was supposed to be making you feel better this time.”
She rolled her eyes. “Blah blah macho, blah blah ego. Can you take me home already?”
“Anything the lady wants.” He unlocked the car and held her door for her, earning him another amused eye roll. He closed her in, then went around and climbed in himself, adjusting the seat so his legs would fit. “You wanna go to Tiffany’s game with me Saturday night?”
“You heard Scilla’s making new demands? Parker’s fit to be tied.”
Trent knew. He’d gone out to his parents’ old place and found two more walls down and a short thank-you note amidst the rubble.
But he hadn’t missed the way she’d avoided the question. “I offered to take some pictures for your parents. Looks like she’s grown a lot since the last ones they’ve got on the wall. So, Saturday night?”
“They’ll like that. They don’t see her very often.”
She closed her eyes and dropped her head against the headrest.
Case closed.
The silence on the drive home nearly killed him. When they got to her house, he still insisted on walking her to her door. On her porch, he reached for her again. “Maddie?”
She shook her head. “I can’t, Trent.” Her voice wobbled. “I want a baby of my own. I want to feel him growing and kicking inside me. I want to love him before I know him. I want to look at him and see a better part of me. Maybe it’s selfish, but adopting isn’t enough.” She fisted her hands low over her belly. “There’s somebody special in here. He deserves his chance to have a life. I’m going to do things wrong, and I’m going to make mistakes, but I have to try. If you can’t—if we can’t—then we just can’t.”
Every word licked at his hopes and dreams with a flame he couldn’t put out, until his future looked as bleak and hopeless at is had a couple of weeks ago. He shoved his fists in his pockets. “So that’s it then,” he said, because there wasn’t anything else he could say.
“I’m sorry,” she whispered.
He nodded. He swallowed hard, then reached out to touch her one last time. “Mad,” he said, his own voice breaking, “promise me you’ll be happy.”
She stepped back, eyes on the ground again. “You too.”
Coming home had been hard.
Still not being good enough was infinitely worse.
BY SUNDAY evening, Maddie was ready to rip her biological clock out. A full day of Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On” was making her nauseous. So when somebody knocked on her door just after sunset, she bolted up from her makeshift bed in her paint room. She slowed her steps as she approached the door, as if she could still see Trent walking away, shoulders hunched, head down. Broken.
She sucked at her lower lip, fighting back the well of tears. He wouldn’t be back for more, would he?
She crept to the window and peeked out.
Her dad was on the steps.
She was both disappointed and relieved. She gave her eyes a quick swipe, then opened the door. “Hey, Daddy.”
He stepped into the room with a look she recognized well. The disappointed-but-concerned parental look of impending guilt. “Hey, pumpkin.” He gave her a little hug. “You feeling okay? We missed you at dinner.”
She pulled away and fluttered her hands at the drop cloths still scattered around the room, glad he couldn’t see the extent of the damage Horatio had done. “Just had a long week. Work projects, side projects, work problems, pet problems.” She swallowed back the additional explanation. If he hadn’t seen Trent yet, he would soon enough.
Her dad held out a grocery bag. “Mom made eggplant lasagna.”
Maddie’s stomach grumbled out a protest that she was pretty sure wasn’t hunger. “Thanks.”
“I like what you’ve done in here.” He shifted on his heels. “Feels a lot nicer.”
Did everyone have to have an opinion on what she did with her house? She gave a little shrug. “Just felt like a change.”
“Still sleeping in your office?”
Maddie was getting an itch…somewhere deep, deep down, sandwiched between those two vertebrae in her back that she just couldn’t reach no matter how bad she might’ve twisted.
Simon hadn’t bailed on his campaign when Hunter started gaining ground. Parker didn’t boycott his living room whenever he and Scilla had another fight there. And Connor—well, Connor wouldn’t know a personal problem if it were spelled out as a mathematical equation. “No,” she told her dad.
No need to mention where she was sleeping. Because she would hit the furniture store first thing in the morning, and she would get a new bed, then she would lie on that bed in her bedroom until not sleeping anymore wasn’t an option.
“You did a real nice job in Ruby’s bathroom too,” he said.
That itch was pulsing in time with her clock, and she didn’t have to strain to make out the changed tune. Beck. “Loser.”
She was. She was a loser. She was only good enough to paint bathrooms. She didn’t do big green energy projects at work, she didn’t inspire the next generation in the classroom or run for mayor, she wasn’t studying world domination through astrophysics.
She was the disappointment in the family.
“Thanks,” she choked out.
“You and Trent seem to make a pretty good team.”
And there it was. The question of why she’d sent him home broken, dejected, and lost, looking worse than he had when he’d come back to town. Why she’d hurt him. Because he was Trent Sawyer, Mr. Invincible, and she was Maddie Mason, Ms. Failure. Trent was the only reason she had work on her desk right now. He was the reason she’d gotten rid of the dark living room. He was the reason the town was excited about a new mayor, even if Hunter Galloway still had a lead in the unofficial polls, the reason the church had a solid roof.
He was the reason she’d had a bathroom to paint in the first place.
Without him, she’d be an even bigger loser. Was that what her dad was trying to say? Maddie felt her chin rising. “Yeah, well, he doesn’t need me to make him look good.”
The Reverend Mason’s jaw flexed, and his nostrils gave a slight flare. His voice dipped low. “Mad, what’s going on?”
When they were growing up, Parker and Simon would come home from school talking about their friends or their sports or occasionally, mostly Parker, duking it out with somebody who’d be their best bud the next day. Maddie’d come home crying because someone called her four-eyes, or looked at her wrong, or got to the best seat at the lunch table first. When they hit those junior high and high school years, Simon and Parker had found where they fit, and Maddie had floundered, jumping from one club to the next, never finding the friends, the activities, anything that felt right. At parent-teacher conference time, Simon and Parker were given glowing academic reports, while Maddie’s teachers worried about her sociability and that she “wasn’t performing up to potential.” Her parents would come home, sit her down, and ask, “Mad, what’s going on?”
Every time.
She was thirty years old, and she was still getting the same question from her dad.
Much as she didn’t want her parents to get old and die, she didn’t want to be a child forever more. That itching spread, and her back gave a spasm. Her arms twitched, and her left knee wobbled under the weight of her life.
“You can’t solve this,” she said, fighting back the lump in her throat. “I’m a grown-up. I have grown-up problems, and I will find the grown-up solutions, and I’ll do it by myself. Without you.”
He blinked once, twice. Instead of breaking her resolve, the moist shine in his eyes and droop of his mouth made something ugly flare up inside her. She pointed to the door. “Please leave.”
“Maddie—” He reached toward her, but she ducked out of his way.
“Please,” she repeated.
He stared at her for a long minute, then ducked his head and turned and walked out the door. He wasn’t broken, but the self-conscious way he rubbed at his thinning salt-and-pepper hair told her he was hurt.
She collapsed against the wall. Less than twelve hours, and she’d hurt two of the most important men in her life. Maybe she should go ahead and call all her brothers too.
She rubbed her wet cheeks with her sleeve, then pushed away from the wall and headed back to her art room.
It was time to figure out how a grown-up would solve this problem.
MADDIE’S PHONE rang at 5:01 Tuesday night as she was sitting in the Monical’s Pizza parking lot in Bloomington. She jumped, then breathed a sigh of relief. If Mr. Mark Farley wanted to know why she was late, she could tell him her business partner called.
Because that sounded a lot better than saying, “I decided it was my turn to be late for an Internet date. Nice job, you passed the first test.”
Not that she’d noticed anyone who looked like a Mark Farley walking through the door anytime in the last ten minutes she’d been sitting here.
She answered her phone. “Hey, G. What’s up?”
“Blythe Brothers Jewelers wants ad space on MisterGoodEnough.com,” Gina shrieked.
“Ohmigod. The big jeweler in Bliss?” The little town in northern Illinois had a huge wedding industry. Advertising from any of their shops was a big deal.
“Yep.”
The pitter-patter of Maddie’s heart might’ve been joy, but more likely it was something like the indigestion of knowing that having a good date with Mr. Farley tonight could lead to more revenue because of the success case.
Mr. Farley was looking better and better all the time.
“Fantastic,” Maddie said.
“And you’ll never believe this, but Cheryl Doogan signed up today.”
Maddie latched onto the excited notes in Gina’s voice, hoping it would carry her through her date tonight. “Really?”
“Yeah. She posted in her profile that her nephew had such good luck, she decided it was time she tried out the dating circus.” Gina let out a hoot of laughter. “God, I love this town.”
That was worth celebrating. For the first time since Friday, Maddie felt a true smile on her lips. “Glad it’s working out for you.”
“Yeah, well, moving’s a bitch. Oh! Guess who else signed up.”
“If you say one of my brothers, I don’t want to know what you’re going to do next.”
“Better. Hunter Galloway.”
“Nuh-uh.”
Gina let out an evil squeal. “Oh, yeah, baby. He tried to hide behind a PayPal name, but I got mad skills on decoding that sort of thing. Think that’ll be sufficient blackmail to get him out of the race?”
“I think he’s probably doing it so he can prove the women who are using the site are losers who need to love God first.”
“Spoilsport.”
Maddie smiled. “Sorry.”
“So since you brought me down, I’ve got bad news too. You want it now, or after your date?”
She was only two minutes late. And it might be good to go in with nowhere to go but up. “Hit me.”
“There’s a rumor going around that Simon’s behind MisterGoodEnough Junior, and people are pissed. He took a hit in the Register’s mayoral poll this afternoon, and I heard he might be in trouble at the school. If I don’t nail whoever’s behind this Junior crap soon, we might have to claim it to keep Simon out of hot water. ”
“Holy hell,” Maddie sighed.
“Got that right. But hey, at least it’s not boring. Enjoy your date. I want all the juicy details. When’s it start?”
“Three minutes ago.”
“Good gravy, is this one late too?”
“No idea. I’m not inside yet.”
“Omigod! Go, go, go! Knock him dead, Mad.”
“I’ll try. And G? Do you think we could keep this one off the blog?”
“Aw, Mad. You bet. Try to enjoy yourself, okay?”
“’Kay.”
Gina disconnected. With no more excuses for waiting, Maddie grabbed her small purse, climbed out of her Bug, consciously decided not to let work bother her, gave her purple smiley-face shirt a tug for good luck, and headed for the door, harboring no hopes at all that someone who’d been as evil to men this week as she had could possibly have an honest-to-goodness decent date tonight.
But when she crossed the threshold and glanced around the dimly lit dining room, a round-faced, dark-haired, Mark Farley–looking guy raised a hand and half smiled at her from a corner booth. Round one went to Mr. Farley.
He wore wire-rimmed glasses that hadn’t been in his profile picture, but she wore contacts, so she didn’t count that against him. He rose as she approached the booth. “Maddie? It’s great to meet you.”
She shook his hand and smiled back. “You too.”
Maddie slid into the booth and studied her date closer. He still had all his hair, his teeth were straight and white. His khaki pants and green button-down shirt were clean. While she’d caught the drift of his eyes checking her out as she approached the table, he hadn’t leered. So he didn’t set her heart to pounding or light her loins on fire, but she didn’t know him yet. She’d give it time.
Besides, that instant zing of lust had never worked out well for her, now had it?
He tugged at the cuffs on his shirt and gave her a nervous smile.
“How do you feel about kids?” she blurted.
His forehead creased into uneven lines as his brows shot up. He seemed to choke a little, but after a quick drink, he met her eyes. “I like kids. Have to.” He grinned, and she noticed his teeth were slightly uneven. “I teach seventh grade science at a small Christian school.”
He and Simon would have a lot to talk about at family dinners. Probably her dad would too.
Was Cupid finally cutting her a real break? “Good,” she said. “Good. See, I just got out—wait, let me start over. I really want kids. I never thought I’d have to resort to online dating, but I’m getting older and my parents are getting older and I don’t want to wait any more for kids.” She sounded like an idiot, and she knew it, but she couldn’t shut up. “And I’ve had some really bad experiences, and so I don’t want to drag this out if we’re not after the same thing, so if you don’t want kids, please tell me now so we can cut our losses early.”
He tugged on his cuffs again. “I, ah, have a seven-year-old from a previous relationship. Her mom and I don’t get along real well, but she’s pretty much my world.” He fiddled with his silverware. “Kids are great. I’d love to have more.”
She blew out a slow breath. Parker would like this guy. “Great. Great. I’m sorry, I know I sound like a dork….”
“It’s okay. You have to have your priorities, right?”
The waitress approached, and they paused to order. While they waited for their drinks, Maddie studied him more. He had a little extra flesh around his mouth, giving an impression that he frowned a lot.
Trent smiled a lot.
Maddie gave herself a mental shake. She and Trent didn’t have a future. “So, Mark, do you play any video games?”
