Dating for Two (Matchmaking Mamas) (5 page)

“What is your pleasure?” the older woman behind the counter asked politely.

Erin looked at the pastries, each one more tempting than the last. “One of everything,” she told the woman wistfully.

Though pleasant, the woman behind the counter looked as if a sense of humor was not part of her makeup.

“That can be arranged,” she said in a very serious voice.

Afraid that the woman would begin placing things on the tray that Steve had picked up and was resting on the counter right now, Erin quickly shook her head.

“Oh, no, no, I was just kidding, giving voice to a fantasy,” she explained. Taking a breath, she scanned her choices one last time and made up her mind. “I’ll have a cup of coffee and a cream-filled turnover.”

“Make that two,” Steve told the woman.

The dark-haired woman inclined her head. “As you wish,” she replied.

With a grand sweep of her hand, she indicated that they should move along to the center of the counter, toward the register. She met them there, delivering two cups of steaming, aromatic black coffee and two large cream-filled turnovers, each residing on its own plate. The woman carefully placed the plates one at a time on the tray, right next to the coffee.

She proceeded to ring up the sale. “Will that be together?” she asked.

“No,” Erin answered.

“Yes,” Steve said at the same time, his voice resounding slightly louder than hers. Taking out a twenty, he handed it to the woman.

“No, really, this isn’t necessary,” Erin protested, reaching into her purse.

The woman seemed to take no note of her, handing Steve his change. He slipped what she’d given him into the tip jar beside the register and picked up the tray. For the first time, the older woman smiled.

“You don’t have to pay for me,” Erin told him as he walked over to a small table for two to the left of the register.

Setting the tray down, he looked at her. “If you had asked me out for coffee, I would have expected you to pay for me,” he told her cheerfully, despite the fact that he really wouldn’t have allowed her to pay. The idea of going Dutch had never appealed to him and it wasn’t something he felt comfortable about doing. Certainly not when it came to something as insignificant as a cream-filled turnover and a cup of coffee. “Tell you what,” he suggested, sitting down after she had taken her seat. “You tell me what fantasy you were giving voice to and we’ll call it even.”

She looked at him, slightly confused. “What?”

“Back there, when that woman looked like she was more than happy to give you ‘one of everything,’ you stopped her by saying you were only ‘giving voice to a fantasy.’” As he spoke, he distributed the two cups of coffee and then the two turnovers. With the tray empty, he removed it and put it out of the way on the floor behind his chair. “Did you used to dream about pastries?”

He meant it as a joke, in the same vein that he’d asked her about naming inanimate objects. He hadn’t really expected her to answer his question seriously.

“All the time,” Erin told him with a heartfelt sigh.

“You weren’t allowed sweets as a kid?” he asked. The guess arose out of his own childhood, when one of his friends—Billy—had parents who wouldn’t allow him to have any candy, cake or cookies. Billy’s snacks were all painfully healthy foods, such as nuts, fruits and carrots. The second Billy was out of the house, he made up for it, scarfing down as many sweets as he could get his hands on. He’d had a serious weight problem by the time he was twenty.

Erin, on the other hand, looked as if she was in danger of blowing away if she lost as little as five pounds.

“Oh, I was allowed sweets,” she told him. “I just couldn’t keep any of them down.”

He took a sip of his coffee before venturing, “Allergies?”

Erin broke off a piece of the turnover and savored it before answering, “Chemo.”

“Chemo,” Steve repeated, stunned. “As in chemotherapy?”

“That’s the word,” she acknowledged, nodding her head. Even now, more than twenty years later, the very sound of the word brought a chill down her spine. She always had to remind herself that she had conquered the horrible disease, not the other way around.

He felt as if he had opened his mouth as wide as possible and inserted not just one foot but both. “I’m sorry, Erin. I didn’t mean to bring up any painful memories.”

She smiled at him, appreciating his thoughtfulness. “You didn’t. I was the one who brought up the memory—you just asked about it.”

How did he extract himself without sounding clumsy—or callous?

“Are you all...better?” Well, that certainly was neither suave nor warm, he upbraided himself. “I’m sorry. This is none of my business—”

“That’s all right,” she assured him. “I don’t mind answering. Too many people act like you’re some kind of alien creature when you have cancer. They don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything at all—and they just disappear out of your life. As to your question, yes, I’m all better, thanks for asking.

“And it wasn’t all bad,” she confided. “Being that sick made me appreciate everything I had, everything I was able to enjoy after I got out of the hospital. Besides, if it wasn’t for that whole experience, I would have never met Tex.”

“Tex,” Steve repeated, drawing a blank for a second. And then he remembered. “That would be your stuffed dinosaur, right?”

“Hey, who’re you calling stuffed?”

The high-pitched voice caught him off guard and he automatically looked around to see where the voice was coming from before he realized that Erin had projected it.

Erin tried hard not to laugh. “I’m sorry,” she said, her eyes still dancing with amusement. “I just couldn’t resist. Tex has been such an integral part of everything I do, at times I have to admit I almost feel he’s real.”

“That makes two of us,” he told her.

Even so, Steve was only vaguely aware of her apology. What he was far more aware of was that Erin had placed her hand on his wrist while she was talking to him.

The second she’d touched him, he had felt an instant connection with this animated, unique woman.

Chapter Four

H
is interest engaged and heightened, Steve found himself wondering things about her. A great many things. For starters, he was intrigued by the wording she’d used in referring to the puppet that had created such a hit with the class.

“Just how did you ‘meet’ Tex?” Steve asked. Then, before she could begin to answer, he quickly added, “And if you don’t mind, I’d rather you told me the story instead of hearing it from Tex.”

Instead of taking offense, the way he was afraid she might, Erin laughed. “Sure. I didn’t mean to make you feel uncomfortable by using his voice,” she apologized.

He didn’t want her to think he was humorless. “I’m not exactly uncomfortable,” he told her, searching for the right way to explain just what he
did
feel. “I guess I just feel a little strange having a conversation with a suitcase—especially when the suitcase is still out in your car,” he pointed out.

“Well, at least you’re not hoarse from shouting,” Tex’s voice told him. And then Erin flashed a very endearing chagrined expression. “Sorry, I just couldn’t resist one parting comment.”

“Maybe you’re missing your true calling,” Steve speculated.

She wasn’t sure where he was going with this. “And that would be?”

“Stand-up comedy with Tex and those other toys you brought with you.” And that reminded him of something else. Sitting across from her like this had all sorts of thoughts as well as questions popping into his head. “By the way, that was very generous of you.” When she raised her eyebrows quizzically, he elaborated, “Bringing enough toys for the whole class.”

Erin raised one shoulder in a shy, dismissive shrug he found startlingly appealing. “It’s actually a little selfish of me.”

“Just how do you figure that?” Steve asked.

To her it was as plain as day. “Easy. I get back a lot more than I give. There’s nothing greater than seeing the joy bloom on a kid’s face and knowing that you were partially responsible for putting it there.” Before he could respond, she quickly changed the subject, returning to a previous comment he’d made. “And as for your suggestion about doing stand-up comedy, I do get to satisfy that whim twice a year when I pay a visit to CHOC—Children’s Hospital of Orange County.” Erin was quick to spell out the full name in case he wasn’t familiar with the facility or its common abbreviation.

“Twice a year?” he echoed. She really
was
serious about bringing joy to children, Steve thought. “Let me guess—around the holidays.”

“Obviously nothing gets past you,” Erin teased.

“You were going to tell me how you and—” Steve lowered his voice without realizing it “—Tex met.”

Erin stared at him. “Why did you just do that?” she asked with a laugh.

“Do what?”

“Lowered your voice before saying ‘Tex.’”

The second she said it, he realized she was right. He’d lowered his voice automatically, the way he would have if he were talking about Jason with the boy close by. Steve had no choice but to laugh at himself and the situation.

“Because now you have me acting as if that puppet of yours is actually real,” he confessed.

She took it as a compliment in part and smiled her thanks. “Then I guess I do owe you that explanation. I created Tex to keep me company. When the doctor diagnosed me with cancer, I didn’t know what it was, but I knew it was scary enough to frighten my poor mother. She tried not to let me see, but she did a lot of crying. Then someone told my dad about that famous children’s hospital in Memphis. My mother lost no time in getting me in. My dad stayed back home working while my mother flew out with me.

“The people there were all very kind,” she recalled with fondness. “But treatment is a long, frightening process when you’re a little kid. I missed my friends back home. They sent messages and we stayed in contact for a few weeks, but that didn’t last long and little by little, it stopped.” She shrugged, avoiding his eyes. “I felt like they forgot all about me. I wanted a friend who would always be there for me whenever I was scared or lonely—my mother told me I would never be alone as long as I had my imagination.”

“Smart lady,” he commented.

Erin smiled. “She is—when she’s not being a mother hen. Anyway, I was really into dinosaurs, so I created Tex. At first he was just one of my thick green socks that I drew a face on with a laundry marker. Then my mother got some green felt, and I bought sequins and pillow stuffing in a craft store. I sewed him by hand at my bedside and drew in his features.” She smiled as she remembered the early prototype. She still had him locked away in a box in her closet. “Tex wasn’t very pretty but he was very, very loyal, which was all I wanted.

“I held on to him when they took me in for my treatment sessions.” Despite the amount of time that had passed, the memory was still very vivid in her mind. “And he never left my side no matter how sick I got. After a while, I really did start thinking he was real. Since I couldn’t go anywhere, I created some fantastic adventures for us in my head. All that helped get me through some of the darker times,” she told him, trying to make the whole experience sound less of an emotional roller coaster than it actually had been. After all, she wasn’t trying to elicit his pity just to fully answer his question.

“After I miraculously got better, I started to think about other kids who had to go through what I did. Other kids who might have felt abandoned, lonely and scared. I wanted to help them get through it, just the way Tex helped me. That desire never left me, so while I was still in college, I came up with the idea of creating a whole line of stuffed dinosaurs that didn’t do anything but look loving. And with each stuffed toy, I’d include a little book of adventures that the toy and the child who got that toy would have. I donated the first hundred I made to a local hospital’s children’s wing.”

He could easily see her doing that. He had clients who would have had heart failure over the mere suggestion of giving away their product like that. She had an extremely large heart, he couldn’t help thinking.

“Not very profitable,” he commented.

“Oh, there was profit,” Erin assured him with feeling. “Profit in ways you can’t begin to imagine. Seeing those bright, happy faces was absolutely priceless. And I felt I was giving a little something back to a medical system that cured me. Anyway, it turned out that a local newscaster’s son was among the kids in that hospital who got one of my dinosaurs. The newscaster did a story on me. Pretty soon that segment was being picked up by other station affiliates and before I knew it, the story had gone national and I was getting donations to create more toys and more books.”

Erin smiled at him as she finished off the turnover she’d been picking at. “And just like that, I was officially in the toy business. It didn’t hurt that parents who weren’t dealing with the trauma of severely ill children were ready to introduce plain, old-fashioned imagination back into their children’s lives. I was getting in more demands than I could fill by myself. That was when I decided I needed help and hired a couple of people I’d gone to college with. Pretty soon a couple of people weren’t enough to keep up with the demand, so I hired a couple more. Now I’m so busy I have to schedule brushing my teeth.” She flushed. “I guess that’s more information than you wanted.”

Actually, he found himself wanting even more, but he kept that to himself for now. Rather than address her last sentence, he commented on her time crunch. “You seemed to have found time for Career Day.”

She laughed. “I have trouble saying no to short people,” Erin told him.

“Kids or Mrs. Reyes?” he quipped.

Her eyes crinkled as she smiled at the question. She’d meant children, but she could see his point. “Mrs. Reyes was rather petite, wasn’t she? Actually, it was the school’s assistant principal who called me. A woman by the name of Felicity,” she remembered. “When she told me that the presentation would be in front of a classroom full of second graders, I just couldn’t get my lips to say no.” Her shoulders rose and fell in a disparaging shrug. “So I didn’t.”

When she’d referred to her lips, Steve’s eyes were drawn to that part of her and he caught himself wondering, just for the slightest moment, how they might feel against his own.

The next moment, he silently scolded himself. What was the matter with him?
You’re not in the market anymore, remember? You tried dating and you’re just not any good at it or at picking suitable candidates. Stick with what you know—being a lawyer.

Dating someone made him feel like a fish out of water. Granted, this little break with this woman was exceedingly nice, but he couldn’t exactly call it a “date.” If anything, it was a pleasant interlude, a pause in his normally hectic routine. He couldn’t think of it as anything more than sharing some coffee with a really nice fellow human being.

Nothing to be made of that, he reminded himself.

“I have to admit that I was a little envious, watching you.”

“Envious?” she asked, surprised. “Why?”

“The kids looked as if they were hanging on your every word.”

She was quick to correct his observation and put it in its proper perspective. “They were busy eyeing all the toys, hoping to get their hands on some.”

He knew better. “Those kids all took to you even
before
you started handing out the toys. You had that whole class in the palm of your hand the second you started talking.”

She saw it differently. “You mean the second
Tex
started talking. I wasn’t an adult speaking to them—I was Tex’s keeper.” Which was just fine with her. “Kids are more than willing to suspend reality and believe in talking dinosaurs or anything else that sparks their fancy. That’s the trick,” she told him with a discernible measure of pride. “Sparking their fancy, making them your partner in the world of make-believe. Kids love adults joining them in this world where they can have great adventures and where absolutely
anything
is possible.

“To be completely honest, I love it, too,” she told him, “because it allows me to experience—vicariously—what I wasn’t able to experience when I was that age.”

Using a minimum of words to refer to herself, she had managed to create an image in his mind of the little girl she had once been. She’d aroused both his sympathy and, more importantly, his admiration. She’d not only survived everything that had happened to her but managed to find some good in it and use what she’d found to help other children faced with those very same daunting conditions.

“Well, whatever the pragmatic explanation is, all I know is that my son really took to you—and Tex.”

She liked the fact that he tagged on the dinosaur, even if it was as an afterthought. To her it meant that he had a large capacity not just for empathy but for flexibility, both of which were important qualities as far as she was concerned.

“Your son.” She paused for a moment to picture the class in her mind. “That would be the quiet one with the beautiful green eyes?” Eyes, she now noticed, that father and son seemed to share.

“That would be him. Jason,” Steve said, giving her his son’s name. “I haven’t seen him that enthralled with anyone—or anything—in two years.”

Erin knew she should be going on her way, but this man with the magnetic green eyes had managed to pique her curiosity with his last comment. Children were definitely her weakness.

“What’s been going on these last two years?” she asked him, even as she wondered if she’d overstepped some hidden line.

“Not very much of anything,” he confessed. Finished with both his turnover and the coffee, he slipped the plate from one under the saucer of the other. “The sitter I hired brings Jason home from school and he goes right to the TV monitor in the family room.”

The boy was around seven or eight. “Cartoons?” she guessed.

Steve shook his head. “Video games,” he told her. “Except for when I get him to do his homework, he’s glued to that set in the family room, playing this one particular video game where he has to shoot down an army of aliens to keep them from destroying the earth.”

Erin was vaguely aware of the video game he was referring to.

“Noble endeavor,” she commented, then couldn’t help adding, “Sounds a little bloodthirsty for a seven-year-old, but noble.”

“The game’s actually labeled age appropriate,” he told her. He had made sure of that, but once he actually saw Jason playing it, he had his doubts. Unfortunately, the boy appeared hooked on it. “Besides, compared to the way he’d been right before he started playing, I was thrilled that he showed an interest in
anything.

“Unfortunately, trying to get him away from the game, other than when he’s in school or in bed, is impossible,” he confided. “In a way, it’s as if this is the only reality Jason can deal with. That’s why when I heard him laughing this morning, it was like suddenly seeing the sun coming out after enduring forty days and nights of nonstop rain.”

Instead of basking in the implied compliment, Erin was far more curious about what had caused this withdrawal in his son in the first place. She had a feeling she was treading on private ground, but she sensed that the man sitting across from her needed to get this out, needed to talk about what was bothering his son—and very possibly him, as well.

“What happened approximately two years ago?” she asked Steve quietly, her voice low, coaxing, her eyes unwaveringly on his as she did her best to make him feel that it was all right to share this with her.

Steve took a deep breath before speaking, as if that could somehow shield him from the pain the words always created.

“Julia—Jason’s mother—died.”

Sympathy immediately flooded through her. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” Erin said, wishing there were better words to convey the depth of the distress for him that she was feeling right at this moment.

She was well aware that losing someone close was like getting a punch to the stomach, one that refused to stop hurting. That was the way she’d felt when her father had died so suddenly, close to ten years ago. Her mother had been equally affected.

Erin knew that her mother had never gotten over it completely, despite the fact that the woman tried to behave as if she had moved on. She suspected that in a way it had to be the same for Steve and his son. And that Jason undoubtedly saw through his father’s performance, just as she had seen through her mother’s.