Finding Mr. Right (8 page)

“Roger Brook Taney and Francis Scott Key shared an office in that building. With due respect to Francis Scott Key, I can’t resist thumbing my nose at the building whenever I pass it. When Taney was a Supreme Court Justice, he wrote the Dred Scott decision, which ruled that no slave or descendant of a slave could be a US citizen and, as a non-citizen, Dred Scott did not have the right to sue in a court of law.”

“I know. Here’s Taney’s house,” Tyra said, “and I can’t count the number of times I’ve spat at it. But Frederick isn’t what you’d call the real South.”

“Definitely not. You get southern hospitality and Yankee pride. That’s why I like it.”

When Byron parked in front of his house, Tyra closed her eyes and said a silent prayer. She looked up at the big, red brick corner row house that sat a stone’s throw from Druid Hill and wondered what awaited her inside. A high iron fence, on the inside of which grew thick evergreen hedges that guaranteed privacy for it occupants.

Byron opened the gate, took her hand and walked up the steps. The door opened almost as soon as he pushed the buzzer, and she looked into the faces of Jonie and Andy. Her first impression of the child was that he didn’t look at his father but at her.

“Hi, Miss Tyra,” he said and they walked in.

“I’ve been looking forward to meeting you, Andy,” she said, put the shopping bag on the floor, bent down and offered to shake Andy’s hand. To her amazement, he shook hands.

“Me, too. Hi, Dad. Can we check my arithmetic before the kids come? I want to show Miss Tyra what I did.”

“In a minute, Andy. Aunt Jonie, this is Tyra Cunningham. Tyra, this is Jonie Hinds, my aunt.”

“And my aunt too, Miss Tyra.”

After they exchanged greetings, Tyra said to Jonie, “May I help you with things for the picnic while they’re doing arithmetic.”

Andy looked up at her. “Daddy said you were coming to see
me
. Don’t you want to see me do my arithmetic?”

“Yes, I do, but I didn’t realize you would like me to be there. You and your dad always do your arithmetic together, and I didn’t want to interfere.”

“Oh, it’s okay. Maybe next time, you can check my arithmetic. Dad says I’m messy, but I always get it right.”

Tyra looked at Jonie. “Next time. Okay?”

“Of course. First things first.”

She went with Byron and Andy to the boy’s room and sat on the big red wooden elephant in the middle of it. “Don’t try
to lift my elephant, Miss Tyra. Only my dad can move it. Come look out the window, and you can see my tent.”

Looking out the window, she decided that Byron’s plot was extremely large for one in the middle of a big city, and she made a note to ask Byron how he’d managed to acquire it. She listened to the arithmetic exercise and decided that she was double glad she’d finished her formal education.

“How’d I do, Miss Tyra?”

“Your father told me that you’re smart, so I’m not surprised. Congratulations on getting all of it right. You’re a very good student.”

He gazed up at her, his expression intense and his eyes—large with dark brown irises rimmed in light brown—so like his father’s and grandfather’s. “Do you have any little boys?”

“No, I don’t. I wish I did.”

“Gee, I’m sorry. You can come to see me sometime. That’s the doorbell. I have to go downstairs.” He ran out of the room and plowed down the stairs like an engine out of control.

She turned to Byron, who sat on the edge of Andy’s bed. “He’s a lovely child, and he is awfully good looking. What are you going to do when he gets to be a teenager and the girls find out about him?”

His grin suggested that she shouldn’t be too concerned about that. “Not to worry, sweetheart. Cute little boys often grow up to be frightful looking teenagers.”

She raised an eyebrow. ‘Who’re you fooling? You never had a day looking frightful in your life, and he’s the image of you.” She treated him to a long, slow wink. “I’m going downstairs and see what the kids are doing.”

“Oh, no you don’t.” He jumped up and grabbed at her. “Flirt with me and leave me here to deal with it, huh?”

She dodged him. “You’d rather have a promise than nothing, wouldn’t you?” she threw over her shoulder as she headed down the stairs.

“Witch! My day will come,” she heard him grumble, and couldn’t help smiling. He didn’t know it, but she could hardly wait for their weekend together.

She removed a box from the shopping bag and went outside to the children’s tent. “Andy, I have something here for you and your friends. Shall we give it to them?”

He ran over to her and looked at the box. “Colored bubbles? We’re going to blow bubbles?”

“If you’d like. We can. I brought enough for all of you.”

“Are you going to show us how?” Tyra said she would. “We’d better blow them out here or in the tent. Aunt Jonie will have a melt down if we mess up the kitchen floor.”

“It’s kind of windy. What about the back porch? If we mess that up, I’ll mop it.”

He stared at her. “You will? Okay.” He called the children, and they gathered around her on the porch. She gave each of them a pipe, kept one for herself, and soon the boys were dancing, shouting and laughing as they tried to see who could blow the biggest bubble.

“Look, Daddy. I just blew a blue one, and I already blew two big red ones.”

“Seems like a lot of fun,” Byron said. She glanced up at him and asked if he wanted to try one. He blew several, but she could see that his mind wasn’t on it. “I’ve got to make the fire in the pit so we can roast these hotdogs and marshmallows. They’ll be starved in a few minutes.”

“No, we won’t,” a chorus of voices disagreed. “We have to see how big a bubble we can blow.”

However, by the time the hotdogs were done, the boys had bounced around until they exhausted themselves. Byron gave them each a long stick with marshmallows on the end and let them roast their own. After filling up on hotdogs, marshmallows, lemonade and strawberry ice cream, the boys wound down like tops.

“I’m going to take the boys home. I’ll be gone about twenty minutes.” He leaned over and kissed her lips. “Andy will keep you company.”

She saw that Andy watched the two of them closely, but she couldn’t figure out his reaction to seeing his father kiss her. But after Byron left, the boy confronted her.

“Why did my daddy kiss you?”

“We’re friends, and we like each other.” He rubbed his eyes with his knuckles. “What’s the matter?” she asked him. “Are you sleepy?”

“He didn’t have a nap,” Jonie said. “I’m surprised he can stand up. They loved those bubbles so much they didn’t even want to eat, and they used up a lot of energy. Don’t you think you should go upstairs and lie down, Andy?”

“No, because Miss Tyra came to see me.”

Tyra took Andy’s hand. “I’ll go up with you, and I’ll sing you to sleep.”

“But I don’t want to sleep while you’re here.”

“Then we’ll both sleep. Come on.”

She sat in the big leather reclining chair in Andy’s room. “Andy, do you think I could have a hug?”

He rubbed his eyes. “I guess.”

She held out her arms, and he reached up to her, but her ruse didn’t work, so she said, “If you crawl into my lap, we can both go to sleep.” She pulled him into her lap, and he rested his head on her breast and snuggled up to her so quickly that it stunned her.

“Gee, Miss Tyra, you smell so good,” he said, and before she could reply he was fast asleep.

After delivering Andy’s playmates to their parents, Byron headed home, deep in thought. He hadn’t expected that Tyra would get on so well with four rambunctious four-year-old boys, but she interacted with them as easily as if it were her
life’s calling. Andy hadn’t misbehaved, but he knew that could happen at any time and he was eager to get back home.

“Aunt Jonie, this house is too quiet. Where are Andy and Tyra?”

“She took Andy up to his room to get a nap. When she insisted, I thought he was going to kick up a storm, but they went up there, and I haven’t heard a sound since.”

“Thanks, but I’ll believe it when I see it.”

He bounded up the stairs and went to Andy’s room, tiptoeing on the chance that the child might actually be asleep. He got no further that the door. A gasp escaped him and his heart constricted to such an extent that he leaned against the door jamb. Winded. He’d never seen a woman holding his child that way, almost as if he were a baby. It was a picture that would remain in his memory and in his heart forever. Tyra asleep with Andy in her arms.

Suddenly, he wheeled around, went to his office and got his camera. Nearly a dozen times, he snapped pictures of the scene with his child asleep and nestled in the arms of the woman he loved. Unable to resist longer, he knelt beside the chair, gathered the two of them in his arms and kissed them. Her eyes opened, then closed and opened again. Then she recognized him.

“Oh dear, I…shh.” Andy snuggled to her still asleep and unaware of the drama around him as Tyra gazed into Byron’s eyes and saw in them, more plainly than words could tell her, that he loved her. She reached out, caressed his cheek and parted her lips for his kiss.

“Do you want me to put him in his bed?” Byron asked her.

“Please don’t. He’ll think I didn’t want him here. Besides, I’m enjoying this. It’s the first time I ever held a child this way, and he’s so sweet.”

“Wasn’t he too heavy for you to lift?

She nodded. “Yes, so I asked him to crawl into my lap, and
he did. The next minute, he was asleep. I don’t know when I dozed off. I didn’t realize I was sleepy.”

“If I wasn’t looking at this, I probably wouldn’t believe it. What did you do, wave a magic wand?”

“You told him that I was coming to see him, and he tried to be a little gentleman toward his guest. He didn’t want to take a nap because I was here to see him, so I told him we’d both take one.” She kissed the boy’s head, and he turned and moved his head to her other breast.

“He’ll wrinkle your pants.”

“So what? Maggie will be glad to press them. She claims she doesn’t have enough to do.”

Andy turned again, and then he opened his eyes. “Daddy? Did Miss Tyra go home?”

“She’s holding you in her lap.”

“Oh.” He put his head back on the sweet spot and went to sleep.

He could see that she didn’t plan to put the child in his bed, and he didn’t want to interrupt their bonding, because it was important to him. He got a chair and sat beside them. He wasn’t comfortable, but he figured that his comfort was of minuscule importance compared to the miracle of his son asleep in Tyra Cunningham’s arms.

That didn’t mean Andy would accept and love Tyra and he could therefore relax. As a father, he had learned that children could shift with the wind and that Andy was not an exception. But he had hope now, and though she hadn’t said she loved him, she would after their weekend together. He bolted forward. She hadn’t agreed to it.

“Did you agree to our weekend?” he whispered.

“Clark got his back up when I told him I was going away with you for a weekend.”

He was certain that his eyes grew to twice their size. “You told him?”

“Why not? I’m grown. I never dreamed he was so old-fashioned. If he mentions it to you, you have my permission to poke him in the snoot. I wouldn’t go out of the country without telling a member of my family. I applied for my passport. Did you?”

“Mine’s in order.” He could only stare at her. She’d just told him that she agreed to something that was going to change both their lives, and she did it with all the casualness of one friend knocking knuckles with another. He let out a long breath and decided he better get used to it.

He realized that she wasn’t going to budge about putting Andy in his bed, so he put a CD of easy-listening music on his stereo recorder, sat down beside them and took her hand. Was she aware of that scene’s domesticity? He could definitely get used to it and to others of that ilk.

“Byron, I’m going… Mercy be. Will you look at this?”

He released Tyra’s hand and went to the door where Jonie stood looking as if she’d seen an aberrant phenomenon. “How’d she get him to do that?”

“I don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, Aunt Jonie, and I don’t question Providence. I don’t know how she got him to climb into her lap, but he certainly likes it there.”

She rubbed her hands together. “I guess I don’t baby him enough these days, but I don’t want him to take me for his mother. I hope you’re considering something permanent with her, Byron, because she’s really a fine woman. I got that when she shook my hand. She isn’t a glamour girl or a party hopper.”

“Thanks. You’re right. She’s as solid as they come. I’d take you downtown, but I’d rather not leave them.”

“It’s okay. I’ll take the bus around the corner and get off half a block from the store. Do you need anything from Macy’s?”

“No, thanks.”

He hadn’t planned to take Andy with him when he drove Tyra home, but he obviously wasn’t running that show. He sat
down, and as he looked at Tyra and Andy, the boy crawled up higher, rested his head on Tyra’s shoulder and put his arms around her neck. Although she didn’t awaken, she adjusted her hold on him. It was too much. He got up, walked to the window and looked down at the tent. Andy loved that tent, but he’d hardly spent half an hour in it.

She’s the one
. He wheeled around to see who had spoken those words. He’d swear that he heard them, but except for Tyra and Andy, both of whom were asleep, he was alone.

Half an hour went by, and he sat in the silence, enjoying a peacefulness that he often wished for. “Daddy. Miss Tyra, where’s my daddy? I have to go to the bathroom.” Andy scrambled from her lap and, still half asleep, started toward his father’s bedroom. Byron patted her shoulder as she sat up, took Andy’s hand, led him to the bathroom and went back to Tyra.

“Both of you were sound asleep. Andy thinks he’s too big to take a nap, though he gets one anyway. But I could see that he enjoyed that. Would you like some lemonade, tea or coffee? Aunt Jonie went shopping, but I can get it. Andy will want ice cream.”

“I’d love some lemonade. You know? I haven’t taken a nap in years. I feel like a million dollars.” He leaned over, teased her lips with his tongue, and when she would have sucked him into her, he released her and straightened up.