Ms. Miller and the Midas Man (6 page)

“Borrow a book from the library.”

He glanced quickly at Lydia and found he didn’t care if she heard what he was about to say or not.

“You’re not going to make this easy for me, are you?”

She looked up from the melon rind she was slowly forking with bored rhythmic motions. “What? Your gardening?” She set the fork down. “Why should I?”

He shook his head. “Getting to know you. You aren’t going to make it easy.”

She lowered her eyes from his and sighed, placing her hands under the table. “There’s not much to know, Mr....ah, Scott.”

“Why do you find it so hard to call me Scotty?”

Now she glanced at her sister and apparently came to the same decision he had. “Calling you Scotty would make you seem like a friend. I don’t want or need any more friends. I told you that.”

“Okay. Then would you say you’re more interested in Howard’s friendship than you are in mine?”

She frowned. “No. Not really. He’s more a friend of Alan’s and Lydia’s.”

“But you call him Howard. Why can’t you call me Scotty?”

She looked as if she wanted to argue with him, but then she chuckled and shook her head. “All right,” she said, reaching for the plate of seeds and juice in front of him. “I give up. Scotty it is.”

Feeling ridiculously victorious, he reached out for her arm and was about to detain her long enough to get her to smile at him when the tips of his fingers felt the soft ridge of skin on the inside of her wrist.

Without thinking, with no thought at all, he turned her hand palm up. Pink and shiny, the scar across her wrist stood out against her pale skin as a sign of despair and abdication. His shock must have registered in his face when he looked at her, because she snatched her hand away from him, hid it under the table, and glared at him as if he’d violated her.

“I’m sorry,” he said, quickly and softly, not knowing what else to say. “I...”

“Don’t jump to conclusions,” she said, reaching for his plate a second time with her right hand. “You still don’t know anything about me.”

But he wanted to, and he would have told her so if she hadn’t hurried away with the plates and then managed to avoid him for the rest of the time he’d stayed—playing with the kids, talking to Alan and Howard for a while, and then to Lydia about the upcoming school year.

He rubbed the tightness in his chest as he sat in his porch swing and opened his eyes. The overwhelming urge to go to her had him sitting up, leaning forward to brace his arms on his knees, then lacing his fingers together in frustration.

If he were King of the World he’d first tear down the fence in the backyard and then her front door, so there would be no physical barriers between them. He’d walk straight into her house and into her soul. He’d take her in his arms and hold her. Tight. Kiss her until she was too weak to resist him any longer and then he’d go right on kissing her until she felt no more pain, no more regrets, no more of whatever she’d been feeling when she slit her own wrist. If he were King of the World.

He sighed heavily and sagged back in the swing, combing the fingers of both hands through his hair. This was a hell of a time for him to be falling in love with a needy woman.

A needy woman? She was as ornery and stubborn as a mule.

She was a Chinese puzzle with no beginning or end, no rhyme or reason. Nothing about her made sense in his head...and yet everything about her spoke to his heart.

A new school year would be starting in less than three weeks. He had a new job to prepare for, a house to get in order, a life for himself and his daughter to arrange. Now was not the time to be falling in love.

But he was. And he knew it.

He glanced over at the house next door when the music slowly faded to an end. The last note floated in the air to be picked up and used as a first note by the crickets and night bugs, as they began their own nightly recital. He felt a strange sort of relief, as if his mind was suddenly his own again.

He made a concerted effort to make a mental list of to-dos, frowned over the decision to paint Chloe’s room pink and surprise her or to let her pick out her own paint. He nearly broke a sweat steering his thoughts away from the woman next door and toward anything pertinent to his own life.

Restless and scattered, he finally stood to go inside—maybe paint a couple more walls before he went off to toss and turn in bed, to dream of touching her, to ponder on the taste of her, to imagine her whispers in the dark...

“Damn,” he muttered, opening the screen door and hearing another slam closed nearby.

Vivaldi’s Four Seasons always made her melancholy, even though it was a favorite she loved playing. Maybe it had something to do with time passing and life changing, she ruminated as she slipped out the kitchen door to restore her little garden to its well-ordered, pre-nephews-and-neighbor’s-dog state of tidiness.

She smiled a little, thinking of the boys and that huge beast, so mild-tempered and tolerant. And to think he’d frightened her, she chuckled softly, folding lawn chairs and stacking them neatly inside the garage door.

The back porch light glinted off a soda can. Picking it up, she was tempted to toss it over the fence to...well, just to do it. To get back at Scott Hammond for making her feel this way. Restless and unfocused. She put the can in a garbage bag with a stray napkin and tied a knot in the top of it.

Scott Hammond. Scotty. His name flirted with her mind as boldly and consistently as he teased her...

“Do you like children,” he’d asked her, straight out and direct, breathless from playing human tackle dummy with the boys. She’d just received a sloppy wet kiss for tying Jake’s shoe and the question had caught her off guard.

“Of course,” she said. “Sure. Most. Depends on the kid, I guess.”

“I have a daughter. She’s five.”

“Eric’s almost six,” she said, describing the extent of her intimate experience with five-year-olds. “I like kindergarten kids, and first-graders. They’re very eager to please.”

He nodded, watching her. Something he’d been doing all afternoon. Something that was really getting on her nerves. Was he memorizing her gestures and expressions? Studying her as if she were a research project? Why couldn’t he look at her when she wasn’t looking back? The way she watched him? He had wonderfully broad shoulders and the nicest backside she’d seen in years, with long, well-shaped legs and...Damned if she was going to stare though.

“She stays with me every other weekend,” he said.

“That must be hard,” she said, thinking of her own childhood without an active father. He’d given up his battle with her mother when she was seven and avoided all three of them whenever possible.

“It is,” he said, glancing at the back door as Howard came out of the house and started toward them again. “I hate it. I miss not having her around all the time. The worst part of it is, I think she’s handling the separation better than I am.”

Now she did stare a little. He was speaking so candidly, looked so vulnerable. It was information she could use against him, hurt him with if she wanted to—but he was trusting her not to.

“I believe women handle divorce better than men do,” Howard said, sitting down beside Gus to join the conversation. “I mean, in the overall scheme of things. It’s painful for everyone, but it’s been my observation that women tend to bounce back faster.”

Scotty shook his head. It was his experience that no one handled a divorce very well. “I meant Chloe. She doesn’t seem to mind the weekends, it’s just the way things are for her. I’m the one who knows things should be different. Wants them to be different. I resent the time I can’t be with her.”

“But that was another reason why you came back here, wasn’t it? To be closer to her?” Howard said, then, as if speaking for the entire town, he added, “We wondered what you’d do, when we heard Janis had moved back to Springfield.”

He shrugged, and for an instant she thought she saw shame in his eyes, shame and something else...extreme discomfort. Though he was the one who had brought the subject up, perhaps he hadn’t meant to discuss it with Howard. He said, “There wasn’t anything I could do.”

“How will you handle it now?” Howard asked, then chuckled. “When you’ve been single as long as I have, you come to know all the ins and outs of a divorce and visitation rights. I’m an authority on it, and I’ve never even been married.” He laughed.

Scotty gave him a small smile and seemed reluctant to answer. “Janis and I will meet in the middle, an hour drive for each of us, on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons.”

“Your little girl doesn’t have allergies, does she?” Gus asked, having a sudden brainstorm, not knowing why she felt so sorry for him, only that she did and wanted to help him, to protect him from any further prying.

“No,” he said, looking confused.

“Oh now, you shouldn’t sound so sure when you say that, Scotty,” Howard warned him, picking up on one of his favorite subjects. “Children can develop allergies overnight. To drugs. To food. They build up an intolerance over a period of time and—zap—it’s trips to the allergist twice a month. Or in milder cases many pediatricians recommend treating the symptoms with over-the-counter drugs...

Several more minutes went by before Scotty’s eyes slowly trailed back to her face, the twinkle in them the only outward sign of his knowledge and gratitude of the good deed she’d done. She smiled at him briefly, then lowered her gaze away when she realized they were once again connecting, on a nonverbal level.

Connecting with someone like Scotty Hammond would be a big mistake, she knew. Having had some time to think about it, about his attitudes toward fathering and his sisters and the town of Tylerville, maybe there was more to him than a great smile and a cocky attitude. What a shame. It was so much easier to think of him as a lazy, insincere cad than a responsible man with feelings and principles and ideals.

The picnic table was heavy, and she had to move one end at a time, sort of walk it back to its place beside the garage.

“Wait a second.” She heard his voice and jumped a little. “I’ll help you.”

Why she was surprised to hear his voice and the latch lifting on the gate she didn’t know. So many times that evening, in the quiet of her little house, she’d heard his laughter, his voice commenting on a sister or describing his daughter or enthusiastically explaining his plans for the upcoming school year. Several times she’d turned around to see if he was standing behind her. This time he was.

He took several jogging steps across her yard and took up the opposite end of the picnic table. They swung it into place together.

“Thanks,” she said, smiling and looking away as he grinned at her, self-satisfied. He was so tickled to have achieved the center of her consideration again, to know he was paramount in her mind for the moment, and to see she wasn’t oblivious to him.

Oblivious, indeed. Her pulse was racing and her mouth had gone dry. She might have met a stranger in a dark alley with less anxiety.

“My pleasure. My house may need paint, and my dog and I invite ourselves to dinner, but we can also be very handy to have around.”

“So I see,” she said, trying to smile again, her face feeling stiff. “Is it also true that you can leap tall buildings in a single bound and that everything you touch turns to gold?”

“Yes,” he said, and he didn’t hesitate to add, “I also hang the moon and the stars...at least that’s what I tell Chloe.”

She gave an amused but nervous laugh. Howard was right, it was very hard not to like him, despite the way he made her feel inside. “I bet she believes you too.”

“Of course. When you want to badly enough, you can believe most anything.” She was back at the bench, and he casually took up the opposite end to help move it. “Aren’t there things that you believe in, no matter how unlikely or impossible they might seem?”

“No. Not anymore.”

“The totally disillusioned Ms. Miller, huh?” He was studying her when she straightened up to face him. She couldn’t tell if he was feeling pity or disdain when he said, “That’s a shame.”

Either way she didn’t like it.

“Why? Why is that a shame? People don’t have to believe in fairy tales and superheroes. They don’t have to pretend life is better than it really is. That there’s some sort of magic involved. What’s wrong with being realistic? Life is unfair and people are human. That’s all there is to it.”

He felt neither sympathy nor scorn, but he was curious. This wasn’t a pathetic disturbed woman speaking, this was a woman in pain. Hurt and beaten. A strong woman clinging to negatives to survive because they were simple and true, and all she had left.

“What about dreams?” he asked, betting himself that she had none left.

“What about them?”

“Aren’t dreams food to the human spirit? Don’t people need dreams, as unrealistic as they might be sometimes, to keep them moving forward? To give their life meaning?”

“Why do they have to be dreams? Can’t they simply be goals you set for yourself? Can’t they be realistic, one-step-at-a-time goals? Dreams are too easy to blow out of proportion. It’s crazy to believe in things that may or may not be real, things that can’t be, can’t happen.”

“Crazy or painful?”

She opened her mouth to answer then closed it. He knew. Two days, and already he knew she was a failure, a disappointment. Well, so what? She’d tried to warn him.

“Yes. Crazy and painful,” she said, turning away to finish picking up. Unfortunately, there was nothing left to pick up. But to turn around and face him again was an intolerable thought.

She could hear him coming up behind her and braced herself. Still she trembled, as if hit by lightning, when he touched her shoulders.

“What happened to you?” he asked softly, the tenderness in his voice bringing tears to press and sting against the backs of her eyes. “Who hurt you?”

He wanted to turn her around and hold her in his arms, but she was so tense under his hands, he knew it would be like holding a plank of wood. The tightness in his chest began to ache, making it hard to breathe.

“No one,” she murmured, more than a little uncomfortable with the topic...and his proximity. She attempted to step away but was held fast at the shoulders, then turned, so he could see her face.