Promise Me A Rainbow (21 page)

“I’d like to tell you about it,” he said.

She looked back at him. “I’d like to hear.”

“It was the damnedest thing. She had the idea that she was a jinx. She’d heard some things her grandmother had said, and she put that with some things she’d seen on television, and somehow she thought she’d caused her mother’s death.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I’m not sure I do either. Fritz was two when Lisa died, and she’d heard about how she used to follow right on Lisa’s heels, calling ‘Mama’ all the time. She thought she was being an aggravation. I told her that all two-year-olds do that. Charlie did. And Della. But she said
they
weren’t jinxes. She thought she’d driven Lisa into harm’s way the day she died because
she
was a jinx. And—I don’t know—she stopped calling me Daddy so the same thing wouldn’t happen to me. It was like you said. It wasn’t logical to me, but it was to her. She’s still calling me Joe, but I think she feels better about things. I can’t say I really understand why she thought everything was her fault.”

“Children do that—especially at certain ages. Divorce or a death in the family can be very hard on them.”

He looked at her across the table, letting his gaze linger. He was still puzzled—but not so much about Fritz as he was about Catherine Holben.

The waitress brought their beer and he took a long sip. “I’d like to ask you a question. It isn’t about Fritz.”

“Go ahead.”

He looked at her for a moment. “You . . . never ask me anything. Why is that?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“I mean, we’ve had several long conversations now, and you’ve never asked where I come from or what I’m doing here in Wilmington. Things like that. You’re the first person I’ve met down here who didn’t want to know what kind of accent I had or why I was living here.”

“It could be because you told me to butt out of your business.”

He smiled. “It could be,” he agreed. “But I don’t think it is.” He had the feeling—no, he damn well knew she’d ask anything she wanted to ask. “So why haven’t you? I get the feeling you’re . . . holding back.”

“Being so compulsively nosy, you mean,” she said, but he didn’t comment on that. She thought for a moment before she answered. “It’s because you said you didn’t talk about your wife, about Lisa. I thought your living here might have something to do with her death. So I didn’t ask.”

He was surprised. He had prepared himself for some flip answer that would put him in his place. He had been afraid that she would think he was being coy, that this was some kind of line, but she’d answered him truthfully.

He studied his beer, then took another swallow. “It does,” he said, letting himself look into her eyes. “You know anything about Dorchester?”

“England?” Catherine guessed. She was being obtuse because that familiar, intense expression of his had returned, and she was still wary of it.

“Boston, Ms. Holben. A neighborhood of Boston.”

“No. I don’t know anything about Dorchester.”

“I grew up there. We were living there when Lisa was killed. Lisa and I had gone to see some friends—a night out away from the kids, you know? On the way back a drunk driver crossed the centerline and hit us head-on. She was killed. I wasn’t.”

Yes, you were, Catherine thought. Her eyes held his. “Go on,” she said quietly. For some reason, he seemed to want to tell her this, and she intended to hear all of it.

“That’s all.”

It wasn’t all, and they both knew it.

He suddenly avoided her gaze, but he’d run out of other places to look. He glanced back at her, knowing those calm eyes of hers would be waiting. He realized that he was going to say to her what he’d never said to anyone. “I’d . . . had a few beers. I wasn’t drunk, but I always thought if I . . . hadn’t had them, maybe I could have . . . done something.”

He stared at her, waiting for her reaction.

“Yes,” she said, and for some reason it made him angry. He had just told her the darkest secret of his life, and she had no more to say than that.

“You keep saying that, Ms. Holben. In this particular case, what does
yes
mean?”

“It means,” she said carefully, “that if I were in your place, I might think that, too.”

“You’re not in my place.”

“No. But I think I can understand why you didn’t want to live where everything reminded you.”

He didn’t know what to say to that, so he said nothing. Somehow she always seemed to be able to disarm him by simply telling him the truth. Part of him resented her presumption that she could share his pain, and part of him was more than grateful for her empathy. He looked around the pub. More people were coming in, the happy-hour crowd from the downtown businesses.

“I have another question,” he said, looking at her. He knew the beer was making him bolder than he would have been otherwise, but he didn’t worry about it. He wanted to know. “There’s something else about you I don’t understand.”

“What?”

“You seem to like children. I was wondering why you didn’t want to have any of your own.”

She frowned. “What makes you think that?”

“I heard the . . . argument you were having with Jonathan. Something about your having children being a condition of the marriage. I thought he was marrying somebody else because you wouldn’t have his kids.”

She stared at him across the table. He thought for a moment that she was going to get up and leave.

But she didn’t. She looked at him, her gaze unwavering. “Not wouldn’t,” she said evenly. “Couldn’t.”

Couldn’t
, he thought. The word hung in the air between them.

“Catherine, I’m sorry,” he said quickly. “This is none of my business.”

“No, you asked, and I’ll tell you. I’m barren. Jonathan came from a big loving family. Going to his parents’ house on Christmas Day or Thanksgiving Day was like going to the Waltons’. Going to Sunday dinner was like going to the Waltons’. He wanted a big family like that of his own. I couldn’t give it to him, and now I try to compensate for it—my barrenness—by helping the teenage girls you met today have the best babies they can.”

She made it sound very matter-of-fact, but it wasn’t. The calm eyes weren’t so calm now, and it was all he could do not to touch her. It hadn’t occurred to him that Jonathan would have left her for a reason like that. If he had, he wouldn’t have asked. No wonder she hadn’t wanted to go to the son of a bitch’s wedding.

“Are your parents living?” he suddenly asked, because it was somehow important to him to know that she had family—someone to look after her if, God forbid, she should ever admit to needing it.

“No,” she said.

“Any brothers or sisters?”

“No,” she said again. “I was a spoiled only child.”

So, he thought. All she had was that son of a bitch, Jonathan. He didn’t think she was spoiled. There was nothing about her that would make him think that.

The waitress brought their food.

“So how did you happen to pick Wilmington?” Catherine said to him. She was attempting to change the subject, but he didn’t want to change it. He wanted to say something, do something, that would make her feel better.

“Catherine . . .”

She looked at him, her eyes filled with pain. “I’m not comfortable talking about this, Joe. I probably won’t ever be. Would you . . . humor me now? Let’s talk about something else.”

He could do that, at least. God knows he’d been in the same situation enough himself when someone had wanted to talk about Lisa. He knew all about “talking about something else,” so he launched into the D’Amaro family history, starting with Michael’s hitch in the Marines twenty-three years ago and his being at Camp Lejeune and ending with their decision to take over their father’s construction company and move it to the North Carolina coast, where there was a building boom.

“You were right. I didn’t want to stay around Boston, where everything reminded me of Lisa. I used to come down on the bus to visit Michael when he was at Lejeune, and I liked it down here. I still do. Are you going to eat that pickle?”

“Yes,” she said pointedly.

He grinned. “I was only wondering.”

“Well, you can forget it. This one is mine.”

His grin broadened, she smiled in return, and a thousand warning bells went off in his mind.

You don’t want to do this, D’Amaro
.
This is going to be nothing but trouble from the word go
.

But he did want to do it. He wanted to sit and talk to her as long as she’d let him. He wanted to tease her until she put him in his place. He wanted to be close to her. He wanted to know what it would be like to kiss her, to make love with her.

Good
.

It would be good. Somehow he knew that. He let his eyes follow the curve of her throat to her breasts. The sudden mental image of Catherine, aroused and willing, made him stir uneasily in his chair.

“So did your father come here with you?”

“What?” he said, because he definitely wasn’t listening.

“Your father. Did he come down here with you.”

“No, he retired. He’s still in Dorchester with my mother, making things in his workshop and going to Red Sox ball games. So . . . are you a Wilmington native?”

“No. I’m from a couple of hundred miles inland. We used to come here to the beach every summer when I was growing up—to Wrightsville or to Carolina Beach. You know, when you travel a long way to get here and you catch the first glimpse of the ocean between the motels and the houses—it’s wonderful. I never did get over the thrill of it. I said I was going to live here and here I am.”

“But you’re not living on the beach.”

“No. I still want to catch that first glimpse of the ocean. Only now, I don’t have to go as far.”

The conversation dwindled, and they sat looking at each other. Two of the men playing darts began to argue about the regulation distance to the board on the wall.

“It’s seven feet, nine and a half inches, Herb! That’s the regulation, and that’s where you’re standing. Seven feet, nine and a half damn inches.”

Music still played in the background, the kind of music Della and her friends—or Beatrice and the girls—would like, and the participants on a television reality show struggled to win.

“Catherine, I was wondering,” Joe said abruptly. “Sunday afternoon there’s a meeting for the building association. If you’re not busy, I thought you might go with me.” He shrugged. “Keep me company? Eat a steak? The meeting will be a pain, but the meal is always great.”

She didn’t answer immediately.

Here it is, she thought. The point where she would have to make a decision. He was asking her to go someplace with him—when he knew she was less than a woman—and he’d made no mention of Fritz. He was looking at her intently, and she suddenly realized that she had let the silence go on too long.

“What time?” she asked, because, when everything was said and done, she’d never had trouble making up her mind.

“Three. I’d need to pick you up about two-thirty.”

“All right,” she said, and he smiled.

“All right. Good.” He looked away, as if he were suddenly shy because he hadn’t really expected her to say she’d go with him. “Well, I’d better get back to work before Michael realizes how long I’ve been gone.” He stood, and he didn’t try to take both checks.