The Heart of the Matter (10 page)

Laura felt the comfortable warmth of the place chip away at her concern at being here. It was the kind of house that welcomed and enveloped you and made you want to stay.

Well, she would, she thought. For two weeks, anyway.

She put the cat carrier down and opened the door. Sergei didn’t move.

“Come on, kitty,” she coaxed, tapping the floor in front of the carrier. “Come on, Sergei. You can come out now.”

He came to the edge of the carrier, sniffed her finger, but remained inside.

Laura rooted through the groceries the boys had left on the counter, found the plastic jug of milk, then opened a cupboard and found neat stacks of plates, dessert plates and saucers. She filled a saucer with milk and put it down in front of the carrier.

Sergei leaned out to lap it up greedily, but remained inside the wire cage.

Laura left him to adjust in his own time and began putting groceries away. Jason had told her that their last visit had been Memorial Day weekend, and she saw that the cupboards were still well-stocked with canned goods and staples, and that the freezer held two packages wrapped in butcher paper-one marked Steaks and one marked Chops.

She pushed the beef to the back and stacked chicken and fish in it, along with a few bags of vegetables and a couple of cartons of egg substitute. She stored fruit and
fresh vegetables in the crisper, and milk, eggs and margarine in the fridge.

She found a cupboard for cereals and rice, and a drawer for pasta. Flour and baking supplies did not have a home, so she looked through cupboards and drawers until she found an empty space at the bottom that held only tin foil and plastic wrap.

She looked for pots and pans and found some of them hanging from an extended overhead rack above a kitchen island, and others stacked in a storage area under it.

As she looked around, groceries put away, cookware and appliances waiting, she felt an excitement that had been rare in her lately. The professional part of her life had so overtaken the domestic part, that she seldom had time—or took time—to do the cooking and baking she once loved to do.

Jason stood in the kitchen doorway and watched her scan the room. There was a small smile on her face that was entirely happy. And that made him happy. He didn’t bother to analyze why that was or what it meant. He was on vacation, and he was glad to see that she also seemed to be in a more relaxed mood.

The cat, however, did not look so relaxed. It had retreated into the back of its carrier, watching him with enormous and mistrustful golden eyes.

Buttercup, who’d come bounding down the stairs with Jason, hoping for a treat, went toward the carrier to investigate. Sergei responded with a hiss and a warning whine that began on a high note and ended on a low, primitive rumble deep in his throat.

The dog, who did not have a hostile bone in his body, stopped several feet from the carrier, soft snout sniffing the air, plumed tail wagging in an offer of friendship.

Laura came to pet Buttercup. “Does he like cats?” she
asked Jason with a smile, “Or is he just hoping for a taste?”

Jason laughed. “He likes everyone and everything.” He looked around at the clear countertops. “You put the groceries away already.”

“There’s so much room,” she said. “It was easy. I moved a few things around, I hope that’s all right.”

“I’m sure it’s fine.” He swept a hand toward the doorway. “I took your bags upstairs. I’ll show you where.”

He led the way up the stairs to a room in the farthest corner of the U-shaped gallery. “The boys’ rooms are all in the middle,” he said as they passed the bottom of the U. Adam and Eric burst out of the room in the middle, baseball bats and gloves in hand.

“We’re going to the field at the school!” Adam shouted over his shoulder as they raced for the stairs.

“Hey!” The single shouted word stopped both boys at the door. They looked up at Jason, who turned to Laura. “You up to cooking tonight, or shall we go out and start your regime tomorrow?”

“Tonight,” she decided, anxious to use that wonderful kitchen. She glanced at her watch. “Six-thirty?”

Jason turned to the boys. “Home by six, so you’ll have time to clean up.”

They waved agreement and burst outside, the door slamming loudly behind them. Laura started at the sound.

Jason patted her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I’d like to tell you that you’ll get to the point where you can tune out their noise, but you won’t. You just have to wait until they go away to school.” He grinned as he placed a companionable arm around her shoulders and led her down the last arm of the hallway. “I’m trying to get them in an accelerated program so they can skip a few grades, but so
far, it isn’t working. Seems they have to be brilliant instead of just charming.”

Laura laughed lightly. “The world has such a narrow view of things. Oh…”

She let the soft sound trail away as she walked into a cream-and-white room that was fairly large, though one side of it was tucked under an eave. On the opposite side was a double bed with a brass headboard. It was covered with a red-and-cream quilt that drew the eye to red-andwhite gingham curtains and a colorful rag rug on the bare floor. Under the eave was what appeared to be a closet door, and beside it an old-fashioned wardrobe in a milkpaint shade of blue. A dried flower arrangement in a duck decoy stood atop it.

She went to the window and looked out onto a sunshot view of the lake, billows of the deep green trees that lined the far side doubled by their reflection in the water. A single fisherman in a little red boat drifted by.

“It’s beautiful,” she breathed. Then she turned to Jason and smiled. “The room and the.view.”

He had come up right behind her and was almost close enough to touch. But she didn’t. And he didn’t And that somehow exaggerated the smallness of the space, making it crackle with the possibility.

“Well…” She tried to walk around him. “I guess if I’m going to have dinner ready at…”

He stopped her, both hands on her arms holding her in place. The light from the window made his dark hair glisten, and caused a mystical pattern of light and shadow in his eyes as they focused on her.

“It’s only three o’clock,” he said. “Relax for a while. Take a walk, go down to the lake. Or town’s just about a quarter of a mile down the road…” He took his keys out
of his pocket and dangled them in front of her. “You can

take the car.”

She shook her head and tried to move away again, but he retained his hold on her. “I’m here to help you with Matt,” she said with mild impatience, “and to…”

“Cook,” he finished for her with a wry twist to his lips. “Yes, I know. Those were the excuses we used, anyway.”

She could have pretended she didn’t know what he meant, but she knew as well as he did what he was talking about. But that didn’t mean
she
wanted to talk about it.

“This time,” she said reasonably, feeling the pull of his personality, of the warmth in his eyes, “is supposed to be about…about the boys…”

He gave her a small shake. “No,” he corrected her. “It’s not. My whole life is about the boys. They’re the center of it all the time, and I can accomplish that now

without conscious thought. But your coming along on this trip makes it about
us—you
and me.”

Laura opened her mouth to reply, but before she could, there was a loud shout from down the hall. “Da-ad! My crutch is stuck in the bathtub drain!”

Their dispute forgotten, Jason and Laura looked at each other, she, wide-eyed with confusion, he, narrowed-eyed with dread. He repeated, “The bathtub drain…How in the hell…”

There was a loud, reverberating crash, and he stopped analyzing.and ran to investigate, Laura right behind him.

Matt was standing on the bathroom floor, one crutch indeed stuck in the tub drain and sticking straight up like some strange piece of installation art. The other crutch had fallen in the bathtub, obviously the source of the loud crash. Matt held on to the tub with both hands, his casted leg sticking out to the side.

“Mathew,” Jason said in exasperation as he closed the lid on the john, sat him on it, then handed him the crutch from the bottom of the tub. “What were you trying to do?”

“There was a spider in the tub,” Matt replied, pointing to the drain. “It could have bitten Laura. I tried to hit it with my crutch, but it went down the drain.”

“Laura was at the other end of the hall, Matt. I think she was safe.”

“Well, they have all those legs. They crawl really fast.”

Laura went to put an arm around Matt’s shoulders. “That was very brave, Matt,” she said, meeting Jason’s doubtful glance with a barely suppressed smile and pleading with him not to suggest that Matt was protecting himself rather than her. “Spiders are kind of creepy.”

Jason looked from her to his son, then with an eventempered resilience she was coming to admire more and more, he shook his head over the absurdity of the situation, grabbed the crutch with one hand and pulled.

Nothing happened.

He tried both hands.

Nothing happened.

Laura began to laugh.

He turned to her, an arrogant eyebrow raised. But behind his frustration, she saw amusement. And that sent her over the edge.

“I was just imagining,” she laughed, leaning back against the commode, “explaining to the plumber how that happened.” She mimicked his voice. “Well, you see, I was chasing a spider…”

Matt began to laugh with her, delighted that a move for which he’d expected to get into trouble had turned out to be funny—at least to Laura.

Jason turned to them, both hands on his hips. “I’m glad you’re both having such a good time.”

Instead of repenting, they laughed harder.

On the brink of laughter himself, he held it back with a manful pursing of his lips. “You won’t think it’s so funny when five of us have to share my shower.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake.” Laura stood and pushed up the sleeves of her cotton sweatshirt. With a grinning glance at Jason, she took a firm grip on the crutch. “Let me show you how this is done.”

“Oh, you’ve done this before, have you?” He stood back, arms folded, and watched her.

“No,” she admitted, firming her stance. “But how difficult can it be if you have…muscle.” The last was added on a grunt as she pulled with all her might.

It didn’t come.

She pulled harder.

It still didn’t come.

In a do-or-die battle with the crutch, she braced a foot against the side of the tub for leverage and pulled again. It finally gave with a little pop of sound and a power and propulsion that shot her backward.

Even as she flew like a stuntwoman in harness, it occurred to her that she should have allowed for this contingency. Expecting to connect with teeth-shattering force against the wall, she was pleasantly surprised when she connected instead with something solid and unyielding but warm and somehow comforting. Jason.

He wrapped both arms around her as his back took the impact with the wall.

Giddy with success and his closeness, she turned her head against his shoulder to smile at him, the freed crutch held aloft. “See?” she said.

He looked down into her smiling face and felt his spine
go weak. He was grateful for the wall behind them. He saw her catch the wild rush of his pulse, his accelerated heartbeat, the desire that rose in him like wind up a canyon—and saw all those things mirrored in her eyes.

“Oh-oh.” Matt said in a tone that distracted Jason’s attention. He had to rip his gaze from Laura’s.

“That rubber thing on the bottom,” his son said, pointing to the bare wood tip of the crutch Laura held up, then down into the tub. “It’s still stuck in the hole.”

Jason sighed with reluctant acceptance as Laura used that as an excuse to push her way out of his arms. She knelt on the floor and leaned over the high edge of the old tub and tried to pull the rubber foot free, but it was well and truly stuck.

Jason went to the utility closet in the kitchen for the tools he kept there, picked out the needle-nosed pliers and headed back upstairs, thinking that so far, this wasn’t going as he’d hoped.

My eldest son has met a girl, and though that means he has drifted away from me in one respect, it also means a bond has been forged between us that will never be broken. Now women will be a mystery to him, too. And he also will wonder how being enslaved can inspire such happiness.

—“Warfield’s Battles”

“
T
his is pretty good.” Eric looked up in total surprise from his plate of baked chicken, red potatoes and fresh string beans. “I thought the beans would be awful, but they’re crunchy. I like them.”

Laura accepted that as praise. “Thank you,” she said, passing Matt the salt he couldn’t quite reach. “Fresh vegetables are usually better than you expect, even if you think you don’t like them. Do you guys eat cauliflower?”

Eric and Matt made ugly faces. Adam, seemingly oblivious to everyone, bumped the tines of his fork against a chunk of potato.

“I have a recipe that’ll change your mind,” Laura said to the two younger boys. “You want to try it sometime?”

“Ah…sure,” Eric said with a complete lack of conviction.

Matt sprinkled salt liberally on his green beans and smiled at her with an adoration that seemed to be growing by the hour. It might have concerned her, considering the unpredictable nature of her relationship with his father, but the feeling was mutual and she found it hard to believe that shared affection could ever really be bad.

“I bet if I liked green beans,” he said heroically, “I’d really think these were delicious.”

Jason laughed, and Eric looked at him with a frown of amazement. “That’s a dufus thing to say.”

“Adam?” Jason leaned toward his oldest, who didn’t respond at first, then seemed to sense that he was being watched.

He sat up, blinking himself to alertness. “Yeah?”

“You okay?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You could have eaten an elk by now. Aren’t you hungry?”

Before he could respond, Eric rolled his eyes and helped himself to more chicken and more green beans. “He’s in love with Brianna Jackson.”

Adam turned on him as though he were motorized. “I am not, so just shut
up
about her!”

“Who’s Brianna Jackson?” Jason asked.

“The summer kids’ new shortstop,” Eric explained, “There’s a lot of kids who come here on vacation at the end of the summer. And we play ball with the kids who live here all the time. They’re the lake kids, we’re the summer kids. Brianna’s really good, too.” He grinned maliciously at his brother. “Adam’s gonna marry her and have lots of babies and start a team of his own.”

“Really.” Jason smiled at Adam. “Sounds like a plan. But you’re going to wait until after college, right?”

Eric answered before Adam could. “He has to. He has
to get rich first, ‘cause her dad’s a stock guy and makes lots of money.”

“A stockbroker,” Adam supplied with a fulsome glare at Eric. “You’re such a…”

“Watch it,” Jason warned quietly.

Adam sighed and put his fork down. “May I be excused?” he asked hopefully, “before I puke all over the table?”

Matt turned to Laura with a proud smile. “I did that once. We had.”

“Matt.” Jason cut him off before he went into descriptive detail. Then he turned his attention to Adam. “Sure. Go ahead.”

“Can I go down to the lake?”

“Yes. Just be home by dark.”

Adam left the room, Buttercup hard on his heels.

Laura experienced a mild jolt at the familiar caution. It was weird, she thought, when and where old emotions could rattle you. She finished her meal in silence, feeling just a little out of tune.

Jason applied himself to the delicious food, thinking grimly that if he was ever going to make time with this woman, he had to clear the decks of crutches stuck in drains, boys calling each other names, and Matt ready to launch into a description of puking at the dinner table.

But with three boys, and one of them in a cast, he didn’t see how he was going to do it

So they coasted from day to day for the first week.

Laura spent a lot of time with Matt, who lapped up the attention, became proficient at helping in the kitchen and even made a few strides in reading and math while helping her read and modify recipes.

When his older brothers teased him about it, Laura reminded
them sweetly that many of the world’s great chefs were men, and that their expertise called in big bucks.

She worked out an exercise routine for herself and Jason that involved a NordicTrac he kept at the vacation house and never used, and a stretching-and-strengthening training regimen.

Adam and Eric often joined them. Matt and Buttercup watched and offered sympathy. Sergei was content to watch the action from his carrier in a corner of the kitchen.

Jason spent one sunny morning after their workout trying to put together the spine of a book idea to present to his agent, and finally emerged just after noon to find laughter and activity in the kitchen.

The boys were hurrying from the kitchen to the porch with plates of food, Buttercup following and barking excitedly. Adam hurried past him with a pitcher of tea and the announcement that “lunch is in five minutes unless you want yours in the office.”

Jason followed him out and found the table laden with colorful dinnerware he didn’t even know they had, linen napkins fan-folded in water goblets, sandwiches on a platter under plastic wrap, a hollowed-out cucumber filled with some kind of dip and a tomato whose innards had been scooped out and replaced with sticks of carrot, pepper, celery and asparagus.

Matt sat at the table with a basket containing silverware and managed to lean far enough left and right and across the table to see that every place was set.

The slam of the screen door announced the arrival of Laura with a tall angel cake and Eric with a cooler, which she asked him to place under the table.

“Are we celebrating something?” Jason asked.

Then he realized that a young girl sat on the swing on
the porch. She wore jeans, a baggy sweatshirt with the Boston Red Sox logo on it, and a red baseball hat over white-blond bangs. A long, fat ponytail bobbed through the sizing hole in the back. She had a tomboyish air, but the gentle, rounded front of her shirt said female.

Adam took his hat off, tossed it at a chair, cleared his throat and turned purple. “Dad,” he said, extending his hand toward the girl, “I’d like you to meet Brianna Jackson. Bri, this is my dad, Jason Warfield.”

The girl took the hand Adam extended toward her and got to her feet with a grace that belied the ball-field attire. Jason suspected that Adam’s extended arm had merely been a gesture of introduction, but when Brianna took it, his closed tightly around it—though his color now became close to that of an eggplant.

“It’s nice to meet you, Mr. Warfield,” she said, offering him her other hand. “My dad says you’re pretty funny. He reads your column all the time.”

Jason shook her hand, a little startled by her charm and confidence.

“Please tell him I appreciate that,” he said, pulling a chair out for her and redirecting Eric when he would have sat beside her.

With a frown, his middle son took his place across the table. When Laura sat beside him, the frown turned suddenly to a smile. Buttercup settled under the table.

Jason moved to sit near Laura, but was beat out by Matt, who moved with determination if not agility on his crutches. Jason contented himself with the other end of the table and simply watched as Laura and Brianna mercilessly worked his boys.

He was distracted for a brief period by a wonderfully seasoned tuna salad sandwich and the cream cheese, dill and something-else dip that Adam passed to him. A slice
of sweet red pepper dipped in it seemed to embody the flavor of a summer picnic.

Eric refilled his glass of iced tea, which was also some fruit-and-tea concoction that was flavorful without being sweet, and Jason sat back to sip it as Brianna told Laura about her home in New York.

“The Hamptons are great, I guess,” she said with the air of a child who was indulged and probably spoiled but still sweet, “but I love to come here. My friends at home don’t like to play baseball.” She rolled her eyes. “They’re into tennis.”

“Rackets are strung with catgut, you know,” Eric said conversationally.

“Cool!” Matt contributed.

Adam looked daggers at both of them. “I don’t think Brianna wants to talk about cat guts.”

“We dissected a cat in this biology class I took,” she said without blinking, “and it was kinda gross but kinda neat, too.”

“You had biology in seventh grade?” Eric asked. “I thought they only had that in high school.”

“I’m in a gifted program,” she said with pride but without arrogance. “We get to do all kinds of cool stuff.” Then she looked at her watch, a delicate piece with what appeared to be diamonds on both sides of the face. “We should get back, Adam, or they’ll start the second game without us.”

Adam turned to Jason and asked gravely, “Would you excuse us, Dad?”

“Of course, Adam.” Jason stood, and with a glance encouraged Eric to do the same as Adam got to his feet and pulled out Brianna’s chair.

Jason watched his son and the girl walk down the steps side by side, seeing it as a metaphor for what could be
ahead of them. At the bottom she winked at Adam and challenged, “Race ya!” and took off, leaving him to pump like fury to catch and eventually overtake her. Jason grinned to himself. Another metaphor for what might lie ahead.

Eric grabbed his hat off the back of his chair and pulled it on his head. “Well,” he said philosophically, “they didn’t ask me to come, but…” He held up a grubby ball. “I have the only ball that hasn’t ended up in the lake.”

Jason grinned. “Heavy hitters, huh?”

Eric smirked. “No. Slow fielders. They end up in the water before we can catch them.”

Jason caught the back of his shirt. “Hey. Go easy on Adam, okay? In a year or so, some pretty little shortstop is going to stand you on your ear, so give him a break. And don’t tease him in front of the other guys.”

Eric made a face. “Well, you sure know how to ruin an afternoon.” Then he smiled thinly. “Okay, okay. But if I ever get like that over a girl, you can shoot me.”

Jason shook his head over the regretful information. “It’s going to happen, son.”

“Then shoot me now and save me from it.”

Jason patted his back. “Trust me. When it happens, you’ll be glad I didn’t listen to you. See you later.”

Eric walked down the porch steps, giving Jason a disbelieving look over his shoulder.

Laura began to stack dishes. Jason moved to help her, but she stopped him with a hand on his arm. “I’ll carry these inside. The baseball freaks forgot all about dessert, so that means more for us.” She looked greedily at Matt, who was beside himself at the prospect.

She pulled the angel food cake in front of Jason and handed him a knife and clean dessert plates. “You serve
while I take this stuff inside. The berries and yogurt cream are in the cooler under the table.”

Jason followed her instructions, putting a heaping plate in front of Matt, who was looking pensive. Buttercup woofed from under the table. Jason fixed him a plate, too.

“Is Laura working for us?” he asked, picking up his fork. “Like Mrs. Fregoza does at home?”

Jason shook his head. “No. She has a job at the hospital, remember? She’s on vacation, too. She came with us as…our friend.” That was accurate, but largely lacking in detail. Since he didn’t know how to round it out, he left it at that.

“Well, maybe if we paid her money,” Matt suggested, “she could do this for us all the time. She’s a really good mom. She even makes the healthy stuff taste pretty good.”

Laura stepped out onto the porch just in time to hear the “mom” remark.

“If we paid you…” Jason listened with trepidation as Matt took the matter into his own hands “…could you be our mom at home, too?”

Laura cast a glance at Jason, who tried to tell her silently that Matt was acting on his own. She focused her attention on the boy.

“Moms don’t become moms for money, Matt,” she explained with a smile, taking the plate Jason handed her. “They do it for…love.” She looked determinedly away from Jason.

Matt turned to his father. “Then, she can do it, right? Because I love her.”

Laura reached over to pinch his chin. “There are three other people in your family, Mathew. And moms…moms have to love dads for the whole thing to work.”

“Oh.” He frowned at his father. “She would have to love you.”

“Right.”

The smile came again. “Well, that’s easy. Me and Adam and Eric love you. All we have to do is teach her how.” He turned to Laura. “Okay. You want to learn?”

“Urn…” She bounced another glance off Jason, this one amused and a little devilish. “Sure.”

“Okay.” Matt finished a large bite of creamy strawberries, swallowed and put his fork down. “First, you got to do everything he says.”

“Everything?”

“Everything. And right away. He doesn’t like it when you wait.”

“I see.”

“And you can’t fight in the house,” Matt rattled off.

“Okay.”

“And if you fight, you can’t hit. And you can’t say bad words. And you have to put your laundry in the hamper or it doesn’t get done, ‘cause Mrs. Fregoza won’t come looking for it.”

“Gotcha.” Laura leaned toward Matt on folded arms. “But I think you’re telling me how to make him love you, instead of what makes you love him.”

“Oh.” Matt considered the change, then didn’t seem to see a distinction. “Well, we love him ‘cause he loves us. He takes care of us, and doesn’t let anybody hurt us, and he plays with us and takes us places and even when he yells at us, it’s because he loves us. That’s what Adam says. And he’s…you know…he’s been around the longest, so he oughta know.”

Laura looked up into Jason’s face and wasn’t at all surprised to see a somewhat self-satisfied gleam in his
eyes. It sounded, she thought, as though he deserved to sport it.

He leaned toward his son, his eyes filled with the love Matt had just boasted about. “I think you definitely need a raise in your allowance,” he said.

Laura carried dishes into the kitchen, emotion, elation, excitement all curiously entangled and feeling as though they were caught in her throat.