take-out containers inside. He smiled that straight, white, signature smile. Bart barked once, and pranced excitedly around in a circle as if they were old friends. Traitor.
“I have it on good authority that your mother likes her buffalo wings hot.” He raised one of the bags.
“Just like her men,” Anne repeated her father’s favorite line and rolled her eyes. Obviously, Dad wanted to make sure his main squeeze got her favorite meal and Jack was merely a conduit.
Jack grinned and nodded as if he’d been schooled by the master. “Just like her men,” he repeated. “Oh, and coleslaw without mayo, which was a little harder to find.” He raised the other bag.
“Skinny slaw,” she said, at a loss for anything else to say. Her father’s sweet gesture made Anne smile even though it had put her in a most uncomfortable position. Should she take the food and close the door? Even by her dodge-the-past-at-all-costs standards, that would be cold.
“May I come in?”
How could she refuse? Anne hated to cook, knew that inevitably Beverly would get hungry, yet hadn’t planned or stocked up for a single meal, and something in one of those bags smelled fresh and heavenly.
“Of course,” she said, breaking the awkward pause. “Come in.” How was she supposed to play this? As if he hadn’t broken her heart or helped her betray her best friend? Or as if he was once a great friend whom she’d adored, and had laughed and cried with more than any other person on earth … but who’d drifted away? Still undecided, she scratched her forehead and put on her best hostess face.
She showed Jack to the kitchen where he unloaded the bags on the counter and immediately paid his respects to Bart, who sniffed his hands excited by the scent of chicken. Jack glanced around the room as if recalling being here a thousand times long ago. “Did they remodel?”
Anne nodded. Since she’d moved out, her mother had added French Country flair to their sturdy ranch-style home. They’d knocked down a wall and opened up the flow of the kitchen into the family room. Now they had a block wood island, and trendy glass-fronted white cupboards with granite countertops, and shelves with canisters and spices lining the walls. Plus a state-of-the-art gas stove with a gazillion burners for Beverly’s love of cooking, and a two-foot-long tilted rack for all of her international cookbooks. Trying her best to avoid facing Jack, she spotted the perfect place to put Jocelyn’s flowers on the antique wood sideboard, deciding to do it later.
“I’ll go get my mom,” she said, turning, but her mother and Jocelyn were coming to them.
“I could smell the food all the way down the hall. Jack, you shouldn’t have,” Beverly said, smoothing the pillow’s impact on her hair. “But I’m really glad you did.”
He wiped his hands on his khaki slacks and shook hers as if he hadn’t seen her in months. “I couldn’t let the big guy down.” He winked at her mother. “He was worried Anne wouldn’t fix you dinner or, worse, that she would.”
A mischievous glint graced his eyes, and if Anne weren’t so busy feeling conspired against, and a bit like an outsider, she might have laughed along with everyone else.
“Har har. Hey, I may be a lousy cook, but I’d never let my mommy go hungry. I remember how to dial for takeout. Was just thinking about doing it, too.”
She opened a cupboard and got down some dishes. Beverly insisted on setting the utensils on the table with her one good hand, making several extra trips in the process, Bart dogging her every step. Jocelyn took drink orders and Jack, well, he stood there looking gorgeous with his late afternoon stubble and super-starched pale blue pin-striped shirt that hadn’t a hint of a wrinkle.
He must have felt her studying gaze when he used his thumb to scratch his upper lip and glanced at the floor.
How was she going to share a meal with him and act casual? If he subscribed to the popular fallacy that time healed all wounds, she had some news for him. She sighed, then took her place at the table, deciding to beat everyone to the fresh-from-the-oven garlic rolls.
“Why do you volunteer with the fire department?” Anne had acted more like a journalist than an old friend throughout dinner. In between her barrage of questions, all neatly superficial, Jack had noticed she only picked at her food.
“California’s broke. Whispering Oaks depends on volunteers to make up for the shortage of firemen, and I guess it’s my way of giving back.”
Anne didn’t need clarification on what he was giving back for. How many times had Brianna been rushed to the hospital in an ambulance? The fire department had been first on scene the day she had collapsed at school, and at their prom …
“Sort of like the same reason you became a nurse,” her mother said.
“Brianna,” Anne said.
Okay, so she’d go first at naming the elephant in the room.
“Brianna,” he repeated just before taking a large swallow of his iced tea.
Her gaze met and held his for the briefest of moments, just long enough to confuse him and make him wish he could read her mind.
Seeing Anne’s eyes dance away each time he’d tried to engage them, gave him a clue that it wouldn’t be easy to convince her to spend some time with him. Just the two of them. He definitely needed to deliver that apology.
As dinner wound down, Jack decided to go for it, to take the sneaky route and make his move in front of an audience. If he hadn’t already committed to meeting the latest in a long string of computer-arranged compatible-dates.com, and if he hadn’t cancelled on this particular lady before, he would ask Anne out for coffee tomorrow night. Now, he needed to come up with something else, and fast.
“Anne, you feel like going for a hike to Boulder Peak for old time’s sake this Saturday morning?” he said, knowing it had once been one of their favorite places to hang out.
She blinked a half dozen times and wiped her mouth before answering. “Oh, that sounds great, but I can’t. I’m taking Mom to get her hair and nails done. Right?” His spin ball got deflected with the precision of Venus Williams.
“We can do it another day,” Beverly said, a sheepish look in her eyes as she took a dainty bite of wing.
“But you want to look nice when Dad comes home. You told me yourself.”
“I can take her,” Jocelyn piped in.
The expression on Anne’s face could be described as mortified, but Jack decided not to focus on the negative. She could protest all she wanted, but apparently the team was on his side.
He smiled. “Then I’ll pick you up at eight.”
Friday evening, Anne propped up her mother’s arm, made sure everything she could want was within reach, and armed with her mother’s long grocery list, she set out to do some shopping. Bart sat in the family room attentively at Beverly’s side watching over her.
On the drive home odd tidbits from life elbowed their way into Anne’s mind. She drove down familiar streets, each with a memory attached, and having spent so much time with her mother and spoken to both her brother and sister yesterday, everything seemed to invite reflection.
She
