Murphy,” she said and stayed seated. Lord knew her knees would buckle if she stood up. Water still dripped from the ends of her hair, down the back of her T-shirt. “Long time, and all that.” She couldn’t seem to get a good breath. She rested one palm lightly on Frances Bird’s head. With her other, she gestured to the stash of cans and sawhorses in the back of his truck. “Busy?”
Strings hung from the armholes of his sleeveless, washed-to-cobwebs shirt By the grace of God and a miracle of thread, one button clung to the placket of his shirt. Sweat-plastered to his ribs, the shirt hung open, revealing a narrow streak of hair bleached to sunshine gold. Glowing in the bright light, that tapered line drew her gaze unwillingly down the taut muscles of his chest to the waistband of paint-kaleidoscoped jeans, jeans so worn on the seat that it was a wonder his ever-loving Jockey shorts weren’t on display. Or maybe Murphy wore boxers these days. Maybe Murphy Jones had turned trendy and wore designer thongs. Like lottery balls popping into the air, wild, unpredictable, her thoughts slammed into each other.
He rested one plaster-dotted work shoe on the step below her and leaned forward. “Well, bless my soul. Look what the cat dragged in. And on a scorching June day. What brought you to this neck of the woods, Phoebe?” He nudged her bare knee with a long, callused finger, blinked, stepped back and crossed his arms.
“Hospitable as ever, I see.” Laying her arm across Bird’s shoulders, Phoebe smiled brightly up at him and wished desperately she’d found time for that red lipstick and that her feet weren’t caked with dried mud. Fetching dimples would be a plus, too. “No how-do-you-do? No how’s life been treating you in the last, oh, how many years has it been? Eight?”
He paused as if he were counting them up. “Yep. Eight sounds about right.” The tip of his work boot nudged her bare toe. “Come for a visit, did you?”
From beneath the red and blue bandanna he’d tied over the top of his head and knotted at the back, damp, dark brown hair curled down his neck. A shine of sweat darkened his hair and skin, slipped down his temples to his jaw.
His glance slid to her daughter. The tiny bead of sweat vanished into the rumpled collar of his shirt. “Hey, kid,” he said, nodding.
Frances Bird beamed at him, tilted her head and batted her eyelashes. Her rosebud mouth curled with happiness. “Hey, Mr. Man.”
Phoebe almost sighed again, and stopped herself before she became a wind machine. Frances Bird had been born flirting. The result of an absentee father? Phoebe’s own failure? Or simply southern genes asserting themselves in spite of an aggressively midwest upbringing? Phoebe tried not to overanalyze her daughter’s lightning-bug sparkle around males. Tapping her daughter’s shoulder, she said, “Frances Bird, meet my—what are you and I to each other, Murphy?” She lifted her chin, giving him a little attitude, but she couldn’t manage the smile this time. “Not brother and sister.”
“Not by a damn slight” Murphy held her gaze.
“Family, anyway,” she said through a tight throat. “Family. That counts for something, even after eight years. Right?”
He didn’t say a word.
“Hey,” four-year-old Frances Bird said, her flushed cheeks dimpling with delight. “Me and my mom are going to live with you.”
“Oh?” Murphy didn’t move an inch. The pleasantly interested question would have fooled anyone who hadn’t grown up with him.
But his poker-faced acknowledgment didn’t fool Phoebe for an instant. She heard the dismay behind his affable drawl, and her anxiety increased, threatened to blaze out of control.
Avoiding his coolly distant perusal, she slicked Frances Bird’s wet bangs off her face. “Well, sugar, that hasn’t been decided.” The worst he could do would be to send them packing. And if he did? She’d handle that, too. She had no choice. “We’re here for an afternoon’s visit. To catch up on old times. That’s all. Don’t panic, Murphy.”
Bird’s mouth puckered up with stubbornness. “You said—”
“I know what I said, Frances Bird.” This time Phoebe couldn’t stop the sigh that came rolling up from her toes.
“And what did you say, Phoebe?” A breeze lifted the corner of Murphy’s shirt, brushed it back from his chest, died away in the stillness. “About coming to live with me?”
Frances Bird patted Phoebe’s knees comfortingly. “Tell him, Mama, what you decided.”
When Phoebe didn’t speak, Frances Bird leaned forward confidingly and rested her elbows on her skinny knees as she looked up through her eyelashes at Murphy. “We are bums on the street. So we’re going to live with you now ’cause we got no place else to go. And Mama said, home by damn—”
“Don’t swear, Frances Bird.”
“—is where when you go, they got to take you in. And that’s that, she said.”
“Yeah?”
With her hair swinging about her face, Bird nodded vigorously. Water dotted the faded blue of Murphy’s jeans. “And, Mama,” she said earnestly, “you say the damn word all the time.”
Stifling the groan that battled with yet another sigh, Phoebe lifted Frances Bird onto her lap. “Shh, baby. The grownups have to talk now.”
“That’s for damn sure.” He reached up and tugged at his bandanna, shadowing his eyes.
At Murphy’s use of the forbidden word, Frances Bird poked Phoebe’s face and rolled her eyes.
He studied them for a moment, a long moment that had Phoebe’s bare toes curling and heat flooding through her again before he said softly, “Bums on the street, huh?”
“Not quite.” Phoebe shaded her own eyes as Frances Bird leaped into explanation.
“Oh, yes. But we didn’t sleep in boxes. We stayed at a motel one night. With tiny pink soaps. Soooo pretty. I kept one.” Frances Bird batted her eyelashes again, smiled, and kept talking like the River Jordan, rolling right on down to eternity.
Phoebe yearned to sink through boards of the porch into a quiet, cool oblivion where Murphy Jones’s too-observant gray eyes couldn’t note her every twitch and flinch. Although easygoing, Murphy had never been a fool. Not likely he’d become one since she’d last had a conversation with him. This homecoming, if that’s what it was, was not going well.
“We got fired. and we got debts, and—”
“Enough, Frances Bird.” The hint of steel in Phoebe’s voice finally silenced her chatty daughter. Lifting her chin, Phoebe held his gaze. “Well, Murphy, are you going to keep us standing outside for the rest of the night?”
He rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. “Seems to me, Phoebe, you’re sittin’, not standin’.” His drawl curled into the deepening blue twilight of the heat.
“Murphy’s right, Mama.” Frances Bird tugged the hem of Phoebe’s shorts. “We’re sitting.”
She stood up. “Fine. Now I’m standing. Everybody happy?” Turning her back, she marched up the stairs to the swing, anger crackling down her spine with every mud-caked step. This was worse than she’d anticipated.
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