Hannah said, feeling disloyal, but she couldn’t seem to help herself. Something about the look in Alex’s eye had kept her talking all through dinner, and telling the truth more often than not. In fact, the only flat-out lie she’d told was to say that college had been a lot of “fun.” College had been work, which she had liked, but it certainly hadn’t been fun.
“He’s very…direct.”
“Blunt,” Hannah translated.
“Maybe a little stern.”
“Rigid,” Hannah amended.
Alex grinned. “Opinionated?”
“If that’s your opinion,” she shot back, then almost gasped when Alex laughed. What was she doing? She was teasing with him, bantering back and forth. And it was fun. “Want to go for the gold?” she heard herself ask. “And number one of the top ten reasons Hugo Clark is not exactly a barrel of laughs is…?”
Alex’s grin faded as he sat forward, propped his chin on his hands and looked at her. Through her.
She waited, trembling, wishing she’d kept her big mouth shut.
“He doesn’t appreciate what he has?” Alex asked at last, his voice low, intimate.
Hannah bowed her head, concentrated on pleating her napkin in her lap, then mentally slapped herself for fidgeting and folded her hands on the edge of the table. “I shouldn’t have said anything.”
“Wrong. Somebody should have noticed sooner,” Alex told her sincerely, then rocked her to her core by adding, “I should have noticed sooner. Life with Hugo hasn’t been a picnic, has it, Hannah-banana?”
He reached across the table, took her hands in his. “I’m glad you came home, Hannah. And I’m glad we’re here tonight, as adults, rather than as the sometimes rotten kids some of us used to be. Not you, but me. Let me make it up to you.”
“Make it up to me?” Hannah’s mouth was so dry she was surprised she could even form words. “I don’t understand.”
“Neither do I, exactly,” Alex said, releasing her hands and handing her a fork so that she could eat the cake in front of her. “And I don’t want you to think I’m some kind of do-gooder, or a penitent making up for past sins. Still, I do remember the way you were pretty much on the outside of things growing up, even if you were younger than I, and Cade and Mac as well. I remember you coming to The Desert Rose with your dad just about once a week, and I remember the way we used to tease you.”
Hannah poked the fork into the cake, breaking off a piece but not daring to lift it to her mouth just yet. “It wasn’t so bad. Except maybe the day Mac tossed me into the watering trough. It was hot, and he said I looked like I needed some cooling off. He was just having fun, and I couldn’t have been more than ten or twelve at the time. I think I thought it was fun, too, until everybody else started to point and laugh.”
Alex winced. “Where was your dad?”
“Standing there, laughing,” Hannah told him, remembering how her father had laughed with the boys, as if it had all been a very funny joke, until she’d stood up in the trough and everyone could see that her white T-shirt had become pretty close to transparent after her dunking. Then he’d grabbed her by the elbow, dragged her to the truck and lectured her all the way home about how real ladies don’t show everyone “their wares” like common sluts.
Hannah frowned now and decided maybe she’d been closer to thirteen the day of the dunking. She wasn’t sure, but she did know she woke up the next morning to see a training bra lying on the bottom of the bed. She’d looked at it, then cried for hours, wishing her mother would please come home and tell her what to do with it.
Some time after that, she’d wished her mother home again to explain what was happening to her body, why she was bleeding and feeling so sore and sick. She couldn’t ask her father, she already knew that. So she had searched his bookshelves until she found one that explained what “going into heat” meant. Until tenth-grade biology class, she’d actually feared that each time she “went into heat” the boys in her class would know and try to go after her like stallions.
What a fear-ridden childhood she’d had. Alone, lonely and filled with fear. And all the time made very well aware that she was as worthless and shiftless and potentially wanton as her mother.
“Hannah? Hannah, what are you thinking? You have such a strange look on your face.”
“Hmm?” she said, coming out of her private thoughts, to realize she’d finished her cake, and to become aware that she’d been lost in those private thoughts while Alex sat there, ignored. “Oh, I’m so sorry,” she said quickly, reaching for her water glass and knocking it over on the table. “Oh! Look what I’ve done!”
Alex calmly patted the wet spot with his napkin, telling her, “It’s all right, Hannah. Look—” he said, knocking over his own water glass “—we might just be starting a new after-dinner ritual, washing the tablecloth while it’s still on the table.”
Hannah’s eyes were wide as she looked at what he’d done. “Well, that’s just plain silly.”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” Alex agreed, and then he smiled. He smiled so completely and happily that Hannah smiled with him, and a part of her that never seemed to relax slowly warmed, defrosted and allowed her to laugh in real enjoyment.
Alex laughed with her, laughed even louder when the waiter came rushing over to the table with a pile of dry napkins to blot the spills. “We’ve started a new tradition,” he told the waiter. “After-dinner spills. What do you think? Will it ever catch on?”
“I really couldn’t say, sir,” the waiter said sternly. “I’ll get your check.”
“He’s not very happy,” Hannah said, watching the waiter walk off, his spine rigid. “I guess that means you’ll have to leave him a big tip.”
“Oh, yeah,” Alex said, nodding. “A really big tip. But it was worth it to see you smile, hear you laugh. You do both much too seldom, Hannah.”
She dropped her gaze, then dared to look up at him again. “Don’t do that or I’ll get all nervous again, and I don’t think there’s a tip large enough to cover me knocking over the entire table when I stand up. And that’s possible, you know, knowing my history.”
“Hannah Slip-on-a-banana,” Alex said, also sober once more. “I wonder—how much do you think that name had to do with your little mishaps? It’s got to be really difficult to be graceful when everyone’s waiting for your next misstep. After a while, you’d have to start believing everyone’s right, and just plain give up trying.”
Hannah melted. Right there in the restaurant, with the waiter placing a burgundy leather folder in front of Alex and waiting until he’d produced a credit card to pay the check, Hannah Clark melted. He knew, Alex Coleman knew. For the first time in her life, she felt as if someone understood her, even cared about her, cared enough to consider how she got to be the local joke, the clumsy child, the awkward adolescent, the shy teenager. The oldest virgin in Texas, perhaps in all of the United States.
“Do…did you really mean it earlier when you said you’d like to make it up to me—you know, for that stuff we talked about?”
Alex
