of her said. “She’s going through a rough time, poor mite. Her mother hasn’t been around for a few days. Her granny is picking her up.”
And just like that, the light she had seen in his face snapped off, replaced by something as cold as the other light had been warm.
Selfishly, Molly wanted to see only the warmth, especially once it was gone. She wanted to draw it back out of him. Would it seem just as real outside as it had in? Maybe she had just imagined it. She had to know.
She had to test herself against this fierce new challenge.
As they waited for a cab on the sidewalk, he seemed coolly remote. The electronic device was back out. She remembered this from yesterday. He came forward, and then he retreated.
“You were a hit with those kids.” She tried to get him back to the man she had seen at lunch.
He snorted with self-derision, didn’t look up. “Starving for male attention.”
“I can see you as a wonderful daddy someday,” she said.
He looked up then, gave her his full attention, a look that was withering.
“The last thing I would ever want to be is a daddy,” he said.
“But why?”
“Because there is quite a bit more to it than carrot sticks and storybooks.”
“Yes?”
“Like being there. Day in and day out. Putting another person first forever. Do I look like the kind of guy who puts other people first?”
“You did in there.”
“Well, I’m not.”
“You seem angry.”
“No kidding.”
“Houston, what’s wrong?”
“There’s a little girl in there whose mom has abandoned her. How does something like that happen? How could anybody not love her? Not want her? How could anybody who had a beautiful child like that not devote their entire life to protecting her and making her safe and happy?”
“An excellent daddy,” she said softly.
“No, I wouldn’t,” he said, coldly angry. “Can you wait for the cab yourself? I just thought of something I need to do.”
And he left, walking down the street, fearless, as though that fancy watch and those shoes didn’t make him a target.
Look at the way he walked. He was no target. No victim.
She debated calling after him that she had other things on the agenda for today. But she didn’t. This was his pattern. She recognized it clearly now.
He felt something. Then he tried to walk away, tried to reerect his barriers, his formidable defenses, against it.
Why? What had happened to him that made a world alone seem so preferable to one shared?
“Wait,” she called. “I’ll walk with you.”
And he turned and watched her come toward him, waited, almost as if he was relieved that he was not going to carry some of the burden he carried alone.
HOUSTON watched Molly walking fast to catch up with him. The truth was all he wanted was an hour or so on his punching bag. Though maybe he waited, instead of continuing to walk, because the punching bag had not done him nearly the good he had hoped it would last night. Now it felt as if it was the only place to defuse his fury.
That beautiful little girl’s mother didn’t want her. He knew he was kidding himself that his anger was at her mother.
From the moment he’d heard Molly laughing from under the pile of children a powerless longing for something he was never going to have had pulled at him.
You thought you left something behind you, but you never quite left that. The longing for the love of a mother.
The love of his mother. She was dead now. He’d hired a private detective a few years back to find her. Somehow he had known she was dead. Because he’d always thought she would come back. He would have left Beebee’s world in a minute if his mother had loved him and needed him.
It had been a temporary relief when the private eye had told him. Drugs. An overdose.
Death. The only reasonable explanation for a mother who had never looked back. Except, as the P.I. filled in the dates and details, it wasn’t the explanation he’d been seeking after all. She’d died only a few years before he made the inquiries about her—plenty of time to check in on her son if she had wanted to.
She hadn’t.
And he was powerless over that, too.
There was nothing a man of action like Houston hated so much as that word. Powerless.
Molly came and walked beside him. He deliberately walked fast enough to keep her a little breathless; he knew intuitively she would have a woman’s desire to talk, to probe his wounds.
He could feel his anger dispersing as they left the edgier part of the Lower East Side and headed back to where Second Chances was in the East Village.
“This is where I live,” she said as they came to a well-kept five-story brownstone. “Do you want to stop for a minute? Meet Baldy? Have a coffee?”
She obviously intended to pursue this thing. His feelings. He was not going to meet her bird, enter her personal space and have a coffee with her!
On the other hand, the punching bag had not been working its normal magic. He hesitated. And she read that as a yes. In the blink of an eye she was at the door with her key out.
He still had a chance to back away, but for some reason he didn’t. In fact, he ordered himself to keep walking, to call after her, Maybe some other time. But he didn’t.
Instead, feeling oddly powerless again, as if she might have something he was looking for, he followed her up the three flights of stairs to her apartment.
“Close it quick,” she said, as he came through the door behind her. “Baldy.”
And sure enough out of the darkness of the apartment a tiny missile flew at them, a piece of flesh-colored putty with naked wings. It landed on her shoulder, pecked at her ear, turned and gave him a baleful look.
“Good grief,” he said, but he was already glad he had come. The bird was so ugly he was cute. The tiny being’s obvious adoration for Molly lightened something in Houston’s mood. “ET call home!”
Still, there was something about that bird, looking as if it, too, would protect her to the death, that tugged at a heart that had just faced one too many challenges today.
The
