skin was smooth, dewy and well cared for and the puppy fat had turned into a kind of ripeness that looked warm and inviting, along with the soft creases at the corners of her eyes and the smile lines around her mouth.
It was a little disturbing that he remembered her so well, but then, he’d made an extensive study of girls in high school. If he went to a reunion—which, to be clear, he had no intention of ever doing—it would probably turn out that he remembered them all.
Joe listened to Mary Jane’s car engine, heard “the noise” and knew she should have brought it in for a checkup about five hundred miles ago. He did some further exploration and diagnosis, and came up with at least three major repairs that the car needed right now.
Mary Jane was lucky it had held up this far, and hadn’t left her stranded somewhere with smoke billowing from the engine. He would need to order parts from the distributor, and when they arrived he’d need to pull apart the whole engine to put them in. It was Tuesday today. She wasn’t getting the car back before Friday at the earliest.
He did a grease and oil change on another car, and then a wheel alignment and a tire rotation on a third, knowing that both clients would be back soon to pick up their vehicles. The bad-news phone call to Mary Jane would have to wait.
Which was a pity, because it gave him more time to think about her.
How well she’d held up in the looks and youthfulness department. How surprised he was that she was still here. She’d been intelligent, articulate, hard-working, always earned good grades. He somehow would have expected her to have moved away, in search of wider horizons.
In high school, the girls had been divided into two groups—the ones who thought he was gorgeous and had wild crushes on him, and the ones who thought he was gorgeous and couldn’t stand him.
Naturally, Mary Jane was in the second group, and naturally, he had been all about the girls in the first.
He’d dated—hell, he couldn’t remember—at least five or six of them. The prettiest and wildest and most popular, because those were the ones you could get the farthest with, and were the ones that made the other guys look at you with envy and respect, cementing your position as the coolest kid in school.
Looking back, he could see how much he’d been riding for a fall. Sometimes, he wanted to reach back in time and slap his teenage self upside the head. Hard. He could also see that if just a few things had gone differently, the fall might never have happened.
Because he’d come so close.
Seriously close.
Even now, he might easily have been starring in some long-running TV crime show, or choosing between movie scripts that had Oscar potential written into every line. As he’d said to Mary Jane, life was a funny thing.
There had been a major series of audition callbacks where he’d ended up in the running, along with just one other guy, for the lead role in a crime drama series, and the other guy—now a household name—had gotten the gig. There had been one gorgeous female smile that he’d caught in a crowded diner and had followed up on instead of letting it slide.
Just those two events, and his whole life had gone off on a completely different track from the one he’d envisaged.
He couldn’t let himself think about it, because on the one hand, he’d fallen so far short, but on the other, there were two things about his life now that were so incredibly precious he couldn’t imagine himself without them.
The owners of the other cars showed up both at the same time, and he took their money and returned their keys and remembered he still hadn’t called Mary Jane Cherry, even though it was nearly four o’clock. He was just about to pick up the phone when his father came in, towing two identical seven-year-old girls and looking pretty tired.
The girls, of course, were Joe’s two precious things.
“You’re going to tell me it’s easier fixing cars than taking care of these two,” he told his dad.
“Nah, we had a great day.” But a tiring one. Dad couldn’t gloss over that.
“What did you do?”
“Played on the beach at the lake. Did a round of mini golf up at that place with all the waterfalls. Had ice cream.”
Dad couldn’t keep up this pace all summer. He had prostate cancer, and the only good thing about this was the doctor’s promise that it would kill him so slowly he’d likely die of something else first, fifteen years from now.
Joe was starting not to believe the doctor, but maybe it was the sheer energy of two little girls that had Dad looking so tired today. “I’ll get them into a vacation program,” he promised his father. “Day camp, or something.”
“Horseback riding camp?” said both girls together, in identical and intensely hopeful voices.
Joe sighed. “Maybe horse-riding camp. We’ll look into it.”
He didn’t know where this horsey thing was coming from, but it was rabid. The girls had a shared subscription to a pony magazine, and the walls of their room were covered in horsey pictures. They had a whole shelf of horsey books. Not just stories, but books on how to ride and groom and look after your pony. They had a plastic pony play-set, and plush ponies that they slept with every night, and unicorn socks—apparently unicorns counted as ponies—as well as horseshoe bracelets and pony T-shirts and pony pajamas.
Now that he and the girls had left California and come back east, it might actually be possible for them to meet a pony or two, face-to-face.
“You don’t have to shove ’em into some day-camp program just because of me,” Dad said.
“Pony camp! Pony camp!” said the girls.
“Well, I won’t, not unless it’s one they enjoy,” Joe promised, but he knew he might be stretching the truth.
They might be forced to enjoy it whether they wanted to or not, because Dad really could not look after the girls all summer, five and a half days a week. The whole idea of Joe being here in the garage was to give Dad a break until they decided whether to sell the place or close it down. His taking care of the girls was a stopgap measure until the three of them got settled, because they’d only moved from California two weeks ago and still weren’t fully unpacked.
Holly and Maddie had spent half their lives in day care and day camp in the four years since Joe had had full custody, because he’d had no other choice in the matter. Even so, all the child care was still way better than what they’d had before they’d come to him. He’d spared Dad most of the details on that, and it was cute...and warming, somehow...that Dad, in his innocence, viewed professional child care as such a poor option.
He would try to get a little more of the unpacking done tonight after Dad and the girls had gone to bed, he promised himself, so that at least his father didn’t have to deal with the mess. Joe didn’t really have time to devote a whole precious evening to going through cardboard boxes. He had studying to do. But if he didn’t take care of Dad...
“Ready to close up shop?” Dad asked now, betraying his eagerness to get home and take it easy.
“Not quite. I have a phone call to make, and she’s probably going to want the loaner car, so I’ll have to arrange
