intended to keep it that way. “Come on, Sam,” he said. “Stop dawdling.”
His five-year-old son had stopped to examine a particularly enticing box. “Can we get this one, Daddy?”
Trevor glanced at it. Chocolate puffs with chocolate-flavored marshmallows. “Don’t think that’s a good choice, son. Let’s stick with what we’ve got. Now, come on. Abbie’s getting hungry.”
“Me, too.” Sam abandoned the sugar-laden cereal and hurried after his father and sister. “Can I have a Fun Meal? They’re giving away race cars this week.”
Looking at the shopping cart filled with nutritious food, Trevor almost sighed at his son’s daily request for a dry burger and greasy fries accompanied by an inexpensive toy. He tried to give in to the request no more than a couple of times a month. “Not tonight, Sam.”
From her seat in the shopping cart, fourteen-month-old Abbie babbled something incomprehensible. Trevor gave her a distracted smile and pushed the cart past the gossip mavens, hoping they would be content to talk about him without feeling the need to talk to him. Maybe if he pretended not to notice them…
“Trevor. Oh, Trevor, dear.”
He would have cursed if his children hadn’t been listening. Reluctantly realizing a conversation was inevitable, he stopped and turned, feeling Sam crowding close to him. He made no effort to smile, but he spoke cordially enough. “Good evening, Mrs. Godwin.”
Nellie Hankins, he noticed, had bustled away. No Hankins would be seen associating with a McBride—the result of another old scandal.
Martha Godwin, blessed with all the tact of a tornado, moved to stand directly between him and the cash registers. “How have you been, Trevor? We haven’t seen you around much lately.”
“I’ve been busy, Mrs. Godwin.”
Her expression changed to one he detested, but had seen far too often during the past year—cloying pity. “Poor dear. It must be so difficult for you trying to raise these two adorable children on your own.”
Sam pressed his face more tightly into Trevor’s leg. Sam hated having attention focused on him—especially this sort of attention. Abbie babbled and crammed her fist in her mouth, slobbering enthusiastically.
“Precious child,” Martha crooned.
Abbie blew bubbles, making a sound that summed up the way Trevor was feeling. “Excuse me, Mrs. Godwin, the kids are hungry. Goodbye.”
He moved the cart forward so that she was forced to move aside or risk losing a few toes. She left in a dignified huff when it became obvious that she would pry no interesting comments out of Trevor today.
“Guess you put that old battle-ax in her place.” The supermarket checker spoke with a satisfaction that bespoke her experience of being on the wrong end of Martha’s gossip.
Ignoring her, Trevor waited impatiently to escape the supermarket and get back to the blessed privacy of his own home.
ON THE FIRST DAY of her summer vacation, Jamie Flaherty sighed happily and wiggled her brightly painted toenails, letting the sun soak into her mostly bared skin. She wouldn’t stay out long, she promised herself, thinking of all the damage excessive exposure could do to a woman’s skin. But it felt so good to just sit and soak up rays for a few blissfully lazy moments.
In the end, it was vanity that forced her to move into the protective shade of a poolside awning. A few months away from her twenty-ninth birthday, she had no intention of risking premature wrinkles; she planned to fight aging as long as modern technology made it possible.
She slid a pair of sunglasses from the top of her head onto her nose and glanced around, taking stock of the others who were enjoying the neighborhood pool on this Monday afternoon in early June. There weren’t many, since most people worked on weekdays—unless, like Jamie, they were fortunate enough to have summers off. Five or six children made use of the shallow end of the pool, some in inflated arm-bands, others showing off swim-class skills. Three women sat in chairs nearby, chatting as they kept watch over their kids.
A little boy of four or five sat on the edge of the pool about halfway down, splashing his feet in the deeper water. His blond hair was dry, and he didn’t look as though he’d been in the pool at all. He didn’t seem unhappy or bored, Jamie decided. Just thoughtful. There was only one adult in the water, a young woman playing with a squealing toddler in a floating plastic seat. The little girl was blond, and reminded Jamie of the boy sitting on the side of the pool. Siblings?
And then her attention wandered again.
At the deeper end of the pool, near the diving board, half a dozen teenagers postured for each other, though most of the local teens hung out at the more popular new pool on the west side of town. A young lifeguard slouched in an elevated seat, his attention focused more on a couple of pretty teenage bodies than on his duties.
Stretching out in her shaded lounge chair, Jamie smiled as she remembered the long-ago days when she and other girls her age had worked so diligently—but so subtly, they had believed—to distract buff young lifeguards. Her smile deepened as she fondly recalled how often they had succeeded.
“I know that smile. It always means you’re up to mischief,” a familiar voice observed.
“Just remembering mischief.” Jamie nodded toward the bikinied teenagers posing for the lifeguard’s benefit.
Susan Schedler groaned as she lowered her very pregnant body into the chair next to Jamie’s. “Oh, God. Was I ever that young and thin?”
“Hey, we were hot stuff.” Jamie pulled her gaze away from the girls to smile fondly at her longtime friend.
Susan glanced pointedly at Jamie’s hot-pink bikini. “One of us still is.”
“That’s very nice. Thank you.”
“Just stating facts.” Susan lay back in her chair and rested a hand lightly on her bulging belly.
“How are you feeling today?”
Since Jamie had asked, Susan launched into a detailed analysis of her condition and how impatient she was to reach the end of it. Most of her attention on her friend’s words, Jamie allowed her gaze to wander again. The teens had stepped up their flirting, she noticed. One of the girls had “accidentally” positioned herself so the lifeguard could look straight down her bikini top. With a frown, Jamie realized that he was taking full advantage of the silent offer.
While she had identified with the kids earlier, it perturbed her that the lifeguard was allowing his concentration to be drawn away from the pool. Jamie had worked as a lifeguard for three summers, and she knew the young man had been trained to resist distractions.
She glanced again at the shallow end, where children were still splashing and squealing. The young woman still played with the toddler in the floating seat, and the three women in the poolside chairs were heavily into a gossip session. Murmuring a response to something Susan said, Jamie turned her eyes to the spot where the little boy had been sitting. He’d moved, she noted. He’d probably given in to the lure of the cool water. She looked at the shallow end again, casually searching for his golden head among the other kids. She didn’t see him. Was she simply overlooking him? Kids looked different wet, of course.
Something
