All for a Story (35 page)

“N-no,” Max stammered, reaching for his handkerchief after helping Monica safely to the floor. “Not currently.”

“Formerly?” the man said.

“Somewhat,” Monica said. She ran her fingers through her hair before good-naturedly helping Max wipe away the remnants of her lipstick. “From a way back.”

“So any of this junk yours?”

“Watch it,” Max said, accepting his glasses from Monica. “You know what they say about one man’s rubbish.”

“It’s another man’s job to haul away,” the hauler said. “Just tell me what you’re takin’ and what I’m takin’.”

Max looked to Monica, who had gathered her book and her box of stories. “Do you think there’s anything else?”

She gave the piles a mere passing glance. “No.”

“Well, then.” Max reached into his vest pocket and pulled out a small white calling card, one left over from his time in Los Angeles. He turned it over, asked the mover if he could borrow the pencil above his ear, and carefully printed Uncle Edward’s —his —address on the back. “If you would, have the chair delivered to this address.”

The mover looked at the card, then at Max. His jaw went slack. “You’ve gotta be kiddin’ me. That’s at least —”

“Worth your while,” Max said, handing over three dollars. “And I’ll pay you twice that when it’s delivered.”

The mover remained incredulous. “Nine bucks?”

“Max, that’s ridiculous. It’s just an old chair.”

“Are you kidding? Nothing’s too good for Paolo.”

Her eyes glistened with gratitude. He would have paid tenfold to have her look at him like that. He loved her. If they’d never kissed or never would again, that fact wouldn’t change. He wanted to tell her, right there with the moustachioed mover as a witness, but on the reasonable chance that she did not return his feelings equally, he stopped short of declaration. Instead, he took her childhood belongings, tucked them under one arm, and offered her the other to escort her from the home in grand style. Before they crossed the threshold into the winter’s afternoon, she stopped and turned them to look one last time upon the dreary, gray room.

“‘And of this place, I might have been mistress.’”

The affectation in her voice surely meant this was a quote, but he couldn’t place it. Then she patted the book, saying, “Read it.”

And he promised her he would.

Don’t wink —a flutter of one eye may cause a tear in the other.

ANTI-FLIRT CLUB RULE #5

SHE’D HALFWAY HOPED TO CONTINUE THE KISS in the taxi ride back to the train station, but since Max had given his last three dollars to the mover for the chair, they’d been at the mercy of that same man for a ride. Once the final portable property of her childhood home had been loaded within the wooden slats of the truck, Monica was handed up into the cab while Max sat in the back, feet dangling over the side. Then it was a mad dash to catch the four o’clock, grabbing the only two seats together —right across from a fat, irascible woman and her sullen, drool-crusted child. Thankfully, Max gave up his attempts to engage either of them in travel banter. Even better, the child whined incessantly about needing to go to the lavatory and the mother finally acquiesced, leaving Max and Monica in peace.

“Alone at last,” Max said, touching his forehead to hers.

“Maybe he’ll lock himself in there.”

“
He
? Are you sure? I thought it was a girl.”

“Sorry road for her if it is,” Monica said.

Then he kissed her. Nothing like before, when her feet pooled in her shoes and her head sizzled like frost on a furnace. But sweet and soft, somehow making everything and everybody else on the train disappear behind a curtain of touch and taste.

He pulled away, looking satisfied but not smug, and said, “I hope I’m not causing you to violate the vows of Anti-Flirt Week.”

“That depends. Are you teasing me?”

He shook his head. Slowly. “Are you?”

She held her head steady and answered, truthfully, “I don’t think so.”

Her answer brought a decidedly less satisfied look to his face, and he blinked precisely five times.

“What does that mean, exactly?”

“Well, I don’t know,
exactly
. Who knows anything exactly?”

He just kept looking at her and blinking, making her wish she could disappear during that tiny space of time when his eyes were closed and reappear again, as sure of her feelings as he apparently was of his.

Monica stretched up, hoping for another kiss, but the woman and child had returned, the latter unceremoniously stomping on her foot. Whatever question, answer, and conversation had been left unspoken would have to wait until they could get away from their gloomy audience.

She ran her fingers listlessly over the lid of the box containing her childhood stories, then lifted it and shuffled through the pages themselves. Leaning against Max’s shoulder, she offered one up as a little light reading material. Perfect for the train.

“Is there a monkey in it?”

She knew he meant no harm by the question, and she found her own defensiveness surprising.

“No monkey. Just a girl.” She scanned a few lines, though simply seeing the paper was enough to bring the words back in full detail. “She makes sashes out of butterfly wings for the women in her town to wear when they march in the suffrage parade. But then all the women fly away. What do you think Freud would make of that?”

“I like monkeys better.” This from the child sitting across from her.

Monica lifted one eyebrow, sending the child to melt against its mother’s arm.

“How old were you when you wrote that?” Max asked, either intrigued or amused.

“Seven? Eight? Before the war, when getting the vote was my mother’s passion of the day.”

He held out a hand. “May I?”

All of a sudden, those pages filled with her juvenile, practiced script seemed to be spun from her very soul, and to simply hand them over, a betrayal of the child who wrote them.

“You have enough to read right now,” she said, nodding her head toward the book in his lap. “
Pride and Prejudice
, remember?”

“I liked
Emma
better.” This from the child’s mother, who was not so easily intimidated by Monica’s raised brow.

So they rode in silence, with unfinished kisses and conversations and stories between them.

They lit from the train at Union Station amid a throng of travelers. The sound of a thousand voices filled the space between the marble floors and columned walls. The last of the day’s sunlight poured through the windows in the vaulted ceiling. With silent complicity they joined their fellow travelers, funneling their way toward the exit gates.

“I think I have enough for us to ride a streetcar,” Monica said,
digging in her purse as she walked. “Why don’t you come back to my place for supper?” She tried to think of anything that would give her more time with him. She’d broken some sort of spell on the train and felt close to begging for a chance to make it right again. “Tuesday night, probably beef stew. Mrs. Kinship makes it with pearl onions.”

“I don’t think so,” he said after seeming to weigh a world’s worth of options. “When I left the office this morning, I had no idea I’d be gone all day. Not that it wasn’t a wonderful way to spend an afternoon.”

“Then come with me.” She clutched his sleeve. “If not to my house, anywhere. You must be hungry too. I’m starved. How about Chinese? There’s a great place just a couple of blocks —”

“Stop,” he said, but gently, with his fingers touched against her face.

“What did I do?” She felt the first sting of tears, and they clogged her throat so, she feared she wouldn’t be heard over the din of the crowd. “What did I say? I feel like I ruined something, but I don’t know what, or how.” She felt herself escalating to hysteria, and were they anywhere else but Union Station, they might have accrued the attention of some passersby.

“Come here,” he said, putting his arm around her shoulders in a now-familiar protective way and ushering her to one of the wooden benches near the entrance. He sat her down and moved in close, blocking out everything —the ticket booths, the clock, the hawkers of peanuts and magazines. Only Max, with a blur of activity behind him.

“Something happened back there at that house,” he said with exaggerated authority.

“No kidding,” she said, confused by his adamant tone. “I was there, remember?” She leaned in, ready for it to happen again.

“Stop.” Again, this time more forceful. “It’s something I think I’ve wanted for a long time. With you, and maybe even before you.”

“Before me?”

“There’s never been a woman that I thought —that . . . I loved. And I’m in love with you, Monica. I think I have been since the day I met you. That first morning, at the funeral, when you called me Griffin.”

Her mind followed him back to that moment, unable to recall anything other than nervous amusement at her own cleverness.

“And there were times —moments —when I thought you felt the same. Somewhat the same. So this afternoon, when you kissed me, when you let me kiss you . . .” He paused, bemused by his own declaration, looking to the passing commuters as if they would tell him all he needed to hear. “But here you are, not exactly leaping at the chance to say you’re in love with me too.”

“Oh, Max.” No man had ever declared love for her. Not in a setting like this, anyway. Not with daylight and witnesses, speaking from a clear and sober mind. “How could I be?”

He sat a little straighter, a little farther away. “So how could you —what made you let me kiss you like that?”

She shrugged and clutched her stories. “Playing house?”

It was exactly the wrong thing to say, flirtatious and cruel in the face of his sincerity. He physically recoiled from her, and she wished she could reel her words back in and bring him back with them.

“Max —”

“Of course. What did I expect?”

Now it was her turn to draw back. “That was cruel.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was an apology delivered with pity, not just for his remark but for the reputation that prompted it. She silently sent it back.

Max opted to go to the
Capitol Chatter
offices rather than to his home, hoping a few matters of business would distract him from the afternoon. He arrived to find only Zelda, with a neatly typed list of the girls who had come for the receptionist position. Barely perceptible tick marks spoke of Zelda’s personal opinion, and there were few who passed her muster.

“Everything is fine with Miss Monica?” she asked with her specific blend of maternal austerity.

“All’s well,” he replied, making no attempt to convince her. He told of their visit to the bank, of Monica’s inheritance and the discovery under the floorboard, forging on regardless of the tug at his conscience that he may be betraying her confidence. He hadn’t seen anything in this city as dependable as Zelda Ovenoff’s ability to keep a secret.

“And I am thinking there is something else,” Zelda said, “though it is not my place to know, maybe.”

They were sitting at the large conference table, drinking coffee and picking at the last of the Danish from earlier in the day.

“I kissed her,” he said, trying hard not to relive the experience in Mrs. Ovenoff’s presence.

“Oh, how wonderful.” She squeezed his hand, and he felt a little embarrassed, like he’d just been awarded a prize he didn’t deserve.

“Maybe,” he said. “I mean, yes, wonderful, but then, after, I think I might have chased her away.”

“Nonsense. Who would run from a man like you?”

“A woman like Monica, apparently.”

Zelda tucked a soft finger under his chin and forced him to look up. “Tell me this. Do you love her?”

“I think so, and that’s the problem.”

“How, a problem?”

“Because she doesn’t love me.”

“And what makes you say this?”

“Because she told me.”

“Ah.” She released him and wrapped her hands around her coffee cup but didn’t raise it for a drink. “You think because she cannot say her feelings, she must not have them.”

“That’s not it.” But of course it was.

“Not once, in all of our time together, did Edward Moore tell me he loved me. But I know he did. It is one thing to say and quite another to do.”