Between Friends (18 page)

Dallas was not ugly.

Alex was surprised, as a matter of fact, to discover that she had grown so attractive. He averted his gaze and frowned down at the things in his hand. School notebooks, mostly. Had Dallas not been so pretty before … or had he not bothered to notice? Alex hadn’t really thought about it back then. She was just a kid. Too young. Too scared. But … the next year …

Math. English. Another math … health ed. He leafed through the pages. Half-finished work, mediocre marks.

“Lillian, do you want any of the notebooks from junior high?” Alex asked Lillian.

“No, I don’t think so,” she replied after a moment’s thought.

Alex chucked several of the composition-style books to the floor in front of him. Dallas automatically retrieved them and added them to the black garbage bag. He noticed she had pretty hands. They were slender and pale. No, not pale. Tan.

His attention went back to her face, bypassing the casual clothing Dallas was wearing. Khaki slacks and a navy-blue sweater, sneakers. Yes, she really was much prettier. She’d lost all the young-girl roundness and soft flesh. The last stage of baby fat … or whatever you wanted to call it. She now seemed taller. Her mouth fuller in her thinner face. She had cheekbones and a narrow chin. Alex didn’t remember a thing about her hair, except that there had been a lot of it. Wild. Dallas had cut it all off. What was left was still curly, but short and looser with a fullness about her face that added feminine softness.

“Oh, look …” Lillian murmured.

Both Alex and Dallas turned to her. She had a leather certificate holder. Lillian opened it, smiling softly in memory.

“It’s Nicky’s diploma …” She ran her hand over the surface of the gilded paper, her fingertip testing the ridges of the embossed seal.

“You have to keep that,” Dallas advised quietly.

“Yes, yes.” Lillian sighed. “It’s a miracle that boy ever got out of school with one. I really wanted him to go on to college. He tried for one semester but … he didn’t stay.”

“What did he go for?” Alex asked carefully.

Lillian sighed. “Oh … I thought he should go into something practical. Like accounting. Vin always hoped that Nicky would take over the business someday. But he wasn’t interested.” Lillian chuckled and shook her head ruefully. “He wanted to be rich and famous, I know that, but he never said how he was going to do it.”

Alex shrugged. “Some people aren’t meant to go to college.”

“You should have,” Lillian admonished. “You’re a smart man. You’re smarter than Nicky was,” she ended.

Dallas was surprised that Lillian would admit such a thing. She looked at Alex for his reaction, but he seemed to have not heard Lillian, or chose to ignore it. He’d heard, Dallas decided. Alex had always struck her as someone who paid attention and noticed things.

“What is Vin going to do about the business?” Alex asked Lillian. He silently handed the rest of the notebooks to Dallas and she disposed of them in the black bag.

“I don’t know,” Lillian sighed. “You know it’s a family business. Vin’s father started it, but Vin has really made it much bigger and more successful.”

“I didn’t know that,” Alex said in a low voice.

“Vin would hate to lose it but … when he retires he might have to sell it. I don’t know. He doesn’t talk about it too much, but I know he’s concerned.”

Dallas happened to glance at Alex again, and found his features intent and thoughtful. He sat on the edge of the sofa with his legs slightly spread and his elbows braced on his knees as he looked briefly through each book.

She reached into the bottom of her box. It was empty.

“I’m finished with this one,” Dallas announced. She stood up and sealed closed the top of the garbage bag. She then took the bag and the box and placed them closer to the foot of the staircase for removal upstairs when they were all done.

“I’m almost done, too,” Alex said.

He lifted the next notebook in his stack and wasn’t even going to bother leafing through it until he noticed that the handwriting on the cover was different than what he’d been reading so far. He looked closer. In the small white space on the front of the composition book was written “My Journal.” Alex opened the cover and on the inside of the jacket was printed in the same hand, “this belongs to Dallas Kristin Oliver.
Private.
DO NOT READ
!” The last three words were carefully written in capital letters.

A quick glance through the book showed the text was written in a neat block print tilting forward. The book was only three-fourths filled. When Alex lifted the last page another folded sheet fell out. He quickly retrieved it, putting it back in place. Out of his peripheral vision he saw Dallas returning.

“Lillian, I think you should take another look through these. You may still want to throw out some of it,” Dallas said, getting down on her knees to straighten the stack of Nicholas’s things she’d put together.

Alex quickly thumbed through the pages, only catching a word or phrase here and there. His initial reaction was to return it to her. Then he rejected the idea. For one thing, announcing that he had found it in one of the boxes belonging to Nick would require an explanation. Lillian would want to know how it got to be there. Since Lillian knew nothing of what had happened, there was no point in bringing it to light now. Dallas had had her reasons for remaining silent, and so had he. Instead, Alex decided to remain silent about the notebook.

Covertly, Alex slid the notebook into the inside pocket of his leather jacket, which was lying over the back of the sofa, just behind him. He stood up.

“I’m going to start taking some of this garbage upstairs.”

“I’ll help,” Dallas offered, getting up from the floor.

Alex was going to say that he could manage, and then he changed his mind. He picked up the two heavier garbage bags and started up to the kitchen. Dallas followed behind, maneuvering three corrugated boxes up the narrow passage. She waited while Alex opened the kitchen door and stepped through with the bags to put them among the other outgoing trash in the bins along the side of the house. Dallas stepped outside into the cool night air and stacked her boxes. Suddenly she and Alex were facing each other. She couldn’t see his expression, but she knew that he was watching her. The silence was okay. It didn’t make her feel defensive the way she used to when someone stared at her too long. She took a deep breath. She had to say something.

“I appreciate … you know … that you didn’t say anything to Lillian about …”

He shifted restlessly, hitching up his shoulders so that he could stuff his hands into the front pockets of his jeans. “I couldn’t do that to you. I
wouldn’t
do it to Lillian. She doesn’t need to know that Nick was … anyway, I promised you a long time ago.”

“And you’re a man of your word?” Dallas found herself teasing in a quiet, curious tone.

“All I have is my word. I’m short in other areas.”

It seemed an odd thing to say. In any case, she didn’t agree with him. It felt so surreal to be standing there talking to Alex Marco like this.

He chuckled. “We’re not really strangers. I feel like … we should hug each other or something. You know. Great to see you again, and all that.”

But he made no move to do so, and Dallas did nothing to encourage him. It would have been too awkward.

“How did you feel when you heard about Nick?” Alex asked.

He stepped closer to her and the light from the kitchen window highlighted half of his face. Dallas shrugged.

“I was sorry for Lillian, of course. But … I really didn’t feel anything else for myself. I just remembered what he’d tried to do to me.”

“Men are pigs,” Alex said forthrightly.

The statement was so outrageous that Dallas couldn’t help but laugh, albeit a little uncomfortably. “Are you speaking for yourself, too?”

But Alex apparently didn’t find it amusing. He didn’t respond for a long moment. “You tell me,” he drawled.

Then it hit her. Her amusement vanished as well. This had nothing to do with Nicholas, but just her and Alex. Dallas suddenly felt stripped bare, as open and exposed as it was possible to be before another human being. Yet Dallas knew that Alex wasn’t making light of the past or of the memories. She had been right about him. He did remember everything.

“Do you know what I’m talking about?”

Now it was her turn to nod. Of course she did. More than the circumstance that had first brought them together, there had been another time a year afterward that had had an even more profound effect on her.

“Valerie never mentioned what happened,” Alex said.

The statement confirmed that they’d been seeing each other, and talking about her. Dallas felt like her life had been invaded and it made her wary. “I … never told Val. I never mentioned it to anyone.”

Alex pursed his lips thoughtfully and stared down at his boots. The light made his hair look like silver. “She and I have been out together a few times.”

“You don’t have to tell me that,” she said quietly.

He shifted restlessly. “I know, but … I wanted you to know.”

“Why?”

He shrugged. “I feel like, I always want to be honest with you. We’re friends, and I won’t do anything to hurt you.”

Dallas was surprised by his confession. And ambivalent. It was none of her business who he or Valerie dated, but there
was
the question of how she felt about it. Nothing more was said on the subject. She and Alex continued to stand together in the dark.

The suburban quiet was very different from the constant noise and underlying buzz of the city that she had grown used to. She liked the vitality and bustle of Manhattan better. It was easier to be anonymous in the city, blend in.

“What are you thinking?”

She sighed. She had a suspicion that Alex knew what she was thinking. But she wanted to stay away from … the other thing. “I feel sorry for Lillian.”

“Why?”

“I guess because … I think she deserved a better son than Nicholas,” Dallas hesitated. “She loved him so much. I bet he could have had anything he wanted from her and Vin, but he was so … so …”

“Yeah, I know.” Alex slowly nodded. “It didn’t work out the way they’d hoped at all.”

Another strange thing to say,
Dallas thought. She hugged herself against the chill. “I hope she’s going to be all right …”

“She will. What about you?”

She stared at him, trying to see his expression. “What do you mean?”

“Valerie said your life is very complicated.”

Dallas felt annoyed. “She shouldn’t have said that to you.”

“Is it true?”

“Isn’t everyone’s life confusing? Isn’t yours?” she countered. “I don’t know anything about you, either.”

He chortled, reaching for the door. “You know more than you think you do.”

Alex said it with such certainty that Dallas looked quizzically at him.

Alex pulled the door open again, and held it while Dallas preceded him back into the house.

“You care a lot about Lillian, don’t you?”

Dallas stepped back into the kitchen. The bright overhead light made her squint after the absolute darkness of outdoors. “Yes, I do. Lillian is like … a surrogate mother to me. She’s special.”

“Yeah, she is special,” Alex agreed reflectively. “She’s a lot like …”

Alex suddenly stopped and turned his head partially in the direction of the open basement door. When Dallas started to ask a question, he held up his hand for her silence, his expression alert and focused. And then she heard it, too. Crying. Soft, but heartbreaking sobbing from the basement. Alex moved quickly and started down the stairs. By the time Dallas responded and followed him, he had already reached Lillian. He was kneeling in front of her, and had gathered her against his chest. Lillian’s body shook with her tears.

Alex did nothing more than to support and hold Lillian. Over her head Alex caught sight of Dallas, and stared at her. In an instant of déjà vu she recalled Alex’s comforting her. He hadn’t held her the way he was holding Lillian, but he’d been there for her. Dallas quietly retraced her steps, leaving the two of them alone.

She stood alone in the kitchen for no more than a minute when she heard footsteps on the path leading to the side of the house. The door opened, and Vincent Marco stepped inside. He carried a small bouquet of flowers. Before she had time to gather her wits, he was shrugging out of a jacket and pulling off a baseball cap and calling out for his wife.

“Lilly? I’m ho …”

Vin’s eyes widened with surprise when he spotted Dallas standing behind one of the kitchen chairs.

“Dallas. How you doin’?”

“Hi, Mr. Marco,” Dallas greeted him a bit awkwardly.

His initial surprise quickly faded and Vin Marco placed the flowers on the counter, his cap and jacket on a chair.

“I told you, you don’t have to call me Mr. Marco. Vin is okay. Where’s my wife?”

Dallas was trying to detect whether or not Lillian was still crying. She gestured vaguely with her hand in the direction of the basement.

“She’s, er … downstairs.”

Vin nodded. “Oh, yeah. You were helping her with stuff that belonged to Nick. Did you finish?”

He was heading toward the door. She was not unmindful that there might still be some tension between him and Alex. “Yes. I … I just put out some garbage. I was on my way down again to see if Lillian wanted me for anything else …”

There were footsteps behind her now. Voices and murmuring. Vin also waited, his stocky body poised comfortably. Dallas saw the frown gather between his brows at the sound of another man’s voice. Lillian came first into the kitchen. Dallas watched her face carefully, looking to see if there was any evidence of crying. Her eyes were a bit pink, but she merely looked tired. When Lillian spotted her husband, her eyes brightened and she smiled, happy to see him.

“Oh, Vin. You’re home already.” She turned her cheek to him so that he could briefly kiss her.

He looked over his wife’s shoulder. “Who else is here?”

Alex appeared next.

“I asked Alex to come out, too. I had no idea how many boxes I’d find, or how heavy they’d be. I didn’t think Dallas and I could move them around.”