Dream of You (33 page)

             
Jordan’s smile was a thin excuse of one. “Yes, sir.”

             
“Good.” Vaughn beamed like they were the best of friends and heaved himself up out of the chair. He patted a hand down on the edge of the desk. “I’m glad we’ve come to an agreement, Coach Walker. It’d be a real shame if your career were cut short so soon.”

             
“A shame.”

             
When he was gone, Jordan gave the middle finger to the empty threshold.

**

              By the time Jordan picked her up that evening, Ellie’s bed was a mountain of cast aside outfits. After much consternation and one too many opinions from Paige, she settled on a smoke gray sweaterdress. She paired it with black leggings and ankle boots, her grandmother’s crystal tear drop earrings and the dark eye shadow Jordan liked. Her hair was in big, loose, curling iron-created tumbles around her shoulders, wool pea coat draped over one arm when she met him at the door.

             
“Jesus,” had been his first note of approval, and as they now moved up the front walk of his childhood home, she wondered if she’d missed the mark and she should have chosen demure over sophisticated.

             
Jordan’s parents lived in an older, established subdivision that wasn’t in Marietta and wasn’t in Kennesaw, but somewhere in between. The house was a big brick box, blue shutters and doors, thin cracks spiderwebbing through the pane of one downstairs window, shrubs full of fallen orange maple leaves. The sidewalk curved around from the drive, but a trampled footpath in the grass belied a shortcut. There were oil stains on the driveway and thick curls of smoke coming up from the chimney. Warm panels of light fell out through the windows and yellowed the twilight around them. It was like so many almost identical homes in so many similar neighborhoods; it was a home, bursting at the seams with the histories of five children and the parents who’d raised them. Ellie would take history over new and shiny any day, and even as her heart leapt against her breastbone, she found a smile of approval.

             
“Last chance to back out,” Jordan said as they crowded together on the stoop. He smelled nice – understated cologne just a hint beneath the pear of his shampoo – and he’d had a haircut that week. He hid it well, but he was nervous, lips pressed in a white, unsmiling line. His eyes looked too big, wild and white around the blue-green irises.

             
“Tell me you’re not embarrassed of me,” she said, feeling her smile shake with tension. “And I’ll be fine.”

             
That managed to draw a quick grin out of him. “Like I could ever be embarrassed of you.” His shoulders jumped. “Alright. Ready?”

             
“Ready.”

             
The foyer was worn and scraped pine floors, a hall tree with corroding mirror, a whole colony of roosting coats and a pile of shoes. It was warm, almost too warm, and the air smelled like chemical, air freshener flowers and what might have been ambrosia cooking. All the electronic sounds of a busy house – a TV, a washing machine just a low hum of energy somewhere, and the echo of all the personalities that lived there – drowned out the fast rap of her heart, smoothed her tattered nerves. This was not a frightening place.

             
“Jordie, that you?” a great booming, thunderous male voice called, and Ellie jumped.

             
Jordan’s hand found hers, his long fingers curling around hers and squeezing. “Dad,” he explained under his breath, and then began towing her down the foyer. “Yeah,” he called back, and then to her: “he’ll be nuts about you.”

             
“Dad” was in a big-enough-for-two chair in a living room that looked lived-in. Amidst the overstuffed furniture and floor to ceiling built-in book cases on either side of the mantel, Jordan’s father was still an impressively big guy as he got to his feet. He looked like he’d played ball – or hell, rugby even – big shoulders and big hands; a tall, solid, square-jawed man’s man who really didn’t look anything like his youngest son. Mike resembled their father, she thought, as he came toward them.

             
“Dad, this is Ellie. Ellie, this is my dad Randy.”

             
He looked like a Randy, especially as a smile split his face.

             
“Nice to meet you, Mr. Walker.” Ellie heard the flutter in her voice as she reached out and accepted his shake, his hand dwarfing hers.

             
“None of that ‘Mr. Walker’ stuff,” he said as he gave her hand one final, bone-crushing squeeze and released her. His eyes – green like Mike and Jessica’s – took in all of her face, but that was as far as they went; no leering, no ogling. No shoulder slap and
atta boy, Jordie
. “That ‘Mr.’ and ‘Mrs.’ works on the wife, but I’m still in denial about my age.”

             
Ellie grinned. “Fair enough.”

             
“Jordie!” echoed from the next room, high and feminine, and Randy sighed.

             
“Speaking of which…”

             
Jordan’s hand tightened on hers. “Brace yourself,” he said under his breath, and turned them to face the door.

             
His mother had been gorgeous once: petite, blonde and curvy. Time and five children had pulled at her, fleshed her out and carved grooves in her face. Her sudden, almost startled grin was bracketed by laugh lines, her hips wide and soft beneath a floral skirt. Ellie had a mother, but Jordan had grown up with a mom – that much she could tell before the introductions were made.

             
The best parents ever,
Tam had called them.

             
“Mom - ” Jordan started to say.

             
But she clapped a hand to her chest and said, “Oh, Jordie, she’s beautiful!”

             
Ellie had no idea why she’d been so nervous.

**

              Ellie was a hit. Jordan hadn’t worried for a minute that she wouldn’t be; she was the poster child of the kind of girl mother’s loved: beautiful and natural and smiling and gracious. He’d had the smallest twinge of wonder – would her age be an issue? – but he suspected, as he watched Beth haul the next photo album across the kitchen table, eyes dancing with excitement, that
eighteen
wouldn’t have been cause to blink at this point.

             
He’d had all these protests he’d wanted to voice after dinner when his mom insisted on getting out the pictures, but he’d left them unsaid. Ellie was glowing; she’d shot him a smile – over the first laminated page of the first album – that had been almost painful to bear witness to after Coach Vaughn’s warning that afternoon. He’d been found out. His tryst was putting his job in jeopardy and it was time to call things off.

             
But it wasn’t a tryst.

             
And he didn’t want to call things off.

             
And her dark head was bent over some embarrassing, childhood picture of him and her gray eyes were alive with sparkle and an emotion that made letting her go next to impossible.

             
“She’s cute,”
Randy had told him before dinner,
“too good for you too.”
It was the closest his father had ever come to criticizing his dating pattern. There’d been a note of good-natured warning in his voice:
girls like this don’t deserve to be dropped like hot rocks
.

             
Jordan knew that, just as sure as he knew that getting fired was no longer an abstract might-be of the future: it was a reality.

**

              Dinner furthered the contrast between Ellie’s family and this one: hearty lasagna with salad and butter smothered garlic bread. Paper napkins and clean, white, everyday china. They ate in the kitchen, at a long ranch table scarred by thirty some odd years of abuse. The fridge was cluttered with a whiteboard calendar, photos and children’s drawings; there were grandkids aside from the ones Jo and Delta were incubating. And now, amidst Jordan’s good-natured eye rolls and Beth’s happy chatter, there were photos laid out in front of her like windows into the Walkers’ journey through time.

             
“This was Halloween.” Beth tapped an eight by ten of three scrawny kids and one big-shouldered Walker boy who looked five years older than all of them. Ellie found Jordan – skinny and big-eyed, mop of messy hair – and tiny, scrappy little Jo.

             
“This is Tam?” she asked, but already knew exactly who the boy with the dark hair falling across his eyes was.

             
“Oh, yes.” Beth’s smile was a mother’s sense of pride undercut with an automatic, quick jolt of sadness she probably thought she kept hidden. “Those four were inseparable,” she sighed, “even if Mike didn’t want his little sister tagging along. This is before.” She flipped the page and they were in full KISS makeup. “And this is after.”

             
Maybe it shouldn’t have, but it felt like Christmas to see Jordan’s boyhood. To reach back through time and touch the first threads of a marriage that had been Jo and Tam as skinned-kneed children. It was like a compendium manual that sketched out the histories of favorite characters; like a portrait of Elizabeth Bennet before
Pride and Prejudice
…only this was real life, real people who were part of her every day.

             
“They’re so cute.” She set a fingertip to the protective lamination over a snapshot of Jordan and Jo pressed together on a park bench somewhere, cold and buttoned up in coats, red-nosed and looking like twins.

             
“Well I always thought so,” Beth said, “but I’m their mama.”

             
Jordan sighed and Ellie snuck a look at him, gave him a wink that curled one corner of his mouth in a smile that looked reluctant.

             
They grew up as she turned pages; went through puberty and awkward, gangly spells, had braces and pimples and rolled their eyes at the camera. Jo was sitting on Tam’s shoulders in one shot, and he had his arm around her waist in the next, his hand riding too low on her hip for Beth to have been fooled that they were still just surrogate siblings. Jordan was with his brothers and his sisters, with Tam, uncomfortable in a suit at Walter (who she hadn’t met) and Jessica’s weddings.

             
And then she flipped a page and there was Jordan as a teenager wrapped around a brunette girl who was clearly neither of his sisters in a wig.

             
“Oh, shoot, I thought I got rid of all those.” Beth’s arm darted out like a striking snake and she nearly ripped the album page in her haste to get rid of the picture. But she wasn’t quick enough; Ellie saw the girl’s wide, dark eyes and all her glitter makeup, her French tip nails and pink sundress. She was maybe eighteen – her own age – and Ellie’s sparkly, preppy, polar opposite.

             
Ellie swallowed and glanced up, saw Jordan staring at a long crack in the table he traced with the end of his thumb. His eyes darted up, brows pulled low, and then retreated. He was embarrassed, she thought. He’d never intended her to see pictures of his old girlfriend.

“I had scholarship offers out the ass by the time I was a senior in high school. But I also had this, um…well, this girlfriend.”

This was her, then: the one who’d smashed apart his dreams and turned him from track star to disinterested student and eventually coach.

Ellie was startled by the sudden
, hot urge to reach through the photo and smack the pretend smile right off the girl’s face.
How dare you hurt him like that
, she wanted to rail at her.
How could you?

“Some pictures aren’t worth saving,” Beth said as she crumpled the photo and slid it into her sweater pocket. She sniffed, shook her head like she was dismissing the incident, and resumed going through pages.
Mike and Delta got married at a swanky country club. Tam and Jo were leaning against one another in front of the Cobb County courthouse.

But Ellie kept thinking about the girl she wasn’t supposed to see with Jordan, and wondered how many other date
s had sat at this table and paged through his memories.

**

              “Oh, the cake,” Ellie said when they got back to the Jeep. It was dark as pitch now, the breeze snatching at tumbled brown leaves and her hair. Trick-or-treaters were out in droves on the street, flashlights and glow-in-the-dark candy buckets swinging from their little hands, parents calling for them to wait up. “I was so nervous I forgot to take it in. Oh, your mom probably thinks I’m so rude!”

             
“No, she doesn’t.” Jordan opened her door for her and motioned her in, sighed when she stared at him through her tugging lengths of wind-tossed hair. “We can’t go back in there. We will never break away again if we do.”

             
The whites of her eyes were as bright as little moons. “She sat there and looked at all those pictures with me - ”