Material Girl (12 page)

That was a clarifying moment, a moment when Jake suddenly understood that a distance had spread like a cancer between him and a brother he had once loved. That day, he sensed he was being handed a second chance and vowed to himself and to God that he would fight every day to keep Cole from following the same, useless path of alcohol and menial jobs Ross had followed, just like their father had before him.

And as Jake stalked through the brush on that old path, he imagined exactly how he'd punish the kid. When he emerged in the clearing on the levee, he spotted Cole right away. Several of the kids saw him at the same moment and scattered, but the bolder ones merely looked at him over their shoulder, lifting their beer bottles in blatant defiance.

“Yo, Manning. Your old man is here,” one of them said as Jake marched forward to where Cole was squatting at a makeshift fire, a cigarette dangling from one hand.

The announcement obviously startled Cole; he jerked around and opened his mouth to speak, but Jake grabbed his arm and yanked him up before he could utter a word.

“Woo-hoo! Manning's going to get a span-king!” one of them taunted in a singsong voice.

The ridicule passed over Cole's blemished face; his eyes

hardened, he thrust his chin out and glared up at Jake. “He ain't my old man!” he responded defiantly.

“Maybe not, but I'm all you've got,” Jake said low, and grabbed Cole's smoke, tossed it down, and ground it out with his heel before shoving Cole forward, away from the fire.

“You can't tell me what to do!” Cole snapped, walking backward, still glaring at him, stealing a glimpse of the others.

Jake let him have that one. He understood the kid's pride, and he could strangle him in private just as easily as he could in public. He lowered his head, pointed at the path. “Don't push it. Just walk,” he managed through the grit of his teeth.

“Screw you,” Cole shot back. But he turned and walked.

Jake looked back at the kids who were left, his gaze instantly falling on Frankie. Frankie's mouth twisted into a sneer, and it burned like acid right through to Jake's heart.

He turned away, striding forward, ignoring the laughter and calls after Cole.

He caught up to his nephew and clamped a hand down on his shoulder, squeezing so hard that Cole's knees buckled. “Shit! Cut it out, Jake!”

“Watch your mouth,” Jake snapped. “You and I are going to have us an understanding.”

“Whatever,” Cole muttered, and Jake squeezed harder. “All right!” Cole shouted, and Jake let go. Cole rubbed his shoulder, then walked on as if Jake wasn't there.

“First off, you're grounded. And second, if I ever find you with the Capellini kid again, I'll take a piece of hide off both of you.”

“You can't touch Frankie,” Cole argued.

“Oh yeah? Try me.”

Cole rolled his eyes, marched on until they cleared the brush. Then he stopped, gaped at Jake's Harley. “Where's the truck? How am I supposed to ride that? I don't have a helmet!”

Lord have mercy, the kid had the nerve to complain? "Well, hell, Cole, what could I have been thinking? I forgot

the limo!" Jake snapped, then shoved Cole toward the bike. Muttering under his breath, Cole straddled the seat and folded his arms across his chest, refusing to look at his uncle. Jake got in front—hating it more than Cole, he was quite certain—and started the bike.

As he pulled out onto the dirt road, he told Cole that if he ever ran off again, he'd just hunt him down again, personally strangle him with his bare hands, then transport his carcass to juvenile hall. And if Cole was of a mind to upset his grandma again, or disobey her in any way, or cause her another single solitary moment of grief, he would crack his fat head wide open and scramble his brains for breakfast.

But even the threat of serious bodily injury didn't seem to make any difference to the surly teen. It was amazing to Jake that Cole could be such a sweet kid in one moment, a veritable stranger the next. No wonder Mom was so tired all the time. Living with Cole had to be a little like living with Freddy Krueger, never knowing when the nightmare was going to show up again. Which was why Cole needed to come live with him. Jake knew it, but he just couldn't seem to find the time to make that monumental commitment.

Mom was waiting for them on the porch of her modest three-bedroom house, her bony frame bundled in an old, snagged beige sweater she had worn as long as Jake could remember. She stood as Jake pulled into the drive, watched through hard brown eyes as Cole slammed up the steps and brushed past her.

“Get yourself inside to bed,” she said as he passed, but Cole didn't bother to look at her—he slammed the screen door behind him.

“Hey!” Jake shouted after him.

Cole stopped, dropped his head back in insolent disgust, and slowly turned around. “Good night, Grandma,” he said icily, then looked at Jake. “Am I excused now?”

“Yes. I'll be back to pick you up in the morning,” Jake said, even though Cole was already pounding up the stairs.

Mom sighed wearily, shaking her head as she stared at the screen door. “Don't know what I'm going to do with him, swear I don't.” She paused to fish a pack of smokes

from her pocket, tapped it absently against the back of her hand. “Where are you taking him?”

“We're going to throw a baseball around.”

Mom sighed again, lit a cigarette, and exhaled loudly. “Baseball ain't the answer for everyone, Jacob.”

What is the answer, Mom? “It doesn't hurt anything,” he said with a shrug and looked down the street at the line of identical green tract houses. “He likes it.”

Mom said nothing, just dragged off her smoke. “Well. I better go up and see about him.”

Jake nodded, stepped up, and kissed his mom on the cheek, taking in the familiar scent of stale smoke and soap. “I'll see you tomorrow.”

He left; the ride to the Heights seemed to take hours instead of the half hour it actually took. A half hour in which Jake waged a silent war in his head about what to do with Cole. He paused on his porch to pick up his mail, then came inside and tossed his gear onto a chair, mindlessly stepped around the drop cloth and sawhorse in the middle of his living room where he was staging his own private renovation. As he came to the dining room, he looked down at the laptop he had left open, the books stacked neatly to one side, and the pile of papers that marked the class work he had planned to finish tonight. Wasn't going to happen. With a sigh, he looked through the mail, tossed the bills aside, then proceeded to his bedroom and a hot shower.

A short time later, he went to the kitchen to make a double-decker sandwich and found himself thinking of Robin Lear again, thinking that she was really pretty… but bossy. And full of herself. He mulled that over, and was reaching for a beer when the phone rang.

With a growl, he put his sandwich aside and picked up the phone. “Yeah,” he said unceremoniously.

“Jake?”

“Hey, Lindy, how are you?”

“I'm fine. How are you?”

“I had a long day, actually. I'm pretty beat.”

“Perfect. I made some brownies for you.”

God. That was exactly what had gotten him involved

with the girl in the first place. He certainly wasn't in the habit of dating women fifteen years his junior—actually, he wasn't really in the habit of dating—but he'd met Lindy on campus, admired her pert little breasts, and asked her out for coffee after class one night. Lindy came to class the next week with a baggie full of homemade cookies. She was a nice girl, a good girl, the kind of girl who would dote on a man. And although he hadn't really been interested enough to date her, he hadn't been fool enough to turn down homemade cookies. Lindy had taken his acceptance of her cookies as a green light.

“Uh… that was really nice of you,” he said uncertainly. “But I don't need any.”

“Well, nobody needs brownies.”

“Umm… well, maybe some other time,” he said, not wanting to hurt her feelings. “But I really gotta run. Got a lot to do.” A lot of sandwich.

“Want help?”

“Ah, no. No t hank s.”

She sighed, and Jake could almost see her twist a strand of hair around her finger. “Okay, well, I guess I'll just have a bath and go to bed,” she said listlessly.

At the mention of bath, the thought of a lithe young body flit across Jake's mind, but strangely, it wasn't Lindy's. “Okay. See you in class.” He hung up, turned blindly back to his sandwich, alarmed by the fact that he had just imagined Robin Lear. Naked in a bath. And the thought had been strongly arousing.

He took a big bite of sandwich and pondered that. In his work, he encountered a lot of society women who had more money than most governments. They were overly pampered, almost always too pleased with themselves—Robin was definitely all that and change. But then again, she was different, too, and bizarrely interesting. Still… he was not the kind of guy to get his thrills at work. He was way too serious about the business he was trying to build.

Nonetheless, the thought of her was so magnetic that she kept popping into his head the next day. When he took Cole to the park, he thought of her. At the grocery store, buying

for his mom, he thought of her. Over his class work, his invoicing, and during the Astros game that Sunday he thought of her, wondered what she was doing. He thought of her in her torn jeans and Curious George pajamas. Worst of all, when he slept Saturday night, he dreamed of making love to a woman who turned out to be Robin Lear, whose blue eyes glazed over in the throes of a powerful, nails-in-the-back climax.

He even thought of her when Zaney called and said he would not be at work on Monday or Tuesday, or for that matter, maybe even Wednesday. The news didn't perturb him nearly as bad as it ought to have done. The only thing he could think was, he'd be alone with Robin Lear.

But so what? She had thought he was a pervert! How he had managed to turn one encounter into a fantasy like this was a little troubling. Yet by the time Monday rolled around, Jake was sort of anxious to go to work and see her again.

He arrived at the house on North Boulevard earlier than he had wanted, but was smiling as he let himself in and put his things in the dining room and noticed the aroma of coffee in the air. And when he heard the bedroom door open, he turned expectantly and looked down the hall… and whammo, felt the huge stab of disappointment.

It had never occurred to him, had not once crossed his mind. What an idiot he was!

It wasn't Robin who came walking out of the bedroom at all, but a guy, a nice-looking guy at that, wearing nothing but a pair of silk boxers.

When Robin heard the sound of Evan's voice outside her bedroom, all hopes that it was all just a bad dream were effectively obliterated. She lifted her head, winced at the sharp pain right behind her eyes, and dropped, facedown in her pillow, cursing the damned wine Evan had bought. She hadn't intended to drink it, particularly since she'd been so mad at Evan for showing up unannounced to begin with. But then Mia had shown up with her Big News. Mia, who had, since their high school days, gone through men like there was some huge race, who had managed to piss off all boyfriends (and some of Robin's, too), was getting married.

Her first thought was to call Ripley's Believe It or Not, because A, Mia was completely incapable of commitment to anything, including a dog she once had, and B, she and Michael fought every other week and had ended their affair no less than fifteen hundred times. And now she was getting married. Married!

The announcement, made to Robin and Evan when Mia and Michael had arrived for their Saturday night dinner date, had prompted a gushing Evan to run out and buy a few

bottles of Pouilly-Vinzelles for a celebration. Robin tried to stop him, told him they already had plans, but Mia, in her near state of euphoria at being given a ring (and it wasn't that great of a ring) had proclaimed with great verve, “Oh noooo, Evan must stay and help us celebrate!” This, in spite of knowing how Robin felt about Evan, in spite of the very pointed looks Robin gave her, in spite of the universe in general. She just flipped her long blond ponytail over her shoulder and smiled all moon-eyed at Michael.

So Evan had dashed out for the wine, Michael had ordered up Thai, and Robin had drunk heavily as Mia went on and on about her wedding plans, which she had, apparently, given quite a lot of thought.

Actually, Robin might have survived the evening had it not been for the third bottle of Pouilly-Vinzelles and that moment alone in the kitchen with Mia, when in a tipsy moment, she blurted, “God, Mia, are you insane? You hated Michael two weeks ago! You swore you'd never speak to him again! This is a huge mistake!”

To which Mia had smiled in the most condescending way possible and said, “Oh, Rob, I know how you must be feeling. But you haven't lost me!”

“What in the hell are you talking about? I'm talking about this on-again, off-again thing you have with Michael! Who's to say that next week you won't hate him again?”

Mia's smile was so sympathetic that Robin was tempted to try and rub it off her face. “Don't worry, Rob! You'll find a husband! I mean, you'll chill out in a few years and then, who won't want you?”

Chill out? Chill out? Robin had been so stunned that she couldn't even reply. She had stood there, gaping in dumb shock as Mia checked her lipstick in the glass reflection of the cabinet, flipped her hair over her shoulder again, and smiled when Michael called out, “God, Mia, what are you running on about now?” She laughed, walked out of the kitchen to where Michael and Evan were seated around the dining room table, leaving Robin to stand in a state of utter confusion.

Chill. Out.

That remark rattled Robin, all the way through the third bottle of Pouilly-Vinzelles. By the time Mia and Michael left and Evan opened the fourth and last bottle and asked about her arrest, Robin had—in spite of the annoying little voice warning her to shut up, shut up, shut up!—crumbled into despair. Not a good idea, in hindsight. Lit up like the Texas Commerce building, crying into her Salviati crystal wineglass, one thing inevitably led to another, and before she knew it, she was wailing about her dad, her demotion, the fire, and even Mia's engagement. And then, somehow, Evan was kissing her, and then…