Newton Neighbors (New England Trilogy) (8 page)

Earlier, when he had fiddled with the keypad for the house alarm, she couldn’t have helped but notice how pumped his biceps were, too. He had a lot of muscle.
What a good model he would make for those raunchy firefighter calendars,
she thought and tried to remember back to their full conversation.

“I didn’t realize how much I loved the silence until it was gone,” Jessie had said, smiling at him when the second alarm finally stopped.

“Now,” he said without missing a beat. “I think I should take your phone number, you know, just in case there are any follow-up questions we might need to ask you.”

At first she wasn’t sure. “I’m not in trouble for this, am I?”

He laughed, the sound deep and warm. “Nah. This is all pretty standard stuff. It’s just, if I have any questions, like perhaps if you might like to go out for a drink sometime.”

She smirked. “Are you hitting on me?” He gave her a guilty-as-charged grin, but it faded fast when a senior officer walked in to see what was going on.

“Did you get the code?” the man asked.
 

Jessie nodded, a little spooked by his military style.

“Very good.” Then he looked at Dan. “Walker, no messing about, you hear? Let’s move out,” he said and left as quick he had entered.

Dan pulled his cell phone out. “Quick, your number.”

Jessie slipped into her oversized dressing gown. “Ring, ring, ring,” she whispered while standing in the bathroom. She didn’t want Ely to hear about Dan—not yet. If he called her and they dated, good, but if he didn’t, she wouldn’t want Ely feeling sorry for her. He was very cool, a swashbuckler, running into burning buildings and liberating smoking toasters. She smiled at her reflection. No, that wasn’t fair. Firefighters were heroes. They often found themselves in extreme, dangerous situations. Literally saving people’s lives, making the difference between life and death. It took a certain kind of man to be willing to run into a burning building. She had found a guy who couldn’t be further removed from her psychologist suitors if she had tried. They were all thinkers and talkers. Dan was a doer.
 

If he phoned, what, she wondered with a shiver of anticipation, would he do to her?

Chapter Five

Maria’s Little Secret

“What am I going to do?” Maria asked her little girl.
 

Alice was strapped into her high chair, finger painting with a great big globule of yogurt. Maria had tried to spoon-feed it into the baby, but it appeared Alice didn’t like peach flavor, so she spit it out very effectively. While it was no fun for her to eat, it looked like it was great fun to play with. At least she wasn’t screaming. That was a small mercy. The one time Alice seemed content with her company was at mealtimes.

“You’re lucky,” Maria said to her daughter. “You have no worries yet.”

It had only been four days since the fire incident, and Maria was still in shock. There were a few things that bothered her about that night. For years now, really since she had gotten pregnant with Alice, she’d been watching her figure slip. At first it had been in the name of a healthy pregnancy. She’d forgiven herself because her daughter was young. Eventually she’d stopped thinking about it and just accepted her new shape in the name of motherhood. It had nothing to do with the fact that she liked a glass of wine most nights now. It was easy enough to settle for the middle-aged suburban housewife look because she was a busy mother of two and a good mom, but now she questioned her good mom title.
 

Would a good mom go out and leave a brand new sitter alone without the alarm codes or even a number to contact her? Would a good mom have gotten so caught up on how pretty the sitter was? What did that matter, as long as she was good with the kids? Would a good mom let herself get so out of shape? Maria began to wonder if she was doing anything right. Raising Alice seemed to be a lot harder than bringing up Cody.
 

“Everyone tells me the weight gain is normal at this time of life.” She gently wiped the edges of her daughter’s mouth with the rim of the baby spoon. “To be expected, even.”

She’d heard it a million times, but it didn’t help. “Getting old and getting fat—ha, what fun it is looking at reality. At least there’s always the chance I might lose the weight, but there is no way on God’s good earth I can turn back the clock. I’ve got to face up to getting older, and those sitters are only going to get prettier, Alice.”

These issues had been bubbling under the surface for months, but the night Jessie arrived had crystallized everything for Maria.
 

She had seen the way Ricky looked at the new girl. It had been subtle, difficult to pinpoint, but very real nonetheless. He had stood a little taller, more alert, and held himself like he had when he’d been courting her. Ricky was attracted to Jessie.
 

Maria had teased him about it in a lighthearted way, and of course, he’d denied it. He hid behind the surprise of “toast-gate,” as they now referred to it. But Maria knew that look. She’d seen it a million times on her husband’s face—when they’d first met, first dated, first made love—but she hadn’t seen it in a long time. They had slipped into a mediocre marriage. Funny, she had filled out and softened around the edges, but he hadn’t.
 

Rick’s drug of choice was adrenaline. He was a runner, but in the last few years he had taken even that up a notch and now did marathons. He’d done the Boston one first and then the New York and Chicago Marathons. More recently, Rick had run Dallas, and last night he mentioned the London City Marathon. Ricky had never thought of doing a marathon outside the States before. If he was going to, there were literally hundreds of options, and all of a sudden he wanted to do the London Marathon. London, Jessie’s hometown.

Maria had asked if it was because of her. She’d tried to make it sound like a joke, but he got mad and had told her to stop raving about the sitter and let it go. He had accused her of being delusional.
 

Was it all in her head? Was she going nuts over nothing? Maybe it was a natural male reaction to a pretty woman. She had experienced that enough herself when she was younger. It was frustrating, though. He could still flirt, but she couldn’t.
 

She was past her best. The whole darn reason her figure was ruined was because of his kids, and now he got to look at other woman while she—

Alice picked that precise moment to splash the little puddle of yogurt hard with the palm of her hand. It splattered up in all directions, and one particularly large dollop landed in Maria’s eye. The timing was sublime. This—this was what Maria got, while Rick got marathons and flirtations with younger women.
 

Bad enough she’d lost her figure and was aging faster than she could say “corrective surgery,” but now she was proving to be a bad mother, too? She had missed all of Jessie’s phone calls. For Maria, that was unforgivable. What sort of woman goes out and drops her purse on the floor without thinking to check her messages until it’s just about time to go home? A bad mother. That was who.
 

Maria had been a mom for over a decade. She was proud of her title and had thought she was a good one, but not anymore. What if it had been more serious? What if a child had been hit by a car and needed a kidney or a blood transfusion—not that her blood had been in any state to be transfused after all the fruit punch she’d drunk. But what kind of a mom would be so irresponsible? Only a cruddy one.

Maria got a paper towel and wiped her eye clean. Then she noticed her sweater had a peach-colored splat, too. Rubbing at it just made it worse. What did it matter? Maria deserved to look and feel awful.
 

Alice began to whine, causing Maria to jump. If she didn’t get something tasty for the baby fast, her daughter would head straight into a major meltdown. She got the box of crackers from the cupboard and gave one of those to her daughter instead. Alice parked the tantrum when she saw the food she loved. Maria sat heavily into the seat beside her and ate a cracker, too.

“So you see, Alice, I’m old, fat, and don’t get me started on being stupid.” She tried to remember what that smarty-pants was studying. “Emotion regulation and blah, blah, blah romantic relationships. I don’t even know what that means,” she said with exasperation. “Do people regulate their emotions? For real? I sure don’t.”

It was impossible for Maria not to compare the woman she was today with the girl who had graduated from the University of Vermont a short fifteen years earlier. That was where she had met Rick, and she smiled at the memory. He used to say Maria was his
treasure
. It was pure chance they had both ended up at the beautiful lakeside campus.
 

For Maria it had been right down to the wire. She had been nervous about traveling so far from her beloved Puerto Rico. Missing the weather was one thing—Maria was a sunshine kind of girl—but she had known the culture would be very different, too, and the distance vast. Traveling home hadn’t been easy or cheap. All of that had been incidental, though. At the very last minute, in the name of exploration and bravery, she had opted for Vermont over Fort Myers in Florida. That had been her other option and the one preferred by her parents. Back then, she’d decided it was time to spread her wings, so she had gone to Vermont to study business administration. As luck would have it, so had Ricky.
 

His full name was Ricardo. That was what his late mother had called him, but he made sure everybody called him Rick—everybody except Maria. She used the pet name Ricky. She was the only one who could do that.
 

When they had first met at a party, she had given him the cold shoulder. But she’d liked him right away. Who wouldn’t? He was a good-looking guy, his Puerto Rican ancestry visible, even though she had soon learned that he’d been born in the US. Rick had tanned skin and dark eyes. He reminded her of Johnny Depp—small frame, extremely self-assured, eyes that penetrated. Even after all these years, he still had the thin physique and dark complexion. Ricky hadn’t aged as much as she had—running held back the years for him. Things had been different when they first met. Way back then she hadn’t shown that she liked him, not at first. Maria knew how to handle herself around men, and the last thing a woman should do was show interest.

“The more a man has to chase a woman, the more he wants her,” she said to her little girl. “That’s what my mother taught me, and in time I’ll explain it all to you.”

Alice gurgled in agreement.

That night fifteen years ago, the rule had served her well. She had ignored Ricky to start with, and he had fought for her attention. Finally, he’d made a concerted effort to get her to talk with him and then to dance, but she hadn’t made it easy.

“A man has to work for you,
cariño
,” she told Alice with enthusiasm. “You have to be a great prize for him to win. He has to be proud to win you, hungry to win you.”

Alice farted. Maria slumped. That life was such a distant memory now. When was the last time Ricky had looked at her the way he looked at Jessie? Years, for sure.

Way back then, Maria had her choice of men. With her long dark hair and sassy curves, she had never been short of boyfriends. If there was one thing she would have liked to change about herself it was her height. She was only five-foot-four, but then again, that meant she could always wear heels and her legs looked great.
 

Her eyes were a deep, dark brown, which were regular enough in Puerto Rico but highly prized in Vermont. She had a wide mouth and perfect teeth, without the help of an orthodontist. Her friends used to call her ‘Jenny from the Block’ because she looked a lot like Jennifer Lopez. But Maria, although flattered, had laughed it off. “I would rather have her bank account than her body,” she would say. But still, it was a heck of a compliment.

Those days were gone now. Jennifer Lopez had produced twins and still looked like a sex siren, whereas Maria looked like she’d swallowed JLo! Losing her youth and her looks was bad enough for Maria, but if she had Ricky’s undying love, it would still be okay. Now she was beginning to wonder if that was conditional, too.
 

Was it her body he’d fallen in love with and not her personality? Was he really going to stick around if he was beginning to look at the sitters that way already? What would their marriage be like in five years if they’d reached this point in just a decade?

When she’d left home, Maria assumed she would go to college in Vermont, work for a while in New York, perhaps, and then head back to Puerto Rico. It had never been in her plan to leave the tropical island forever, but life had other plans. Ricky Sanchez had stepped into her world.
 

His grandmother and his mother, both now deceased, had been Puerto Rican. Ricky spoke fluent Spanish, but more important than any of that, he simply got her. Maria used to tease him that he was marrying his mother, because both she and her mother-in-law came from the same little island in the Caribbean, but he insisted that there were plenty of differences between the women. Ricky had been so romantic back in college. He had written her notes and left them under her pillow or next to the bathroom sink. She would find them in her folders or even in the fridge. In those letters he swore his undying love. Ricky wrote with such passion—how could she not fall in love?
 

Then there was the sex. It had been amazing in those early days. Ricky hadn’t been able to get enough of her. They’d been like rabbits, morning, noon, and night. It was a miracle she had scraped through her degree, they’d spent so much lecture time in bed together. But somehow both of them had left college with degrees, and she’d also gained an engagement ring. The rest—she took another cracker—was history.