Next To You (12 page)

Caroline laughed like Betty Rubble and took the cola and popcorn from his hands. Batman ran in and flopped over on his back at Will’s feet.

‘Holy missing gonads, Batman!’ Will moaned. ‘What have you done to your dog, Caroline?’ He crouched and gave the dog a pat on the belly. ‘You poor little man. You don’t know what you’re missing, do you?’

Batman flipped over on all fours and wiggled his backside.

Caroline sighed. ‘I’d wiggle like Marilyn Monroe too if somebody rubbed my feet. Be glad you don’t spend the day running around in heels.’

‘Hey, if Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis pulled it off in
Some Like It Hot
, maybe I could too.’ Will rose. Caroline started down the hall for the kitchen and he followed. ‘You watched it the other night, didn’t you?’

‘No. Could you please get some glasses? They’re in the top cupboard, the one to the right of the sink. When was
Some Like It Hot
on?’

‘Last Wednesday, on Turner Classic Movies, after
Gilda
.’

‘Gilda.’ Caroline shook her head, placed the unfolded bag of popcorn in the microwave, and pressed the start pad. ‘I tried watching
Gilda
a while back, but decided I’d be better off trying to find clean underwear than dancing around and flipping my hair like Rita Hayworth does in that strapless black dress she wears in the movie. That’s how I burned my popcorn that day I thought you were the deliveryman. I was pretending to be Rita Hayworth.’

Will looked her up and down. She may not have been as voluptuous as Rita, but Caroline most assuredly had a Class-A figure. She caught the look on his face and, thankfully, misinterpreted his appreciation for dismay.

‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘You won’t have to put up with anything like that for tonight’s feature.’

Will set the glasses on the counter and filled them with soft drink. ‘What are we watching this evening?’

‘I’ve decided to move from Rita Hayworth to the Barbara Stanwyck and Gary Cooper comedy
Ball Of Fire
. I love Barbara Stanwyck, but if you don’t like that one I also have Miss. Barbara in
No Man of Her Own
. Did you ever see the remake,
Mrs. Winterbourne,
with Ricki Lake, Shirley MacLaine, and Brendan Fraser?’

‘No.’

‘It was done as a cute comedy. It lacks the dark aspect of the first.’

‘Your uncle worked with Barbara Stanwyck on
The Big Valley
. Did you know that?’

She cocked her head to one side. ‘Who do you think introduced me to her films?’

‘Okay. How about we watch both Stanwyck movies then?’

‘We might need another bag of popcorn.’

‘Why do I get the impression you live on popcorn?’

‘What makes you think that?’

He cocked his head. ‘The night we ate Indian here was the one time I didn’t smell popcorn when I came up the stairs. Do you have microwaveable snack food for dinner on a nightly basis?’

She shrugged. ‘I watch a lot of movies. Popcorn goes with movies. I think it’s more a habit than anything else. I have to have that bag sitting beside me with the lights off and movie on.’

‘So it
is
your evening meal?’

The microwave peep-peeped. She opened the door, pulled out the steaming red paper bag, and smiled. ‘Dinner is served!’

***

It was very late. The computer screen in front of Alex was the only light source that lit the tiny back-room office beside the walk-in refrigerator. He’d started checking next week’s restaurant orders, but he’d come across something he’d forgotten about.

They’d been stored on the computer, mistakenly filed in a folder titled
Special Events
. Instead of a spreadsheet itemizing the number of strawberry pies the Café Rushmore had needed for a Labor Day Function, he found digital photos of Drew and Caroline. There were probably forty photos of them both, and Alex looked at them all.

The first photo in the little slideshow had Caroline curled around Drew on a towel at the beach. In the next she was holding a blue shirt up to his wide, blue eyes. He became fixated upon one. It was of the three of them. They sat on a large black rock shaped like an upturned palm. Drew was in the middle. They had their arms around him.

Alex stared at the photo, not moving for fifteen minutes.

He touched the screen, his fingers outlined the contours of Drew’s head before he began to use the computer’s photo imaging program to enlarge the left section of the photo where Caroline sat smiling. He erased Drew, then himself, and cropped the image until all that was left was Caroline’s head and neck.

Over and over, he traced the shape of her mouth, leaving a circle of natural oil from his fingertips on the screen. Finally, he blew up this picture until her face filled the screen in a blurry array of distorted colored squares. Then he saved the resized and retouched picture, and filled the screen with the image. When he squinted he could make out it was her. He could see her giant iris, the burst of colors around the pupil, the gold, green, and tiny bit of blue that matched Drew’s eyes.

Alex centered on her lips until he began to think about all the different activities her mouth, and his, had engaged in together. He remembered the time after Drew had been fed, when they’d gone to the narrow laundry on the other side of the old house they’d lived in. As he touched her, Caroline had bitten into his shoulder to stop from crying out. That memory bled into another, and another, and another.

She knelt over him on the short loveseat in the living room, her fingers frantic in his hair, her mouth as full and lush as the image of on the screen. His hand slipped beneath the practical black and white check of his flour-dusted and blackberry juice soiled chef’s pants, and Caroline stroked him, his gaze fixed on her mouth. The taste of her was nearly in his mind. It was almost there. That hot, damp, slightly salty flavor mixed with soap, her perspiration and perfume melted together with the sensation of her still slightly rounded belly beneath his hands, her fingers knotted in his hair, his face buried deeply into her center.

Chapter 5

Over the next two weeks, Will helped his new neighbor hang artwork on the walls of her apartment, fixed the leaky toilet in one of her bathrooms, and changed the washers on her dripping kitchen faucet. He acted as a handyman, played with her dog, and Caroline repaid him with dinner, ice cream, and desserts like cherry cobbler.

He liked that they’d started trading off, an evening at her house, another at his. He began to appreciate what vegetarian cooking did for his waistline, that she washed the dishes, even when he cooked, that she didn’t mind watching
The Antiques Roadshow
, and was always up for a movie, especially an old one.

Despite all the affable things about her, despite the pleasant time they had together, despite how much he liked that she called him William, he’d begun to think they might be spending too much time together. There were times he caught the scent of verbena, or she’d bump against him, and that tug of attraction made itself known, and he heard the voice of the Robot from
Lost in Space
shouting, ‘
Warning! Warning Will Murphy!’

Will had no intention to act on anything; he was merely being lazy and embracing his comfortable life, but he didn’t want to give her the idea that he had ideas. The morning coffee was fine; nice and neighborly, but the nights … it was probably a good idea to pare them back and avoid any sort of confusion or complication between friends, and more importantly, neighbors.

The evening he decided would be their last together for a while revealed she’d mulled over something similar. Caroline handed him a parfait dish of fudge-brownie ice cream and said, ‘Are you sure you want to sit here and watch
Rebecca
with me tonight?’ she said. ‘Wouldn’t you rather be out of the house and out with a friend on a Saturday night than with your introverted next-door neighbor?

‘I am out of my house and out with a friend.’ He chiseled a chunk of brownie from the ice cream and spooned it into his mouth.

‘Oh, yeah, how exciting it must be for you to watch a gothic romance while I drool over Laurence Olivier. Don’t you ever go out?’

He swallowed rich chocolate and said, ‘We could go out.’

‘I mean on a date with someone.’

Will shrugged and carved out more brownie. ‘I’m sort of between girlfriends right now.’

‘If you spend anymore time with me that space between is just going to expand.’

The spoon full of brownie paused at his chin. ‘I travel a lot for work. I’m gone for a few days, sometimes a few weeks, occasionally a few months. Living out of a suitcase gets old. When I get back the only thing I want to do is stay home. I’m at the lazy, stay at home stage right now. But I don’t exactly see you
out there
either.’

Mouth flattening, Caroline looked at him, twirling a strand of hair around a finger, contemplating something. ‘I’m not prepared, or even willing, to try that quite yet. Half the time I don’t know how I feel, so why would I want to drag someone else into my mad little world of confusion? Besides that, I really sucked at dating. I just got too embarrassed and tripped over my own tongue. Frankly, William, I think I’m over dating, but mostly I’m trying to build up my cash flow.’

Will sat back on her striped sofa and dug out the last chunk of brownie. ‘Did you know there’s a social script men and women follow for dating? I read that once in some magazine in my dentist’s office. The interested male shows up, the woman meets him at the door. There’s some chitchat, they go out to eat or maybe dancing, they come back, decide to go out again, and have a goodnight kiss if it all went well. Both parties seem to know the parts they’re supposed to play and the statements they’re supposed to make. Occasionally, people miss the cues, or misconstrue something, which is why there’s a sexual harassment case between employees I’m dealing with at work this month.’

She snorted. ‘I always missed cues and flubbed my lines. I got it pretty wrong when I thought you’d asked me out and were just being neighborly.’

‘True, but I confess I thought you were a fun first date. Speaking of our it-wasn’t-a-date-night, you asked me to indicate politely if you had spinach in your teeth. Let me say you’ve grown a righteous chocolate ice cream soul patch beneath your bottom lip. It’s like my older sister’s, ’cept hers is real.’

Caroline rubbed her lip and licked the chocolate from her fingertips. ‘Do you have any other siblings, other than the bearded sister who shares her name with this Hitchcock movie?’

‘Mm-hm,’ he said. ‘I have a much older half-brother named Timothy. My father’s first wife, Tim’s mom, actually died in childbirth. Tim’s a nice guy. He moved to New Zealand when I was eleven. I think he was twenty-two at the time. He caused some scandal in my family for a while.’

‘What did he do?’

He moved from his corner of the couch and set his empty dish on the coffee table, licking the brownie bits from his teeth. ‘In the late sixties he lived with Sherry, a black woman, and they had a baby. My mother was appalled—not because of the interracial thing, but because Sherry and Tim
lived in sin
and had their first child out of wedlock.’

She chuckled. ‘How Catholic is your mother?’

‘Very. Tim’s a great guy. We keep in touch, but I don’t see him often. He’s still with Sherry. They have a farm, three sons and lots of sheep. You were an only child, weren’t you?’

‘Yes, but I still managed to cause scandal in my family.’

‘Why, what did you do, steal a car? Oh wait, you
did
do that.’

‘I shacked up with two men at the same time. My mother was positive I was going to get knocked up by one of them. Eventually, I was, but in a respectable married way that satisfied my conservative mother’s Catholic moral standards.’

‘I didn’t know you had a child.’

Caroline’s gazed shifted to the frozen DVD image of Joan Fontaine and Laurence Olivier on the TV screen, unable to meet the surprise Will knew had been plain on his face. She scooted to the end of the sofa, put her parfait dish on the coffee table, and gave a sad little laugh. ‘I don’t. Respectable things don’t always turn out according to plan. My little boy died.’

He nearly said,
losing a child is often the catalyst to the breakdown of a marriage
, but he caught himself and turned toward her, his hand settling lightly on her shoulder, thumb on her collarbone. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She shifted so that her chin rested against the back of his hand. ‘You smell like brownie.’

‘You want a bite of me for bringing up something unpleasant?’

‘No.’ She lifted her chin, shaking her head. ‘That’s the first time I said that. The first time I told anyone who didn’t already know. It wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be.’

Will didn’t say anything, accepting that disclosing something so tragic would indeed be hard, and understanding anything he uttered would have simply been hollow. His thumb brushed her jaw when he drew his hand away.

‘Let’s watch something else,’ she said, rising from the couch, shaking her hands as if she were flicking off water. ‘Let’s watch something less moody and more fun, like a buddy movie.
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Sting
, or
Lethal Weapon 3
.’

‘Let’s watch Butch and Sundance. It’s a great buddy picture. I love it.’ Will made a face. ‘Except, outside of BJ Thomas’s ‘Raindrops Keep Fallin’ On My Head,’ the score is crappy—but somehow it won an Oscar.’

‘I can’t remember what the music is like. I haven’t seen the film in a long time.’

‘It’s kind of all over the place. Some of the music sounds like the soundtrack from a cheesy, Swedish, seventies X-rated movie.’

‘An X-rated seventies Swedish movie? I’ve never seen one of those. What’s the music like?’

‘Women singing
ba-da-da-da-da
softly, over a recorder. I don’t know who decided recorders were supposed to be sexy. The film score from the YouTube documentary
True Facts About the Land Snail
is sexier.’

‘You watch many of those crappy European porno films?’

Rising, Will collected the dirty ice cream bowls. ‘Well, when I was twenty and had long hair like Johnny and Edgar Winter—they’re musicians with albinism, you know—I starred in a skin flick. It was called
Frosty Gets Milked
.’