On the Ropes (10 page)

“You don’t believe that now?”

“No. The monster becomes smaller if you confront it. Sometimes you have to confront it over and over again. It may not go away completely, but you can make it so small”—she held her thumb and index finger a hair apart—“that you can’t hear it anymore. It can’t bother you when it’s just a pin speck. You just laugh at it.”

“I hope to be able to laugh someday.”

Meg nodded and moved her cart toward the store’s front corner. When they stopped at the deep bin holding frozen chicken, she said, “I’m going to take a wild guess that Stephen doesn’t know very much about you.”

“Not for lack of trying. He knows all the superficial things and a few things I’ve…”

“Sanitized?”

The woman’s intuition was downright scary. Then again, so was Stephen’s. He may not have pressed, but he knew when not to. Their family tree must have been an interesting one.

“Yes. Sanitized. I thought maybe he tolerated it because he only wanted…”

Nope. She wasn’t going to go there with the man’s
sister
.

Meg pulled up two bags of chicken breasts and nestled them in Janette’s cart. “Listen. I know my brother and what he’s like. I can fill in the blanks, so let me say that if he
hasn’t
gone there yet, there’s a reason. What that reason is, I don’t know. You are one of the very few things in his life he won’t discuss with me, so I have no idea what’s going on. That bothers me.”

That took Janette by surprise. Meg had known about her. That much was obvious. Beyond that, Stephen hadn’t said anything. Why? Could it have been that maybe he actually liked her? No,
wanted
her for more than just a body in his bed?

Well, she couldn’t hope that. She wasn’t even sure she could give him that. It’d be best if she just forgot about it.

“I-I’d
like
to talk about things,” she said while Meg pawed over the kielbasa. “It’s just not something I’m used to doing. No one really knows anything about me.”

“Not even your friends?”

“I tend to keep people at arm’s length.”

Meg blew her overlong bangs out of her eyes and pressed on to the bacon. “My friends wouldn’t let you do that. I don’t know how long Stephen will accept it, either.”

“Are you telling me to shit or get off the pot?”

“No, I’m telling you that it’s a damn shame that you can’t think of one person you can lay it all out to. What you’re carrying around is probably far more uncomfortable than these babies.”

“I would tell Stephen. I would, but I think he’d find me pathetic.”

“Do you care if he’d find you pathetic?”

Janette scoffed. What kind of question was that? “Of course I do.”

“Good. Then that means you like him.”

“That was never a point of debate. Of course I like him. I think he’s fascinating.”

“Mm-hmm.” Meg put three packs of thick-cut bacon in the cart.

It seemed like a lot for a week, but maybe Seth had a bottomless belly.

“Yeah, he’s fascinating, all right. But is he best-friend-fascinating or potential-lover-fascinating? I’m just asking. Do-gooder streak or not, Stephen has enough friends. As far as I know, he’s not the kind of man who’d mope around nursing a broken heart. But, Janette, this could go very badly. Fratricidal compulsions or no, I don’t want to see my brother sad.”

And Janette didn’t want to be the one making him sad. She didn’t want to break his heart, but she couldn’t even be sure he was willing to give it to her…or that she would take it.

She didn’t know where she’d be in a month or a year. She had plans, sure. If her mother wanted her around, she’d stay put. If her mother brushed her off, she’d go back to Bermuda and try to put it all behind her.

That’s what she’d gotten on the plane intending to do.

But then Stephen had been so kind to her that she started believing that tenderness could be within her reach.

She wanted it. She wanted to lay it all bare for someone and to be accepted in spite of her inadequacies. Maybe Stephen could be
the one
, but she didn’t even know how to assess that. It seemed like it should have been an easier thing.

She followed Meg to the registers and they got into a line four customers deep. Meg did a final rearranging of the items in her cart and turned to face Janette. “So, where are you going next week? No thinking. Just tell me.”

Janette sighed. “I may possibly go see my mother. I haven’t seen her since I was a child.”

“By whose choice?”

“That is a
very
long story.”

“But you’d tell it?” Meg paused to move her cart up one position, and turned right back around. “Well, would you?”

“It’s so dramatic. It’s the sort of story you’d watch on a television movie, and I don’t want people thinking I’m going to be the one bringing drama to every scenario.”

“You think Stephen and I haven’t had our own fair share of drama?”

It certainly couldn’t compare to what Janette had experienced, but she didn’t say so aloud.

“And Seth, too. His parents abandoned him and he spent a lot of years of his life in a Roma camp. He wouldn’t hesitate to tell you that.”

“None of you believe in secrets?”

“Oh, we have plenty of them. There are always going to be dirty, shameful things you don’t want to talk about—not even to your own family. But, you’ve got to tell people, even if they like you less afterward. That’ll only prove they’re not worth your company.”

She had a point. It seemed so simple.

Janette helped Meg load everything onto the conveyor belt and carefully arranged the packages back into the carts. Meg swiped her card without even waiting for the cashier to announce the total, but when Janette heard it, she went a little light-headed. It wasn’t an astronomical figure by any means, but it would have certainly made Janette think twice. She couldn’t imagine being
that
comfortable with her finances. That was almost a fairy tale in and of itself.

They were pushing the carts across the parking lot when Janette’s phone buzzed in her purse. She cringed at the display and put the phone to her ear. “This is Janette.”

Meg cut her a look but said nothing. She hit the trunk release for her crossover and parked the cart right up to the bumper.

“Hi, Janette. Dell here. I got some info for you.”

“Oh.” She shifted the phone to her other ear and angled the cart so it wouldn’t roll into traffic. She paced at the side of the car and squelched the temptation to walk farther away. Nothing he’d say would require a great deal of privacy, and she knew that, but old habits died hard. Giving up a part of her mystique felt a bit like giving up a limb. “What did you find out?”

“I got in touch with one of your mother’s caregivers. She has two regulars. With HIPAA being what it is, she wouldn’t give me a lot of information about her health status, which is fine, but there were some things that are public knowledge. You know, were published in newspapers and whatnot. The community had been interested in her recovery because they never did find the person who committed the hit and run. What I understand is that she’s semi-independent. Wheelchair-bound, but she can do a lot of basic things for herself, including holding down a little part-time job from home. She can’t drive, though, or do any lifting. The caregivers get her where she needs to go and help her clean her apartment and whatnot.”

The heavy burden of guilt that had been stifling Janette’s lungs for the past twenty years eased somewhat, and she took a deep breath. She wasn’t completely
broken
, then. Maybe her mother wasn’t the dazzling, social woman she once was, but she wasn’t only alive, she was
living
the best she could.

Now for the question of the hour.

“Did the caretaker think she would amenable to seeing me?”

“Uh, well. She couldn’t speculate on that. She said in the seven years she’s worked with your mother that they haven’t once talked about you. She didn’t know what to make of that. Most people who know anything about her seem to know there was a child in the car with her.”

“She’s angry at me.”

“Whoa, whoa, whoa. My job is to find facts, not jump to conclusions. There could be a number of reasons why she wouldn’t discuss you with her caregiver, and to be quite honest, I would put anger at the bottom of my list of probabilities. Who knows what’s going through her head? If you want, I can find out more—whether she’s made any inquiries into your wellbeing or if she keeps any photos around.”

She pinched the bridge of her nose and took a deep breath.

Meg peered around the side of the car and mouthed, “You all right?”

Maybe it was the foreign air muddling her reflexes, but instead of stiffening her spine and impudently responding, “Of course,” she shook her head.

“Can I help?”

Janette wished she could.

“No,” she said to Dell. “You don’t have to go to that trouble. Perhaps just tell me when the best time to visit would be—what her schedule’s like. I think it would be best if her caregiver was there when I stopped by.”

“I can definitely find that out. You’re in the area for the next few weeks, right?”

“Yes.”

“Good. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up, and Janette pulled the phone from her ear.

Meg walked over and extended an unwrapped bar of caramel-filled chocolate.

Janette sighed and broke off a piece. “Thanks.”

“No problem. Glad that trick works for you. Stephen hates chocolate.”

“What cheers him up, then?”

“He keeps a punching bag in his home office. You want to drive? I need to twist my spine in a way that’s not conducive to safe steering.”

“You trust me to drive your car?”

Meg shrugged. “Stephen trusted you enough to bring you here, so why bother vetting you again? He’s got good judgment. He always has…beating people up to defend my honor, aside.”

“Good big brother.”

“And super uncle.” Meg held out the keys. Janette took them. “He’s great with kids. He works with a bunch of them at the community center he took boxing lessons at as a kid.”

“Really?”

Janette pushed both empty carts to the corral while Meg climbed into the car.

Meg didn’t answer until Janette had the car on the highway.

“Stephen’s got one of those crusading personalities, I guess. His firm actually requires employees to commit to a certain number of community service hours per year, and that kind of pissed him off because when people are forced to do things, it’s hard for them to be empathetic to the people they’re serving. If they don’t want to be there, they’re not going to go above and beyond.”

“I believe he’s right about that.”

“Don’t tell him I said it, but he’s right about most things. The way his brain works is a little scary. I don’t think he’s ever really lost an argument. He can talk you into a corner and make you feel incredibly dumb, but he’ll be really sweet about it.”

“Well, he’s definitely intelligent.”

“More than that. My parents had him tested as a kid right around the time his ADHD was at its worst…uh…you do know about the ADHD, right? Did I just put my foot in my mouth?”

Janette chuckled. “He told me.”

“Just checking. Some people act like it’s a terminal illness. It was just the way he was wired. I don’t know exactly how bright he is because my parents are too classy to brag, but I have my suspicions. He’s an attorney with an undergraduate degree in sociology. In my mind, there’s no reason he should be able to keep up with Seth when he starts rambling about rocket propulsion, but somehow, he always manages to come up with an intelligent question.”

“He seems to hide his intelligence behind a thin veil of lechery.”

Meg laughed so hard she snorted. “That sounds about right. It wasn’t always like that. When he was kid, he used jokes or just changed the subject a lot. I thought that was part of his ADHD at first, but figured out as an adult that he’s just too fucking reasonable.”

A trail of heat seared Janette from her heart to her cheeks and shame settled in before she could chase it back. She’d noted his carefulness but hadn’t wanted to make assumptions about it. Just what had he discerned about her?

“What does he want from me?” She was really asking herself more than Meg, but Meg responded.

“If that’s not obvious, then maybe you should ask him.”

Perhaps she should.

Operation “Woo Janette” was in full effect, and Stephen wasn’t above resorting to cheap tricks to make his gambit a successful one. Meg might have been annoyed at him using her son for bait, but the
cute kid
trick was probably as old as mankind itself. Why would he try to reinvent the wheel?

Stephen suspected that once Jan was comfortable enough to talk to him—to pull back that filter she’d probably had firmly installed since childhood—everything else would fall into place. He didn’t know much about her, but what he did know was that she was a careful woman not easily swayed by silver tongues and temptations of the flesh. She was upright and cautious in that blue blood way his mother would appreciate, but he also knew there was a spark in there. She kept snuffing it, but it was impossible to hide. He saw it on the rare occasion she smiled.

If he could make her smile all the time, she’d be his. No question about it. He was going to try, because he’d never encountered another woman who’d made him want to.

“What do I have to do again?” Toby asked. That kid was all about details. In his world, there was no such thing as going with the flow.

Stephen adjusted the tilt of the beach umbrella to cast the shadow more fully over Toby. The sun had moved and Toby had ended up in a bright pocket. “Just stick to Jan like glue. She needs the company, and you’re really good at making people have a good time.”

Seth, who lay on his belly with his face against his folded arms, chuckled.

“Why does she need the company? Aren’t there kids where she comes from?” Toby asked.

“Not like you.”

Toby pursed his lips and squinted at his uncle. “Did you make her mad and she doesn’t want to be around you?”

Seth barked.

Stephen glowered at the back of his brother-in-law’s head. “Absolutely not! I just want to make sure she has lots of fun this week.”