Promises to Keep (34 page)

“Yup. Me again.” He shifts from foot to foot, looking uncomfortable. “I heard that your sister was sick, and I just wanted to say I’m sorry. I brought you these.” He proffers the flowers.

“Wow. They’re beautiful,” Steffi lies, touched beyond measure by the gesture. “Thank you.”

“And I thought maybe you could do with a drink.”

“You know what? I’d
love
a drink. Come in and let’s have a beer.”

Stanley surveys the mess in the kitchen. “Are you ever
not
cooking?” he asks.

Steffi sits down at the kitchen table and looks around, laughing. “I guess not. It’s what makes me happy. And when I’m sad, or depressed, or lonely, the only thing I know to do to make me feel better is cook.”

“Is this all for you?” he says in amazement.

“NO!” She swats him. “What do you think I am, some kind of glutton?”

“I didn’t want to say anything.”

“The cookies and cakes are for Mary’s store, and the rest is split between Amy and my family.”

“Is it true you’re a vegan?”

“Kinda, sorta,” she says, raising a beer as he cracks off the top and passes it to her. “I was. I worked in a vegetarian restaurant, so I still used eggs and dairy, even though I didn’t eat them myself, but it’s harder out here in the country. In New York it’s easy to be anything you want, but you’re much more limited outside any major city. Also, you kind of see things differently when you know where your meat is coming from. If I’m going to eat it, I want to know it’s from an animal that’s been raised on a family farm, grass fed, led a happy life and killed humanely, and there are enough small farms out here that I do know that.”

“Really?” Stanley shrugs. “I don’t much care how it’s raised as long as it tastes good.”

“But you
should
care.” Steffi turns serious. “Most animals are shoved together in tiny pens, filled with diseases, living horrible lives.”

“I guess I’ve never thought about it much before.”

“I don’t want to lecture you about it, but you should think about it. And it tastes better when it’s local. Everything does. Here”—she looks around the kitchen, then jumps up and brings back a pot—“this is homemade pesto. Try it.” She dips a spoon in and holds it out to him, expecting him to take the spoon, but he covers her hand in his and dips his face forward, eating off the spoon they are both now holding.

It is suddenly shockingly intimate, and there is a silence as he holds her eyes while chewing. Steffi feels her stomach lurch. Oh God. She wasn’t expecting
this
quite so soon.

“Wow,” he says eventually. “That’s amazing.”

Steffi recovers quickly, smiling with delight. “See? That’s basil grown outside in the garden, with garlic grown next door. Everything’s fresh and you can taste the difference, can’t you?”

“I don’t know whether it’s because it’s fresh but that is really good.”

“Do you want more?” She grins. “I’ve got tons. I was making a fish recipe. Do you like fish?”

“I love it. And yes, I’d love some.”

Steffi is not hungry in the slightest—cooking has always killed her appetite, so she sits and watches Stanley as he eats. He is aggressive, head down, almost shoveling the food in, and she is happy he is such an enthusiastic customer.

“Do you want some salad?” she says, when he is finished.

“Oh man,” he groans. “I couldn’t fit anything else in. This is so nice of you. I came here to see if you were okay, and you end up feeding me. That’s just freaky.”

“It’s not. It’s nice. I like feeding people.” Steffi shivers, aware now that she has stopped whirling around the kitchen cooking that the temperature in the house has dropped, and it is chilly.

“You want me to build a fire?” Stanley says.

“No, it’s fine. Don’t worry.”

“I’m not worried. I build great fires. I don’t mind.”

“Okay,” she says finally, with a shrug. “Let me clean up in here and then I’ll come in.”

 

Steffi knows what will happen tonight. She didn’t expect it to happen quite so quickly, or quite like this, but she knew, the second she laid eyes on Stanley, that all things being equal—no wives, girlfriends or stalkers to get in the way—they would end up in bed together.

She drags out the cleaning-up process, not sure whether she actually wants this. Her mind feels so full of Callie, but what did Callie say to her just today? She wants Steffi to
live
. She wants Steffi to have adventures. She wants Steffi to be able to come and tell her stories.

If Callie wants to live vicariously through Steffi, let’s be honest here, there isn’t anything terribly exciting about grocery shopping and spending the rest of the day cooking.

Steffi wipes a cloth over the counters, and bends to check her hair in the dark window. From this angle, she looks pretty damn good. Oh shit, she thinks. Bad underwear. She had shoved the lacy Victoria’s Secret stuff to the back of the wardrobe, happy instead to pull on flesh-colored T-shirt bras and panties—no sex appeal whatsoever, but so much more comfortable.

“I’ll be back in just a minute,” she calls to Stanley, as she races upstairs and roots around for her “good” underwear.

She runs into the bathroom and scrapes a razor under her arms, then sniffs to make sure. All good. The old underwear is stuffed into the laundry basket, and the new is put on. Her stomach isn’t quite as flat as it was when she was living in New York—all that walking definitely helped keep the pounds at bay—but she will have to do.

Back into the living room. Steffi tries to be casual, to pretend that neither of them knows what is on the menu for the rest of the evening. Stanley is lounging back on the sofa, one arm holding his beer, the other resting along the back. He looks perfectly comfortable. And shockingly sexy.

Where should she sit? Well, she knows where she should sit, but it feels too obvious, so she sits in the chair by the fire.

They talk, softly. He asks about Callie, and she finds herself telling him, welling up when she gets to the prognosis.

“Come here,” he says, holding out his arms, and he puts them around her to comfort her. She leans her head on his chest and remembers just how good this feels, to be held in the arms of a man.

And when he finally kisses her, it comes as no surprise whatsoever.

 

Steffi wakes up slowly, pulling the covers tightly around her, wondering what time it is. It is dark outside, but that means nothing. The mornings have been dark outside for weeks now. She pulls her watch over from the edge of the nightstand and squints: 6:04 a.m. Time to get up—chickens and goats to feed, dog to let out, heating to be turned on. There must be a way, she thinks, to time the heating so it is off during the night, then comes on automatically at around 5:00 a.m., so every morning is not like climbing out of bed and into a fridge.

But she hasn’t been able to figure it out. It doesn’t seem possible to regulate the system. It is either boiling hot or freezing cold. She has sent an email to Mason but has yet to hear. She will ask Stanley—she knew there was something she had forgotten last night.

Stanley. She smiles to herself as she burrows down in the sheets, in the warmth, trying to remember every detail.

They sat on the sofa last night, for hours. Kissing, and stroking each other, and murmuring.

Steffi expected to jump into bed with him, but that didn’t happen. She still isn’t sure why, but she is glad. It was enough to be held, and kissed, and comforted.

He left at two in the morning. He stood up and said he really ought to get going. She knew that was the point at which she could have said stay. She knew that had she said it, he would have said yes. But she needed some alone time. Needed to process everything that has happened over the last twenty-four hours, this roller coaster of emotions she has been on.

From the devastation of thinking Callie might live for only a few weeks, to the high of thinking it may be as much as five and a half years.

Stanley’s sweetness in showing up with flowers; his holding her all those hours, without pushing her, or trying to go further than either of them might have been comfortable doing.

In the old days there would have been no question of her jumping into bed with him, but she feels that if she has learned nothing else through this journey with Callie, it is what it is to be an adult.

Life is indeed short, and she must seize the moment. And yet, and yet . . . She feels she has aged ten years in the past few weeks. She feels, finally, as if Callie’s illness is forcing her to grow up, to be patient instead of impulsive, to be calm, even when her insides are raging.

Grown-ups don’t always give in to instant gratification. They don’t jump into bed with total strangers just because it feels good.

Perhaps she will sleep with him next time. Perhaps not. But for today it feels good to have sent him home, and to have peeled off her Victoria’s Secret underwear, all alone, in her bathroom, to have climbed into her long, white, Victorian nightgown, and collapsed into bed with no one but a large, shaggy, snoring deerhound for company.

Better is waking up on her own. She bites the bullet and jumps out of bed, running downstairs, her teeth chattering, to the thermostat, which she moves to Heat, then to the back door, which she unlocks, shooing Fingal out, before running back upstairs and jumping under the covers again.

This is now her morning routine. The pipes clank ominously as she reaches over for her computer, settling it on her lap while the house quickly starts to heat up. There may only be two temperatures, but at least, and thank God, it doesn’t take long to heat.

There is an email from Mason—finally

Steffi takes a deep breath, and hits Reply.

R
eece checks that everything is in the small suitcase. Blanket, the framed photos that Lila brought, clothes, toiletries, iPod. It is all there.

The nurses come in and help Callie sit up, then transfer her into the wheelchair that will take her to the car. Her legs are now so weak that they have arranged for another wheelchair for home. A physical therapist will be coming to the house, and will, they say hopefully, be able to help with restoring some muscle strength.

“Five and a half years,” Reece said to Mark half an hour earlier when he came in to tell them her first radiation therapy session would be the next day. “There are cases of people living that long. Is that possible?”