Sterling's Reasons (8 page)
Blocking the memories as they seared painfully across her heart, Sterling took one more look at the baby hand that rested at her breast and then she set him down on his wiggly little feet and patted his head. She couldn’t control it much longer. She had to get out of there. This had never happened before and she didn’t know how to handle it.
The child’s mother took the toddler’s hand. “I’m sorry, miss. He just runs everywhere he goes. I wonder how I’ll ever keep up with him.”
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“It’s all right,” she said, surprised that her voice sounded quite calm and normal. Sterling crouched down until she was eye level with the little boy.
“Children have a way of rambling fearlessly through life.” His hair was so fine and soft. Her son’s hair had been that way. There were chocolate stains on his shirt from an earlier treat.
“How many do you have?” the mother asked as she pried the lollipop from his hand. “It’s got dirt on it, Petey.”
“None,” Sterling answered, standing up and feeling the razor cut of her own words. “Take good care of your mom.”
“Joe,” Sterling turned her attention to him and said as brightly as she could,
“would you wait for our order? I’ll find us the best picnic table out there.”
Without waiting for his answer, Sterling was out the door and out of sight.
Joe looked from her to the head of the small boy. What was that all about? He looked toward the door that Sterling had bolted through. That lady is so intense.
Either intensely happy or intensely silly or intensely stubborn. Or intensely hurt.
What was that he had seen on her face? His concern made him impatient with the blundering efforts of the young clerk behind the counter.
Outside, Sterling jogged to the edge of the dock and swiped at big, round tears that ran down her cheeks. Grabbing a tissue out of her purse, she dried them and swore at herself, only to feel fresh ones course down her cheeks.
Forcing deep breaths, offering her face to the wind off the sea, she managed to look nearly presentable. But inside, the ache wouldn’t let up. It made her angry.
She found the table closest to the water and wiped the seats down with the shirt she had worn. She looked out to sea for diversion and found Timmy’s face wouldn’t fade from her mind. Her son. He would have been almost nine now.
Holding the boy in the restaurant had brought back the feelings of how good it 60
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had been to hold him in her arms, feel his little hands grab on to her…She missed it so.
“That’s the slickest way I’ve seen yet to get out of paying your bill. Are you all right?” Joe’s concerned voice came from behind her.
From years of practice, Sterling pasted a shallow smile on her face. She nodded, taking the bags from his hand, and helped him place the food on the tables and dispense with the wrappers. Because of the breeze, everything wanted to slide off the surface, so she weighed everything down with the contents and watched as Joe swung a leg over the bench opposite her and examined her suspiciously.
It was the first really acceptable thing she had seen in his eyes besides amusement. In the sunlight, his eyes appeared almost green. She was somehow comforted by what she saw there. Soulmates. Comrades in pain. She wasn’t ready to share hers with him. Not yet.
“Of course I am. That little kid could have cracked his elbow a good one, that’s all.” She pushed the hot dog down further in the bun and licked ketchup off her finger.
Watching her carefully, he unwrapped his pizza. “It was more than that and you know it. Tell me about it.”
“Why don’t you just eat, Joe,” she clipped and took a bite of the hot dog. It was tasteless. She was disappointed in herself. The meal was spoiled.
He didn’t like being dismissed, so he persisted gently. “Because I want to know what caused that kid to affect you that way. I don’t really know anything about you, Sterling. So enlighten me.”
Although she tried to be civil, she snapped, “It’s really none of your business.” Then softening her voice and her attitude she scolded herself for her harshness. There wasn’t any sense taking out her anger on him. “I’m fine. Look,
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the sun is bright now and, oh, look at those boats. Fishing must be a hard way to make a living. I’m glad to see that people still do it the old way. A hard day’s work for a day’s pay, then home to the little woman to see if she has a pot of stew on the stove.”
Did she really think he could be so easily diverted? There was a silence. A stiff one. He watched her. Tried to figure out what had knocked the bounce from her. The pizza in his hand felt cold. He put it back down. For now he would let her get away without answering his question. But not without comment.
Joe pulled a key chain from his pocket and popped the tops from the two bottles of long-neck beer. “It’s okay for you to poke your nose into my business but I better not do the same to you, right?” He set one of the bottles in front of her.
“Thank you.” She put the beer to her lips and turned it up for a bracing swallow. When she replaced the bottle back on the table her hand was instantly wet with foam as the liquid spewed up and into the air.
Joe laughed at her amazed glare. He stopped at her look. “I can see you don’t know how to drink a long neck.” He chuckled as he wiped splashes of beer from her hand with a napkin. She looked at his hand working over hers, felt the gentleness in his touch, and had to smile up at him.
“You’re going to tell me there’s some dumb secret to drinking out of a beer bottle?” She pulled the bottle closer and looked into it.
“A long neck, yes. You sip it and set the bottle down slowly. Or you get drenched.”
“That’s stupid.” She pushed the bottle away from her.
“That’s real life.” He grinned, because she was off guard and she was perplexed. And she looked so beautifully ridiculous in that get-up. He laughed 62
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because it was there and it felt good and because, somehow, it seemed to make her feel better.
“I want a Coke,” she stated flatly.
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Chapter Five
He folded his pizza and took a bite. “This is rubbery and cold,” he announced.
“It’s supposed to be. Don’t you do anything but gripe?” She tried to sound light and interested. He was beginning to loosen up even if it was reluctantly.
And that was her job, wasn’t it? She had pried the lid from his coffin and managed to get him out of it for a while. But how long would it last? How long could it last?
Here she was feeling sorry for herself and yet she was supposed to be helping him. Sometimes, such as in moments like this one, she wished there was someone for her to lean on. Just for a while. She had kept herself busy. Kept interested in helping other people. It had worked for these past five years and then pow—it came to her out of the blue wearing tiny Adidas shoes and little denim overalls. Until moments like now, she didn’t allow herself the time to think about how much she missed the evenings when Timmy would go to sleep at a reasonable hour and she and Jerry would curl up together in front of the fire place. It was so easy to recall the safe, protected, loved feeling. God, she missed it all so much.
He watched her. She was concentrating too much on the food. In the short time they had known each other he had filed one piece of information on her.
She enjoyed eating, loved it…
Sterling’s Reasons
Something was on her mind. Something she wasn’t willing to share just yet.
“Sterling is a strange name. How’d you come by it?” He reached over and wiped ketchup from her chin with the beer-soaked napkin.
Grateful for the diversion from her own thoughts, Sterling grimaced. “My mother loved fine things. Art, porcelain, silver.”
He grinned a little just to cheer her up. “Could have named you Brass then, couldn’t she?” He hadn’t cared much for her when she was all wound up and he cared even less for the fact that now she seemed torn up by something. It did something to his gut.
The floodlight-across-the-dark-parking-lot smile of hers played on her face.
He had to admit it. He liked her. Even above the purely male interest, he liked the flaky broad. But he still had to find out what she was up to and put a stop to it.
Sterling studied Joe. The little bit of gray in his hair was visible in the direct sunlight. He was a handsome man. Her Jerry had been handsome, too. He hadn’t had a mustache, but he
had
had long sideburns and his hair had been unruly, like Joe’s. She could almost remember the way it felt to kiss him. She lowered her lashes to keep the memory to herself.
“Where were you born?” His question surprised her. So far he had shown no interest in such personal details.
“Oklahoma. Tulsa, to be more exact. I love that place. My folks are schoolteachers. Elementary school and high school. So you can guess how they were always too involved in my life in or out of school. But I developed a talent for entertaining myself early and taking care of myself.” The breeze pushed her hair across her face and Sterling shoved it back with the back of her hand. She realized what he was doing. Changing the subject. Getting her mind on other
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things. Just as she had been doing to him all along. Okay, she admitted to herself, so it was a relief to think of something else.
“How did you like growing up in Indiana?” she asked.
Sterling saw the flash of suspicion on his face and squelched it just as quickly by qualifying her information. “The newspaper was very thorough.”
“We were farmers,” he said after a moment’s pause. “I went to school just enough to satisfy everyone. The rest of the days I went hunting and fishing.
Never knew anything about game seasons. Anyone saw me they just shrugged and said, ‘There goes that MacDaniels kid again.’ I enjoyed it.”
“And you never had any trouble with grades?”
His brows drew together as he cocked his head to study her questioningly.
“Why get A’s if C’s are passing?”
She shrugged and finished a french fry. “That’s one way to think about it.
You’re a smart man. A road scholar?”
“What makes you say that?” He swung his leg over the bench so he was sitting with his side to her, one elbow leaning on the table. “Well?”
“The way you move, the way you absorb everything. The way you assess anything that comes your way. You know a lot about a lot of things. You catalogue information and file it away in your brain. Besides that, you have made a success of your career.”
He didn’t deny it. He did exactly that. He had a good memory and was proud of it. You needed it to get the job done. He didn’t comment on it. There was no reason to.
Sterling watched Joe. He was a much more passionate man than Jerry had been. Jerry had been easygoing and laid back. Joe was energetic. Filled with a force that drove him. “Vietnam. It must have been very difficult to be there?” she asked nonchalantly.
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She didn’t miss the flicker of suspicion in his eyes. “It was no Sunday school picnic.” Not by a long shot. “I was Fire Team leader for an infantry rifle squad, 5th Mech. Da Krong Valley, Gio Lihn, Con Thien. We were headquartered at Quang Tn. Why did you bring that up?” He squinted in the waning sunlight.
“Just making conversation. I care about the veterans. I’m proud to know someone who was there. I’m glad we have you guys to take care of things, keep us safe. You couldn’t have gotten much farther north could you? Were you drafted?”
“I enlisted. Three years. The last year I got my orders to go in country.
Corporal J.T. MacDaniels. I haven’t thought about him in a while.” And he hadn’t. “How did you know I was there?”
The nightmares,
he thought grimly,
were of a different sort now.
“I read about it. What can I say? I subscribe to many newspapers. Didn’t you read any of the accounts of the accident?”
“Sure, I’d want to read all about it. Did it have nice gory pictures, too?” He balled up his trash and pitched it into the can. Turning up his beer, he took a long swallow and then eyed her tenuously. “Tell me who you are, Sterling. Just spit it out and we can simply get on with it. I can tell you to get lost and you can go back and tell whoever sent you here that it’s a no-go.”
“It’s all so simple for you, isn’t it? I feel like I’ve known you for years.
Yesterday I might have considered leaving here, but not now. Why can’t we just be friends and do our thing? I need a rest, and even though you’re not the most willing neighbor or companion, I have sort of gotten used to you.” That was a lie.
She would never get used to or be complacent with him. He was too complex.
There would always be something to contend with. Some new facet to think about. The thought was exciting.
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She stared back at his direct, challenging look. “You’d like to get rid of me, wouldn’t you? Well, you can’t. We’re stuck with each other merely because we chose the same isolated stretch of geography to crash on. I’m not that bad, am I? I like you.”
Joe hated that her words touched his heart. The very same one that he thought had turned to stone. The very same one that he had hoped would turn to dust. He reached across the table and picked up a lock of hair that fell over her shoulder. “I didn’t say you were bad. You’re crazy, you’re a pain, but you’re not bad.” He wanted to know what happened back there to make her withdraw so quickly. He wanted to know why he even cared. He tried again. “Something happened back there in the restaurant. What was it?”
She finished her food and balled her trash. He took it from her and pitched it the same as he had his, only this time he missed. He walked over and picked it up. Then she was there, beside him, ready to move on. He let it pass that she ignored his question.
