Stuck in the Middle (14 page)

Rosa hopped down from the counter and came around the corner. She shrugged her purse off her shoulder and dropped it into the bottom drawer. “Your dinner was good?”

Joan swiveled away in her chair to shuffle the stack of customer invoices she’d been folding. She could kick herself for telling Rosa about Ken coming to eat with them last night, but she was so nervous yesterday morning the news exploded out of her almost on its own. “It was okay.”

Rosa leaned forward, the long necklace she wore brushing the desktop. “You have a date with him, yes?”

Joan slid a stack of window envelopes and the folded invoices toward her. “Here. Stuff. No, I don’t have a date with him.”

Rosa peered at her, but Joan kept her gaze fixed on her hands as she worked. After a moment, Rosa patted her shoulder. “You no worry. He will ask you soon.”

Joan’s spirits rose at the confidence in her tone. “
Don’t
worry, not
no
worry.” She risked a sideways glance. “You think so?”

“
Don’t
worry.” Rosa amended, then nodded. “He likes you. I watched him look at you when you showed him furniture.”

Yeah, well, Rosa didn’t see him when he got his first look at Tori last night. For most of the night Joan had tossed in her bed, unable to clear her mind of the image of Ken and Tori’s clasped hands. Or Tori’s adorable dimple and Ken’s smile as he gazed down into her face. True, he hadn’t seemed all that crazy about either one of them as the evening wore on. And his sudden departure did seem suspiciously like an escape. But as Allie said, looks counted for a lot. And Tori did look awesome.

When sleep finally came, Joan dreamed she was walking down the center aisle at Christ Community Church on a white satin runner strewn with rose petals. Dressed in a tux, a smiling Ken waited for her at the altar. But when she got to the front of the sanctuary, a swell of music made her turn to look behind her. Tori stood in the doorway, dressed in white lace and carrying a bridal bouquet. As her little sister glided gracefully down the aisle, Joan looked at her own outfit and saw that she wore an old pair of ripped jeans and flip-flops. When Tori reached the front, she shoved the bouquet into Joan’s hands and whispered, “Gosh, Joan, at least you could have worn the True Religions to my wedding.”

Shaking off the dream, Joan folded another invoice and added it to the pile in front of Rosa. She had another chance, though—church on Sunday. True, Tori planned to be there, but they’d both promised to be on their best behavior.

She had one day to figure out what her best behavior should be.

“We need to debrief.”

Heart pounding, Joan whirled around in the desk chair. Allie leaned against the doorjamb of the tiny back office, her arms folded across the top of her belly.

“Don’t sneak up on me like that!”

She stepped into the room and lowered herself awkwardly into the hard visitor chair tucked between the desk and the wall. She kicked her shoes off and flexed her swollen toes with a sigh. “Why do you sit there with your back to the door? It would give me the creeps. You should get a couple of those delivery guys to turn the desk around for you.”

“There’s no room in here. I’d have to crawl over the top of it to get to my chair.” Joan rocked backward and fixed her sister with a fearful look. “Was last night as big a disaster as I think it was?”

“Not at all! True, the guy escaped as soon as your back was turned, but you had some very nice moments. He practically drooled all over himself when you opened the door.”

“Yeah, till Tori showed up looking like a model.”

“That outfit was unexpected.” Allie shook her head. “I figured she’d go chic casual, not elegant professional. But don’t worry about that. Somehow Ken doesn’t strike me as the kind of man who’s impressed with suits. You did fine.”

The knot in Joan’s stomach relaxed a fraction. “He does seem more like a jeans guy, doesn’t he?”

“Absolutely. And that’s why I’ve got our next step all planned out. I did some surfing through the online catalogs on my lunch break, and I have the perfect outfit picked out for Sunday. Our baby sister will choke on her bubble gum when she gets a look at you.”

Joan cocked her head and gave Allie a hard stare. “You seemed to enjoy the evening quite a bit. A little too much, in fact.”

Her eyes went round. “Who, me?”

“Yes, you. If I didn’t know better, I’d think you staged the whole show for your exclusive enjoyment.”

A grin stole across Allie’s face. “You two were pretty funny. You blushed like crazy every time he looked your way. And I’ve never seen Tori so discombobulated. One look at your jeans and she started acting like a runner-up in a beauty pageant.”

Joan answered Allie’s grin with one of her own. “She did, didn’t she?”

“Which is why we’re going to follow up with something completely unexpected. If we can keep her flustered, she’ll spend more time worrying about you than trying to impress Ken. Are you up for another trip to the mall tomorrow?”

Joan caught her lower lip between her teeth. She couldn’t take off work on a Saturday. She was scheduled to open the store. And she already spent more on clothes this week than the past year. But she didn’t have a thing to wear on Sunday, not anything that could hope to look good next to Tori’s wardrobe.

She glanced at the clock on the corner of the desk. “It’ll have to be late. I can’t leave work until four.”

Allie heaved an exaggerated sigh. “Just how I wanted to spend my Saturday night. Fighting the mall crowd.” She brightened. “I know. Let’s go to that new Mexican restaurant. I heard their fried ice cream is to die for.”

Ken opened the back door to let Trigger out onto the screened porch. Dog toys littered the floor beside a big fluffy bed and a huge tub of fresh water. A doggy door allowed free access to the backyard. Standing in the doorway, Trigger turned mournful eyes up at him and then looked away, ears and tail drooping.

“Sorry, boy.” He squatted down on his haunches and rubbed the dog’s neck. “I wish I could leave you inside, but you can’t be trusted. You’ve got some pretty bad habits, you know.”

He tossed a couple of chewy treats onto the bed. He’d learned in a dog training book to always give a treat when leaving for work in order to establish positive feelings about the regular routine. Trigger seemed to get the routine part, but the positive feelings were slow in coming. As though he knew he had no choice, the dog slunk through the doorway, a picture of dejection, and dropped onto his bed. He ignored the treats as he cast a last reproachful glance at his master. Guilt pricked Ken as he looked down into the woeful canine face.

“Hey, a guy’s gotta work. I can’t stay home and play with you all the time. You’ve got a huge yard to run in, tons of toys, a cushy bed, and your very own room. You’re living in dog paradise.”

Trigger didn’t appear to appreciate his good fortune. He rested his head on his paws, eyes never leaving Ken as the door closed.

Ken bolted the latch and peeked through the curtain. “Terrific. Now I get to feel guilty while I go to work to save lives. Thanks, Karen.”

He went into the bedroom to retrieve his bag. When he passed his desk, his gaze fell on the single sheet of paper he’d printed out. Directions to Mike Lassiter’s apartment. He couldn’t get that boy out of his mind. What kind of place did he live in? And how about the kids he ran with? His mother said they were “bad news,” but that could mean anything.

Ken picked up his bag and slung it across his shoulder. Something about Mike’s tough-guy attitude niggled at Ken’s thoughts. Ten was a critical age, so easily influenced for good or for bad. He got a glimpse of the boy’s relationship with his mother at the hospital, and it didn’t look good. Did Mike have any positive influences in his life?

He stared at the printout in the center of the desk. All these questions refused to go away, so yesterday morning Ken copied down the address from the hospital file and printed the directions off the Internet. The Lassiter apartment wasn’t too far from here. If he hurried, he had time to drive by before he went to work. Just to take a look, to satisfy his curiosity.

Snatching up the paper, he crept to the back door and peeked through the curtains. And smiled. The chewy treats were gone, and Trigger was playing out in the yard with a stuffed cow. Ken watched as he whipped the toy back and forth violently, then tossed it up into the air and pounced on it when it hit the ground. The picture of a happy pup.

Chuckling, Ken left through the front door. He tossed his bag into the passenger seat as he slid behind the wheel. Weird how the mutt weaseled into his emotions so quickly. He and Karen didn’t have dogs growing up, because Mom always said animals were too much work. Turns out she was right. But since Trigger came into his life, he was starting to see why people were willing to take on the responsibility. Having the lively pup around took the edge off of the loneliness that haunted his off-work hours. In the past few weeks, he realized that dogs really could be man’s best friend.

And, as Karen said, chicks dug them. He shook his head, remembering the meeting with Joan on the sidewalk. He had actually considered asking her to help him train Trigger. She seemed to like dogs, and she knew how to make them behave. But after spending a little more time with her last night, Ken wasn’t sure what he thought. Things got uncomfortable when Tori showed up. There was something weird going on between those two. Maybe he’d better just stick to the dog training book.

He drove to Main Street and turned left, following the directions on the paper.

And what about the way the conversation froze last night when he mentioned God? Eric’s face had hardened and Allie looked uncomfortable. Funny, he always heard Kentucky was smack-dab in the middle of the Bible Belt, where church was a big part of everyone’s lives. But he was finding out that, just like anywhere else, some people here attended church out of habit more than anything else. He couldn’t understand that. His faith had been such an important part of his life since his teenage years.

A couple more turns and Ken found the apartment complex he was looking for. It was about what he’d expected, ten or twelve faded brick buildings with uniform rows of shutterless windows. Broken-down chairs and rusty bicycle parts littered the concrete stoops before each dirty white door. He rolled down the window for a better look. Heat overpowered the air conditioner in an instant, and a rancid odor stung his nostrils when he drove by an overflowing trash dumpster. A few nice cars were parked in the lots that ran between the buildings, but most of them were beat-up and some even had duct tape and plastic in place of missing windows.

Between the last two buildings, a group of six or seven young people loitered around a graffiti-covered landscaping rock that bordered a broken-down playground. Beyond it, a basketball goal hung at an unusable angle from a busted backboard. Ken downshifted into second and drove slowly, scanning the boys’ faces. He caught sight of a familiar shaggy head and put on his brakes.

“Hey, Mike,” he shouted out the window.

All heads turned in his direction. They were young teens, Ken guessed, bored and up to no good. A couple wore dingy T-shirts with a strange-looking symbol sketched on the chest in bold black lines. One kid looked right at Ken as he defiantly puffed a cigarette. Ken let his gaze slide over the boys and come to rest on Mike, the smallest and probably the youngest of the group by several years.

Mike stared at him a moment, and then his face brightened with recognition. He tossed his head in a gesture of greeting. “What’s up, Dr. Fletcher?”

The boy wore a pair of ragged tennis shoes. Hopefully he was keeping his stitches bandaged and clean. “Just passing by. How’s the foot holding up?”

Mike glanced at one of the other boys before taking a few steps toward Ken’s car. He limped noticeably. “It’s okay. I stayed off of it until today, like you said. It ain’t bleeding or anything.”

Ken nodded. “Good. You coming back next week to have the stitches removed?”

He crossed the rest of the distance to the car and spoke in a low voice. “I don’t know. My mom says we don’t need to pay no doctor. She can take stitches out, no problem.”