The Grand Finale (12 page)

In the absence of sherbet glasses, Berry poured the pudding into coffee cups. She heard Jake move to the kitchen and knew he was leaning his hip against the counter, his arms loosely crossed over his chest, watching her. She kept her eyes glued to the coffee cups, but she felt him assessing what he saw: Lingonberry Knudsen braless in a skimpy T-shirt and silky little running shorts. She
wriggled her bare toes against the tile floor and gnawed on her lower lip. She had a new plan and she was determined to see it through to the end. Now if she could stop hyperventilating and get her blood pressure under control she’d be just dandy.

Jake crossed to where she was working and looked over her shoulder. “Smells great. What is it?”

“Butterscotch pudding.” Was that her? All husky-voiced and inviting?

He scraped some pudding off the side of the pot with his finger and took a taste. “It’s good!”

“Yup,” Berry said. “And I’ve got something even better…soap.”

“Soap?”

“Yes sir, soap. I feel like taking a shower with lots of soap.”

“Have you been drinking again?”

“Nope. Been there, done that, didn’t like it, not doing it again.” She put the pudding pot in the sink and ran water into it so it could soak. “Moving on to bigger and better stuff,” she said.

She crossed the kitchen, turned when she got to the stairs, and stripped off her shirt. She smiled at Jake and made her way to the land
ing, halfway to the second floor. She paused long enough for her running shorts to hit the carpet. When she didn’t hear footsteps behind her, she turned and placed her hands on her hips. “Aren’t you coming?”

“No, but I’m very close,” Jake said, unbuttoning his shirt as he followed her up the stairs. By the time he reached the bathroom she was already in the shower. He dropped his jeans at the bathroom door, removed the rest of his clothing, and joined her.

“I finally get to see all of you,” Berry said, smiling.

Jake returned the smile and took the soap from Berry’s hands. “More than a couple inches,” he said with pride.

Hours later Jake drowsily opened his eyes and pulled Berry on top of him. “Mmmm,” he murmured, kissing her neck, running his hand along the smooth curve of her back. “Holy cow,” he exclaimed, looking at his watch, “do you know what time it is?” He moved out from under her and reached for his jeans. “Poor Mrs. Fitz and Miss Gaspich have been stranded at the Pizza Place all day. I should have picked them up an hour ago.”

Berry slumped deeper into the couch and furiously zapped stations with the remote control. “Twelve forty-two,” she muttered, glaring at her watch. The ladies were upstairs, asleep. Everyone was asleep but her and Jake. She’d thought it was cute when he’d had a sudden burst of inventive inspiration during supper and gone charging off down the cellar stairs. It had stopped being cute at about eleven-thirty. Now it was downright infuriating. She took a deep breath and tried to calm herself, knowing that she was being unreasonable. For the past two weeks, Jake had given up all his spare time to work in the Pizza Place. He deserved this night to himself. He was a chemist. An inventor. He needed to work at his profession. But why tonight? How could he leave her alone like this after they’d shared such a beautiful after
noon? It was the first time she’d ever really made love with a man, and her world felt tilted. She’d expected his world would be equally tilted.

“It’s tilted, all right,” she said aloud to herself. “Tilted in the opposite direction from mine. He could hardly wait to get away from me.” She gave herself a shot to the forehead with the heel of her hand. “Ugh, men!”

That was a bunch of garbage, she thought. She was letting all her old insecurities come back to haunt her. She shut the television off and crept up the stairs, telling herself that men simply looked at these things differently. They took life in stride. That was the basic difference between men and women. Women were women. And men were thoughtless beasts! Berry wrenched the bedroom door open and closed it with a thunderous slam. She stripped off her clothes and flung herself into bed, covering her head with the pillow. This is just temporary insanity from too much sex, she groaned. I should have started out slowly. And I certainly shouldn’t have done it the same day I made pudding. It overloaded my system. I’ll feel better tomorrow.

Three hours later Berry thrashed side to side
in bed. She squinted at her clock and muttered an oath. She punched the pillow and viciously kicked at the confining tangle of sheets. You were supposed to be relaxed after you made love, she fumed. You were supposed to go to sleep with a smile on your face. What was wrong with her? She’d made love all afternoon. Why wasn’t she tired? Why wasn’t she smiling?

Another three hours later Berry half opened one eye and caught Jake tiptoeing around the room, gathering his clothes. “Jake?”

“Sorry I woke you. Go back to sleep,” he whispered.

“What are you doing? Why don’t you come to bed,” she said.

He stood over her with a tie dangling from his hand and a blue shirt thrown over his shoulder. “I can’t. I have to get to school early today. If I could just find my damn shoes…” He looked under the bed and grunted with satisfaction. “Found them.” A quick kiss on the top of her head and he was gone.

Berry stared at the closed door and sighed. She didn’t want to be an alarmist, but this was beginning to feel a heck of a lot like her mar
riage. She slipped into a pair of jeans and a soft flannel shirt and went in search of breakfast.

Mrs. Fitz was already at the round oak table, sipping tea. “Holy cow, Lingonberry, you look awful.”

Berry got the coffee brewing. She banged a coffee mug onto the kitchen counter and stared at it.

“Looks to me like you got man problems. What’d that Jake Sawyer do now?” Mrs. Fitz asked.

“Nothing.”

“Nothing? Uh-oh. That don’t sound good.”

Berry propped herself up on the counter while the coffee dripped into the glass pot. “Boy, love really stinks,” Berry said to the coffeepot more than to Mrs. Fitz.

“Yeah,” Mrs. Fitz agreed, “it can be a bummer.”

“Are you in love with Harry?”

“I don’t know. It’s hard to tell at my age. You don’t know whether it’s love or just the prune juice working.”

Berry poured herself a cup of coffee and set a skillet on the stove. “You like French toast?” she asked Mrs. Fitz.

“Who’s making it?”

“I am.”

“Yeah. I like it.”

Berry cracked three eggs into a shallow dish and whipped them with a fork. “Good,” she said, “because I’m going to make a whole loaf of it.”

It was eleven o’clock at night when Berry finally drove down Ellenburg Drive and solemnly stared at the house. Lights blazed from the downstairs windows and Jake’s car was parked in the driveway. He hadn’t shown up for work at the Pizza Place, and he hadn’t called beyond leaving a short message to say he was busy. Berry parked and made her way through the house to the kitchen where Jake was hunkered over the table. His shirttails were out and his shoes were kicked off.

“What’s going on?” Berry asked.

Jake gestured to the stacks of dog-eared notebooks in front of him. “I’ll never catch up. I didn’t know I had to grade these things.”

“Can’t you grade them tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow I have to grade spelling workbooks.” He thumped his finger on a smudged
page he’d been reading. “These kids are really something. They’ve actually been paying attention to me. I taught them to add!”

Berry had to smile at the pride and astonishment in his voice. “Can I help?”

“No. This is something I have to do myself.” He pasted a scratch-and-sniff sticker on the book and moved on to another.

Berry cracked her knuckles and sighed. She emptied the bag of groceries and polished off three butterscotch puddings. “I guess I’ll go to bed,” she said in a conversational tone to the kitchen.

Neither Jake nor the kitchen answered her, so she kissed Jake on the top on his head and dragged herself up the stairs. He’s such a good guy, she thought. He’s trying to be a good teacher. Problem was, it felt a lot like Allen trying to be a good doctor. She’d been understanding with Allen, and she wanted to be understanding with Jake. Unfortunately, she needed some acknowledgment that something special had passed between them. She needed reassurance that Jake loved her. And she didn’t want to have to beg for it.

The next morning Mrs. Fitz looked up at Berry from the breakfast table and shook her head. “Boy, I thought you looked bad yesterday, but this beats all. Your eyes look like tomatoes.”

“I had a hard time getting to sleep.”

“Jake didn’t look so hot, either. He left about an hour ago with his hair standing on end and his tie hanging crooked.”

“He say anything about me?”

“Nope. He just kept mumbling about Joey Barnes and how he was going to flunk math if he didn’t learn how to keep his papers neater.”

Berry took a brand-new store-bought apple pie from the refrigerator, added three scoops of vanilla ice cream, sat down across from Mrs. Fitz, and dug in.

“You can always count on an apple pie,” Berry said.

Berry slammed the front door to the Pizza Place behind her. “That does it. Boy, that
really
does it,” she shouted, throwing her books onto the counter. She waved a piece of paper at Mrs. Fitz. “Do you know what this is? This is what being in love does to you. Makes you stupid. Makes
you fail art history tests.” Berry flapped her arms. “I knew this would happen. I just knew it. There’s not enough room in my head to think about both Jake Sawyer and Vincent van Gogh. Ever since Jake Sawyer popped into my life I’ve been neglecting my studies, and now I’m failing,” she wailed. “I’ve worked so hard for my degree. All down the drain for a few moments of savage passion.”

Mrs. Fitz’s eyes opened wide. “Really? Savage passion?”

“Savage passion. The whole nine yards.” Berry chomped on a bread stick. “And I’m crazy in love with him. Absolutely bonkers.” She drew her eyebrows together. “But I’m not going to be. I’m going to fall out of love this instant. I have finals coming up. If I study hard I might be able to pull my grades up.” She wrapped a white apron around her waist and set her textbook on the counter.

Berry removed the towel from her head, shook out her damp blond curls, and rolled her eyes at the crashing, clanking sounds originating from the kitchen. Jake must have come home while
she was in the shower. Only Jake could make that much noise in the kitchen. He was probably looking for dinner, doing his bear-foraging-in-the-woods routine. Mrs. Dugan was still on her cruise, Mrs. Fitz and Miss Gaspich were at the Pizza Place with Harry, and Berry had taken a couple hours off to try to relax after grinding her way through three chapters on Renaissance art.

Jake’s voice carried up to her. “I can never find a damn thing in this house,” he muttered. “Nothing’s ever in the same place twice.” Another volley of clattering accompanied by swearing. “Too many women! All I wanted was a pizza, and look at what I got…four women who can’t agree where the frying pan should go.”

All he wanted was a pizza! That had become painfully obvious during the past week. He hadn’t said more than ten words to her since The Momentous Occasion on Sunday. She stepped into a pair of lacy blue panties and tugged at her jeans, silently swearing that she was never going to bed with another man for as long as she lived. She was a flop in the sack, and she had no intention of humiliating herself ever again. She wrenched the jeans over her hips and zipped
them halfway. They wouldn’t zip any further. “Damn!” She stood tall and held her breath and pulled. She had them zipped, but she couldn’t button the top button. A soft roll of flesh hung over the waistband. Berry stared at herself in the mirror. She was fat! She tapped her foot. This was all Jake’s fault, the creep. She’d wanted romance, but she’d had to settle for food, and now she was
fat.
Berry gave up on the button and shrugged into a T-shirt, gaping in disbelief as it stretched taut across full breasts. Hot damn. She had cleavage. She tipped her head back and gave herself a critical look. Who would have thought getting cleavage would be this easy? Turned out all you had to do was get fat.

Jake appeared in the doorway. “Having problems?”

“My pants don’t fit.” She poked at the roll. “I guess this is butterscotch pudding.”

“I hope this isn’t going to ruin your appetite. I made a great dinner for tonight.”

“You made dinner?”

“Actually, I bought it, but I made the money that paid for it.”

Berry followed Jake downstairs and they
stopped at the entrance to the dining room and stared in silent horror.

Berry was the first to speak. “There’s a dog on the table.”

“Dammit, I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“You succeeded.” Berry looked at the empty serving bowl. “Is this bowl supposed to be empty?”

“It’s supposed to be filled with beef Bourguignon. That slob of a dog ate my dinner!”

“And this basket?”

“Used to be rolls in there.”

Berry could hardly keep from laughing. The floppy-eared puppy resembled a furry Buddha, sitting in the middle of the table like a centerpiece. It wagged its tail against the white lace tablecloth.
Thump, thump, thump.

“Hard to believe this little dog could eat all that food,” Berry said.

“Are you kidding? Look at that stomach. She looks like a beach ball with legs.”

“She ate everything but the peas.”

Jake picked the dog off the table and stroked her glossy black head. “I thought she was secure in the carrier the pet store gave me.”

Berry bent to retrieve a piece of ragged red cardboard. “You mean this box that’s been chewed to shreds.”

“Maybe we should name her Jaws.” He sat her on the floor and watched her scamper in a small circle. The puppy stopped and squatted.

“Maybe we should call her Puddles.”

He ran his hand through his hair. “Oh, man, look at this mess. The only name for her is Calamity Jane.”

“Haven’t you ever had a puppy before?”

“No. Have you?”

“No.”

“It was part of my plan. You know, floppy-eared dogs running around after a pack of kids.”

“Lord, you don’t have a pack of kids stashed away somewhere, do you?”

Jake grinned. “No. The kids come last. They’re the fun part. We get to make the kids.”

“We?”

“Oh, gross! Your dog just threw up on my foot. This never happens in the movies. You ever see a dog throw up on George Clooney’s foot when he’s trying to be romantic?”

Berry looked at Jake suspiciously. “Why are you trying to be romantic?”

“It’s the weekend. I’m finally caught up with my schoolwork, and I thought we could get reacquainted. It’s been really nice of you to be so understanding,” he said, running his hand through his hair. “You can’t imagine what it’s been like for me to have to sit here grading papers until all hours of the morning. Sometimes I just felt like walking away from it all and climbing into bed with you, but I couldn’t do that to those kids.”

Here’s the thing, Berry thought. I’m going to have to work on trust and patience, and he’s going to have to improve his communication skills, or I’m going to end up looking like a blimp.

“Now that I’m caught up, I wanted to do something special for you,” Jake said. “A romantic dinner for two, some very private dancing, and some very passionate lovemaking.”

“Great,” Berry said. “You go upstairs and wash your foot while I take care of this mess.”

When Berry had the floor completely clean, she tucked the puppy under her arm and carried her to a grassy knoll overlooking the little stream. A week ago everything had been bleak
and brown, but April rains and unusually warm weather had prompted grass to grow and trees to bud. Berry stretched flat on her stomach and smiled. Calamity Jane bounded down a grassy slope, yelped in fright when she confronted a dandelion, and raced back. Berry hugged the little dog. “Would you like to know a secret?” she whispered. “I’ve always wanted a little black dog with floppy ears.”