The Kindness of Strangers (7 page)

And he liked Jordan’s mom, too.

Chills snuck up the back of his neck just thinking about her.

It started last September . . . no, actually it started two years ago just after Dad died—that was the first time. But that kiss was all hazy in Nate’s memory . . . like he’d been drunk or something. Mom had been so out of it, and Mrs. Kendrick stopped by to check on her. Nate had been sitting in the kitchen. Just sitting there. Staring. And sort of crying because it was all so messed up—his dad
couldn’t
be gone, you know? And Mrs. Kendrick had hugged him, which was nice, even though he was too old. Nate didn’t care. And she made these little noises, and she kissed his forehead and cheeks. And then his mouth. She kissed his mouth in this way that felt like . . . she was drinking him. For a long time, too. But then she whispered, “No, Nate, you’re just sad, that’s all,” and went upstairs to see his mom. Nate freaked out.
She
kissed
him,
he thought, but then the way she said “no,” he wasn’t sure. He was mortified. He’d kissed his mom’s best friend! What a loser. But . . . that whole month was murky in his mind. He avoided her after that. He hid in his room whenever she came over, and after a while everything felt normal again. Like it had all just been one of those dreams that felt really real.

But last September it all started again. Mom had guilt-tripped Nate into going to one of Danny’s soccer games. “Do you know how many of your hockey games he’s gone to? This is something he does well, and we need to support him in it.” So Nate went and got stuck sitting with Mom and all these dumb moms of fifth-graders. He couldn’t find anybody he knew to sit with. He was just trying to watch the game, and Mrs. Kendrick showed up.

All these moms called her up to sit with them. She was carrying this little video camera like she always did and still had on white surgical scrubs and a doctor’s jacket on top of a pink sweater. She wore pink a lot. It looked good on her. But, really, anything would. For a mom she was pretty hot. Really small and fit, in a lean-cat scrappy sort of way. You could tell she worked out. She looked like she just
had
worked out. Her face was all flushed, and her blond hair was pinned up, but all these strands of it had fallen out and were floating around her face. Nate couldn’t help but think that’s what her just-got-laid face would look like.

“We didn’t think you’d make it,” Nate’s mom said to her.

“Me neither,” she said. “Ten minutes before I was supposed to get off, the ER sent up a woman in labor. I just helped deliver a healthy, eight-pound baby girl.”

For Christ’s sake. All the moms oohed and aahed. Mrs. Kendrick ended up sitting between Nate and his mom. She took off her jacket. That pink sweater was sleeveless, and her arms and shoulders were really ripped and muscled, like she lifted weights. She turned to look at Nate and held contact with her weird, glittery eyes. Heat zoomed across Nate’s face.

“How’ve you been, Nate?”

That was an innocent question, right? But the
way
she asked it made Nate think his face was going to burst into flames. All he could think of was her kissing him. “Okay,” he said, but his voice came out all geeky. He cleared his throat and managed to say, “Jordan’s playing great,” sounding more like himself.

“Oh, good.”

The other women all started telling stupid stories about labor and babies being born. Mrs. Kendrick at least paid attention to the game, filming it with her camera. She complimented Danny’s playing, but Nate knew she was only being nice to his mom.

Sitting next to her jolt-wired him with adrenaline. He tried to watch the game, but he couldn’t focus. When he saw Mowaza come into the stands and sit below them, Nate fled.

“Hey, Nate, my man,” Mowaza said. “Thought I was stuck here alone.”

“Don’t complain. I was stuck with a bunch of women talking about labor pains and episiotomies.”

“Epizza-whats?”

“Don’t ask.”

Mowaza laughed and scooted his paper tub of fries toward Nate. They sat there, leaning their elbows on the bleachers behind them and eating the fries.

Nate felt Mrs. Kendrick behind him. Was he just freaking out? She was someone’s
mom.
He waited until Jordan made a decent play, then turned to see what she was doing.

She ducked her head and looked away, lowering her camera. She’d been watching him, filming him. Then she looked back and smiled. A shy, “you caught me” kind of smile. Nate couldn’t see her eyes behind her shades. He whipped back around to face the field.

“You got any smokes?” he asked Mowaza. “I’m needing one in a big, bad way.”

“Is the pope Catholic? Let’s take a field trip.”

In the bathroom, under the stands, Nate shared a quick cigarette with Mowaza and thought about telling him but didn’t. It couldn’t really be what he thought, right?

When they left the restroom, Mowaza got in line for a hot dog, and Nate saw Mrs. Kendrick at the end of the rampway that led to the bleachers. She had put her white jacket back on and was watching him. Had she
followed
him?

She lifted her chin and mouthed, “C’mere.” Nate couldn’t read her expression. Shit, was he in trouble? Did she know they’d been smoking?

She walked out of the stadium and out onto the street. She never looked back at him but walked about a hundred yards and sat down on a curb between two parked cars.

What the hell? He caught up and stood behind her. “Mrs. Kendrick?”

She sat with her knees to her chest. She patted the space beside her. “Sit down. I need to talk to you.”

So he sat. They were in this really small space between the cars, and it meant Nate had to touch her. Their legs were pressed side to side. His heart pounded, and he knew that his face was red. “W-what’s up?”

She smiled at him, and her eyes had something playful, almost mocking in them. Nate had no idea what was going on, but he was aware he had become unbelievably sweaty.

“How’s your mom doing?”

Nate blinked. “What?”

“How is she holding up? Does she seem all right to you?”

You are an idiot!
his brain screamed. Here he thought the woman had been coming on to him. Yeah, right. Fat chance, bozo. “What do you mean? Like . . .”

Mrs. Kendrick’s face changed, and she said, really soft and gentle, “Since your dad died, Nate.” She lifted up her hand and moved his hair out of his eyes. She left her hand there on his head.
She is touching me,
was all Nate’s brain could hold. Her fingers were in his hair, just above his left ear. Their heads were so close he smelled her mint chewing gum. “Nate?”

Shit. He’d forgotten she’d asked him a question. “I . . . I, um, I think she’s okay now. You know, she’s doing . . . all right.” He sounded like a moron. And his face still burned.

“Does she have any friends?”

She kind of stroked his hair, and his head filled with her perfume. Somebody walked by, and he wanted to glance up, but he didn’t want to move her hand. They were hidden there, down between the cars. That is, if his own damn heartbeat didn’t give them away—in his ears it sounded like an amplified drum.

“Um . . . well, yeah . . . sure. . . .”

“Besides me?”

Was she dissing his mom? But her eyes looked soft and full of concern. “I worry,” she said, “that she’s gotten isolated. That she doesn’t have anyone as support.”

Nate was dying to wipe the sweat off his upper lip but couldn’t move. Even if Mrs. Kendrick was right, why was she telling
him
? What was he supposed to do about it?

He cleared his throat. “She’s friends with Mrs. Ripley.”

Mrs. Kendrick laughed and kind of thumped him on the head like he’d made a joke.

“No, really. I know she’s a little weird, but my mom really likes her. They talk a lot.”

Mrs. Kendrick smirked and said, “Anyone else?” She started stroking his hair again. Nate felt a little pissed off, like she thought his mom was a loser or something. But not pissed off enough to want her to stop touching him.

“Sure. She goes running with Ethan Whitacre’s mom.”

Mrs. Kendrick’s hand stopped moving. “Gwinn Whitacre? That cop’s wife?”

“Yeah.” Ethan’s dad was an Oakhaven officer.

“But Gwinn works for your mom. That’s different.”

“Yeah, but they go to movies and stuff.”

She drew her hand away. “Really? A lot?”

“Yeah, they went out just last Thursday. I had to stay home with Danny.”

Something new shone in Mrs. Kendrick’s eyes. Nate felt like he was talking to the girls at school and thought of the way they’d sulk if their friends didn’t save seats for them in the cafeteria. Hadn’t she
wanted
his mom to have friends?

“Remember last summer when my grandma came to visit? Grandma stayed with us while Mom went to Cincinnati with Mrs. Whitacre for a day. They stayed in some hotel and did all that spa stuff—massages and nail stuff and all that.” G.G. had to really push Mom to go, but Nate decided not to say that.

Mrs. Kendrick stared straight ahead. He felt like he’d answered wrong on a test.

“I think you’re her closest friend, though,” he said, embarrassed at how eager to please he sounded.

She looked into his eyes. Their mouths were inches apart. “Nate?”

The way her mouth moved saying his name hypnotized him. He loved the way her teeth came together, parted, then came together again. He nodded at her, his eyes on her mouth, wanting her to say his name again. He thought she was going to ask him something, but she didn’t. She just kept looking at him. His brain had melted, and he wanted to ask her, ask her about that time in his kitchen two years ago. “Do . . . do you remember . . . ?”

Mrs. Kendrick touched his mouth with a finger, then moved her lips to his. Even as his brain screamed,
What the hell are you doing?
Nate opened his lips for this kiss. His ears were on hyperalert for someone walking by, but only for a few seconds before she kissed him too drunk to care. Damn. Mackenzie didn’t kiss like that. When Mrs. Kendrick stopped, she smiled and touched his mouth again.

She stood up, but Nate couldn’t make his legs work.

She reached into her pocket and brought out a pinwheel mint. “Your mother would be devastated to know you were smoking. Here.” She pressed the mint into his sweaty hand, then took out the video camera from her jacket pocket and looked down at him through it. What the hell? He blinked at the red recording light. “You’re sweet,” she said, and walked back into the stadium. Nate thought he might melt into the curb. She
kissed
him.

He’d tried to tell Mowaza, but Mo had laughed and said, “You wish! You’re so full of shit.” And it did seem like that. That kiss, like the first one, eventually seemed like something Nate had imagined so vividly he’d convinced himself it was real. But every time he decided that it was all in his head, Mrs. Kendrick would do something to freak him out again.

Like she brought Jordan to the high-school hockey games and always hung around afterward to talk to him. One night she’d pressed her hand on Nate’s chest when she said, “Good game,” and let it stay there awhile, but no one else seemed to notice a thing. Not even Jordan, who conveniently watched the Zamboni clean up the ice.

Once, right upstairs, in their own kitchen, while Mom talked to someone on the phone about a wedding cake, Mrs. Kendrick had said to him, “You should come over sometime.”

And Nate had looked at his mom, standing two yards away on the phone. He’d looked at Mrs. Kendrick and that way her eyes laughed. He asked, with a challenge in his voice, “What for?”

Mrs. Kendrick had smiled and said, “We have a pool. A trampoline. Tennis court. Lots to do. Come over anytime.”

It made him crazy. He even dreamed about her. The sort of dreams he normally loved, but when they featured her, he woke up feeling lucky to still have all his parts.

Nate stood and picked up Klezmer’s toy ball, just as the rabbit caught up to it. Klezmer wheezed this funny sigh and flopped down on his side. He made Nate laugh. “Sorry, buddy.” Nate hefted him up and held his velvet-pillow fur against his cheek for a second before he lowered the rabbit back into his hutch.

Poor Jordan Kendrick. Nate figured he’d need drugs, too, if Mrs. Kendrick were his mom. He felt sorry for that weird, skinny kid. Nate wouldn’t want to piss that woman off. She seemed dangerous enough when she liked you.

Chapter Four
Sarah

S
arah stood in her kitchen and stared at the phone. She’d just called the hospital, but they said that Jordan Kendrick was no longer a patient there. What should she do? Why didn’t Courtney call her? Every time the phone rang last night, Sarah had prayed for it to be word from Courtney, but it was always Mackenzie for Nate.

Jordan’s green backpack sat waiting by the back door. The backpack gave her a reason to go over to the house. She could return the backpack and leave quickly if she sensed she was intruding. Plus, she honestly needed to find out about the party tonight. Did they still want her to cook? She couldn’t imagine they’d be in an entertaining mood.