The Older Woman (7 page)

“Now what?” he said, because there was a car in Meehan’s driveway, one he recognized immediately. The boyfriend was back.

Doyle watched as the bagel guy walked purposefully across the patio to the back door, watched as he rang the doorbell, watched as he went inside. So.

That’s that, then.

Meehan must have been expecting him or she wouldn’t have let him come right into the house like that. The ease with which he made entry also suggested that she wanted him there. She must have changed her mind after all about letting him feel guilty.

Doyle sighed heavily. There was no point standing by the window staring at Meehan’s house like some horny teenage boy whose hormone-driven imagination didn’t even come close to his reality. He’d go downstairs and stare at it—in spite of the fact that whatever was going on over there was none of his business.

He took the army shrink’s advice and tried to identify the emotion he was feeling—the one that wasn’t total aggravation.

Or

lust.

Concern,
he decided after a moment.

He was definitely concerned, in spite of the fact that he had no doubt she could take care of herself. He just didn’t want that guy jerking Meehan around again.

But there was more to it than that, and he knew it. Yes, he was aggravated. Yes, he was concerned and on the high side lustful. But at the top of the list, incredibly, was…jealousy.

He was actually jealous, and where had
that
come from? Somehow his making that long, rainy and unwilling hike across the yard to see about her had translated into a certain sense of responsibility where she was concerned—like he had controlling interest in her welfare now.

Sir Galahad with a cane.

He’d come to her rescue—sort of. Now he felt responsible for her. Very

simple.

A distinct hazard for would-be Galahads everywhere.

He left his apartment and went painfully down the back stairs, the ultimate goal being pretty much the same as always—to get to the porch all in one piece. It was amazing to him that he could forget how much it was going to hurt from one time to the next. But then, if he could remember, he probably wouldn’t go—unless the place was on fire.

It took everything he had to keep moving. At one particularly painful point, he had to mentally call up his old drill sergeant.

“You will persevere—soldier,” he recited under his breath in a not-so-instant replay of his basic training days. “The thousands…and thousands who…have gone before…you…demand it! You will not ‘try’! You will do! Failure is not an option! Hooah!”

Hoo-ah!
Too easy!

He made it to the swing eventually, but he had the shakes. He was hot and sweaty—but upright. Once again his old drill sergeant would be proud. He wiped his face a couple of times on the underside of his T-shirt, wondering idly what ever happened to the son of a bitch. Still somewhere scaring the hell of recruits, he supposed.

The church ladies were all in the front parlor. The downstairs windows were up because of Mrs. Bee’s penchant for “natural” air-conditioning, and he could hear them plainly. They must have heard him, as well, because their voices dropped to whispers almost immediately. Whatever was going on in there, his arrival had put a crimp in it—

big time.

But he was still too unsteady to effect a strategic withdrawal. Mrs. Bee and the girls were just going to have to work around him for the time being. He sat there, trying to stretch out the pain in his legs and not swear. He couldn’t imagine what the church ladies could be doing that he shouldn’t know about. After a time they apparently forgot to whisper.

“Do you think he would?” somebody asked.

“Oh, for heaven’s sake, just ask him,” somebody else said.

“No!” at least three voices responded.

“What would people say? I’m telling you right now, this ain’t going to cause nothing but trouble and heartache,” a different voice said. “What if it’s not legal?”

“Well,

he’ll
know. I’m not afraid to ask him—”

“No,” he heard Mrs. Bee say. “
I’ll
ask him.”

He could hear the scraping of the dining room chairs Mrs. Bee would have dragged in for the women who couldn’t get up from low, upholstered couches anymore—

and then the mass exodus from the parlor. Before he could make a run for it, Mrs. Bee was at the screen door, clearly with a mission.

“Calvin,” she said in her schoolteacher voice.

“Yes, ma’am,” Doyle said, trying not to smile. Whatever it was, it was damned serious.

“I…we,” she said, indicating the four little old ladies behind her, “need a—” she made a circle in the air with one hand “—little favor.”

It took all of ten minutes for the cars to start arriving. The driveway was full, and one side of the street in front of the house.

The word was definitely out.

Doyle sat on the swing to recover from the mission, trying not to grin. He’d never heard such giggling. A sudden chorus of little-old lady squeals rose from the parlor, a good indication that the newest arrivals must have just been apprised of the situation.

“Oh, pooh,” somebody said. “I had titties every bit that good when I was that age.”

“Lula Mae!” several voices said.

“Well, I did!” Lula Mae insisted.

I better get out of here, Doyle thought, chuckling to himself. Somebody was going to end up embarrassed before this thing was all over, and more than likely it was going to be him.

He hobbled out into the backyard, eventually sitting down at the cement picnic table near the sagging grapevine—well out of the traffic pattern. A stand of pine trees grew along the edge of the property. He could smell them. Pine—and honey-suckle—and dry earth in need of rain.

He occupied himself by looking around.

At the sky.

At the wasps maneuvering in and out of the grape vine.

He didn’t look toward Meehan’s house, regardless of how easy it would have been to do so. Without warning, a sudden wave of longing washed over him—for what he wasn’t exactly sure.

For his old, precrash self?

For

Rita?

Maybe for Pop Doyle’s farm in Georgia—which was probably a parking lot by now.

He had been happy there when he was growing up. Until Pop died, it had been the one place he’d always wanted to come back to. He would arrive unannounced after every overseas tour of duty, loaded down with souvenirs and embellished stories of his military adventures abroad. The farm was where he had learned that working hard was a lot better than feeling sorry for himself and that some people would love him and some people wouldn’t, regardless of their blood ties—and there wasn’t a damn thing he could do about it.

His mind went briefly to his mother and his only sister, Nina, in Florida. It had been months since he’d talked to either one of them. Nina had surprised him by coming to see him in the hospital shortly after he’d been hurt—which only served as an indicator of how really bad off he was. No way would she have come if somebody hadn’t told her he was dying—and even then it was iffy.

His mother had called a few times while he was on Meehan’s ward—which was likely the result of somebody she knew asking her how her poor, multifractured, somewhat crispy paratrooper son was, and her realizing that, for the sake of appearances if nothing else, she ought to at least ask.

He couldn’t deny that he and his mother and sister essentially stayed out of each other’s way, but he no longer blamed them for what could only be described as a heartfelt indifference. He had been born late in his mother’s marriage, a change-of-life baby. The last thing she’d wanted was another kid, especially a rowdy male child, and her solution had been to dump him into his equally unwilling sister’s lap. Both women had had their own individual game plans for their lives, and come hell, high water or a surprise addition to the family, they’d stuck to them.

He’d gotten through it, though, essentially raising himself until he had a big enough run-in with the law to get sent to live with his Georgian grandparents—and he would be grateful to whoever had come up with that solution until his dying day. He finally had a place to belong, and Pop had taken the time to try to explain the women in his family as kindly as he could. “Them two wells is dirt dry, boy,” he said in another of his homespun correlations. “And you can keep going to them and going to them until hell freezes over—but you ain’t going to get what you need from neither one of them. And after so long a time, you begin to look like a damn fool for trying.”

If Calvin “Bugs” Doyle had been any good at all for Rita Warren, it had been in helping her see the truth of that principle when it came to her own careless family. Thanks to Pop, both of them were able to get a handle on things, to understand one simple truth: people are the way they are, and you can keep knocking yourself out trying to change them or you can move on. He was trying to do that right now—with her. Move

on.

He closed his eyes, feeling the summer heat rise up around him. He was still hot and sweaty.

And

tired.

Every now and then, enough of a breeze stirred to make the tall pine trees creak and sigh. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Maybe it would rain, he thought. And if it did, maybe he could sleep—a good sleep with no dreams and no pain. Wouldn’t that be something? He hadn’t slept like that since he’d crashed on the couch at Meehan’s house.

A small cracking sound made him open his eyes again. Meehan was coming through the hedge toward where he was sitting. The boyfriend stood waiting impatiently in the driveway next to his car, and he kept looking toward the street, as if he expected yet another little old lady to arrive, one who would have the audacity to park where she shouldn’t and box him in.

Meehan wasn’t all dressed up this time. She looked more like the old Meehan, her hair twisted up and caught in a big barrette, her clothes baggy and not showing off anything. He realized immediately that it didn’t matter. He had an excellent memory of what she looked like under them.

“Bugs,” she called with some alarm. “What’s wrong? Did something happen? Is Mrs. Bee okay?”

“Nothing…yes…and yes,” he said.

“Well, what?” she asked, looking over her shoulder at all the cars.

“I bought the church ladies a girlie magazine.”

“You

what!”

“You heard me,” he said.

“What kind of girlie magazine?”

“The

under-the-counter,

wrapped-in-plastic kind.”

“Why on earth did you do that?”

“Why? Because they made me, that’s why. One minute I’m sitting on the swing minding my own business—sort of—and the next minute Thelma and Louise is out of the motor pool and we’re all wheeling down the highway heading for the nearest dirty book store—and you can stop grinning about anytime now.”

She tried…but she didn’t make it. “Now wait. They
made
you go buy them a girlie magazine.”

“Correct.”

“Why?”

“Well…see…there’s this one church lady that’s a royal pain in the butt. She treats them all like bastards at the wedding and they’re way tired of it—”

“Pitty-Pat

McCall.”

“That would be her. Well, word got out some relative of Miss Pitty-Pat’s is in the magazine.”

“Posing,

you

mean?”

“Roger that,” he said, and Meehan laughed out loud.

“And they’re all in there looking at it?”

“That would be my guess.”

“Are you telling me the truth?” she asked with a suspicion that was certainly justified.

“You think I could make up something this wacky?”

“Actually, no,” she said, laughing again. “It just doesn’t sound like Mrs. Bee.”

“Yeah, well, we all have our limits.”

“So what are they going to do? Are they going to show Pitty-Pat the magazine?

Or at least tell her they’ve seen it?”

“Nah,” he said. He picked a pine needle off the picnic table, twirled it between his thumb and forefinger for a second, then tossed it aside. “Mrs. Bee’s got too much class for that. They took a vote. They’re not going to say anything one way or the other.”

“But the reign of terror is over, right?”

“Damn straight. So,” he said, glancing toward where the boyfriend stood waiting.

“What’s new?”

“Are you doing all right?” she asked instead of answering.

“Are you?” he countered.

“I will be,” she said.

“Me, too,” he assured her—when he was certain that neither one of them believed a word of it. In fact, he thought maybe they were both trying too hard.

“How have you been sleeping?” she asked next, watching him closely. He could practically see her morphing from Mrs. Bee’s concerned neighbor into the on-duty nurse.

“About like usual,” he said vaguely.

“Meaning?”

He didn’t answer. He looked into her eyes. She let him.

And let him.

Damn, Meehan, don’t do that.

He didn’t look away—couldn’t have if he’d wanted to. He could sense a kind of sadness in her, a wistfulness, a
need
he couldn’t identify, but one he knew she would never admit. It wasn’t sexual—and yet it was. It left him unsettled and—

“Katherine!” the boyfriend suddenly called.

“I’ve got to run,” she said, turning to go. “Tell Mrs. Bee to hang on to that magazine. I’m coming over to see it.”

“I’d wait until the crowd clears,” he called after her. “There are some bawdy old ladies in there. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve heard!”

She kept going, dismissing his remark with a laugh.

So what’s wrong, Meehan? he thought, watching her go.

Maybe he’d been mistaken, he suddenly decided. Maybe she was just tired or something. She wouldn’t take up with the boyfriend again if she didn’t want to. That was the bottom line here.

Doyle could see him staring in their direction,
wondering
—just the way he himself had wondered earlier when he spotted the silver car in Meehan’s drive.

“That’s that, then,” he said out loud when she got into the bagel guy’s car and they drove away.

He continued to sit at the picnic table for what seemed a long time. He felt rested now, up for the return trip.