Wait for Me (8 page)

“The Carey Foundation, as you well know, is overextended as it is. I’m firmly committed to asking the trustees to reevaluate several of our grants at the next meeting. We can’t possibly take on anyone new at this time.”

“But we can take on some stupid birds in South America?” he asked, vexed that when he’d finally found a worthy cause of his own, the funds in the foundation he’d been managing most of his adult life were already allocated elsewhere.

“Don’t be silly, dear, you know as well as I do that we can’t use the foundation money on anything but people-related concerns. You don’t remember grandfather Edgar, of course, but he was adamant on the point. I think it had something to do with the time the dogcatcher came through and picked up three of his dogs and put them to sleep before he could bail them out. He was furious about that for years.”

“So how are you supporting your birds?”

“Oh, this is another group entirely, dear. I’m helping Marsha Levenson with this one, you know how she is...”

She went on to tell him in detail, but he only half listened. Hell, he didn’t need a damned foundation to support the Paulson Clinic. He could do it himself. If they had more money, they could pay better wages and Holly could move to a nicer neighborhood... unless they spent the money on food and medical care.

He was beginning to see that there was more to being charitable than simply writing a check.

While Oliver had inherited the greater portion of his wealth, Holly had to work for hers. And while most of the Carey legacy was tied up in banking, Holly hated banks with a passion.

Stopping for the mail she’d forgotten to pick up the day before, she pulled another overdrawn notice from her mailbox—her third in a week—and fought a sick, smothering feeling as she climbed the stairs to her apartment.

Money. Why was it always money?

She put the key in the lock and smiled as she recalled the art auction and the way she had kept raising Lena Vochec’s bid and glancing at her with a too-sweet smile to get her to top it. It was a good thing Lena hated to lose. It would have been terribly embarrassing to have to admit to several hundred people that her savings account was in even worse shape than her checking account. It had no shape at all, in fact.

Well, she’d been bluffing people like Lena Vochec for years. Loan officers. Bank officials. Foundation directors. And she was good at it. No sense giving up something she excelled at just because it was a little dishonest, she thought, tossing the overdrawn notice into a drawer with the others.

It was only money, after all, and there was no point in letting it get to her, when she’d be walking in the park with an eat-’em-alive hunk of a man in less than an hour. She smiled. It had started to rain already.

Weekends were long anyway. People who were out looking for work during the week brought all their problems to the clinic on Saturday—and stood in line till Sunday, it seemed. But this had been an especially long two days for her.

Oliver had been on her mind like a brain tumor. The sound of his laughter, the sudden catch in his voice, the tiny crescent-shaped scar on the back of his hand...

There was a knock at her door.

“You know, you’re pretty creepy yourself,” she said, pulling the door open without checking to see who it was first, knowing as well as she knew her own face that he’d be standing there. “I was just thinking about you.”

“You were?” He was pleased. Well, more than pleased. He wanted to rip her clothes off and bury himself so deep inside her that parts of him would never know daylight again.

“I was wondering if you’d bring an umbrella.”

“Oh. No. I didn’t even think about it,” he said, at a loss. “I guess I should have. We can stop someplace and buy one.”

“Absolutely not. Why go to the park when you know it’s going to rain, just to stand under an umbrella?”

Why go at all? he wanted to know, but didn’t ask. He’d been so eager to see her, he’d arrived thirty minutes early. Another first. Maybe she wouldn’t notice.

They teetered in the doorway, wanting to kiss hello, wondering if they should shake hands, deciding it might be best to delay any physical contact.

“Come in and sit for a minute,” she said. “I want to change clothes.”

Why? he wondered. She’d be soaked to the bone in five minutes.

Her apartment seemed to have shrunk since his last visit. He could spit from one end to the other. It was wallpapered, had freshly painted trim, and was neat and cheery, but it gave “efficiency apartment” new meaning. She could cook breakfast, brush her teeth, and make the bed in three easy steps. And why hadn’t he noticed before that there was no bedroom, he speculated, pondering the couch, trusting it would fold out into a bed. A one-room apartment with a kitchen and bath. Oakland wasn’t any different than any other town. There were places to live, and then there were places to live... but this wasn’t one of them.

Holly, on the other hand, didn’t think of it as all
that
terrible a place. She knew most everyone in her building and was on saluting terms with several of the merchants and a few of the people across the street. She liked to call it a neighborhood with potential—for both harmony and discord.

“I’m glad you came early,” she called from the bathroom. He rolled his eyes. She’d noticed. “I’ve been dying to ask if you really asked Clare Hilendorfer if her costume the other night was a bun in the oven?”

He grimaced.

“Well, she was standing there with those cooking mitt things on both hands and she did look pregnant. I didn’t see the little handle she was holding until it was too late.”

“And by then she really was too hot to handle, huh?” she asked, stepping back into the room, grinning.

“She was... upset. I apologized, but the damage was done.”

“She almost laughed about it yesterday.”

“You went to St. Augustine’s yesterday? I thought you had to work yesterday.”

“I did go to work. The hospital’s on my way home, so I stop in to visit a lot. Thursdays I’m there all day. Are you ready to go?”

The weather in Oakland was remarkably different from that of San Francisco in the summertime. Warmer, drier, no fog. In winter the differences were less noticeable—they were both a little cooler and wetter.

Holly had put on a bulky knit sweater and blue jeans that reminded Oliver of the wallpaper in her apartment—old, clean, and stuck tight to the walls. She had one of those rear ends that were almost impossible not to reach out and smack.

“Ow,” she cried, startled, rubbing her tush as she turned to him. “What was that for?”

“It was a vote of understanding for Barry Paulson,” he said, looking straight ahead into the rain as he passed her on the sidewalk.

“Who’s Barry Paulson?”

“A man with two shirts and no self-control,” he answered cryptically, hoping that poor Barry was giving up everything he owned for a fanny as nice as Holly’s. He stepped to the curb to open the door of his car. “I have absolutely no respect for him.”

She was frowning at him in confusion, then noticed the open door.

“Oh, no. We’ll ruin your upholstery with our wet clothes. There’s a BART station two blocks down, and it’ll take us right to the park.”

He looked up and down the street in both directions and saw plenty of other cars. But in their midst his late-model Lincoln looked like a shiny invitation to grand theft auto. Why hadn’t he brought his driver?

“Okay,” he said with misgivings. He snatched a brown paper bag from the front seat. He locked the doors and set the alarm.

Strange... When she sidled up to him, slipping her hand into his, he didn’t once look back at his car.

“Isn’t this great?” she asked, tipping her face to the downpour. It was running down his raincoat in streamlets. His hair was plastered to his head, his face was wet, and he had to keep blinking to see. It was pretty great all right. But only because the raindrops sparkled in her eyelashes and lingered dewy-fresh on her skin, calling him to sip away every drop to quench his thirst. She pushed her dark hair up and away from her face. He wondered if he’d ever known anything as uniquely and naturally beautiful as Holly Loftin. “There’s nothing like a good rain to wash away your troubles,” she said.

“Do you have troubles?”

“Who, me?” she asked, thinking of her drawer full of bills and overdrawn bank slips. “Troubles are for people who think too much, but never think to change anything.”

They talked about Oakland on the way to the park—after a small show of getting him his own transit pass.

“After school I took some time off; there were...” she hesitated briefly “...some things I’d been wanting to do for a long time. I started looking around San Francisco, and then I got sidetracked to Oakland. I found someone here that I didn’t think I could leave. So I stayed. I got a job and a place to live and started a life here. And I like it. I like the town and I like the people. I’m comfortable here.”

Only a fool would have assumed that there hadn’t been any other men in her life—and Oliver was no fool. He wasn’t even disappointed. But he felt a certain blackness in his heart for the person who’d had the power to make her give up her home and family to live in a strange town, alone, fending for herself.

“Have you been anywhere else?” he asked. “Have you done much traveling?”

The answer was no, and the rest of the trip was taken up with places she dreamed of seeing and the places he’d already seen.

The rain drizzled as they ambled through the children’s park and the picnic area and stood on the banks of the lake watching a few die-hard sailors braving the wind and waves. Their conversation bounced from hither to thither, but nowhere near yawn. They laughed and teased and fed whole wheat bread from his brown paper bag to the squawking mallards and a few wayward Canadian honkers.

“I wasn’t sure if they’d prefer white or dark bread. So I brought both,” he explained.

“Let’s keep ’em healthy and feed them the dark. What are you going to do with the other loaf?”

He shrugged. He hadn’t thought about it. Throw it away? Leave it on a bench for someone else to feed to the ducks?

“Can I have it?”

“Sure,” he said, handing her the bag, concern biting at his mind. Couldn’t she afford food?

“The Paulson Clinic thanks you,” she said with a gracious smile. “Even leftover duck food is a welcome sight.”

Suddenly he was feeling too fat, too well fed.

“I wish it were a truckload of bread.”

“So do I.”

The best part of the afternoon, however, were the long, contented moments of silence. Whole segments of time when being male or female, rich or poor, blue blood or foster child didn’t matter. Precious pieces of time when it was enough to simply be and be together.

It was during one such moment when Holly chanced to glance at Oliver. She liked looking at him. He was certainly handsome, but it was his confidence and quiet intelligence that appealed to her most. It made her feel safe.

There wasn’t a woman alive, or a man for that matter, who didn’t want to feel that the person they were with was capable of protecting them, of taking care of them, of caring for them. Being the captain of one’s own ship was frightening and lonely sometimes. A safe harbor and solid land were always a comforting sight. Oliver was a comforting sight.

He was feeling safe and comfortable, too, she noted. It made her happy and sad at once to see that he felt free to be himself in her presence, that he didn’t think he needed to be constantly in good cheer for her. But it was a shame to see that he had that isolated and lonely look on his face again, the one he got when his guard was down; when he didn’t think anyone would notice; when he didn’t think anyone would care.

“What was he like?” she asked softly.

He chuckled and shook his head. When he looked at her, his expression had changed to one of futile acceptance.

“He was a good man,” he said, not bothering to pretend that he didn’t know who she was asking about. Obviously, she’d been diddling with his thoughts again. “Born in the wrong century, but a good man.”

“What was he like?” she asked again.

“He wrote poetry,” he said, sounding almost as if he didn’t approve of it. He turned and walked slowly along the shore, away from the ducks and geese. “He wore a bow tie every day for as long as I knew him, and he never once raised his voice to me.”

Holly’s brows rose. At first she thought these were strange things to recall about a loved one. Stranger still, that Oliver didn’t sound as if they were cherished memories. But then she remembered Marie’s husband, Roberto, and smiled. He always wore long-sleeved white shirts and rolled the cuffs up to his elbows. And when he spoke, his voice could be heard in every corner of the big old house on Chambrey Street.

“What sort of poetry did he write?” she asked, thinking it a good place to start. Oliver needed to talk about his father. It didn’t really matter about what, he simply needed to get started.

“Crap mostly,” he said, surprising her. “Stuff about loyalty and truth and loving a son and springtime and fulfilling your own destiny.”

“Oliver?” she broke in, unable to connect the hostility in his voice with the grief in his eyes.

“I hated that stuff,” he went on. “I used to think he was the biggest wimp that ever walked the earth. A sissy. And he was old. Close to fifty when I was born. I used to think it was because he was so weird that no woman would marry him before he met my mother, and that she had been duped, tricked somehow into having his child. Later I was a little more cynical about it. I figured that it probably took him fifty years to figure out how to get it up.”

His mouth closed on his bitterness, forming a slim, angry line. He stopped and looked out over the lake. She watched his chest heave with heated emotions. He was silent for a few minutes. She wasn’t sure of what to say or do and took her cue from him. Finally his lids lowered over his eyes, as if blocking out some terrible scene, and then he looked at her as if he’d forgotten she was there.

“He wasn’t around much when I was young. He was there but not around. He was like this kindly old gentleman who lived with us. Gentle, quiet, off in a world of his own. I didn’t know what he did all day when he went off to the office. I didn’t know what he did all evening in his study. He never offered to share his life with me, and I didn’t care enough to ask.” He started walking again. “My uncle Max turned up at a pivotal time in my life. I was almost eight and my mother had recently died and... I guess I was sort of lost.” He looked down at his shoes. “Soft things and nice smells always make me think of her, but I don’t really remember much about her,” he said as an aside. “Anyway, Max George had married Elizabeth a few years earlier, and when I might have turned to the kindly old gentleman who was my father for comfort and companionship, Max showed up. He and Elizabeth moved in with us. Johanna came, too, but she was away at school most of the time. At the time, I thought they came to live with us because my father didn’t want to have to take care of me, but I later found out it was because they were broke and had nowhere else to go. And it never occurred to me that I could have been sent away to school like Johanna if my father had wanted me out of his hair.”