Whatever It Takes (19 page)

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Authors: Gwynne Forster

BOOK: Whatever It Takes
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However, Lacette's bubble had just begun to form.
Thank goodness this dress doesn't wrinkle or I'd have to go back to Aunt Nan's and iron it.
She shook it out and hung it in the closet. “Tomorrow, I'm getting an iron and ironing board,” she said to herself.
Douglas rang her doorbell at precisely six o'clock. “You look lovely,” he said, his gaze perusing her in the electric blue silk dinner suit.
“Thanks. If we don't have far to walk, I'll just throw this woolen wrap around my shoulders. I notice you're not wearing a coat.” She showed him the long black cashmere shawl that was a gift from her gramma.
“That ought to do it. Couldn't be less than fifty degrees out, and the restaurant is around the corner from the Weinberg Center. You said you like crab cakes, and Leone's restaurant serves very nice ones.”
After she locked the door, he tried it. “I don't know when I last had a theater date,” he said. “If I pass there around eight o'clock in the evening and see that they have something I like, I buy a ticket and go in. I've been looking forward to this ever since I left you this morning.”
“Me, too.”
I could definitely get used to being with this man,
she thought later as he drove her home.
But he's too perfect,
her mind jeered. Something has to be out of order. She had sought opportunities to ask him if he had ever married, but none arose. “What the heck?” she said to herself, “nothing beats a trial but a failure.”
When he brought her home later, she gave him her door key, and he opened the door, stepped into the small foyer with her and handed the key back to her. “Can we do this on a regular basis?” he asked her. “I want to spend some time with you.”
“I'd like that. I'd offer you some coffee, but I don't have a coffeepot yet. I only learned this week that the house was ready for me to move in. Maybe next time.” She stared at her feet, waiting for his next move, and when there was none, she looked up and saw adoration shining in his eyes, but immediately, his eyelids dropped, hooding them.
“Douglas, I want to ask you something, but I want you to know that my behavior won't be predicated on your answer.”
He took her hand and held it loosely. “What is it? If I know the answer, I'll be glad to tell you.”
She looked steadily into his face. “You told me you weren't married, and I believe you. Have you ever been?”
“Yes. I'm a widower, and I have a nine-year-old son. Right now, he's with my parents, but he'll be with me as soon as school is out this summer. Does that bother you?”
She shook her head. “No, it doesn't. It hasn't made sense to me that a man like you never married. Women are smarter than that.”
“Thanks for that nice compliment. I'd been trying to find the right time to tell you this. My son is dear to me, Lacette, and he's one of the reasons why I'm careful about the women I get involved with. You know what I'm saying?”
“Yes, I do. I'd like to meet him, if and when you think it's proper. Good night.”
He leaned forward and brushed her lips with his own. “I want more that that,” he said, staring down into her face, a face that she knew was the picture of surprise and feeling, “but as I said, I'm a patient man. Good night.”
She locked the door, eager to spend the first night in her house.
So he was a widower with a nine-year-old son.
She pondered that as she strolled through the nearly empty house wondering how long he'd been alone.
The dining room table goes right here near the window. Am I going to like his son? And suppose he doesn't like me. No, I'll put the table in the center of the dining room the way everyone else does. No, not in the center of the room. I'd like to see the fireplace while I eat. Did his wife love him? Oh, Lord. Suppose he's still in love with her.
She went into the kitchen, sat on the counter stool and gazed at the windows.
Yellow curtains against the gray marble counters and chrome fixtures would create a charming ambiance.
What was causing the dizziness in her head, and why did she feel as if she would float right out of that open window? She went upstairs to her antique gold and violet colored bedroom, undressed and went to bed. Throughout the night, he brushed her lips with his own time after time.
At seven the next morning, Lacette got into her car and drove to the nearest supermarket for a coffeepot, coffee, and food for the day. She discovered that she liked her world while it rested, dormant, with little or no traffic—human or otherwise—and with air that the evergreen trees and brisk wind had cleaned during the night. On her way back home, she turned into All Saints Street and slowed down when she passed the Mountain City Elks Lodge. She nurtured a fondness for the place, not because of what it was then, but what it was during the 1920s—a fifteen-bed hospital for African Americans who, because of their color, were denied service in the Frederick City hospital.
“Sometimes, I get sick thinking of the past,” she said aloud. “I don't know how our ancestors bore it.” She voiced that sentiment to Douglas when he arrived around ten o'clock to help her unpack.
“They didn't have an acceptable choice.”
They sat on the floor assembling a white, four-foot metal shelf on which she planned to store vegetables, onions and other root vegetables that didn't require refrigeration, and she marveled at the smoothness with which they worked together and that she felt at ease with him.
“How long have you been alone? I mean widowed.”
“Three years. My son wasn't quite six when Emily died. She had been sick for several years. It was a terrible thing to witness a person's gradual deterioration and know you couldn't do anything to help.”
“I'm sorry, Douglas.” She reached out and gripped his wrist. “I'm terribly sorry.”
His gaze seemed to penetrate her, to see into her mind and her heart. “Yes. I can see that. Thank you, but I've worked my way out of it. I don't feel that pain any longer. It's in the past.”
“How can that be? You have her son, the child she gave you.”
“I said I no longer feel the pain of her loss. In the end, my love for her was that of a brother for a dear sister. I had long since buried the carnality of it. I had to, because she was unable to respond, but I remained faithful to her.”
Without thinking what she did, she rose up on her knees, leaned over and kissed his cheek. “I think you may be an exceptional man. I'm not sure, but I think so.”
He stared at her for a second before letting a loud laugh float out of him. “So I still have a way to go with you. Is that it?” A grin floated over his face. “Anyhow, I appreciate that almost compliment. That kiss, too.”
He put the shelf in the kitchen beneath the window. “Anything else you want me to do?”
“Nothing that I can think of,” she said as she leaned against the stove, admiring their handiwork.
“Well, I'll have to change that. How about riding out to Gettysburg with me this afternoon? It's warm for late February. We could picnic . . . whatever.”
She reflected upon the double meaning he'd given to her words, wondering what he'd do to influence her need of him. “Sounds interesting. I haven't been there since I went with my Girl Scout club.”
He walked toward the front door, holding her hand. “Then we'll go. I'll be by around two.”
She looked at him, hoping that he didn't see her nervousness. How could a man make her weak in the knees? She cloaked her feeling beneath a stern facial expression. “Okay.”
“What's the matter? A minute ago, you were warm and . . . hell, you were sweet. What happened?”
“Would you get out of here, so I can put these things away?” She reached up and grazed his left cheek with the back of her hand. “See you at two.”
He stood there for a minute, opened the door and left.
“I'll have to be careful with this man,” she told herself, “and I'd feel a lot better about him and about me if I hadn't let my libido drag me into bed with Jefferson Smith. I hate myself for doing that. He was all skill and no feeling. I don't care what he said when he left; he used me, and I helped him do it.”
 
 
On the evening of that day, while Lacette bathed in contentment over the beginning of what appeared to be a romantic relationship with Douglas Rawlins, Kellie was taking a look at her life. And she didn't like what she saw. She paced the floor of the parsonage's upstairs hallway furiously rubbing the skin of her upper arms. She had switched on nearly every light in the house, but the brightness did nothing to dispel her loneliness. She couldn't say that she missed her father or that she regretted Lacette's having left home. She understood her problem, knew that her loneliness stemmed from her failure to move ahead in life. Her father hadn't allowed the setback of his broken marriage or the circumstances that precipitated it stop him in his tracks. He'd moved on. And Cynthia was taking her medicine with more grace than anyone would have expected.
Lacette had a new home and was about to open her own business, and from appearances that morning, she also had Douglas Rawlins. What did
she
have? Wasn't she the more beautiful, the more talented and the more popular of the two of them? She kicked the frayed Kerman carpet until her right big toe smarted from the punishment she gave it.
Glancing at her watch, she saw that it was eleven-thirty and wondered who she could call. She didn't have Lacette's phone number, and if she'd had it she doubted she'd use it. She didn't want to talk with her auntie, and besides, she was probably asleep. While she pondered, the telephone rang and she ran for it with such speed that she stumbled and had to grab the top of the banister for support.
“Hello,” she said, panting for breath.
“Hey, babe. I'm parked around the corner in front of the church.” Her stomach clenched, and she leaned against the telephone table, hoping the feeling would pass, hoping she could outwit demon desire.
“You could have awakened my mother. You shouldn't call me so late. I'm sorry I gave you my telephone number.”
“I saw your mother in Tad's less than ten minutes ago.”
“I don't believe you.”
“You telling me I'm lying? She had on a shiny green dress. Right?”
What was her mother doing hanging out in Tad's bar? “Yeah. I've had a long day, Hal. Some other night.”
Some part of the floor, laid in at least seventy years earlier, creaked. She whirled around, waiting for she didn't know what. When she didn't hear the creaking again, she shrugged it off as the state of her nerves. Annoyed at herself for wanting him and at him for calling her, she balled up the fist of her left hand and pounded the table.
“What was that?” Hal asked.
“Nothing. I'm not going to meet you.”
“Sure you are. You want what I got, and you want to get back into that house so you can find whatever you been looking for. No woman drops me, babe. You'll hang with me till I'm ready for you to go. Aw, come on, babe. Don't you want me to make all hell break loose inside of you? This time, I'll give you something I haven't given you before. Guaranteed to drive you straight out of your mind. Hurry up before your mother comes home.”
“Ten minutes,” she said, kicking herself for her weakness. She put on a tight sweater with her jeans, added a jacket and a pair of tennis shoes, and made it down the stairs and around the corner without encountering her mother or anyone she knew. She slid into the van and closed the door.
“Give me a chance to breathe,” she said when his hand went to her breast. “Where're you taking me? I'm not going back to—”
“I found us a nice place, and if you know anybody there, it'll be because you've been there before.”
When he stopped in front of a motel in New Market, she grabbed the steering wheel. “Are you crazy, Hal? My daddy lives here.” She slapped her hand over her mouth. “I mean—”
He backed up and sped off to the highway. “If your mother and your old man split up, it's just what most married people eventually do. Do you think I wouldn't know that if she was hanging around Tad's, your old man wasn't in the picture? Don't be so uptight about everything.”
“All right. Why can't we go to your place?”
“Look. I live with my old man, and he's a deacon in your daddy's church.” He drove off the highway and into a group of trees and brush. “This'll have to do for tonight. I'll figure something out.”
“Wait a minute. I'm not . . .”
But one hand pulled her sweater over her head, baring her breasts for his mouth, and the fingers of his other hand were crawling up her thigh.

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