Chapter Five
Croft slid a savory-looking roast into the oven with mitted hands. A week had passed since my talk with the professor, and now I wanted to ask Croft about some things. I needed a favor, too, and hoped he wouldn’t be too merciless.
“There! Would you like a torte of some sort for dessert? Or are you just going to stick with popcorn?”
“Nah. I didn’t get a movie for tonight.”
“Hmmph. That’s four nights in a row, Jack. You’re beginning to worry me.” He grinned.
“Croft, I wanted to know… What was my mom like?”
Croft gazed at me for a minute, and then pulled a chair away from the table to sit down across from me. “She was sweet,” he said slowly. “Sweet and lovely and honest. She was an amazing woman.”
“You knew her well?”
He thought about it, and then shook his head. “Not as a peer. I worked for your parents then, but at the company, so I saw her mostly when they needed me on weekends. They lived in Concord, as you know, and always had a ton of people over: dinner parties, houseguests, her family. When I finished whatever it was I was there for, I always seemed to end up helping her out in the kitchen. She was a decent cook, but terrible with any dishes that required either spices or improvisation. At first, she would ask me to help prepare the salad or a dessert, but after a while we switched, and I would do the main course and the side dishes while she sliced tomatoes and cucumbers.”
I looked down at the table. “Was my dad different back then? Happier, maybe?”
Croft hesitated in answering again, and I looked back up at him. I could sense his mind treading delicately among the many ways he could answer that.
“Yes,” he finally said. “He was different. And happier. When your mother passed away, it was as if she took a huge part of him with her. He sold the house in Concord, moved up here to Marblehead. He took three months off from the company – I had already begun to work for him personally, and he helped to get both you and me settled – and then he began to request any assignment that would keep him away. Away from whatever would remind him of her. Boston, her relations, their old friends.” His eyes met mine. “And you, Jack.”
“Me?”
He nodded. “You’re just like her. Your looks, your eyes, your demeanor, your personality.” A wry smile lightened his serious expression. “Well, maybe not the sweet part I mentioned. But everything else.”
We both sat silently for a minute, listening to the kitchen clock tick off the seconds. A car splashed by in the street, the oven hummed steadily as it cooked the roast, Croft’s fingers drummed an absent pattern on the tabletop. I swallowed, and the sound seemed magnified in the too quiet room.
“I was wondering if you could drive me to school next Friday night.”
His fingers ceased their mindless beat. “Friday night?” I nodded. He looked pensive for a moment, and then the edges of his mouth turned just the slightest jot upward. “The dance,” he stated quietly. “Ralston’s Fall Formal.” I nodded yet again, and waited for the subtle riposte, the sly comment, the playful jab.
It didn’t arrive. “I’d be honored to,” he said evenly. “And Tilly? Will we be picking her up on the way?”
I stared at him. “Yes,” I eventually managed to say, and tried not to burst into tears as the love I felt for this man overwhelmed me in a powerful surge. I’d told him about Tilly, about our practically daily forays to Ladycakes, to Fort Sewall Park when the weather allowed, to Redd’s Pond with a parcel of sticky buns tucked in my backpack.
Croft smiled warmly at me. “I’m looking forward to meeting her, Jack.”
Chapter Six
The night of the formal was cold and still. Dark clouds had been threatening rain all day, but hadn’t delivered yet, for which I was thankful; the tuxedo Croft and I had bought was uncomfortable enough without the indignity of dampness.
“Ready?”
“Yep,” I replied, and jumped into the front seat of the Audi beside him. In my hands, I held a delicate corsage that Professor Schnabel had dropped by an hour before. “Enjoy your dance tonight, Jack,” he’d exhorted with a wink. “You, too,” I’d whispered back, smiling.
We drove up Washington past Abbot Hall, and then down the hill, passing Paulie’s and OneStop and Ladycakes to turn left onto Prospect. Tilly’s home was a quaint, narrow wood-sided house, painted the most delicate of blues. A spotlit American flag flew just off the porch; a glass lantern above the doorway provided genteel illumination.
I knocked twice, strongly. The door opened after a few seconds and she stood there, incredible and beautiful and glowing in an off-white, knee-length dress. Her hair was swept upwards, a pair of demure pearl earrings glinted in her ears, and the light makeup she had applied made her appear years older than when I had seen her just the day before.
“Oh, look,” she said with an entranced smile. I turned, and saw a few flakes of the season’s first snowfall drift past us.
“This is for you,” I said, turning back to her and removing the corsage from its plastic container. She helped me to pin it to her dress, guiding my stumbly fingers with a soft, patient hand.
I finally finished, and she looked into my eyes. “It’s perfect,” she said quietly.
And she was right. For the night, the dance, the corsage, the snow, and Tilly herself were all I could have wished for right then.
I promised her father she’d be back by eleven, gave her my arm to help her down the steps, and then escorted her to the car, where Croft was holding the back door open for her. And as I rounded the rear of the Audi before sliding in to sit beside her, he nodded his head to me across the snow-sprinkled moon roof.
“All right, boyo,” he said, a tender smile gracing his features. “All right.”
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