* * *
“... So then Joey says to Edith, ‘I’m gonna go to Bayonne right now, ya know, get my mouthpiece, see, and then, ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom, da kid’s mine.’ I think that’s when Edith and I decided to be friends. I mean, when you spend five straight minutes laughing together, it’s rather difficult not to be friends.”
Jack stood in front of the wide-screen TV, holding a glass of ice water (his beverage of choice for the next twenty years, at least), and looked at his aunt. She was reclining on the base of her spine on his couch, her red high-top sneakers planted firmly on the coffee table. “He actually said that, Sadie? Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom?”
“Oh, my, yes, he said it. Ba-da-bing-ba-da-boom! And he did this rather elaborate sort of snapping of his fingers and banging of his fists on top of each other while he said it. I was very impressed. After all, this is a boy who couldn’t seem to learn the words and motions to ‘Ring Around the Rosie’ when he’d visit here as a child.”
“Can we get on with this?” Keely asked from her seat, also on the couch. Hell, everyone was on the couch: Sadie, Keely, Petra. All but Sweetness, who was in the matching chair, quality-testing it for its weight-bearing properties.
“There isn’t much more to tell, Keely,” Sadie said kindly. “We were tipped off by Jack’s lawyer, we were ready and waiting, and we handled everything beautifully. Edith’s a lovely woman, and smart, too. She saw through Joey instantly.”
“She was nice, wasn’t she?” Keely said, looking at Jack. “I mean, I thought we’d get the stereotypical social worker. No humor, no insights, no bending of stupid rules. She didn’t even take notes or have us fill out a single form.”
“And I was brilliant, of course,” Petra put in with her usual lack of shyness or inhibitions of any sort. “Although next time maybe I’ll carry a Bible instead of a book of poems. That ought to impress the hell out of her.”
Jack looked up at the ceiling. “Nope. No lightning strikes heading for you, Petra. Amazing. Still, Keely, I wouldn’t sit too close to her if I were you.”
Keely didn’t smile, but only looked at him, her head tipped to one side. “I think Jack is our weak link,” she said, turning to Sadie. “He just doesn’t know when to shut up, does he? I had to kick him when Edith wasn’t looking.”
“What? And yeah, why did you kick me? I was only showing her all that great stuff we bought for Candy. All those safety things for the electrical outlets, the cabinet doors, the table edges. And the knee pads. I thought she was very impressed with the knee pads.”
“Pathetic,” Petra declared, rolling her eyes.
“Pathetic how?” Jack asked, truly not understanding. He thought he’d done a good job, impressing Ms. Peters with how well he was providing for Candy.
Keely got up from the couch, walked over to him. “What Petra is trying to say, Jack, is that Ms. Peters is glad to know about the safety plugs and the knee pads, but what she’s assigned to do is check out how we feel about Candy, if we’re going to provide her with a loving home life, not just things. Joey can afford to buy her things.”
Jack rubbed at his forehead, still holding on to the remnants of his hangover headache. “So I goofed?”
“Not really, Jack,” Keely assured him. “She probably did need to see where Candy sleeps, how well you’re providing for her. But she’ll be coming back, unannounced, to see how we interact with Candy. So you can’t be so stiff, so formal. You’ve told me to relax around Candy, and now you’re doing your own stiff-as-a-statue impression. You have to just sort of pretend Ms. Peters isn’t here, just be yourself.”
“Yeah? Well myself was under a little strain here,” he responded testily. “Jimmy’s people may have found Cecily, we’re lying to a very nice woman who could put all of us in jail, and I’m trying to hang on to Candy while Joey is ba-da-bing-ba-da-booming all over Bayonne, hunting up his own lawyer. And that’s only the beginning of what’s on my mind right now. There’s just a little bit of stress here, folks.”
He felt Keely’s hand on his arm and damn near flinched. Pity? She was going to offer him pity again? Oh, no, not in this lifetime.
“Jack,” she said quietly, “we probably need to talk. Privately.”
“Well, I can take a hint,” Petra said, popping up from the couch. She reached out a hand to assist Sadie to her feet. “Come on, Aunt Sadie, Sweetness. I think they’re going to talk about the separate planes. Do you think if we were to put our ears to the vent on the floor upstairs, we’d be able to hear them? Because I think I’d like to take notes for this thesis I’m considering.”
“Petra,” Jack and Keely said at the same time, so that the girl grinned at them, then led her two cohorts out of the room.
Jack stood very still for a few moments, then motioned for Keely to sit down once more. She returned to the couch, and he sat in the chair, a small corner of his mind happy to learn that Keely had chosen well and the springs had survived Sweetness.
“Well?” Keely said, breaking an uncomfortable silence. “Talk.”
He sat forward, poked himself in the chest. “Me? You’re the one who said we had to talk. Privately.”
“Oh, so you’ve got nothing to say? Okay, Jack, that suits me. That suits me just fine.” Keely went to stand up, leave the room.
“Sit,” Jack said, sighing. “I’ll talk.”
“Well, good,” Aunt Sadie said from the kitchen, her hand in the cookie jar. “I thought we’d have to bring out the thumbscrews.” As Jack and Keely glared at her, she raised both hands, began backing toward the door. “I’m going, I’m going...”
Jack waited until the kitchen door had closed, then looked at Keely. She looked wonderful. She always looked wonderful. “I screwed up,” he said at last. “Out there, in Arizona. I screwed up.”
“Really? How so?”
He grinned ruefully. “You’re not going to make this easy on me, are you?”
“No. I don’t think so, Jack. How did you screw up?”
Jack was a jock, a man of action. He wasn’t the most articulate man in creation, but he wasn’t incapable of expressing himself, either, damn it. Except for when he was looking at Keely, and she was sitting there, so cool, so collected, looking back at him just as if she hadn’t, just a day earlier, had her bare legs wrapped around his hips; a wild woman in his arms, a woman he’d made wild, gone wild with. The woman had an ON/OFF switch, and he’d found the on switch only to have her shut it OFF again. How did she do that?
He cleared his throat, ordered his mind to stop thinking about the wild Keely, the Keely he’d held in his arms. “I... I took advantage of a... of a situation.”
Jack could have carved an ice statue out of the chill from her breath. “Really?”
He pressed on, knowing he was committing suicide yet unable to stop himself. “Yes. I... I invited you to go with me, and then I took... advantage.”
“Gee, I’m impressed. You did this all by yourself? You didn’t have any help?”
Jack bit the inside of his cheek, narrowed his eyes at her. She was giving him a way out? “Well, I guess I didn’t hear you saying no, did I?”
Wrong. She’d led him into a trap, and now she slammed the cage door. “So I’m to blame? Is that it, Jack? You were weak, but I took advantage of that weakness? My goodness, I should probably change my name to Delilah or Jezebel. Or Madonna.”
Jack pushed his fingers into his hair, mentally looking for a way out of the cage she’d put him in, he’d helped her put him in. “That’s not what I mean and you know it, so don’t twist my words, Keely. We’re under a lot of stress here. We got pushed into pretending to be engaged because I opened my big mouth in desperation. We both love Candy and want what’s best for her. We’ve been stuck together in this house—that proximity thing—and then I invited you along to Arizona. How much of what happened, happened because of the stress, the playacting, the hoping to get Candy? Can either of us know?”
She didn’t answer him. He didn’t know which was worse: her s
hort, cryptic answers or no answers at all.
“Keely? Do you understand what I’m trying to say here? Because I don’t want you thinking you want something just because we... we maybe got a little carried away by circumstances. You have your career, remember? When I met you, you told me right up front. You want nothing more than to get back to Manhattan, back to the life you love, the career you love. And I can understand that. Hell, I made a jackass out of myself, trying to get back to the career I loved.”
At last she talked to him.
“If—and this is just a hypothetical, Jack—if there had been no Candy, no... no me... would you still be trying to get back into the majors? Would you have taken that job in Japan?”
Now he knew which was worse, and he wished she would have continued her silent treatment. “I don’t know,” he said honestly. “I honest to God don’t know.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, then stood up. He stood with her. “Wait. Let me explain. I didn’t have a choice, Keely. I know that; you know that. The arm is shot, period. So even if I don’t know what I would have done, I don’t have to know. But it’s different for you. You do have another shot at your dream. You love Candy, I know you do. But are you trying to tell yourself you love me, too, in order to help Candy? And—and this is a biggie, Keely—will you resent Candy, resent me, if you one day decide that you let yourself be talked into staying here while your heart really wants to be back in Manhattan? You have to know that before any of this goes on for another minute.”
She looked at him levelly. Looked at him for a long, long time, then said, “You know your problem, Jack Trehan? You think too damn much.”
And then she was gone, heading for the back door and probably Sadie’s apartment, leaving him to figure out just what the hell had just happened.
That took about two minutes.
He’d said—well, at least alluded to—the two of them maybe getting married, raising Candy.
He’d said—he was sure he’d said—something about Keely maybe thinking she loved him.
But he’d never said a word about him loving her back.
He should have kicked himself all the way back here from Arizona. Then he wouldn’t have been here now, to bury both his big, dumb jock feet in his big, dumb jock mouth.