A Man for the Summer (9 page)

Griff stifled a grin. Nothing could stop a kid from building a ramp when they’re the age when they want to go flying off it. He had built his own using a roll of duct tape and a chaise lounge filched from winter storage in the basement—and paid for it with a week’s grounding.

He opened the door and was blinded by the sun, which sent a searing pain directly from his eyes to his brain.

“Hey!” He yelled, his voice croaking from disuse. “Keep it down out here!”

The boys, surprised, stopped and turned to look at him. There were, he was surprised to see, only about four or five of them, deeply tanned kids tough enough to be barefoot on the hot asphalt.

There was one kid with a shock of red hair and a grin that was just a little too familiar.

“Who are you?”

Griff forced himself to frown, and looked into all the expectant, wide eyes. The gazed back steadily, curious. With a start Griff realized that none of them were afraid of him, and had to remind himself that most kids didn’t get in trouble every time they went out to play, as he had.

“I’m a customer,” he said. “A paying customer of this hotel, who’s trying to get a little rest. And do you know why I’m not getting any rest?”

The kids shook their heads.

Griff pointed to them with exaggerated menace. “Because you all are creating an ungodly racket.”

“My uncle owns this motel,” one of the boys said, a hint of defiance in his young voice.

“What are you doing sleeping in the middle of the day anyway?” another demanded.

“None of your business,” Griff growled, and gave the door a harder than necessary shove to close it.

He’d been rude, he knew, and the kids would probably rat him out to the owner of the motel, but he couldn’t help it. He had to get some rest or he was going to lose his mind. How the hell did parents ever get any sleep, anyway?

None of his friends in the city had kids. Oh sure, sometimes a couple of them would get married, move to the suburbs, and then there’d be an announcement in the mail a little while later. Griff was pretty sure they all re-used the same photo of a red-faced, wrinkled newborn. After that he didn’t hear from the friends much.

His own parents had somehow skipped the part about moving to suburbia. Maybe things would have been better if they had. But his father liked being so close to his law office, so he could spend most of his time there, and his mother loved their ritzy address in the middle of the Chicago social whirl. She fielded visits from her rich friend. She shopped and hired decorators and threw parties, and it was Ruby who fixed his sandwiches and Ruby who kept his baby teeth in an old baby food jar.

Outside he heard an adult voice, low, chastising, and then he heard the distinct sounds of the troops packing up and leaving, the plywood being dragged away, a few desultory shouts of goodbyes.

Well. Maybe he’d been a jerk, but at least now he had silence. Blessed silence.

This time when Griff went back to bed, he fell asleep right away. But his dreams were filled with red-headed kids riding bicycles through the streets of Chicago.

Junior was stacking coffee cups in the sink when she heard the front door creak, and then thunderous footsteps in the front hall. She smiled to herself, despite the gloom that had settled on her after Griff left.

“Aunt Junior!”

Two boys skidded to a stop in the kitchen.

“Hi, Joe. Hi, Trevor.”

She automatically reached to run her fingers through her nephew Joey’s shock of red hair, but he ducked and held up a hand, grimacing at her.

“Oops, sorry,” she said. Nine was a sensitive age. If Trevor wasn’t there, she probably could have gotten a hug out of him. Oh well, she’d wait.

“What have you all been up to?” she asked, as Joe went to her pantry and started poking around. Trevor flopped his lanky body into one of her chairs and leaned back in a position that looked terribly uncomfortable, but didn’t seem to bother him a bit.

“Well, we
were
just messing around down at the Sunrise Motel,” Trevor said. “Then Mr. Costello came out and yelled at us.”

“He wasn’t the only one,” Joe added, coming out of the pantry with a package of cookies and a box of kids’ cereal. He helped himself to a couple of bowls, while Junior got out the milk and spoons.

“Hey, get me a bowl too,” she said.

She kept the rainbow-hued cereal around for the kids, but once in a while it tasted pretty darn good. Today was a day, she decided, when she deserved a few treats.

“There was this guy?” Joe continued. In the way of kids his age, many of his statements came out like questions. “At the hotel? Well, he came out of there hollerin’ at us to shut up, said he was trying to sleep. In the middle of the day!” he added indignantly.

Junior straightened. She had a feeling she knew who that was. The Sunrise didn’t have all that many customers mid-week. Or on weekends, for that matter.

“What did he look like?” she asked.

“Weird,” Trevor grimaced. “He was wearing…man, I don’t believe this. He was wearing underwear with White Sox on it.”

Good heavens. Junior arched an eyebrow. So Griff didn’t even have the decency to be a Cub fan. Another strike against him, not to mention a possible genetic issue…she quickly banished that thought.

“White Sox, huh,” she said. “Oh, dear.”

“He was probably about as old as you,” Joe said, squinting at her. “Kind of tall. Medium tall I guess.”

“Ah.” Junior swallowed a satisfying spoonful of the cereal, which was turning the milk in her bowl bright pink. “So, what are you gentlemen doing the rest of the day?”

Trevor rolled his eyes at her. “Dad’s making me help set up for the party,” he said. “Hey, Joe, you want to come help me? I have to weed and mow.”

“I dunno,” Joe said through a full mouth.

The party…Junior had forgotten all about it. It was an impromptu wedding party for Taylor and Raoul, the guy she met at junior college in Sedalia, who was rumored to be from Brazil. Taylor was her brother Mason’s wife’s cousin, not to mention Trevor’s older sister. Everyone in town would be there, no doubt, as much to check out Raoul as to celebrate the young couple’s elopement.

Normally this could be fun. No doubt her brothers Teddy and Charlie Earl and their families would be driving up for the bash, and she loved being in the thick of her family again, around all the kids and her siblings and their wives.

Today, however, she didn’t feel much up to it.

“What all am I supposed to bring?” she said. Nobody showed up at these things empty-handed.

“Well, Dad’s over in Clarksville picking up the pig with Perry,” Joe said, ticking off his dad and big brother on his fingers. “Mom’s got the cole slaw going. I
hate
cabbage.”

“My mom’s making cole slaw too,” Trevor said. “She says your mom puts hard boiled eggs into hers. It’s not supposed to have eggs.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

The boys glared at each other for a minute, then Joe shrugged. “Anyway, I can’t stand eggs
or
cabbage,” he said.

Junior smiled and pushed the cereal box over to the boys for seconds. Kids were so great. Everything was easy with them. They liked stuff, they didn’t like stuff. They argued, they got over it.

Why the heck couldn’t adults be like that?

She glanced at her bowl, whose contents were now practically fuchsia, and pushed it away. She’d napped only briefly, but her body felt energized and her mind was racing, and her headache was gone.

Blushing, she remembered the way she’d had to practically drag Griff into her bed. But he’d more than made up for his reluctance after that.

She shouldn’t have lied to him. Well, it wasn’t lying, exactly, pretending that she hadn’t felt anything the night before. Pretending that the way he kissed her hadn’t burned right through her champagne haze and spun her heart in crazy circles.

She wanted him again, and this time she wanted to be completely sober when he touched her. Wanted to feel again the fire that he set deep inside her, the way his hands—those incredibly strong hands, rough and somehow tender all at once—felt as they grazed and seized and caressed her body.

“Got any Gatorade?” Joe demanded, jerking her back to reality. “It’s hot out there.”

“Yeah,” Junior said absently. “Got a couple in the freezer. They’ll defrost while you guys are running around, but they’ll stay cold. Take ‘em with you.”

The boys clattered out as noisily as they’d arrived, leaving puddles of juice and milk on the counter.

Junior wanted to return to her delicious daydreaming, but there was one problem. Griff didn’t want anything to do with her. He’d only made love to her out of some sort of misguided pity, and now he was furious because she’d let it happen.

She knew he was right to be angry. Having sex with Griff had opened up a complicated Pandora’s box of issues that would take a long time to untangle. She’d taken advantage of a man in a way that was pretty much indefensible, and she hadn’t even really figured out her own feelings about what had happened.

But she didn’t have the energy to think about those complications right now. If only things could be as simple for her as for the kids, who spent their long summer days doing whatever they felt like, drinking Gatorade and never staying mad.

What Junior felt like was finding her way back into Griff’s arms.

There were worse places he could have been marooned.

From a strictly professional point of view, that is. Griff squinted across the street at the Green Bean Café, then took a few steps down the sidewalk, changing his visual angle slightly.

He needed Gordon. He and the photographer he always worked with had developed a kind of intuition, Griff communicating the feeling he was trying to achieve, but it was Gordon’s genius that captured his intentions on film.

And what a picture this would make. The galvanized tin tubs planted with geraniums and six-foot-tall sunflowers were the only spots of color besides the green. The awnings, the door, the “OPEN” sign. The image might even be book cover material, but the trick was to make sure it didn’t come off too cutesy, too patronizing.

Griff sighed.
Missouri Highways and Byways
was, he had to admit, a bit tougher to pull off than he’d expected. Oh, he’d found the cornfields and pickups and greasy spoons, and he could probably work them up into a competent two hundred pages, but it wouldn’t be
right
, wouldn’t be the whole picture.

And Griff prided himself on getting things right.

He needed local color. Sighing heavily, Griff dug in his pack for his notebook. Gloria may have had a point. His editor had accused him of getting a little too slick. Griff had always felt that featuring the top spots, the restaurants, night clubs, and high culture of a city, and somewhere along the line he’d quit trying to find the heart of a place, its pulse and personality.

Readers of his books about Miami and Tokyo and other big cities generally didn’t care. But the people who shelled out fourteen bucks for Missouri Highways and Byways just might.

The café’s screen door swung open and two familiar looking boys spilled out, followed by Junior, dressed now in a faded Grateful Dead tee shirt and a pair of yellow denim ankle pants that seemed to have been molded to her curves. Griff’s mouth went dry.

“Hey, that’s him!” one of the boys shouted, and Junior glanced his way, her hands automatically darting out to grab the boys’ collars.

Even across the street her eyes glinted green. Even from that distance he could see her lips part slightly, her breath caught, and the surprise etched on her face tempered by something else, something that caused his blood to simmer in his veins.

“Hey,” he said, raising his hand in a half-wave, feeling a little ridiculous. He stuffed his notebook back in his pack and crossed over.

Junior licked her lips, and placed her hands on the boys’ muscular, bony shoulders.

“Manners,” she murmured through her teeth as Trevor and Joey shrugged her hand off. They glanced up at her curiously, and she wished she hadn’t had the bright idea of bringing them down for a malt after they’d tossed the softball around.

“Griff Ross, I would like to introduce you to my nephew, Joey Atkinson, and his friend Trevor. Boys, please say hello to Mr. Ross.”

“It’s my pleasure.”

Griff gravely held out his hand. The boys stared at it for a minute before grabbing and shaking vigorously.

He looked stiff as a board, she could see, and didn’t know the first thing about being around kids, but the boys liked being treated like an adult.

“What are you still doing here?” Trevor asked.

“Junior says she fixed you up already,” Joey added. “Your tooth.”

“Mr. Ross has to have his permanent crown installed,” Junior interjected hastily. “In a week, when the lab gets it finished.”

“Cain’t they do that up in Chicago?”