Bliss and the Art of Forever (A Hope Springs Novel) (30 page)

“What about feeding yourself?”

“I eat, too.”

“No, I mean, of course you want to think about what Addy’s eating, but don’t forget to think about yourself, too.”

That had him smiling. “Are you worried about me, Ms. Harvey?”

“Not that you can’t take care of yourself, but that you aren’t. And that you won’t.”

Spoken just like a teacher. “You mean now? Or after you’re gone? When I don’t have you here to remind me?”

“You’ll have your mother,” she said, breaking into a laugh when he glared at her across the table.

“Thanks for that.”

“She feeds you, doesn’t she?”

He reached for his beer. “Spaghetti with guilt sauce. Pot roast with passive-aggressive gravy. Snark pie for dessert.”

Brooklyn frowned as she reached for her beer. “Is your relationship with her really that bad?”

“If she weren’t my mother, and if Addy weren’t her granddaughter, let’s just say we’d have no reason to cross paths. And I’m pretty sure my father would feel exactly the same. I’m wondering if Addy joining the after-school program is going to make a difference in their relationship. Not that I’d mind.”

And wow, did that make him sound like a piece-of-crap son, but the truth was the truth. He and his mother did not see eye to eye about anything—they never would—and he hated seeing his father miserable.

“My mother died two years before my father,” Brooklyn said out of the blue. “He never stopped mourning her. He never gave her up. He never let her go. He was still holding on when he passed,” she added, her focus on her food, her frown telling.

“Is that why you’re going to Cinque Terre?” he asked after a very long moment of turning over her words and thinking about the husband she’d lost. “Because you’re like your father?”

“Artie told me not to.”

“Not to go to Cinque Terre?”

“Not to be like my father. Not to mourn him. Not to stop living my life if he lost his. And I knew what he meant because it’s exactly what I saw my father do.”

“Do you think that’s what you’ve done?”

“I don’t know.” Frustrated, she shoved her hands into her hair and pushed it away from her face. “Sometimes it feel like it. I’m still living in the house we bought together. And until I started going through all the rooms, I still had most of his things. I’ve accepted his death. I accepted it long ago. How could I not? I wake up every day without him. That’s one thing my father was never able to do—come to terms with my mother being gone.”

“Then what’s wrong?” he asked, wondering if she wasn’t ready to make the break after all.

“I feel like somewhere along the line I lost me,” she said, scooping up a bite of guacamole with a chip. “Or maybe I never knew me. I left grad school and became Artie’s wife and a teacher.”

Hmm. “Did you teach because you wanted to? You said your parents were educators, right?”

“They were. But I love teaching. I might have chosen a different path if I hadn’t grown up under their influence, but I don’t regret a moment of my career.”

That was good to hear. “Why did you choose to teach kindergarten?”

“Because of Addy,” she said, sipping from her longneck. “Obviously not Addy specifically, but because of the questions kids that age ask, how excited they are to learn. How hungry they are to learn. I love being a part of that. Showing them what it’s like to discover answers to their questions, and giving them the tools to do so.”

“Makes sense you’d want to keep doing it. In Italy,” he said, so damn glad this woman was teaching his daughter.

“You’d keep making chocolate if you moved.”

“Yeah—”

“And I’m not sure I will teach. Bianca and I have talked about it, but I don’t yet know if her program will be a fit.”

Did that mean she might not stay? “Did you ever think about moving? After he died? From Hope Springs?”

“Not until last summer after talking to Bianca. I love it here. Artie and I had been married a year when we came here from Austin, but since he stayed in Austin so much of the time . . .” She scraped her rice toward her beans and concentrated on mixing the two. “Hope Springs has been my home more than it was ever his, but I still picture him mowing the lawn behind me while I’m pulling weeds from the flower bed. Or hear him singing in the shower when I first wake up. His voice was this big baritone. I loved lying in bed and listening to him.”

Callum frowned down at his plate, breaking off a chip in his beans. “Sounds to me like you have a ghost.”

“If I believed in ghosts, I’d say you’re right.”

“Then selling the house is probably the right thing. You say it’s yours more than it ever was his, but if you can’t be here without him being here, too . . .” He shrugged. “It’s not my place to say, but that pretty much sounds like a given.”

“Or further proof that I really am in a rut.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Doing the same thing over and over again?”

“I think it’s called a routine,” he said, finishing off his food. “Work. School and church and family, or whatever a person does.”

“Going to work. Going home. Reading books and watching movies?”

“Why not? If that’s what makes you happy and gets you through.”

“I want to travel again.”

“Then travel,” he said, wanting to punch himself, but adding, “Instead of staying in Vernazza to teach, fly to Madrid, or Vienna, or Prague. Soak in the culture, gorge on the food, drink wine until you can’t stomach another drop, absorb the atmosphere, and then come home.”

She’d been looking at him while he talked, and she continued to hold his gaze when he was done. Her eyes grew misty, and she blinked, then asked, “Is that what you want? For me to come home?”

He couldn’t say it. Not tonight. Not when she was on the verge of tears. Not when she had her husband on her mind. “How about I take you home?”

The ride took forty-five minutes, and as he guided the Harley into her neighborhood, he wished again they’d taken his truck. No doubt every single one of her neighbors could hear his bike, and were he to glance at their houses, he imagined he’d see curtains fluttering, porch lights flickering on, doors being cracked open to satisfy the curiosity of those inside.

Brooklyn didn’t seem bothered at all when he pulled into her driveway and cut the bike’s engine. She handed him her helmet and allowed him to help her off with her hoodie; then she draped it over her arms and turned, waiting for him to go.

“I’ll see you Monday then,” he said.

“You will?” she asked, frowning.

“In your official capacity as Ms. Harvey.”

“Oh, right. Your first parent-teacher conference.” She grinned as she said it. “I kinda put Ms. Harvey away for the night.”

“Are you going to need help putting her on come Monday? The shoulder and everything?”

“I think I’ll be fine,” she said, though she winced as she flexed the newly inked skin.

“If not, you’ve got my number,” he said, and she nodded, smiling, then waved and turned away. He waited until she was inside before starting his bike. Then he headed for his parents’, even though it was late and the Harley might wake them, because he wanted to see his girl.

Coming to Brooklyn’s classroom on official school business had Callum feeling uneasy. His last visit here, six weeks ago, had been all about fun. The idea of hearing about Addy’s progress, what he’d been doing wrong, how he could do better . . . though for all he knew he’d hear about what he was doing right. For some reason he’d conditioned himself to expect the worst.

From day one he’d made sure Addy had a bedtime story every night. Even then he left books under her extra pillow when he tucked her in, and left her bedside lamp turned low. No harm he could see in her discovering the joy of reading herself to sleep. Whether or not she grew up to be a reader would be out of his hands, but he was planting the seed.

They had fun with numbers, too. Money and measuring ingredients and telling time. He had no idea how much of what they worked on stuck, but why not let her count out her own carrot sticks for lunch? Or the columns in the spreadsheet on his screen while he worked with her in his lap? She’d only be young enough to want to do so another year at most, probably less.

He did his best to answer all of her questions in ways she’d understand. It wasn’t always easy, and a lot of the time he would’ve preferred to change the subject. Who wanted to explain to a six-year-old what rape was?

And, yeah. She’d wanted to know, having heard the word on her Grammy’s twenty-four-hour news station, even after he’d asked his mother repeatedly if she could turn off the sound and turn on the closed-captioning when Addy was in the same room. She’d said she would. She never did. And it didn’t matter now. Even if Addy couldn’t hear the words, she could read them.

“Are you ready?” Brooklyn asked.

She was sitting at her desk, and he was sitting across from her, not in the Addy-sized chair he’d sat in for story hour, but in a chair designed to make him sit up and pay attention. It was hard plastic, unforgiving, bright red. He wondered if it was the chair Brooklyn used for time-outs.

“Callum?”

“That would be Mr. Drake,” he said, dragging one leg over the other and squaring his ankle at his knee. “Since this is us being professional and all.”

But he didn’t want to be professional. He wanted to remember kissing her, to think about her fingers in the small of his back, her lower body pressed to his thigh. About her mouth on his, her tongue hungry and tasting of wine, her hair smelling like lemongrass and green tea.

She rolled her eyes, pressed her lips tight to keep them from breaking into a grin, and frowned as she looked down at the papers in front of her. “Mr. Drake, then. I’d like to go over your daughter’s progress. We’ve got six weeks left in the school year, and we’ll be spending most of that time in review. These are the places I think Adrianne could use extra work . . .”

Adrianne. Not Addy. Because . . . professional. He listened to what Brooklyn was saying, but found himself paying more attention to the tone of her voice than the words, and watching the movement of her lips while she talked. He’d always liked her mouth. She rarely wore bright lipstick. The only time he’d seen it was the night of the church carnival, when he’d first realized she had no trouble standing up to his mother.

For that matter, she had no trouble standing up to him. She seemed to have the most trouble standing up to the ghost of her husband, but he’d told himself he wasn’t going to dwell on that; why should he, when it was up to her to solve that particular problem? Even if the problem felt like it was his, too. And it was, wasn’t it? He wasn’t going to be able to get what he wanted—Brooklyn in his life—until she solved it.

And he did want her in his life. He was crazy about her. The way she questioned him about his history but was never judgmental, as if understanding he was who he was because of where he’d come from, what he’d been through, the wrong steps he’d taken trying to find something . . . He wasn’t even sure he knew now what he’d been looking for. Unless it was belonging. And until he’d had Adrianne in his arms for the first time, he hadn’t known what it meant to have such a visceral tie to another human being. Much like the connection he felt with Brooklyn. To Brooklyn.

“That wasn’t so terrible, was it?”

Bad enough that he needed a drink. Though most of that was due to his train of thought more than anything she’d said about Addy. His gut knotted, he asked, “Have you been to the new pub on Fortune Avenue? Want to grab a burger? A beer maybe? I’m sure they’ve got wine if you’d prefer it. Or coffee.

“And, yeah. I’m asking you out,” he said, uncrossing his legs and sitting forward on the seat, leaning both forearms on her desk. He picked up a paperclip and frowned. “I get that dating one of your students’ parents puts you in a fishbowl, but I’m pretty sure between you coming to Bliss, and me coming to your house on the Harley, not to mention our hanging out at the church carnival, that any gossip that’s going to start has.”

“I know—”

“And I’m pretty sure if my past was going to cause me trouble, it would’ve done so by now. Not the part with Addy’s mother, but the rest. Bliss has a good reputation. Business is booming. Hope Springs is small. People know I’m the ex-biker behind the one-way glass.”

“I know—”

“And I get that you’re going to Italy, that you may stay in Italy. That whatever this is we’ve got going on couldn’t have come at a worse time—”

“Callum?”

“Yeah?”

Her smile was soft and understanding and tickled. “I haven’t eaten anything but an apple since breakfast. I’m starving.”

She was starving. That had to be good. “That’s a yes?”

She nodded.

“Okay.” He took a deep breath, feeling light-headed, his blood rushing through his body in unexpected relief. “So Back Alley Burgers is good for an early dinner? Or a late lunch? Not sure what to call a meal eaten at four p.m. Unless you’ve got more conferences lined up . . .”

“You’re my last of the day,” she said, straightening the papers on her desk. “And since I spent my lunch hour prepping for this afternoon, I don’t care what we call it as long as there’s food.”

“Even if I call it a date?” he asked, trying to play it cool. He wasn’t. Not a bit.

She nodded again, smiling.

“Okay then,” he said, and laughed. The laugh felt good, as did her answer. “We’ve reached a turning point.”

“I guess we have,” she said, and laughed, too. “Though I’m not sure I know what it means.”

Because Italy still beckoned. “It’s okay. We’ll figure it out.”

“One day at a time?” she asked, her hand shaking as she tucked back her hair.

“Something like that,” he said, and then to make it easier on her, asked, “Would you still say yes if Addy joined us, though that makes it less of a date and more just food with me and the girl?”

“Of course,” she said, almost sounding relieved, though that was more than likely his imagination. “Why wouldn’t I? She’s here, right? Is she enjoying the after-school program?”

“She’s loving it. I owe you a ton for mentioning it.”

“And your mother? Is she glad to see her granddaughter engaged with the other children? And not watching movies at her desk in your storeroom?”