Dr. Dad (15 page)

They broke free of the crowd and sprinted across the parking lot toward Toby's car. He released her arm to press the remote button on his key, unlocking the doors before they reached the car. Susannah dove inside and slammed the passenger door. As he circled the car to the driver's side, he glanced behind him. The crowd had followed but halted within a few feet of the car, somehow sensing that to come any closer wouldn't be right.

After wedging his bag of groceries on the floor behind his seat, Toby got in and locked all the doors. He glared at a few stragglers still ogling Susannah through the car's windows, then started the engine. The crowd dispersed as he backed out of the spot and drove away.

He kept going for a few blocks, then turned onto a side street, stopped the car and faced Susannah. She was slouching in the contoured seat, her forehead twisted into a taut scowl. “Are you okay?” he asked.

“I'm fine,” she muttered.

It occurred to him that maybe he'd presumed too much, rushing in to rescue her when she might not have wanted to be rescued. “You looked like you needed a little help back there,” he explained. “I'm sorry if I—”

“It's all right.” She sighed, then pulled off her hat and sunglasses. He saw the tension in her face, the worry. “Actually, I'm grateful.”

Relieved, he relaxed and shut off the engine. “They seemed so…leechy,” he said. “Are your fans always like that?”

She chuckled grimly and reached under her hair to massage her nape. “Signing autographs for fans used to be a part of my job, and I accepted it. But I don't have that job anymore.” She sighed again. “I would have given them autographs if they'd been nice. But they were so demanding, yelling at me. One of them touched me.”

“Touched you? You mean, to make sure you were real?” He supposed that as a hormone-driven teenager, if he'd ever met a star—one of Charlie's Angels, for instance—he would have wanted to touch her, and then he would have vowed never to wash his hand again. That pledge would have lasted until dinnertime. His mother had ordained that her children would not be allowed to eat until their hands were clean, and no matter how much he'd lusted after Charlie's Angels, he'd liked food more.

Susannah snorted. “He groped me.”

“What?”

“He touched my breast.”

“Who did?” He reached for the ignition key, prepared to drive back to the supermarket, grab the of
fender and beat the crap out of him. “Could you identify him? If you can point him out to me—”

She covered his hand with hers to keep him from turning on the engine. “Forget about it, Toby. It doesn't matter.”

“It does! It's a sexual assault! It's—”

“Forget it,” she said sharply.

Honoring her request, he let his hand fall from the ignition switch. “Has this happened to you before?”

“Not in Arlington.” She shook her head. “That store stays open all night. I've been doing my shopping after ten-thirty. The place is usually dead by then. All the produce is picked over, but at least I'm left alone.” She rolled her head back to rest on the cushioned support. “I thought I was acting silly, sneaking around to do my shopping at night. I thought I was being paranoid—or maybe too egotistical, assuming that anyone would even recognize me. So I decided to go shopping at a normal time today. And…I guess I wasn't being egotistical.”

“Or paranoid.” The thought of some stranger touching her breast made him shudder. “What would you like me to do? Do you want to go back?”

“No. They could still be there. Of course, my car is there,” she murmured, thinking out loud. “They'll probably figure out it's mine, too. I still haven't changed the registration from California to Connecticut. The Motor Vehicle Department doesn't stay open twenty-four hours like the supermarket.” She muttered a quiet curse. “If they figure out it's my car, they might vandalize it. Tear off a side-view mirror or something.”

“Your insurance will cover any damage,” he said.
“I'll drive you home. I've got to go out later this evening. I can take you back to get the car then.”

“Daddy School?” she guessed.

“How did you know?”

“It's Wednesday. Last week you went on a Wednesday.”

Last week he'd come home after Daddy School and found her outside her house, and invited her in, and talked to her, and kissed her. He remembered that Wednesday very well.

He wouldn't make her unpleasant afternoon even more uncomfortable by reminding her of that. Starting the car, he shifted into gear and coasted down the street, deciding to take the meandering back roads home.

Neither of them spoke for a minute. He wanted to ask her how she'd been, why she'd kept her distance, whether she recalled her promise to discuss menstruation with Lindsey. He wanted to invite her to trail him around at work and take notes for her scriptwriting. He wanted to tell her that her absence from his life during the past week hadn't diminished his attraction to her one bit.

“I guess you don't like being famous,” he said, instead.

“No.” Her voice sounded dull and heavy. “Not at all.”

“Most people dream of fame.”

“I'm not most people.”

He nodded. “Even so…I would think that becoming a successful actress is so hard, the odds are so small that you'll make it—why would anyone do it if they didn't want the glamour part of it?”

“They'd do it because they felt they had to,” she
said, and he knew she wasn't talking about “anyone.” She was talking about herself.

“You had to?”

“I was supporting my family.”

Her family? She'd told him she had no children. Maybe she was divorced and she'd had to support her husband at some point.

She answered the question he hadn't asked. “My parents and my brothers,” she told him. “My father was an auto mechanic. He wanted to live a better life. And he thought I was pretty. I had a ‘look,' he used to tell me. One of his clients was the casting director at an advertising agency, so he made sure I was at the garage the day that casting director was scheduled to bring in her Porsche for an oil change. After she saw me, he told her I was dying to appear in commercials, so she said I could come in and audition for her. My father told me I had to do it because the family needed the money.”

“How old were you?”

“Nine.” Her voice hadn't lost its drab color. Yet somehow he knew that beneath the monotone, she was seething with anger and resentment.

“So you supported your parents?”

“Yes. I made a lot of money, first with commercials and then with guest shots on TV shows. My father quit his job to manage my career. I guess you could say he was my pimp.”

The harsh word took Toby aback. When he glanced at Susannah, though, her face remained emotionless, as if she'd simply stated a fact.

“You didn't like acting?” he asked carefully.

“I never even thought about whether I liked it. Fame and glory didn't interest me. I didn't care about being
a star or having fans. It was just something I had to do. If I didn't, my family would lose our home. We wouldn't eat. My brothers wouldn't have basketball sneakers.” She shrugged. “I was the breadwinner. It was my duty to the family.”

“But then you grew up. You became an adult. Once you could start making your own decisions—”

“They were so dependent on me,” she explained.

“They were my family—I couldn't just walk away from them when they had no other money coming in.”

“But they exploited you!”

She mulled over her response, then repeated, “They were my family,” as though that was the only answer.

Maybe it was. Maybe family ties could be that strong.

“I finally stopped,” she added, as if to prove that she truly was an independent adult now. “My second year on
Mercy Hospital,
I told my parents I was no longer going to support them. I'd bought them a house, a car. I'd paid for my brothers' college educations. And I was done. But for the next few years my father was still after me, constantly asking for loans, begging for extra money. It was a terrible strain.”

Toby could understand why it hadn't been enough for her to quit her acting work. She'd had to move all the way across the country to get away from her money-grubbing parents.

“I'm sorry,” he said as he turned onto their street.

She glanced at him. “For what?”

“I'm sorry you went through that.” He slowed to take a corner. Trees that just a couple of weeks ago had stood barren were now dotted with unfurling leaves. Lilacs bloomed pale lavender, and forsythia flashed its showy yellow blossoms. Arlington in the
spring was a glorious sight. “I became a doctor because I wanted to,” he explained. “I loved the work. I still do. Everyone should have the opportunity to follow his dream. I'm sorry you didn't have that opportunity.”

“I did,” she said, a shy smile tracing her lips. “Here I am.”

Here she was, he thought. In his town. In his car, next to him.

What was her dream? he wondered. Had her dream led her to him?

That was a silly thought. If her dream had led her to him, she wouldn't have run away when he'd kissed her.

Reaching her house, he braked and pulled into her driveway. He briefly considered inviting her to have dinner with him and Lindsey, but he decided he needed a little time alone with his daughter. He would be going out again in a couple of hours, and Lindsey deserved his undiluted attention for that time.

So he only said, “I'll stop by around ten past seven, and we'll go get your car then.”

“Thank you,” she said. Her eyes were luminous, lit from within. Was she thanking him for rescuing her from the autograph seekers? For offering to drive her back to her car? For listening while she described her ghastly family and her hostility about her former career? For not reminding her of the last time they'd been together, not pressing to kiss her again, not telling her what he was really thinking, really desiring?

Everyone deserved the opportunity to follow his dream. Why did he feel, when he looked into her eyes, that she was another dream he wanted to follow?

Given her background, he ought to be leery. She had
a lot of baggage, a lot of emotional scars. If he was going to fall for a woman, it ought to be a woman who was confident and unscathed, a woman strong and whole enough to handle a widower with an occasionally difficult child. A woman who could go shopping in the late afternoon without drawing a crowd.

Susannah wasn't that woman.

But he still wanted to follow this dream.

S
HE THOUGHT
about him while she poked her fork into the tuna salad she'd fixed for her dinner. Tuna was the closest thing to supper she'd had in her pantry. She would replenish her food supply later, when he brought her back to the supermarket to get her car.

But even if she'd had a well-stocked refrigerator—and even if she'd been a halfway decent cook—she would still have picked at her meal. She wasn't hungry.

She was too busy thinking. About Toby.

She should have called him. But after that night when he'd kissed her and stirred up feelings she'd loved and feared in equal measure, she'd kept her distance. She'd known that if she saw him again, she would wind up involved with him. It would be too easy. Toby was that kind of man.

The last time she'd been involved with a man, it had been easy, too. They'd worked together; they'd been attracted to each other; it had seemed so natural…and easy had proven to be disastrously hard on her emotions. She had learned a lot of lessons from her debacle with Stephen, among them that she needed to look before she leaped, that she mustn't get sucked into a relationship just because it was convenient or because it felt good or because the man had bedroom eyes and persuasive kisses—or because she was used to arranging her life around the needs of others. For the sake of
her sanity, she had to declare her independence from
everybody.
She had to live by herself, for herself, without worrying about what everyone else wanted from her.

Maybe it sounded selfish. But she'd been alive for thirty-two years, and in all that time she'd never taken care of herself. Now was the time to start.

She hadn't done a particularly good job taking care of herself at the supermarket that afternoon, she admitted dismally, shoving her plate away and taking a long swallow of iced herbal tea. If Toby hadn't come along…well, she would have survived. She might have had to elbow that sleazy guy a few more times, a bit more imperatively, to get him to stop trying to feel her up, but she would have signed autographs for all the people who'd gathered around her—and for the additional people who would have been attracted by the crowd. She would have stood in the parking lot, courteously signing autographs for a half hour or more, because there was no way she
couldn't
do it.

It wasn't that she disliked her fans. It was just that signing autographs was the same as everything else she'd spent most of her life doing: pleasing others. Putting aside her own needs and desires and satisfying everyone else's demands.

She leaned back in her chair, her tumbler of iced tea cupped in her hands, and gazed through the arched doorway into the dining room, to the window. MacKenzie was seated on the sill, staring out at the Cole residence next door. Susannah couldn't blame him. Just knowing Toby was inside the solid brick house was enough to make her want to stare at it, too. Knowing he was seated with his daughter right now, chatting about his day at work and her day at school,
maybe discussing tampons—a smile teased Susannah's lips as she tried to imagine that—made her long to race across the lawn, to plead with them for permission to sit in a corner and observe them. How lucky Lindsey was to have a father like Toby.

Susannah wasn't going to let their family warmth bewitch her. She wanted independence. She wanted to answer to no one but herself. She wanted to stay up late if she felt like it, sleep late, write her scripts in the wee hours, eat when she felt like it and run the laundry when
she
needed clean socks, not when anyone else did. She wanted to spend her money, or save it, according to her own whims. She wanted no one pulling on her.

Toby's nearness pulled on her with all the force of gravity. But she would resist his powerful attraction. Even though she'd tasted his kisses and knew how sweet they were, even though she knew making love with him would be even sweeter…

She wasn't going to fall for him, for the safety and security and suffocation of another relationship. She had MacKenzie and she had herself. That was enough to satisfy her.

 

D
ESPITE THE SIDE TRIP
to the supermarket to drive Susannah back to her car—which appeared unscathed, no scratches or graffiti added to it and neither side mirror missing—Toby made it to his Daddy School class in the YMCA building in downtown Arlington with a few minutes to spare. Molly Saunders-Russo stood at one end of the room, directing her students to arrange the chairs in a circle. She started pushing one of the chairs, but a father nudged her out of the way. She was at least five months pregnant, her abdomen as round as a
bowling ball beneath a blousy shirt. She shouldn't have been dragging chairs across the floor.

One of the other fathers greeted Toby with a nod of recognition as he entered the room. The class was small, only nine fathers, and they all looked familiar from last week.

He hauled a chair over to the circle and settled into it as the other fathers and Molly took their seats. “Okay,” she said, gazing around the group with a smile. She already had one child, Toby recalled, and she was expecting another one. Imagine if he'd had more than one child to raise. Imagine if Lindsey had been twins. He'd be in twice as much trouble now.

“Did you all have a good week?” Molly asked. Toby wasn't sure she expected an answer, but a few of the men murmured unintelligibly, and the fellow next to him—Toby recalled that he was the father of an eight-year-old with attention deficit disorder—nodded. Molly's smile seemed to grow. “Did you all practice trusting your kids? Because today we're going to talk about something related to trust—letting go. Giving your children freedom.”

Toby arranged himself more comfortably on the folding metal chair. He was curious about what Molly could possibly say that would convince him it was all right to loosen the reins on Lindsey any more than he already had. He'd allowed her to invite her friends over, and he hadn't punished her for telling those white lies about doing a homework project the time her friends had been at the house without his approval. All he'd done about the lying was talk to her. He'd wanted it to be a serious, sincere discussion, but he'd been the only serious, sincere participant. Throughout the entire conversation, Lindsey had squirmed and rolled her
eyes and insisted that her misstatements were hardly even lies and shouldn't count, and anyway, he
knew
she wasn't a liar, didn't he?

He wished he knew that, but he didn't. Maybe Molly, the alleged expert on father-child relationships, would explain this evening how a man was supposed to know his daughter wasn't a liar when she'd already lied to him.

Still smiling and looking far too optimistic, Molly tossed out a question: “What's the hardest thing about letting go of your kids?”

“Fear,” one of the men shouted out. His response was greeted with knowing chuckles and nods of confirmation.

“Fear,” Molly repeated. “What are you afraid of?”

Silence spread around the circle for several seconds. Then one father timidly ventured, “Fear that my son will get hurt.”

“Physically or emotionally?” Molly asked.

“Both. You give him the freedom to bike through downtown Arlington with his buddies, and he could get hit by a car. You give him the freedom to hang out with whoever he wants, he might choose the wrong group to hang out with. Maybe they'll be bullies, or they'll be sneaking beer, or…” The father glanced around the circle, looking for support. “I don't know.”

“These are legitimate fears,” Molly assured him.

“What other fears do you have?”

“I'm afraid she'll take advantage of me,” another father volunteered. An older man with a silver beard, he'd apparently had his daughter late in life. “I'm already afraid she knows how to manipulate me. If I give her more freedom, she'll manipulate me even more.”

Molly nodded. “Anyone else? What are you afraid of, Toby?” she asked, zeroing in on him.

He said the first thing that came to his mind: “I'm afraid of losing my daughter.”

“Losing her?” Molly appeared intrigued. “Why?”

Damn. Toby didn't want to spill his guts in front of this group of near strangers. How could they understand his fear of losing Lindsey? Most of them had wives, or at least ex-wives, with whom to share the job of raising their children. Toby had lost his wife. And his daughter was looking more and more like his wife. Every day her face became more like Jane's, her voice echoing Jane's…. Didn't these men realize how easy it was to lose a loved one?

He couldn't say that, though. Baring his soul wasn't his style. He prided himself on his ability to hold his world together throughout ordeals and crises and pain. He was a doctor, a healer. He saved lives. He wasn't going to present himself to this Daddy School class as an incompetent fool who was falling apart inside.

Yet he was at the class, wasn't he? By definition, that pretty well marked him as someone who wasn't holding everything together. Like the other students, he was a father who needed help.

The class was still waiting for him to speak. “I have a friend,” he said, shifting in his chair, as if a different posture would make it easier for him to open up to this group. “She had a difficult adolescence with her father. And now she…well, I don't know if
hate
is too strong a word, but…” Closing his eyes briefly, he conjured a vision of Susannah in his car earlier that day, telling him about her tortured relationship with her father. It was nothing like his relationship with Lindsey, but he'd still felt the sorrow of it in a personal way.
“Maybe she does hate her father. She certainly resents him. They're estranged. She moved all the way across the country so there would be three thousand miles between him and her. Losing your child can happen. It isn't just some unrealistic nightmare.”

“Is your relationship with your daughter like this friend's relationship with her father?” Molly asked carefully.

“No. Absolutely nothing like it. I'm just saying…” He folded his hands and drew in a deep breath. “Fathers lose their daughters. It happens. That's all.”

Molly smiled enigmatically and turned from him. Evidently, she recognized that he didn't want to be the center of attention. She called on someone else, who talked about how his son was always testing limits, and every time he loosened a limit the son pressed harder, trying to push the limit even further. Other members of the class joined in, analyzing how fathers could determine where the lines needed to be drawn. They discussed why it was so often fathers and not mothers who drew the lines, why they felt it was their job to exert discipline, whether too much freedom was as perilous as too little.

Toby listened, gleaning useful nuggets of information from the discussion. But a part of his mind remained mired in the worry he'd admitted to—that he would lose Lindsey, that someday she would loathe him as much as Susannah loathed her father.

He didn't know why he feared such a thing. He didn't exploit Lindsey the way Susannah's father had exploited her. He didn't expect Lindsey to support the family, to take responsibility for anyone else's welfare, to sacrifice her own childhood to a career not of her
choosing. He was nothing like Susannah Dawson's father, and he never would be.

Yet he'd heard the bitterness in Susannah's voice even as she'd kept her tone level. He'd sensed the anger seething beneath her placid surface. And God help him, he wondered at the anger that might be seething inside Lindsey, too. Anger about having no mother, perhaps. Anger about floundering into adolescence without a woman to guide her. Anger about all the injustices, both petty and monumental, that she faced every day.

Toby was such a convenient target for that anger. He was her father.

The class wound down, and Toby sorted through what he'd picked up from listening to the others. They seemed to have concluded, thanks to Molly's subtle leadership, that children should have a chance to experiment in the shallow end of the pool before being allowed to dive off the high board. “Start slow. Give them five dollars and ask them to buy you a newspaper. See if they come back with the right change. Or tell them they have to be home from a friend's house by four o'clock, and see if they persistently come home at four-fifteen, armed with a different excuse each time. These are ways you can safely measure their level of responsibility. Do they live up to your expectations, or do they constantly cross the line? If they can't swim safely in the shallow end, they aren't ready for the deep end.”

Useful advice, if a bit general. Some of his classmates' comments had been useful, too, or at least reassuring. Some of them had children far more aggressive than Lindsey. Maybe a truly awful kid would make discipline easier—it was a snap to say no to
someone who kept making unreasonable demands—but such a child would certainly be more exhausting. Compared with those fathers, Toby felt lucky to have a daughter like Lindsey.

Yet he still feared losing her, giving her so much freedom that she floated away from him like a balloon on a breeze, while he frantically, futilely, tried to grab the string that had slipped out of his fist.

“Toby?” Molly approached him as he and the other fathers stood and stretched and started moving toward the door.