Gypsy Magic (The Little Matchmakers) (12 page)

He looked gravely down into the laughing face below him and nodded, while the thought flashed through his mind that Lorraine, as competent a homemaker as she might be, would never, ever have done a thing like this for his birthday—for anyone’s birthday—not even Kevin’s.

Those sparkling blue eyes refused to be denied. He drew in a deep breath, suddenly aware that Kevin had done the same thing… waiting, eyes as blue as Gypsy’s, but not laughing, looking worried, afraid. He released his pent breath and smiled “Yes!” he said with conviction that amazed even him. “I wish to become a member of the magic gypsy realm. I am a believer!” And wondered why his voice sounded so rusty, so unused.

“He’s a believer!” The dancing girl leapt exultantly up once more, spun in dizzying circles which somehow seemed to express extreme joy. She snatched the scarf from her hair and twirled it over her head, her long hair flying wild. She threw her arms wide. “We will make him our king.”

She pirouetted, arms twined high above her head, one knee bent, sole of her foot pressed to the other knee as she spun on bare toes. “Bring on the feast! We must dine with the new member of our realm, a true believer, our own gypsy king!”

She reached behind to her own half hidden bunk and grabbed up her jeans and shirt, climbing quickly into them, shucked the skirt she’d made of shirts and, still barefoot, danced toward the front of the cabin, then back again. In passing, she snatched at his hand, clasped it and dragged him to his feet. As she danced, he gave her a twirl and she laughed aloud, her eyes alight with fun.

“Sit, great gypsy king,” she waved a hand toward the table, “while your subjects bring on the feast.”

The table was soon spread with lunch and, reaching into a newly opened can of butter with his knife, Lance spread his fresh warm bread lavishly, bit into it with strong teeth, all the while watching Gypsy with a strange, speculative expression.

He swallowed. “Did you really know, or was it just a lucky accident?”

“You wait,” she grinned at him, serving him potato salad to go with the thick slices of canned ham on his plate. “You’ll see.”

Presently, Gypsy tapped Kevin on the shoulder. “Come on,” she whispered. To Lance she said, “Stay right there, and no peeking.”

Lance suppressed a not unnatural desire to peek and sat with his back to them, listening to the giggles and whispers, emanating from the other end of the cabin, and even when halting footsteps came across the creaking boards behind him he did not turn. He did, however, when two voices began singing together, “Happy birthday to you…”

A smile spread across his face as he watched Kevin holding the cake on a precarious tilt. The flame of one large candle lit his face from below. Lance smiled, but that smile faded for an instant as the song progressed. Surely Gypsy could have sung his own name into the song instead of singing “Happy birthday dear Daddy?” as Kevin had. He quickly replaced the smile, ashamed of that momentary feeling of disappointment—if that was what it had been.

Reaching out, he rescued the cake. “Thank you both,” he said huskily. “This is the nicest birthday party I have ever had.”

Kevin said gruffly, not meeting his father’s eyes, “Gypsy let me stir the cake all by myself. I had to stir it real hard and then put it in the pan. She said I had to tell you,” he added, thereby making it plain that if left to himself he would never have admitted it.

Lance swallowed. “It looks very good, Kevin.” He leaned over and took a butcher knife from the counter nearby. “Will you cut it for me, since you made it?”

This time Kevin’s eyes flew his father’s face, a surprised, pleased glow in them. “You mean I can use a big knife?” he asked breathlessly.

“If you’re careful.” Lance felt a disturbing heat at the back of his eyes. When Kevin had said,
you mean I can use a big knife?
it could’ve been any little boy speaking to his father, just a normal, everyday question put by an excited child being given an unexpected privilege by a kind and loving father… A beloved father… Not one who was feared.

Lance watched the intent concentration on Kevin’s space as he wielded the knife with great care. His eyes blurred as he became lost in dreams of what might have been, what might yet be, until a hand on his arm brought him back.

“Your cake, Lance,” Gypsy murmured.

He accepted the large slab from Kevin and said, “Yum. Looks good. May I start?”

“Go ahead, Daddy. Here’s ours. We were just waiting because you were busy thinking.”

“That was very kind of you both, but you should’ve woke me up sooner. Who needs to think when there’s good cake like this to be eaten?” He took a bite, chewed and swallowed.
Yucch!
“It’s the best cake I’ve ever had,” he added, with too much enthusiasm, and false enthusiasm that, and Kevin detected it as children will.

Kevin had already taken a bite. Lance knew his son was smart enough to recognize the heavy spongy texture, and to know his father lied.

“It’s awful cake!” he said. “I don’t want any more.”

“Come on, Kev,” Gypsy said. “It’s not that bad. I’ve had worse.” She smiled at him. “I’ve made worse. It’s like this because we didn’t have all the ingredients the package called for. But it is nice and sweet,” she added, taking another bite.

“I’m too full,” Kevin replied tonelessly, setting the cake aside and walking to his bunk where he curled up with his coloring book and crayons.

Lance, sad faced, got to his feet, knowing only that he had somehow wrecked things. He would have done anything to bring back that one moment when he had felt a closeness with his child, but it was gone and he couldn’t find his way back to it. He was afraid to speak for fear of making things worse, but he had to say something before leaving.

“Thank you both for a wonderful birthday party and a great lunch,” he said, and touched Kevin’s head, stroking his hair, the way the glass ball “vision” had said he should. The boy flinched away and Lance wanted to shout at him not to do that. Instead, he said, “I have to get back to work now. It’s stopped raining.”

When Lance returned in time for dinner, the bower was gone, cabin looked as usual, and as they ate, he grieved for the spontaneity of the magic gypsy realm party. With the dishes cleared away, Gypsy sat again at the table and dealt out three card hands, inviting Lance to join in. One look at Kevin’s somber little face was enough to decide him. “Sorry, count me out. I have some compiling to do.” He bent his head over his sketches but not before he caught the venomous look Gypsy’s blue eyes shot at him.

Kevin, being only six, made many mistakes even playing Crazy Eights, and listening to Gypsy patiently explain one point for the umpteenth time, Lance’s conscience smote him. If a total stranger could take such an interest in his child, what was the matter with that him that he did less? Pushing his chair back, he stood and walked around the table to stand behind Kevin, intending to help him play the hand. As he reached over the child’s shoulder to point out the card which should next be played, Kevin ducked again as if expecting to be hit. Lance, good intentions flying from him like water from a shaking dog, saw red.

“Oh, stop that!” he snapped. “I wasn’t going to hit you, Kevin. I never hit you. No one ever hits you. I know you know all your numbers, but look now. This is a queen… This is a king… And this is a jack.” He impatiently flicked the finger against the top of each card as he said its name. “Look at the different shapes of each letter, at the pictures, too. Gypsy played a king of spades. You can play this king if you want, or this spade. Get it?”

Kevin nodded miserably. “I… think so, Daddy.”

“Good. If you want to play cards with Gypsy, pay attention to what she tells you.”

His anger increased as he noticed the trembling in the little hands which dropped cards on the table, tried and failed to put them back into some semblance of order and heard the timorous little voice say, “ “I don’t think I want to play cards anymore, Gypsy. May I go to bed, now, please?”

“Sure, honey,” she replied, hugging him tightly, loathing Lance more in that moment then she had believed yourself capable of despising anyone. She glanced over the child at the man.

“Satisfied?” he asked. He spun on his heel and left the cabin.

One step forward, half a step back, she thought philosophically as she helped Kevin get ready for bed, tucked him in and told him a story. He’d long been asleep when she opened the door and went out to use the bathroom. She returned to find Lance sitting on the bottom step, his long legs thrust out in front of him, his elbows on the stair behind him. She’d have preferred to ignore him, but there was only one way into the cabin.

“Gypsy, could we talk?”

She hesitated. The glow through the window cast a halo behind him, leaving his face in dark shadow. “I guess so,” she said.

“Will you sit down, please?”

She perched herself on the same stair, taking a position similar to his. Overhead, the clouds broke, permitting a shaft of light to flood across the water as the moon rose. It shone on the grass, on the trees, and on his face, which he kept mostly averted.

“What kind of childhood did you have?”

The question surprised a laugh out of her. “Heavens! I thought for sure you were going to tell me to wait for a fair tide, grab a chunk of wood for extra floatation and start swimming for the next inhabited island. Or maybe not even wait for the tide.”

He turned his face toward her. “Why would you think that?”

“Because you obviously see me as an interfering busybody who should keep her opinions to herself and stop all and any attempts to find some common ground between you and your son. Seems all I’ve done so far is create friction.”

“The friction was there long before you came on the scene. I apologize for my attitude.”

She just looked at him.

He blew out a huffy breath. “Where I come from”—he paused, quirked a half smile at her—“or maybe I should say where I
came
from, if an apology is offered, is normally accepted graciously or refused outright, not brushed off.”

“Good memory for words,” she commented.

“Only for words that strike home, and yours did.”

“All right,” she said. “Apology accepted. Now, if that was all, I’d like to get some sleep.”

He laid a hand on her wrist. Gently, his fingers wrapped around it. “It’s not all. I was an only child of parents who never expected to have one. My dad was a businessman, a good one. A successful one. My mother kept the books, did the payroll, and managed the entire office for the business. They both traveled a lot.”

She waited. He said nothing more.

She slid her wrist out of his warm clasp. “So, you were left to your own devices?”

“Pretty much. Oh, there were housekeepers, of course. But the thing is, I don’t think I ever really learned how to be a parent, so I wondered what kind of childhood you had because you seem to have a much stronger grasp of how to do it. I guess yours was pretty standard, huh? Milk and cookies mom, nine-to-five dad, camping vacations, maybe the odd trip to Disneyland, Christmas with Grandma and Grandpa, on one side, Easter with the other side?”

Gypsy leaned her head back and laughed. “Not exactly, though I did spend a lot of time, sometimes as much as a month or two with my paternal grandmother during my teens.”

She sobered. “Apart from that, my childhood was far from normal. When I was six months old, I started modeling baby clothes for department store catalogues and fliers. My mom had always wanted to be a model, but instead, she got pregnant at seventeen, married my dad—a rookie cop—and they had me. Money was scarce. The agency in charge of finding models held an open audition and she thought if I got the job, it would ease the financial burden they were under. I was selected, but by law, most of the money had to be put away for my future. Oh, as my agent, Mom collected a salary and as I grew older and took acting, voice and dancing lessons to increase my poise, that all came out of my earnings, but that was about it. When I was eight, my little brother came along and before he was a year old, they wanted him in the shots with me because a couple of look-alike, dark-haired, blue-eyed kids could be used in many different ways—especially when their mother had the same coloring and was equally loved by the cameras. At last, she realized her dream. She became a model, too. There were TV ads featuring the three of us, or just us kids, or Mom with one or the other of us. We even got jobs as movie extras. It was all good. Except… well, Dad left us and was granted custody of my three-year-old brother and ‘pulled him off the market’ as he put it, because he didn’t want his son used in that way. He—rightfully, I think—wanted a normal childhood for him. He was such a beautiful, happy little boy! I adored him.”

She wound her hands together, lacing her fingers so tightly her engagement ring bit into her flesh.

“Past tense?” Lance said.

“Dad and Kevin—”

“
Kevin?
”

“Kevin. Yes. He was just four. And yes, your Kevin is the image of my little brother. He and Dad were coming back from getting new tires on the car when a gang member spotted him, one he’d been instrumental in putting away for a couple of years. He’d sworn revenge when he got out. He took it. He killed them both.”

“Gypsy…” He pried her hands apart, held one in a firm, warm clasp.

“It’s okay,” she said. “Mom and I did all right. We… got through it. I kept working. She quit working as a photographer’s model and went on a husband hunt. A successful one, too.” She let a short laugh escape. “She was good at finding them, but at keeping them, no so much. Or, maybe, they weren’t very good at keeping her. At any rate, she continued to look after my affairs, my career, until I came of age and took charge of my own life.”

“When you were first here, you mentioned only your fiancé being frantic because you’d gone missing, would be presumed… gone. Not your mother.”

“I’m not sure she’ll have even heard. She’s on her honeymoon—her fourth—somewhere in South America, I think. Or was that the one before? My only other family was my grandma. She died last year.”

“I’m sorry.”