Marrying the Northbridge Nanny (12 page)

“Pink balloon hat,” Logan said with a nod of his own in the direction of where the three-year-old was digging in the sandbox of the nearby play area with her friends.

Then he called Tia to join them.

“I dow’ wannoo,” Tia called back, not so much as glancing up from her digging.

“Come on, you have company,” Logan said.

With that, Tia raised round eyes to their general area. But it didn’t seem to instantly register who her
company
was.

“Come on,” Logan repeated, “your mom’s here.”

Meg thought he must have realized that the three-year-old—who was in a sea of strangers she wasn’t paying any attention to—must not have looked closely enough to know that her mother wasn’t merely another one of them.

That was apparently the case because when he said that Tia took a more concentrated look, dropped her shovel and finally came to the table. But not in any hurry and not with any kind of enthusiasm or excitement.

“Hello, Tia,” Helene said when Tia joined them. There was more warmth in the woman’s tone than had been in anything else she’d said, but not much. And there was no attempt to make any kind of physical contact.

“Hi,” Tia answered with disinterest.

“What have I told you about things like that?” Helene tutored, kindly enough but still, Meg thought this was not the best time to reprimand the little girl.

“Say things properly—say hello,” Tia’s mother instructed.

“Hullo,” Tia said as if she were accustomed to this sort of exchange with her mother.

“Tia, I want you to meet someone who is very important to me—this is Dietrich Wietzel. Dietrich, this is my daughter, Tia.”

“Hello, Tia,” the fiancé said pleasantly but in no way that would engage a three-year-old.

“Hullo,” Tia repeated robotically.

“Dietrich and I are going to be married soon. He’ll be your stepfather.”

Tia raised an index finger to point at Logan. “Hims my fathuh.”

Helene flinched at that but didn’t correct Tia. Instead she said, “Dietrich will be your
step
father. That’s like a second father.”

Tia just stared blankly at the couple, clearly unsure how she was supposed to react to that and so reluctant to react at all.

Then, as if she knew she
should
say something, she said, “I gots Max and Harry. See ’em? They’re layin’ in the shade.”

The puppies were napping at the base of an elm tree that also shaded their picnic table.

“I’m allergic to dogs,” Helene answered.

To his credit, Dietrich made the effort Helene hadn’t
and at least glanced at the puppies, even though he didn’t make any move to pet them. But he did say, “They look like good dogs.”

“They eats shoes and dirt.”

There was a knot in Meg’s stomach as she waited for Helene to once again correct Tia, willing her not to. Not to make this awful, stiff and awkward reunion any worse.

Laugh, hug her, do something—anything—nice,
Meg thought as if she could telepathically force some warmth into this woman.

But it didn’t work. Tia’s mother continued to stand there like a statue, as if she expected Tia to take things from there.

It reminded Meg of her grandfather—the Reverend would have done the same thing, waiting for someone else to make the effort to keep conversation going, offering nothing, passing silent judgment.

But Tia was a very small child. She certainly didn’t pick up on the fact that her mother wanted something more of her, and after fidgeting for a few minutes, she said, “Can I go back and play?”

Helene’s sigh at that was audible. “I suppose. What do we say to someone we’ve just met?”

Tia looked confused.

Logan rescued her. “Say, ‘I’m happy to meet you, Dietrich.’”

Tia did, reciting the words without any feeling, without any real understanding of what she was saying or why she needed to.

“Now maybe you could introduce Dietrich and me to your friends,” Helene suggested.

Tia clearly didn’t understand what was being asked of her and again Logan stepped in.

“Or why don’t the three of you have ice cream? There’s a booth over there hand-churning it and I told Tia she could have a dish.”

“All right then,” Helene agreed.

Neither Logan, Meg nor Hadley said anything about the situation while Helene and her fiancé were with Tia at the ice-cream stand and within little more than half an hour they returned Tia.

“I’m afraid she’s dribbled on her shirt but we need to be on our way so I’ll have to leave that to you,” Helene announced. Then she bent over, craned her head forward to offer a cheek and said, “Give Mother a kiss and say goodbye.”

That part Tia was obviously familiar with because she did as she’d been instructed, and then took off like a shot to return to the sandbox, her pink balloon hat bobbing along the way.

“She’s only three,” Logan reminded his ex-wife then.

“It’s never too early to teach courtesy and social graces,” Helene countered critically, casting a wilting look at him.

“Yeah, now that we’ve conquered potty training,
social graces
are next on the list.”

“You might work on saying yes instead of
yeah
yourself, to begin with,” Helene sniped. “You’re her example, you know.”

Unperturbed, Logan merely smiled a wry smile and shook his head.

Then, rather than inviting Helene and her fiancé to stay any longer, he said, “How about a soda for the road?”

“No, thank you,” his former wife said very formally. “But if you come to our car, I have something for you—we just came across that bottle of wine your client gave you a few years ago. I thought you might want it but I didn’t know if this venue would allow liquor.”

“Okay, I’ll walk over with you,” Logan said as he stood.

His former wife said a clipped goodbye to Hadley and a perfunctory, “Nice to meet you,” to Meg and headed for the parking area with a silent fiancé and Logan bringing up the rear.

Not until they were out of earshot did Hadley mutter after them, “Good riddance.”

Meg agreed with the sentiment but she didn’t say it. She just got up and went to the sandbox to be with Tia.

“I’m makin’ a moun’ain,” the little girl announced when Meg sat beside her.

“It’s a big one, too,” Meg said enthusiastically, looking for any indication that the three-year-old was upset by her mother’s brief visit or departure.

None of it seemed to have had an effect—Tia was merely going about her business as if nothing at all had happened.

But the encounter had left Meg wanting to wrap her arms around the child and give her the hug her mother hadn’t.

She didn’t, because she didn’t want to make a big deal of things that Tia was oblivious to.

But she did show Tia, Howie and Bethany how to
mold sand into shapes using cups and bowls, which delighted them all.

And while to Meg it didn’t make up for the poor parenting she’d just witnessed, it helped her to see that Tia was still enjoying herself.

In spite of her mother.

A
fter Logan’s ex-wife and her fiancé left the picnic, the remainder of the day and early evening went on as planned. Neither Meg, Hadley or Logan made mention of the woman or her brief, unpleasant visit, and certainly Tia didn’t.

By eight o’clock all the entertainments for the kids had ended. The Battle Of The Bands competition that started then was of no interest to Tia. Plus she’d missed her nap and was getting cranky. Since everyone else was worn out, too, they put the bridge’s grand opening behind them and went home.

Once they were there Tia demanded a glass of milk before her bath and promptly spilled it with a great splash all over Meg. Since the stuff was even dripping from the tip of her nose, Logan suggested that they
forego doing Tia’s bath and bedtime together—the way they usually did—so Meg could go to her place and shower.

She’d finished that, put on a loose-fitting pair of navy blue pajama pants with a tight white tank top, and dried and brushed her just-washed hair when there was a knock on the apartment door.

Meg had been telling herself that, after what had almost happened on the riverside bench last night, it was probably better if she and Logan didn’t end today alone. And yet the thought that it could be Logan outside on the landing, that the day and evening that had been spent with so many other people might still be able to end with some alone time with him, made her rush to the door.

And sure enough, when she opened it, there he was, standing in front of a backdrop of thunder and lightning from a threatening storm, holding up a bottle of wine.

“I think I owe you an apology,” he said without saying hello. “How about I say it with this?”

“I don’t know what you owe me an apology for but a glass of wine sounds great,” she said because it was true. Not as true as the fact that being with him—with or without wine—was really what appealed to her, but she thought she’d keep that to herself.

She stepped out of the doorway to let him in, closing the door behind him just as the first few drops of rain fell.

“Looks like the Battle Of The Bands is going to get rained on,” she observed, turning to find that Logan had gone to the kitchen to open the wine with the corkscrew he’d also brought with him.

“They’ll probably move it inside the bridge,”
Logan said as she joined him. “Were you considering going back?”

“No, I’m happy to be in for the night.” Especially now that he was there.

Logan had showered, too. And shaved. She could tell because his hair was still the slightest bit damp, his face had lost the shadow of beard he’d come home with, and he smelled of that ocean-air cologne he used. He’d also changed into a pair of jeans that were more faded than what he’d had on earlier and a plain white crewneck T-shirt instead of the polo shirt he’d worn to the picnic. A T-shirt that fitted him every bit as tightly as the one she had on, showing off such impressive pectorals, abs and biceps that it almost made Meg’s mouth water.

“What do you owe me an apology for?” she asked as she got two wineglasses from the cupboard, trying to contain the urge to run her hands over his torso, across his shoulders and down those muscular upper arms.

Clearly unaware of her wandering thoughts, Logan said, “I don’t think today’s divorce drama and having milk dumped all over you were in the job description.”

“Actually, three-year-olds and spilt milk go hand in hand,” she said.

“Still not pleasant, though. And the divorce drama definitely isn’t part of the nanny’s role,” Logan persisted while he unsealed the wine bottle and positioned the corkscrew.

“It wasn’t exactly drama—”

“It wasn’t exactly fun. But it did get us this very special bottle of wine.”

Was he changing the subject so he didn’t have to talk
about his ex-wife and what had gone on this afternoon? Meg wasn’t sure. But she didn’t want to ruin this time they finally had together, so she went with the safer subject.

“What makes it a very special bottle of wine?” she asked when she’d set the glasses on the counter near him.

“A client who owns a winery in Napa Valley gave it to me,” Logan explained. “She bought a lot of furniture from us and gave Chase and me both bottles of a private reserve. We drank Chase’s bottle, but I’d forgotten about this one.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to wait for your partner to share this one, too?”

“Chase won’t care,” Logan said as he popped the cork. “But I’m not a connoisseur—when we drank wine with the client she talked about letting the wine breathe, and there was all that stuff about swirling it and smelling it and rolling it around in your mouth—things I’m completely ignorant of. What about you? Do you have wine-drinking specifications?”

“Just that it goes in a glass,” she joked. “Other than that, I don’t know anything about all those other things, either.”

“Then I guess we just get to drink it,” Logan said, pouring the wine.

He handed one of the glasses to Meg and she led the way to the sofa. She sat in the center while he set the bottle on the coffee table and did the same thing so that they were both at an angle to face each other.

“Ooh, I don’t know anything about wine, but that’s good,” Meg judged once they’d each sipped it.

“I know that price was no object for Carol when it came to buying furniture, so she must have known her business. And we definitely liked the other bottle, too.”

“So if you shared wine with your client—a woman—does that mean it wasn’t only business between you?” Meg asked, hoping it sounded innocent enough when in truth she was fishing. Encountering his ex-wife today had brought all of her curiosity about his past relationships to the forefront. Particularly since his former spouse had been so different than anyone she’d imagined him with.

“Yes, I drank with Carol and no it wasn’t
only
business,” Logan admitted with a small smile. “At least it wasn’t for Chase.
I
was married at the time.”

Of course—why else would the wine have been something his ex-wife had ended up with until today? Meg felt a little silly for trying to use that as the opening to get him to satisfy her curiosity.

But then he spared her another attempt by saying, “I’d think you’d be wondering more about Helene than about a client who gave me a bottle of wine.”

So he knew she was curious.

“Your ex-wife did remind me of my grandfather….”

Logan laughed. “That’s true. I hadn’t put that together until just now, but yeah, she’s about as much of a barrel of laughs as he is. Now ask me the question you’re dying to ask?”

She had so many. “Which one is that?”

“What did I ever see in her.”

Meg laughed this time. “I won’t deny wondering about
that!
”

Logan smiled. “She was different when I met her—”

“When was that?”

“Eight years ago. Chase and I had just gotten started
in New York. A big-name interior decorator was using one of our pieces in a designer showcase. We went, Helene happened to be looking at that particular display when we got there. She was telling her friend how much she liked our chair, Chase and I started talking to her and her friend, and one thing led to another.”

“And how was she different then?” Meg asked.

“She was a lot nicer for one. And not her mother. But now—” he shook his head. “Actually a few years after we met I figured out that that whole persona at the beginning was really a rebellion against her parents and the way she’d been raised. But it was a temporary thing and eventually her true nature just had to come out—that was what you saw today, the cookie-cutter image of Helene’s mother, Beatrice.”

“Helene was rebelling against her parents just eight years ago? That’s more a teenage stage.”

“Yeah, but before that she didn’t have much of a chance to be a kid. She’s from
old money
—big money. She went to boarding schools mainly in Europe, and a small, private college in Switzerland where there were very strict rules and she followed them to the letter for her parents’ approval—she said that herself. She said she was afraid that if she displeased them at all she wouldn’t have been allowed even holidays at home.”

“That’s awful.”

“My in-laws were not my favorite people,” Logan said by way of agreeing. “But when I met Helene she’d just finished her doctoral dissertation, she’d been granted her Ph.D. in philosophy and she was on her own for the first time, living in New York before she began
teaching at Yale in the fall. She was ready to celebrate her freedom, to reward herself—that’s what she said when I met her.”

“But you believed that was the real Helene,” Meg supplied.

“Exactly. Plus she saw me as an
artist
—”

Meg could tell that he didn’t see himself that way. “You don’t think you’re an artist?”

“A craftsman, maybe,” he allowed, “but I’m not a beret-wearing, putting-on-airs artiste, no. Or a Bohemian. But to Helene I think that’s what I seemed like—especially compared to the cultured snobs she was used to. And by being with me, she thought that’s what she was being, too.”

“Bohemian?”

“And that’s what her parents frowned on—although I don’t think they saw me as any kind of artist, they just saw me as the hick from the sticks who wasn’t good enough for their daughter.”

Meg arched her eyebrows as he continued. “I was starting to have some success that seemed like it would make up for not having a college degree, she was proud of her accomplishments but she wasn’t full of herself—it
seemed
like an okay mix at first. And it was easy to be attracted to Helene. In fact, Chase and I were both interested in her that day at the showcase, but she chose me.”

He paused, frowned, drank his wine, stretched an arm along the back of the sofa. Then, as if he was reluctant to admit it, he said, “And maybe I liked feeling that I could hold my own with a brainiac.”

“But things changed?” Meg said, interpreting his ominous tone and the vertical lines between his eyebrows.

“We dated for a full year—even after she went to Connecticut to work, we still spent weekends together and any other time I could get there or she could get to me. By the end of that year we decided to get married. Her parents were on their yacht in Monte Carlo and not due back for three months, but she said she didn’t want to wait, that she didn’t need their permission, so we eloped—”

“And you relocated to Connecticut.”

“Not instantly, but yeah, eventually I was spending more and more time there than in New York to be with her. And at first things were good. Helene said it was nice to come home to someone who didn’t have his head in the academic clouds the way everyone else she hung around with did. She said it was a relief that when she was with me she didn’t have to be on her toes, proving how smart she was, that I re-energized her so she could plunge back into the never-ending competition for tenure, always vying to be the smartest person in the room.”

Meg made a face. “I hate those situations.”

“So did Helene until her second year—when I guess she’d started to have some times when
she
was the smartest person in the room. And liked it. Anyway, early on she preferred keeping work and our relationship separate because she said I was her escape, so I didn’t have to have much to do with the other professors. But then somewhere along the way—”

“That stopped being the case.”

“She wanted to move up the academic ladder so she was on all kinds of committees, getting involved, and the
more time she spent in that whole world of academics, the more she liked it. Then there were the outside-of-work get-togethers and staff parties and dinners that she didn’t want to miss—things she wanted me to go to, too.”

He finished his wine and set his glass on the coffee table. When he sat back again he said, “That wasn’t a crowd for me. Forget talking movies or weather or sports—it was all Nietzsche and Kierkegaard all the time. And Helene was right in there with the best of them, getting snootier and snootier by the day, it seemed.”

“And turning into her parents after all?”

“Yep,” he confirmed fatalistically. “By about three years into the marriage Helene was basking in that environment and being embarrassed by what a fish out of water I was with her friends and associates. One particular night she got steaming mad at me for slipping out of an after-dinner discussion to find a television so I could get the score on a football game. I said I’d had it with seeing so much of her friends. She said maybe she liked being with them because they didn’t bore her the way I did—”

“Ouch!” Meg said in response to the harshness of those angry words, understanding more of why he was so sensitive about his lack of higher education.

“Yeah, that was about where we started entertaining the idea of splitting up. But then Helene found out she was pregnant—birth control malfunction.”

“That couldn’t have made things easier.”

Logan shook his head again. “Nope. Helene didn’t want to have the baby. She’d never liked kids and she wanted to focus on her career. But I talked her into
going through with the pregnancy, into trying to make things work
because
of it—dumb idea.”

“But since the baby was already on the way…”

“Right. And I know I thought that a baby might help, that some kind of maternal instincts might kick in and bring out the best in Helene. As you could see today, I was dead wrong.”

“So she gave up you
and
Tia.” It wasn’t something Meg could fathom and that was reflected in her voice.

“Basically. There certainly wasn’t any kind of custody battle. Helene fought for other things, but when it came to Tia, she didn’t even make a show of wanting her. Work and the life Helene had built within the Yale community were more important to her and she didn’t want the distraction of a child.”

“And you
did
want Tia—”

“I did,” he admitted unashamedly. “I do. I also didn’t want her in the kind of situation I was in as a kid—inflicted with a bad stepparent. The only way I could make sure that didn’t happen was if she was with me.”

He said that with conviction, and his protectiveness, dedication and devotion to his child just made Meg like him all the more. “How old was Tia when her mother left?” she asked.