That Boy From Trash Town (12 page)

There was an awkwardness, an awareness, between them that had never been there in the past, and that was what she was going to have to learn to deal with.

The situation needed thought. A lot of thought. But that would have to come later. Maybe later, when she wasn't thrown into turmoil by his presence, she would be able to think more clearly.

"The Gutierrez case," she said suddenly. "That was important to you. How can you leave it to Sam? That boy was counting on you."

He smiled. " Alvo's fine. I had it all but wrapped up before you did your disappearing act."

"Really?" She was surprised and pleased, for Dean and for the boy. "How did you pull it off?"

"I didn't. Tess gets all the credit."

Twenty minutes later they were sitting on cardboard cartons, while he finished telling her about what had really happened to Alvo Gutierrez. As she listened, Whitney's blue eyes grew sad, her natural empathy tuned to a couple of children she had never met.

"What's going to happen to them now?" she asked.

"We'll be lucky if Jackson gets six months."

She made a disgusted sound. "That stinks, Dean. That really stinks."

"I know," he agreed, "but at least it's a breathing space. The three of them—Alvo, Tess and their mother—are in counseling and—"

"How did you manage that? I thought the mother was obsessing on her husband? How did you get her to consider her children for once?"

"You'd be surprised what a little unofficial visit from the district attorney's office will do. I asked a friend to call on Mrs. Jackson and suggest that she could possibly be charged with aiding and abetting ... unless she decided to get help for herself and the kids. By the time Jackson gets out, Alvo and Tess—if not their mother—will be stronger. Now they know that they have someone on their side. If trouble starts again, they know they can call the authorities. And maybe, if everything works out—and if I have anything to say about it, it will—they won't ever accept abuse as a normal way of life again."

He stared out the window. "Alvo's got a lot of anger to work out, Whit. And the anger that's most damaging to him emotionally isn't what he feels for his stepfather. It's all the hidden stuff he feels for his mother. He doesn't know it yet, but he blames her. He blames her for having the bad judgment to marry that worthless sleaze in the first place. And he blames her for not protecting him. Alvo thinks he's an adult, an adult who understands all about human weakness, but inside there's still a child who thinks parents are supposed to be all-powerful and all-wise. Strong enough and smart enough to keep the bad things away."

He exhaled slowly, his strong lips twisting in a self-mocking smile. "And of course there's always that little demon inside him that keeps telling Alvo that he got just exactly what he deserved."

As Dean spoke the quiet, unemotional words, Whitney felt an old familiar pain well up inside her. Alvo's story was too close to what had happened to Dean all those years ago. And as always, she wanted so badly to hold him, to rock him until the past let go of him.

Instead she cleared her throat. "You're a good man, Dean Russell," she said, her voice husky. "A good, kind, caring man. No, don't shake your head. And don't tell me you were only doing your job. You saved those kids."

Grinning, he drew back his head to look at her. "One man against the forces of evil? I feel like I should be standing on top of a building, my hands on my hips while my cape blows in the wind."

"As a matter of fact I've always thought you would look pretty darn cute in tights."

He chuckled, and after a moment he stood up and moved away to pick up the box he had just inside the front door. After placing it on the table, he called back to her, "So what are we doing tonight?"

"We're playing penny-ante poker at my place." She walked to the door and opened it. "Eight o'clock. Don't be late."

"Hey, I thought you were going to help me unpack."

She looked over her shoulder and raised one slender brow. "Do I look like a Mayflower man?" she asked as she walked out the door.

Back in her apartment, Whitney took a quick shower and barely had time to get into yellow shorts and a matching cotton knit shirt before she heard a knock on her front door.

"I'm coming! Hold on a second," she yelled, scrambling into white sandals on her way to the door. Before the game, she and Lloyd had decided to try a little Mexican restaurant that everyone at work had been talking about.

Throwing open the door, she said, "Listen, Lloyd, I've been—" The words died away when she saw Dean standing behind her father.

"Look who I ran into," Lloyd said, his grin matching Dean's. "He was wandering around looking hungry, so I invited him to come along with us. Since you two are old friends,. I knew you wouldn't mind."

"Hello, Mary," Dean said. "Where are we going to eat?"

Whitney had been wondering how Dean and Lloyd would get along. Now she knew. They looked like two little boys bent on devilish deeds.

Lloyd's acceptance—which grew even more apparent over dinner—didn't mean the rest of the group from the factory would follow suit. Although they were in no way a hostile bunch, they always stood back a Utile from newcomers, as if they were waiting for some secret signal that this person wasn't going to throw a kink into the well-oiled machinery of the group.

Whitney had invited five of her new friends to the poker game at her house. With Lloyd, Dean and herself, that made eight in the game. Along with four metal dining chairs, a stepladder, footstool, vanity stool and armchair from the living room were crowded around her little Formica dining table.

There was a lot of elbow clashing, and the drinks, dip and chips—the edible variety—that cluttered the table didn't leave much room for poker, but no one seemed to notice.

Dean kept quiet at first, letting her friends get used to his presence, then gradually he began to join in their easy, joking banter. The fact that he took his wins and losses with the same casual good humor was a big plus.

Luckily no one recognized Dean as the man in the expensive suit who had briefly stepped into Rick's Pub one night. Following Lloyd's advice, Dean had decided he wouldn't tell Whitney's friends that he was a practicing attorney. Lawyers, even those of the ambulance-chasing breed, didn't live in this part of town. Because it went against the grain to tell an outright fie, he simply told them he worked in a building that housed a lot of hotshot lawyers, and when the word maintenance was casually thrown into the conversation, they were left with the impression that Dean was a janitor.

For her part, Whitney hadn't doubted for a moment that her co-workers would like Dean. She had, however, expected them to hold back for a while, the way they had done with her. But after she had won her third hand in a row, she realized that somehow Dean bad already become a part of the group.

She had promised herself she would try to duplicate Dean's casual attitude toward Winning, but after taking the pot three times in a row, she raked in the large pile of pennies, singing under her breath, "I'm bad...I'm bad."

Dean picked up a tortilla chip, leaned back in his chair and studied the triangular chip carefully. After a moment he ran his gaze around the table.

"One...two...three," he said quietly, and the next thing Whitney knew, she was dodging the tortilla chips that flew at her from every direction.

She should have known Dean would tit in. It wasn't only that he knew what it was like to struggle to survive or that he spoke their language. Dean simply had a way of connecting with people.

* * *

"... So I thought maybe she would behave herself for a little while, but no such luck," Dean told Lloyd. "It wasn't a week later that she blew up the kitchen."

"You know good and well that wasn't my fault," Whitney protested.

After the gang from the factory left, Dean, Whitney and Lloyd had moved the party to Dean's apartment so that he could share his record collection with Lloyd, but the music was forgotten when the older man began to question Dean about his friend Mary.

"I was simply trying to feed a stray cat," Whitney continued, her voice righteous. "Besides, I was only seven. How would I know how a kitchen works?"

Dean leaned towards Lloyd. "She thought maybe the cat would like a hot meal, so she stuck a jar of spaghetti sauce in the oven and turned the sucker on full blast. Then she promptly forgot all about it."

Whitney smiled in spite of herself. "He looked like an old American sort of cat, so I decided that he would rather have a hot dog."

"The explosion was heard 'round the world," Dean said. "I didn't ever go to her house, but when she told me about it, I couldn't resist. I snuck around back and looked in the kitchen window. The oven door was swinging on one hinge and spaghetti sauce was everywhere. Splattered all over the ceiling and walls. It looked like a madman with a chainsaw had been turned loose in a slaughterhouse."

Whitney glared at the two men who were doubled over with laughter. "I hope you both choke," she muttered, then after a moment, she frowned down at her coffee. "Speaking of choking, I think I better trade this for seltzer."

Dean wiped Ins eyes and groaned. "I was wondering when somebody was going to mention our dinner. That had to be the worst stuff I've ever eaten. Either we went on an off night or everyone at the factory has the taste buds of a doorknob."

"There's something about burnt chili peppers that lingers on the tongue and in the mind," Whitney said with an expressive grimace.

Grinning, Dean stood up and moved toward the kitchen. "I'll pour us all a glass of milk...unless anyone would rather have ipecac?"

As soon as Dean was out of the room, Whitney turned her attention back to Lloyd. "Why do you encourage him to tell those stupid stories?" she asked in exasperation. "I expected your eyes to start glazing over about five minutes after he went off on this excursion into yesteryear, but you just kept on saying 'More, more.' "

Smiling, he shook his head. "I enjoy his Little Mary storks. And he obviously enjoys telling them."

"Sure he does," she agreed, her voice dry. "They're all at my expense. He likes to see me squirm." She drew her knees up beside her on the couch. "Turnabout's fair play. Tell me a Little Lloyd story. Do you have brothers and sisters? A big family?''

He shook his head. "There was a brother, but he died several years before I was born."

"I'm sorry."

Lloyd's eyes grew a little sadder. "I didn't know him, so I could only mourn an idea. I'm sure the loss was rough on my mother and father—that's the worst thing that can happen to a parent—but James was never real to me."

Slowly, almost reluctantly, he began to tell her about his childhood, about growing up in a small town in Illinois. Since both his parents worked, he'd spent a good deal of his time alone, but he hadn't minded. He had things to occupy his mind, things to dream about.

On summer days, when school had let out for the year, he would turn to the railroad track that ran behind his house and follow it for mites. He had a notion that something—adventure, life, something—was out there, waiting for him, if he could just walk far enough.

"Every child thinks he will be something great, something important," he said with a twisted little smile. "That's probably what mid-life crisis is all about. You wake up one day, half your life is over, and you discover that you're nothing more than an ordinary man, that you'll never live up to your childhood dreams."

She was silent for a moment, caught up in his recollections. "What was your dream?" she asked finally.

He smiled. "I was going to be a world-famous paleontologist. The next Louis Leakey. The dream was still alive in college, probably because I didn't have a lot of close friends who could influence me with more prosaic, more profitable dreams," he acknowledged.

After a moment of silence he shook his head, as though to clear away the visions. "Colleges are the world's storehouses for possibilities. All kinds of wonderful things, a multitude of dreams, are laid out before you, like offerings to an ancient king. You start out pursuing them with all your heart, but somehow, somewhere along the way, the dreams change."

He rubbed his face slowly, as though he were growing tired. "It's probably a physiological thing. Maturity. ..hormones... the need for security. Who knows? You simply wake up one day and realize the dreams have become a person. There is someone in your life who makes you more than you were before. There is a star that shines only for you. Someone who makes waking up in the morning an extraordinary event."

He shifted restlessly. "Your center of attention shifts. All your energy.. .all your passion is given over to an individual rather than an idea. The great and important things you dreamed about when you were a child seem like nothing more than flights of fancy."

"Is that the way it happened to you?" she asked, struggling to keep the intensity out of her voice. "Did you find the star that shined only for you?"

As she watched him, she caught a glimpse of intense, personal pain. Then he closed his eyes, and when he opened them again, the wall was up, shutting her out.

A slight noise penetrated her disappointment and she glanced up to find Dean standing in the doorway of the kitchen. In his dark eyes was a look of sympathy that encompassed both of the people in his living room.

A quarter of an hour later, after Lloyd had made his excuses and left, Whitney leaned her head against the back of the couch and exhaled a slow breath.

"It hurts every time," she said softly. "Every time I see him shut himself behind that wall, it hurts. And the thing is, I'm not sure whether I'm feeling his pain or my own." She shook her head in a weary movement. "When I first came here I was afraid to tell him that I was his daughter because— You see, I wasn't sure that after nineteen years he would even remember that he had a daughter once. But I'd forgotten about the letters." She glanced up at him. "Did Mother tell you about the letters?"

"Not directly. I gather she burned them."

She nodded. "It wasn't a small pile of ashes, Dean. He must have written often over the years. And if the one I found in her desk was anything like the others, he didn't forget. He didn't forget her and he didn't forget me. He still loved me in that letter."

"So what's stopping you from telling him now?"

"You saw him pull back tonight. Anytime I even get close to mentioning his past, he does that. How do you think he'll react when he realizes he's looking his past in the face? Maybe I'm making a mistake, but I'm hoping that if he comes to see me as a friend first, a real friend, he won't run from me."

He dropped down beside her and put his arm around her, pulling her close for a moment in a semi-hug. "I'm sorry, Whit. I know it's rough on you. But speaking as an observer, I think you're making progress."

"Maybe. I don't know. It's all so complicated."

"Does that surprise you? All human relationships are complicated. It's the nature of the beast."

She turned her head and slowly examined his face. "Yes," she said slowly. "I guess I knew that already."

When she was a child it had all been so simple. So easy. A thing was either good or bad, with nothing in between. A person was either a friend, or an enemy. Relationships were effortless then. For a friend, you held nothing back. You put up no defenses.

Years ago, before she knew how easy it was to get hurt, she and Dean had that kind of uncomplicated relationship. She had always known where she stood.

She'd never had to consider what she said or did. She'd never had to pretend.

But those days were past, she told herself with regret. Nothing would ever be that simple again.

Reaching out, he rested his hand gently on the curves of her cheek. "Are you ever going to forgive me for the things I said to you?"

She met his eyes. "You think I'm holding a grudge?" she asked in quiet surprise. "You don't really know me at all, do you?"

He looked as though the question hurt and after a moment he gave his head a slight shake. "I thought I did. No, I did. I did know you, but somewhere along the way you started closing me out. You hid part of yourself from me."

"I closed you out?" If it hadn't been so sad, she would have laughed. "The only part I hid was the part you didn't want to see. You wanted me to be a pal.. .no, don't try to deny it. You wanted someone to relax with, someone to laugh with, so that's who I became. I wasn't pretending. Part of me is like that. In all... friendships... there are adjustments to make. I was one person with you, another with the men I dated and someone completely different for my friends at S.M.U. That's the way it works. Everyone does it Even you. For me, you were the tolerant big brother. And don't try to tell me you were the same person with Sam or mat judge you play golf with.''

Dean frowned. The explanation wasn't something he wanted to hear. He didn't like being compared to her casual friends. What they had was more than that. Much more. They were a part of each other.

"Have you grown out of me?" He slid a thumb across her lower lip, tugging at the tender, sensitive flesh. "I didn't want that to happen."

Whitney closed her eyes, fighting to keep from moving closer to him, fighting against the fire burning white-hot inside her.

A year ago she could have accepted Dean's touch as a natural part of life. She hadn't taken him for granted, yet being with him had felt comfortable. It had felt absolutely right. And now a wave of deep regret washed over her as she realized, once again, that it was all gone. All that was left was a nostalgic longing for what had been, what would never be again.

The change hadn't been brought on by her determination to build a life that wasn't centered around him. Change happened on the day she had touched him and allowed him to see the fires burning inside her. She had brought a new element into the equation of Dean and Whitney—sexual awareness. It was Whitney's open, physical need for Dean that had created the uneasiness, the fine tension, that even now filled the space between them. As long as she had kept her desire hidden from him, they had both been able to keep up the pretense that they were the world's best buddies and nothing more.

That day in his bedroom Whitney had given no thought to the consequences. If she'd had her way, they would have made love right then, thereby adding something new to their relationship. But because Dean had wants and needs of his own, desires that were completely different from Whitney's, instead of something being added, something had been taken away.

And only now, as she watched him struggling to retrieve the past, did Whitney feel the full of weight of her loss.

She couldn't change what had happened. She couldn't relive the past, and she could no longer dream about that magical Someday when she could be Dean's forever love. The only choice left to her was to accept reality. And in reality, she and Dean were friends. Old, tried-and-true friends. Nothing more, nothing less.

She opened her eyes. "I'll never outgrow you," she said softly. "But friendships are dynamic things. They grow and change, they evolve. I want you to be a part of my life. Always. But I won't latch onto you anymore. I won't be like an orchid on a tree, with no roots of my own, making do with second-hand stability. We can't go back, Dean. So let's not even try. Let's move on to the next step, explore the hidden parts, the new parts, of each other."

She moved away from him, rising to her feet. "And if we don't like what we find, then maybe what we had wasn't as strong as we thought it was."

"No.'' The word was low and tight, vehement, and he was on his feet, his hands on her arms. "We weren't wrong. It's strong, Whitney. It's real." He made a visible effort to pull himself together, and smiling, he gave her a little shake. "Best friends, right? No matter what."

He needed something from her, some kind of confirmation. She could see it in his eyes, in his too tense smile. "Best friends," she echoed in a whisper. "No matter what."