The Heart of the Matter (4 page)

The boys leaned on the counter and interrogated her while she ground the beans and prepared the coffeemaker. They were disappointed that she didn’t know much about baseball, but grinned happily when she said she spent her spare time cooking.

“We eat deli stuff when Mrs. Fregoza’s off,” Adam said. “That’s on Wednesdays and on the weekend. And she doesn’t bake. She makes good stuff, but never cookies or cakes or anything. Dad brings home this great six-layer thing from the bakery.”

“Well. I’ll have to make you carrot cake sometime,” she said. “You boys want something to drink?”

“Cocoa, please.” Adam narrowed an eye at her. “What about chocolate cake? Can you make that? With a lot of layers?”

“Chocolate,” she said, filling the kettle with water, “isn’t very good for you. It has lots of sugar to make it edible, and, even before you add anything to it, it has a lot of fat. But carrot cake’s really delicious.”

“Does it taste like carrots?” Matt asked.

She smiled at him. He was pressed against her side, watching her work. “No. It tastes like really good cake.”

“Then, can you make some sometime and bring it over?”

“Matt,” Jason corrected him from the table. “That’s not very polite.”

Matt appeared confused. “But you asked her to make the coffee.”

Jason opened his mouth to defend himself, then apparently realized he couldn’t.

“Yeah, but she’d been murdering him in that exercise
class,” Eric said. “She had to do something nice for him. But she doesn’t have to do anything for us.”

“Maybe she’d just want to do it because she likes us,” Matt suggested, then smiled at Laura winningly. “Wouldn’tcha?”

She laughed and hugged him to her. “Yes, I think I would.”

As the boys brought down cups for Laura and told her about the things they loved to eat, Jason speculated absently that she must be thinking they’d had a horrid upbringing—at least gastronomically.

But his true concentration was elsewhere. He watched the back of her beautiful body still in the form-fitting tights and leotard, and actually indulged in the fantasy of having a social life. Not even a love life; a man with three boys underfoot had to know his limitations. But to have a woman around occasionally, to hear light laughter and smell perfume, and feel the touch of a hand that wasn’t sticky or dirty.

In the last year or two, friends had encouraged him to get out more often, to make an effort to find a woman with whom he could build a relationship.

But he’d found that something inside him had clicked off. He had friends and business associates who were women, and he appreciated them, but he no longer noticed shapely derrieres or the seductive rise and fall of a nicely rounded bosom as he had when he’d been the brash young man who’d met and charmed Lucy.

It was probably a defense mechanism, because he’d always thought Lucy embodied the essence of woman and he couldn’t admire one without thinking of her. Not that raising three boys by himself and holding on to the runaway success of a suddenly propelled career left him time to indulge his own needs, anyway.

Those needs came on him rather abruptly as Laura peered into an overhead cupboard then stretched up to reach a seldom-used box of tea. The muscles in her calves and thighs tightened, and her buttocks bunched into tight little orbs.

Four years of celibacy suddenly grabbed him by the throat and shook him. He could have sworn he heard his emotions groan.

Despite the stretch, Laura still couldn’t reach the tea.

“We’ll get it.” Adam lifted Matt onto his shoulders.

With the instincts cultivated over fourteen years of parenthood, Jason sensed disaster. He pushed himself out of the chair as Laura placed protective hands a few inches behind Matt’s back.

Matt snatched the box of tea and turned triumphantly to Laura to hand it to her. He overbalanced as Jason suspected might happen, and Adam shouted, stumbling backward and trying to hold on to him.

Eric grabbed for the front of Matt’s shirt and missed. Laura tossed the tea and caught Matt as he fell off Adam’s shoulders, and Jason caught Adam, turning him as they fell to protect Matt and Laura.

They landed on the floor in a five-body tangle, silent with surprise.

Laura had fallen to the floor in a sitting position with Matt in her lap. Jason lay on his back with Adam on top of him and Eric beside him.

“Everybody okay?” Jason asked, pushing up onto his elbows in concern.

There was a strange current of connection. Everyone had a foot or a hand on someone else and looked one another over anxiously. But it was over in an instant, and the boys erupted into laughter.

They scrambled to their feet and helped Laura to hers
in a gesture so courtly and polished Jason could only stare.

Laura dusted off her hands.

“Thank you, boys,” she said, then reached down for Jason. “Are
you
okay? You’re the one who was already in pain.”

Everything did hurt until she wrapped both hands around his arm to help him up and he suddenly lost awareness of everything but the area she touched. It felt hot. Alive.

“That’s the up side of excruciating pain,” he joked, unable to stop himself from placing a hand over one of hers. “You don’t notice a little thing like a backbreaking fall.”

She laughed, leaning into him unconsciously. He felt suddenly as though he’d punctured a lung. He didn’t seem able to breathe.

He turned his attention to the boys to stabilize his pulse. “How many times have we talked about this?” he asked reasonably but firmly. “What do you do when you need something you can’t reach?”

Matt and Eric waited for Adam to answer. They always did. Jason felt mild sympathy for him as the oldest.

“We get the step stool,” Adam replied with a dispirited sigh.

Jason turned to the corner where it usually stood. It was empty. “Where is it?”

The boys looked at one another. Jason recognized that look. Guilt. “In the basement,” Adam finally replied.

“What’s it doing in the basement?”

The boys exchanged the look again. Jason began to get nervous.

“We were looking for Christmas presents,” Matt blurted.

Jason studied each face in perplexity. “In August?”

“Last year,” Eric said, “we found the computer stuff you bought us in July. We thought maybe you were stockpiling already.”

It was a good thing that humor was his business, Jason thought, otherwise, there were moments when he would fail to find his boys amusing. “Well, someone go get the stool,” he ordered quietly, “put it back where it belongs and remember to use it for what it’s intended for. Otherwise, anything that does arrive from Santa is going to be marked Return to Sender.”

Laura noticed that none of the boys appeared particularly upset by the threat. Adam went to retrieve the stool, and the other two boys took their cocoa and headed to the sofa and the ball game on television.

Jason put a hand on Matt’s shoulder. “You aren’t thinking that I haven’t noticed you were supposed to be in bed half an hour ago?” he asked.

Matt grimaced. “No. But when I’m grown up,” he grumbled, “I’m never going to bed.”

Jason patted his shoulder. “When you’re grown up, there’ll be a lot of times when that attitude will come in handy.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll have so much to do, you won’t have time to sleep. Drink your cocoa, then say good-night.”

Matt went to join Eric on the sofa.

“Poor Matt.” Laura handed Jason a cup of coffee and sat opposite him at the kitchen table with a cup of tea. “It must be hard to be the youngest.”

Jason nodded. “It is, but don’t feel sorry for him about bedtime. He can make that cup of cocoa last an hour and a half. Do you have to call home and tell anyone you’ll be late?”

She wrapped the string of her tea bag around her index finger and bobbed the bag up and down. “Sergei knows I’m late Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays,” she said with a glance at him as she lifted the bag onto a spoon, then wrapped the string around it to drain the tea from the bag. “He just waits in the middle of the bed until I come home.”

Jason wasn’t sure if dismay was called for on his part. “A devoted lover?” he asked warily.

She sipped her tea, then grinned. “A Persian cat.”

Jason scolded her with a look. “That isn’t funny. I was imagining some Russian Olympic gold medalist in weight lifting.”

She shook her head. “No, it’s just me. I kind of like that freedom.”

He nodded and tasted his coffee. It was good. As good as Adam’s. “I dream of that sometimes, of actually leaving the house to go to work, of wearing a suit and rushing around in a big city and having business lunches. Of deciding to stay in town for dinner and spending the night at a club or a hotel.”

She leaned toward him on her forearms, toying with the handle of her mug. “You sound as though you had that once.”

“I did. I went to work for the
Bugle
right out of college as a reporter on the police beat. It was exciting, but the hours were unpredictable. Then I met Lucy, got married, and we had Adam and Eric right away. It became important that I be around more, so I started doing features for the Metro section. That was still exciting without the late nights. Then Lucy died four years ago.” He sighed, his eyes reflecting grief that had been accepted but was still carried. “Ovarian cancer. And I either had to hire a fulltime housekeeper-babysitter or find something I could do at home.”

Laura wasn’t sure if it was appropriate to offer condolences four years after the fact, but if she’d lost a mate she loved, she’d expect the world to continue to apologize for it for a long, long time.

“I’m sorry,” she said.

He spread both hands in a worldly-wise gesture. “That’s life. You count the blessings, not the losses, or you’ll go berserk. Anyway, the paper offered me a column so that I could work from home and be with the boys. It’s worked out beautifully for all of us, but sometimes I feel like a housewife with cabin fever. At least I have two weeks off in August to take the boys to New Hampshire.”

Laura looked around, thinking if she lived in this house, she’d never want to leave it. Though clearly lived-in, it was elegant while still big and comfortable. She imagined it was a great house for parties and having houseguests.

She smiled. “I always take an August vacation, too, but end up spending one week of it leading a seminar at a yearly foods conference.”

He frowned. “That hardly qualifies as a vacation.”

It didn’t, but it was less lonely than going solo on a cruise or to a resort.

“So, if you’re feeling housebound, you’ll be looking forward to Wednesday’s class, then.”

He ran a hand over his face. “If I can move on Wednesday, I’ll be there.”

She pushed her cup aside and reached for her purse. “You’d better hit that hot tub if that’s going to happen.”

He didn’t want her to leave. He liked her sitting across from him at the table in the quiet of evening with the boys watching television at the other end of the room. He missed a lot of things about his marriage, but he really missed an understanding pair of eyes looking back at him, knowing what he was going through as a parent, as a person, and sympathizing, and pledging help and support.

He missed the tandem factor—the helping feet on the pedals, the hands on the handlebars.

He was a good father, but he wasn’t a mother, and he knew nothing he could give the boys would compensate for Lucy’s absence.

He pushed his chair back as she stood, thinking that it wouldn’t be fair to stop her. She’d driven him home out of kindness, and she was probably anxious to get home to her quiet place and her nonintrusive cat. He couldn’t blame her.

Matt came toward the table, his big mug held in both hands. Cold cocoa sloshed in the bottom of it. “Can I have more?” he asked hopefully.

Jason took the cup from him and lifted him onto his hip. “Sorry,” he said. “Time for bed.”

Matt frowned, his wide, dark eyes worried. “What if there’s monsters in there again?”

“Matt, you dreamed that,” Jason explained gently. “They weren’t really there, remember? We looked in your closet and behind the chair and under the bed.”

Matt sighed. “He left before you got there.”

Jason shook his head. “We checked for footprints the next morning. There weren’t any. But we’ll go look as soon as I say goodbye to Laura.”

“If I go to bed now,” Matt asked with a shy glance at Laura, “can
she
come and look before she goes?”

Jason opened his mouth to try to get Laura off the hook. But she put her purse down. “Sure I can,” she said.

“Wait a minute,” Jason complained teasingly, setting Matt on his feet. “I’m usually good enough to check the monsters for you.”

Jason shook his head at him. “But you came home from the class all tired and everything. If there
is
a monster, you can’t fight it off. But she’s got her Power Ranger stuff on.” He pointed to her tights and leotards.

“So there,” Laura said to Jason under her breath as Matt took her hand and led her away.

Jason watched them go, a curious hitch in his breathing pattern.

“Way to go, Dad!” Eric said in a loud whisper the moment Laura was out of sight. He slapped Jason on the back.

“Yeah!” Adam added with the same grin of approval. “She’s really a babe! I didn’t think you could.” Realizing he was getting himself into trouble, Adam tried to rephrase his observation. “I mean, I thought you were too old…”

Mercilessly, Jason stared at him, letting him talk himself out onto a limb.

Adam smiled nervously. “What I meant was, I thought you were too cool to notice girls. Women. Pretty women. Young, pretty women.” His smile widened. “You’re gonna kill me, aren’t you?”

Jason folded his arms. “I’m undecided. You do make good coffee, and you didn’t rat on me when I pretended you couldn’t.”

Adam smiled modestly. “I guess you’re pretty lucky to have me.”

“Okay, we’ll say that’s true. But it’s also true that Laura is just my exercise instructor.”

“Like your personal trainer!”

“No. Not personal. There are about a dozen other ladies in the class.”

Eric laughed. “Ladies?”