The Talk of the Town (13 page)

Watching the skepticism cross his face, she laughed softly. “I didn’t mean to imply that I didn’t love them or that I wasn’t happy at home.”

He tilted his head. “Then what did you mean, Roxie?”

The husky way he breathed her name prompted her to reveal more than she’d intended. “You remember how you told me that all you’d ever wanted was out?”

He nodded.

“Well, I wanted out too. I needed to be on my own, to be alone for a while, to see and do things I couldn’t see and do if I stayed here.” She dropped her voice so low he could barely hear her. “I needed to find something or to do something that made me feel special.”

He thought everything about her was special.

Roxie sighed, knowing she wasn’t explaining herself very well. “What I’m trying to say is, I needed to be a person in my own right, to be someone besides my parents’ only daughter or my brothers’ little sister or even”—she held her hands out, palms up— “the next girl in my group of friends to get married. I needed to feel like I wasn’t always lost in the crowd.”

Luke couldn’t imagine losing her in a crowd of thousands.

Roxie suddenly realized how silly this all must sound to him and shook her head in chagrin. “I’m sorry, Luke. I didn’t mean to go on like that. You must think me a self-indulgent fool.”

“No, Roxie,” he said softly. “I think you’re a caring and generous person who needn’t ever feel less than anyone else.”

Looking down, she refolded the waxed paper in which their sandwiches had been wrapped and put it and their forks back in her lunch bag for another day, leaving their napkins on the table for the time being. She couldn’t meet his gaze for fear she’d blurt out the awful truth. He wouldn’t think so highly of her then, and she couldn’t bear the thought.

As she closed the bag for the time being, she said, “When I was in high school I developed what my mother called a rebellious streak.”

He arched a skeptical brow.

She gave him a hear-me-out look. “I remember one year Dad got involved in the election for mayor, and he and Mother and my brothers practically lived at the candidate’s headquarters, making signs, handing out pamphlets, running errands. But I went to work for the rival candidate.” A self-deprecating smile curved her lips. “We won, too. But I didn’t really care about the election. I was just being rebellious.”

Luke studied her for a long moment, trying to think of something to say that she wouldn’t take the wrong way. Rebellious. He could tell her a thing or two about being rebellious, none of it as tame as what she’d just related.

“I’m shocked,” he said instead, angling her a solemn look that the twinkle in his eyes belied. “They should’ve hauled you in and thrown the book at you.”

Laughing again, she balled up her used napkin and threw it at him. He caught it and, giving her another of his mesmerizing smiles, handed it back to her. They sat there a moment, cocooned in a surprisingly comfortable silence.

“I suppose,” she said at length, “it all must sound pretty stupid to you—”

“No.” His face lost all vestiges of humor. “Not stupid, but blessed.”

Roxie blinked in stupefaction. “What?”

“Blessed,” Luke reiterated in a husky voice. He cleared his throat of the emotion churning there. Then, afraid of making a fool of himself in front of her, he pushed back his chair and lurched to his feet. “It sounded to me as if you were blessed.”

And in that moment, she did indeed feel blessed.

Chapter 7

“May I give you a friendly word of advice?”

Roxie looked up from the end-of-the-week ledger she had just finished preparing for Layton Stewart’s perusal and saw Fesol Vernal standing on the threshold of her open office doorway.

The payroll clerk didn’t wait for an invitation but rather stepped all the way inside. He closed her door behind him and unceremoniously planted his lanky form on the corner of her desk. Then, without so much as a by-your-leave, he launched into his spiel. “I hope you’ll take this in the spirit in which it’s given—”

“Oh, I will,” Roxie interrupted dryly.

“And I assure you with all sincerity that I say this with the utmost good will,” he went on, completely unaffected by her discouraging tone. “I’m concerned, not only as an employee of this company for another employee, but I’m concerned about you as a friend.”

She thought about disputing the fact that they were friends but decided to hold her tongue.

“You can’t know how worried I’ve been,” he began.

Well, at least she agreed with something he said. She couldn’t know. And to be perfectly honest, she didn’t want to know. Clearing her throat, she tried to keep him from going any further. “Fesol—”

“How worried we’ve all been,” he continued doggedly. “Now I’ve taken it upon myself to express to you what so many of us feel.”

Roxie rolled her eyes, but closed the ledger, put down her pen and sat back in her chair, prepared to listen. She really didn’t have time for this, but it was obvious that the only way she would get rid of him was to let him have his say. Only then would she have the pleasure of showing him the door.

“I can certainly understand your . . . commitment to an employee you’ve personally hired. A rash act,” he digressed, “that I still firmly believe to be a mistake you’ll one day come to rue.”

“Luke has been doing very well.” Since Fesol wouldn’t say his name, she would. “And Gary tells me he’s quite pleased with Luke’s work.” There, she’d said it twice.

“For now.”

“For almost two months now,” she corrected him.

Fesol pushed his glasses up the thin bridge of his nose and regarded her balefully through the thick lenses. “Well, that’s neither here nor there. What I wished to say is that you’ve apparently allowed your compassion”—he made the term sound like some dreaded social disease—“to obscure your good sense. You’ve carried things too far.”

Even while telling herself she had nothing to defend, she protested. “I can’t see the harm in a few lunches, Fesol.”

“You’ve had lunch with him four days in a row,” he pointed out. “Four days, Roxie.”

“Guilty as charged,” she said flippantly.

Fesol drew his chin back into his neck like a turtle pulling in its head. “Already you’re being unduly influenced.”

Her fingers itched to pick up her pen and hurl it at him. From some mysterious source, however, she managed to retrieve a shred of patience and leave the writing instrument in place. With cold politeness, she said, “Are you through yet?”

He wasn’t. “You are young and trusting. I merely wished to warn you against permitting yourself to mistake your sympathetic concern for this . . . employee . . . to be anything more than what it is.”

“Thank you for the warning, Fesol,” she said through her teeth. “I assure you I’ll give it all the consideration it deserves.”

At that he removed himself from her desk. He ran a hand over the brown wisps of his hair and heaved a sigh. “I don’t suppose you’ll listen to me,” he said in a gloomy tone, “but I felt I had to speak up. Everyone who works with you, everyone who knows you, shares my concern. An innocent young woman like you involving herself with a man like—”

“Yes, well, I appreciate your concern,” Roxie cut in briskly. Standing, she walked to the door, opened it and held it wide. “Do, please, convey my appreciation to everyone else as well.”

Shaking his head at the hopelessness of it all, Fesol left. Roxie slammed the door behind him, wishing she’d let herself throw the pen after all. Maybe her typewriter, too. Storming back to her desk, she flung herself into her chair and inhaled deeply. After the fifth big breath, she calmed a bit. Another couple of breaths and she began to giggle. Solicitous advice from Fesol Vernal of all people. It was a wonder he hadn’t started in on the dangers of the birds and the bees!

Her laughter pealed as she pictured Fesol lecturing her on the birds and the bees and the hazards of mixing the two. She could just see him pausing to wipe steam from the lenses of his glasses and nearly choked. Wait until she told Luke!

Now her laughter died a quick death. No, this was one thing she wouldn’t be telling Luke. Although she’d come to realize he had a strong sense of humor, she didn’t think he would find Fesol’s dire warnings the least bit amusing. And they weren’t.

As much as she hated to admit it, Fesol was right about one thing. She had placed herself on the outside. She had made herself a target for the collective censure of her coworkers. She had done so from the moment she packed that first lunch for Luke. And with every day that passed, every lunch that the two of them shared, she slipped further and further away from the circle of acceptance.

But Roxie really didn’t care. What she gained in those few hours with Luke more than made up for anything she may have lost. Bit by bit, a friendship was blossoming, a special kind of friendship.

Though they shied away from the type of deeply personal revelations that had marked their earliest discussions, every other subject was fair game—including the normally taboo subjects of politics and religion. They found they agreed more often than not, and on those occasions they teasingly congratulated each other on having such good sense. As she came to know more of him, Roxie became increasingly impatient to know everything about him. She felt rather as if she were on a treasure hunt, digging up the most unexpected prizes.

She learned he was well-read in everything from poetry to pulp fiction. Over yesterday’s lunch of ham sandwiches and pineapple upside-down cake, he confessed that he had even begun reading the Bible his grandfather had left him. Rather sheepishly he said, “Maybe if I’d read it earlier . . .”

“It’s never too late,” she assured him.

He flashed her a rueful grin. “I hope you’re right.”

She learned he had old-fashioned values. He believed strongly in the bonds of marriage and family. He had strict views on fidelity and familial responsibility that had momentarily surprised her. Later, she’d realized it really shouldn’t surprise her. Given his background, given his lack of family support, she understood just how important family would be to him.

Sometimes they were serious, like the day she asked him about the friends he’d made in prison.

He shrugged. “There weren’t any.”

“But surely in all those years—”

“You can’t get attached in prison.” His silvery eyes went steely gray as he looked at her like he was doing so from a long, long way away. “It’s a transient world. The faces are always changing. And once somebody’s gone, they’re out of your life. Former prisoners aren’t permitted to communicate with the ones still inside. So you learn not to get attached.”

She lowered her head, trying to hide the grief she felt at all those years he’d had to suffer without someone to lean on.

But she couldn’t hide anything from Luke. He chucked her under the chin and drawled lightly, “Does this mean you’re sorry to hear I’m unattached?”

“Utterly devastated,” she’d managed to say with a laugh. But of course, she wasn’t sorry about it at all. And later she found herself wishing that he’d let his finger linger a little longer under her chin.

Sometimes they were not so serious, like the day he told her about the time he’d sharpened a stick and poked at one of his grandfather’s bee hives. “Those bees came out of there, buzzing like saws gone berserk, and chased me up a tree.”

“Did they sting you?” she asked.

“Hoo-boy, did they!” he said with a playful wince. He pointed to that sliver of a scar that stood out so whitely on his tanned cheek, a scar she had assumed he’d earned in a fight. “I was sitting on a branch of the tree, alternately swatting at them with the stick and covering my head and face as they swarmed me. Then I lost my balance, fell out of the tree and wound up cutting my face on the point of the stick.”

She gasped. “Oh, that must have hurt like the dickens!”

“It did.”

“I’ll bet your grandfather was horrified.”

He made a face. “Furious is more like it.”

She did a double-take. “Furious? Why?”

“Because I killed so many of his bees, for one.”

“Which meant they couldn’t pollinate the fruit trees,” she assumed.

“Or make honey,” he added.

“And for another?”

“Because it ruined that hive and it had to be rebuilt.”

“Well,” she said in a mock-schoolmarm’s voice, “I hope you learned your lesson.”

“Let’s just say that by the time they tired of stinging me and I stopped bleeding, I had developed a very healthy respect for Granddad’s bees,” he admitted with a quick grin.

Their ringing laughter produced a round of silence among their coworkers, but Roxie didn’t care. So long as she could hear Luke’s laughter, she didn’t care what anyone else thought. She had remembered him as a young man filled with a love of life and laugher. His enjoyment in life had been suppressed, submerged beneath a defensive detachment. Gradually his true personality was reemerging, and she was fascinated by the transformation.

Thinking of transformations, Roxie shook herself out of her reveries and onto her feet. She should have left fifteen minutes ago. Those Ladies Aide members who were free this evening were meeting in the church basement to bake their goods for the sale tomorrow, and she still had to stop by the Blue Ridge General Store to buy a can of molasses before she joined them.

But first she needed to put the completed ledger on Layton Stewart’s desk. Normally he was the first one in of a morning and the last one to leave in the evening. Today, though, he’d left at noon so he could pick up his wife and drive her to St. Joseph to stay and help their daughter care for their newborn grandbaby now that mother and son had been released from the hospital. Even so, he would expect to find the ledger waiting for him when he returned on Monday.

She entered his office just as Barbara McCanse laid some letters on his desk.

“Oh, hi,” the pretty blonde secretary said, looking a little hesitant.

“You’re here late.” Roxie hoped she sounded casual.

Barbara shrugged. “I wanted to finish typing these letters so Mr. Stewart can sign them first thing Monday morning.”