The World is a Stage (14 page)

The question was, why didn’t he make a move? Why did Michael O’Leary, with his game face on and balls tight with anticipation, bow out of the running after just one kiss?

Something was very wrong with him.

Even worse, he’d actually enjoyed their afternoon—quiet, comfortable and completely free of dick jokes. After a quick shower, Rachel joined him in the other Airstream with Jennings, and she didn’t even pull a face when confronted with a platter of Fluffernutter sandwiches for lunch.

They’d been there several hours once they took into account the three games of Scrabble Michael had been forced to sit through, watching the two of them play. By the time they were done, he was ready to swear she was a different person. Maybe it was the adorable way she’d rolled up the waistband of his sweatpants until they rested loosely on her hips, or the face she’d made when she realized she was wearing a Hooters Vancouver T-shirt, but he’d thought she was really getting into the role of Normal Human Being.

As they neared her house, however, all signs of the fun, lighthearted Rachel fled.

“You can just drop me off here,” she said. They were at the end of her block, a nice, picturesque street with people mowing the lawns and kids’ toys scattered around. Her fingers drummed against the door in a nervous staccato beat.

“Nope,” Michael said casually, peering at the numbers on the houses. What had she said hers was? Ten eighty-eight? “This is a doorside service. I’m a very thorough man—I never skimp on the good parts.”

The challenge went unmet, and his heart sank. He was going to have to try harder.

“And since you won’t ask me what the good parts are, I’m going to have to ask you for my clothes back. Preferably before you exit the vehicle. Or now. Now is good.”

She turned to him and scowled. “You’re horrible at reading people, did you know that? I said let me out of your car, not proposition me with poorly timed sexual advances.”

That’s better.
The quiet, internalized Rachel was scary. He doubted she had any idea how much scarier she was than the irate, yelling Rachel.

He didn’t slow the car. At a neighborhood-friendly fifteen miles per hour, she could have easily tucked and rolled her way to safety, but he wasn’t going to make it any easier on her than he had to.

“So what you’re saying is that if my sexual advances are better timed, we’re all sails out and ready to go? Damn, woman. Why didn’t you just say so? I can get my mast up and my canvas billowing—”

“You are impossible!” The drumming had stopped, and there was a wild, murderous look in her eyes. “For a few hours there, I thought we were having a good time. I think there was even a whole thirty minute stretch where you didn’t mention sex once.”

Michael scratched his jaw thoughtfully. “I think it was actually only about twenty minutes. You missed my reference to all the dirty tea bags Jennings had on his kitchen counter.”

He didn’t have time to appreciate the low, guttural obscenities she was about to scream in his ear, because they’d reached her house. It wasn’t the clean two stories of Colonial façade that tipped him off to the cause of her anxiety, or even the line of laundry out back that billowed with silky underthings no decent woman would expose to the neighborhood. No. It was the pair of cop cars in the driveway and the man in a blue hat escorting a very irate-looking woman up the front steps.

Her mother.

“I’m serious, Michael. If you know what’s good for you, let me out and drive away.”

“I’m a glutton for punishment,” he said with a shrug, slowing. He didn’t have time to add anything about his favorite kind of punishments, since Rachel decided she could, in fact, exit a moving vehicle.

He gave her a few seconds to correct the wobble in her step and approach the house before he turned the engine off and got out of the car. He leaned against it as though he hadn’t a care in the world—even though his gaze was sharp under his half-lidded eyes and his crossed arms hid a tension that would have burst into action at the first sign she needed him.

It was a familiar scene to him, the real Walk of Shame. There was nothing shameful about having a little too much to drink on a Saturday night and waking up in a stranger’s bed. There was, however, a whole hell of a lot of shame in being escorted home by police officers when you were too drunk to stand straight—and in the middle of the afternoon.

It was the shame that had pushed Michael’s own parent even further down the path of his own making, strewn as it was with empty liquor bottles. It was the shame that made Rachel refuse to look back and acknowledge him standing there.

Well, he was standing here and would remain that way until he was sure she was okay.

Rachel wasn’t a woman who asked for help or admitted to any kind of weakness. Obviously, neither was her mother. But that didn’t mean either of them didn’t need it.

He’d wait.

He had nothing but time.

“I think one of us should stay home tomorrow,” Rachel said, trying to look casual as she brought the fork to her mouth. She wasn’t hungry, but Molly looked about ready to collapse, her eye still puffy and purple, her shoulders slumped. The only way she would eat was if Rachel led by example. “Just to make sure she’s okay.”

“I suppose by ‘one of us,’ you mean me,” Molly replied, stabbing at her salad. She looked up. “Oh, don’t get on your high horse, Rachel. I just meant that you were the one here today, so it’s my turn tomorrow. I get it.”

Rachel shifted uncomfortably. She hadn’t yet told her sister about all the day’s adventures. The bit about their mother shoplifting a DVD of a movie she’d once had a cameo in, the bit where the cops got called in to escort her home in not one, but two marked police cars that the whole neighborhood had been happy to see—those she shared. But the part where Rachel had not been the worried daughter at home, instead spending the afternoon rolling in the dirt with a man she barely knew and didn’t even like—
that
she left out.

Especially since she still wasn’t sure what to make of his actions.
 

The last thing she’d wanted while she got her mother inside and talked to the police was an audience. So when Michael propped himself up on his car hood and read the user manual from his glove box for a full twenty minutes, never once looking up or offering his help, she wasn’t sure whether to yell at him or say thanks. Only once the police drove away and she finally got everything quieted down inside did he make an attempt at contact.

“You need anything else?” he’d asked, as if he were her waiter or an overgrown pizza-delivery boy.

“From you? No.”

“Okay. Call if you change your mind. I’ll see you at rehearsal tomorrow.”

And with that, he’d gotten into his car, an old Pacer with a wicked backfire, and drove away.

Who did that?
It would have been creepy if it hadn’t been so…nice.

There was no way she was explaining that to Molly. She couldn’t even explain it to herself.

“What do people normally do, Rach? With parents like this, I mean?”

That was easy. “They move across the country. Then they get married and have kids and feel guilty for not doing more.”

“But you did that. Well, the first part, anyway,” Molly quickly amended. “You had the fancy travel stage job and the cross-country career. But you moved back.”

Their eyes met over the table, and both of them began picking up their dinner things, all thoughts of food forgotten.

Rachel
had
come back, and it hadn’t been for their mother’s sake. Indira had been just about to get married at the time, still in the highs and sobriety of her newfound love. The truth—which she and Molly both knew—was that Rachel had done it for her sister.

But she’d wanted to see the tour out through to the end, and it was during the final two weeks in Florida that Molly had called, tearful and scared, just hours away from losing her baby.

She hadn’t come home soon enough. She’d let Molly down.

“Well, I guess I’m going to win daughter of the year award, aren’t I?” Rachel kept her tone light and avoided the elephant in the room, even though it was so blaringly white it was difficult to miss. “We could send her somewhere, I guess. They have those rehab facilities in Sedona the stars are always sent to. She’d probably think it added to her prestige.”

“Would she go?”

Rachel shrugged. She hadn’t yet broached the subject to their mother. It was so much easier to bury herself in work and in Molly’s relationships than it was to think about what to do with the woman who had bred them. Other than living in the house she’d purchased when retirement seemed the only alternative to getting continually thrown off shows, they had very little to do with her. Pick up her empty bottles, pick her up from the bar when she’d had one too many, pick her physically up and place her in bed.
 

Hope another man would come along and pick up the rest.

It was awful to think that three modern women would resort to such awful measures, but there it was. They wanted a man to make it all better.

“Maybe we should call one of the facilities and see,” Rachel said quickly. She could still fix this. “I’m sure they have intervention steps. I know that stuff is hard on you, so I’ll look into it.”

“What about tomorrow, then? I’d just go ahead and stay home, but I was supposed to go out with Eric after work—”

Rachel dropped the wooden salad bowl she’d been carrying to the sink, and pieces of glistening lettuce went flying. She busied herself picking them up, but Molly waited for her to finish, her arms crossed and a frown etched into place.

Truth be told, she finally looked as though she was going to fight for something in her life.

A small part of Rachel cheered. The rest of her wanted to cry. Why, oh, why, did it have to be for that particular man, tattoos and possible criminal activities and all?

“He didn’t hit me, Rachel. It was an accident with the girls, okay? It happens.” Molly’s foot tapped a warning pattern. “I need you to tell me you understand that.”

“Well, I don’t. Even if he didn’t hit you
this
time…”

Molly threw their plates in the sink. Something shattered, but neither one of them flinched. “Oh my God, Rachel. I’m not an idiot, okay? I know I made mistakes before, but that doesn’t mean every man I date from now on is some sort of psycho serial killer. Eric is nice. He cares about me. Why can’t I just enjoy that for a little while?”

She stormed off, leaving Rachel to attend to the mess, which she did forcefully. Cups, bowls and silverware clanged together in the sink.

It was so patently, painfully typical, and Molly hadn’t even given her a chance to respond. They were
always
nice. They
always
cared about her. But it never lasted, and that was when the trouble started.

Rachel felt the edge of the broken plate slice into her hand, but she kept picking up the shards and tossing them into the garbage bin. Dots of blood left a trail of perfect circles on the expensive Italian marble floor.

Rachel looked at the spots dully, pressing a clean dishtowel to her cut and trying not to let the red seep into her line of vision, not to let the anger welling up in her throat take over.

Their mother. Molly. Her own bloody mess.

There was so much cleaning to do.

Chapter Ten

O Noble Fool

“I am not putting those on.” Michael crossed his arms and glared at Mary, the wardrobe matron and living voodoo doll. She had at least two dozen pins sticking out of her hat, and he would rather take every last one of them to the eye than squeeze his boys into the pair of tiny gray tights she dangled in front of him. “I was promised I wouldn’t have to wear a costume.”

“Direct orders from Dominic. All understudies need to be fitted.”

“Do you see my legs?”

Mary looked down over the top of her glasses. She seemed unimpressed. “Yes.”

“How big around do you think one of them is? Near the top, where it matters?”

“I don’t know, honey, but I’m guessing you get a measuring tape up there pretty often. Why don’t you tell me?”

“The answer,” Michael said carefully, “is a hell of a lot more than that.” He pointed at the fabric she held aloft. He knew those things were supposed to stretch, but this was taking things too far. A man had his limits. A man had his rights.

“Dude, will you just get this over with so we can go to lunch? I thought you said you were so hungry you could eat a horse and chase the jockey?”

Michael flipped Peterson the bird. Peterson was not being fitted for tights. Peterson was the understudy to an understudy of the least important part of the play. Apparently, his extensive ink didn’t fit the image of a Renaissance man.
 

Lucky bastard.

“Mary, I think you’re one hell of a seamstress, but there is no way any woman will get me to shove my man bits where they need to go to make this work. Even if she promised to put them there with her teeth.”

“You wear a codpiece.” She dangled something that looked an awful lot like a jockstrap. It didn’t fill him with much in the way of confidence.