The World is a Stage (20 page)

“You don’t get to just swoop in and make me fix broken children and walk away,” she said feebly.

“Watch me.” He grinned. “Thanks, by the way. Who’d have thought you’d be the one with a real knack for kids? I think it’s because you don’t talk down to them like you do to adults. It’s a nice change.”

“I hate you.” It was all Rachel could think to say.

“Aw, shucks,” he said, grinning. “You know how to make a guy feel like a hundred dollars all wrapped up in a glittery thong. Will I see you at rehearsal next week?”

Her head spun. That sounded suspiciously sincere. “Yeah. I guess so.”

“Good. Because you and me, Rachel? We’re not done yet.”

She lifted her hand as they drove away, rooted to the spot and unable to do much more than watch them leave. A few weeks ago, Michael O’Leary telling her they weren’t done would have filled her with anger enough to have her stomping into the wings.

Tonight, though—just for the space of a few breaths—she let his words fill her with hope. She felt buoyant. She felt light.

Damn.
She felt really good.

Rachel and Molly sat having breakfast—not together, but in the same room, their silence sullen and heavy.

Rachel didn’t like it. The last thing Molly needed right now was to be isolated from her family.

“You know, it’s not unreasonable to feel hurt because you walked out on me last night,” Rachel pointed out between spoonfuls of cereal. She kept her voice calm, the same way she might discuss the weather or whose turn it was to pick up the groceries. “Despite what you think, I’m not asking you to give him up, Molly. Just lower the intensity a little, okay? Take your time and make sure this is really what you want before you enmesh yourself in his life. That’s all.”

And give her time to find out more about him. The idea of a wedding didn’t fit in with what she expected of Eric. That he wanted someone to take care of his kids, sure. That it suited his pride to have a girlfriend considerably younger than him and hot as hell made sense. But wedding bells and church pews? After a few months? Something wasn’t right.

“I love you, Molly, no matter how mad you are at me right now.”

If nothing else, the hostile silence made it a lot easier for her to say her piece.

She nudged Molly a little. “Okay? It’s only fair. Besides, I can’t compete with your boyfriend when he puts on a suit like that.”

“He did look really good,” Molly agreed, barely moving her lips.

“You’re telling me. The old lady sitting next to me threatened to try and steal him.”

She didn’t quite get the laugh she was after, but Molly relaxed enough to smile. They had so much to strengthen them, she and Molly. Her sister needed to remember that. “I’m not happy about the way you’ve been reacting to all this Eric stuff. Just so you know.”

It was the first bright spot of the day, and Rachel felt it down to her toes. That was fine. She didn’t need her sister’s forgiveness.

She just needed her to be okay.

Chapter Fourteen

Fight Captain

Michael spent another Warrior Race practice sitting on the sidelines, eating cold Chinese food and wishing he could rebuild himself with bionic parts.

“You guys don’t stand a chance without me,” he called out, not even bothering to fully chew his chow mein first. “You’re too damn sloppy!”

“That’s what she said,” Nick said, coming up behind him and dropping to the ground. Michael took one look at Peterson’s younger brother and swallowed a huge chunk of slimy noodles. The kid had a bruise the size of an apple along one square-cut jaw, a cut pasted with a butterfly along the side of his brow. His hair, longer than Peterson’s but still worn short, was greased into dark brown clumps.

Of course, he didn’t mention how awful Nick looked to his face. Michael wasn’t stupid. “If your lady friends are saying that to you, you’d best get some pointers from your brother. Sloppy is never a compliment.”

Nick finished tying his shoes. His eyes flashed and his brows met in the center of his forehead, and he winced when he forgot that one of those brows was seriously damaged. “Is it bad?”

“Your face?” Michael laughed. “It isn’t good.”

“He’s going to be pissed.”

“Probably,” Michael agreed. “But don’t look at me. I’m not the one who picks fights with guys two times my size. You have some kind of death wish?”

Nick’s normally bright hazel eyes darkened. “It’s not my fault.”

Michael pointed at him with one of his chopsticks and tried to appear nonchalant. With Nick, conversation was always a tricky thing. The least provocation or sign of authority tended to set him off on some kind of cycle of craziness. One of the reasons they’d always gotten along so well was that Michael rarely took to the soap box that had become Peterson’s default position these days. “You know what you need?”

“I don’t give a fuck what you think I need.”

“I’m sure you don’t. But I think you should stop by the farm tomorrow.”

“The farm? You mean like where you grow all those pigs and hay and shit?”

“Well, we don’t have pigs. Or hay. Though there’s plenty of shit.” Michael could tell Nick wasn’t amused. “It’s
lentils
, Nick. People eat them. My cousin even has a mattress made out of them.”

“Whatever.”

“Do it anyway. Jennings could really use a hand around there, and I have to keep going to your brother’s Shakespeare thing. I worry about Jennings, and I’d owe you big time if you kept an eye on him a little. He’s got both feet in the grave, if you know what I mean. Only thing keeping him alive is the amount of whisky he’s got preserving his insides.”

In truth, Michael was pretty sure Jennings would outlive them all. He’d been an ornery old man when Michael was a kid, and other than the deafness, which Michael suspected was mostly for show, he was an ornery old man still. But if there was one thing the bastard was good for, it was putting young men to work and instilling some sort of sense of pride of ownership in them.

“You want me to go help an old man grow lentils?”

“Yeah. It’d mean a lot to me,” Michael said simply. He resumed his attentions to his takeout carton.

He heard the rustle of Nick shrugging behind him. “Sure, Michael. If you want.”

Michael turned his head and added, “We’ll pay you, of course. Farm work’s a job like any other—I can probably convince the old man to go up to fifteen an hour. You have to show up on time, though. Jennings is a bit of stickler about that.”

He was. Michael distinctly remembered carrying buckets of water up and down a hill for an entire hour for every minute he was late coming home on the weekends.

“I can show up on time,” Nick grumbled, his eyes snapping.

Michael refused to take the bait. That kid was just looking for a reason to fight. “I believe you. But it’s not me you have to convince now, is it? Show up at the old barn at seven. We get up with the cocks down there.”

Michael watched Nick bound out onto the practice field, taking a place behind Julian as he swung from rope to rope on a makeshift Tarzan platform he and Peterson had made the day before at the theater. It was a basic frame, nine feet tall and with four sets of ropes about four feet apart from one another. They’d gotten some pretty crazy looks backstage, but no one had questioned them. Men with hammers had a tendency to do that. And the only person who would willingly confront him on his bullshit, Rachel, was avoiding him.

Not well, mind you. But she was trying.

Just yesterday, he’d finished moving the rope swing when Gretchen, the assistant director, approached him. She was cute in that punk,
Run Lola Run
sort of way, with the kind of buttoned-up features petite women always had and hair dyed in bright blue streaks. “We’re going out for drinks after rehearsal today. You want to come?”

The way her hand rested on his forearm, fondling his tattoo in a way that would scar the poor, bosomy pinup for years, would have normally sent him running for his jacket and the nearest bar.

But he heard Rachel’s irritated harrumph from all the way across the auditorium and knew she was watching. Half of him wanted to sweep Gretchen into a mind-bending kiss right then and there. Give Rachel something to really make half-irritated, half-sexual noises about. The other half of him, this strange, conscience-wielding creature he’d never before had the chance to meet, immediately put on a bland smile and demurred, tucking his tattoo back under his sleeve.

He still went out for drinks, of course. But as Peterson remarked later, it was one of the few times he willingly went home alone.

It wasn’t something he planned on dwelling over—especially not right now. He watched his friends from the sidelines, too far away to hear the altercation between Nick and Peterson, but clearly able to see that neither man was pleased with the other. Normally, he would have helped Julian and McClellan, who were heroically inserting themselves between the brothers, but he didn’t want to ruin the headway he’d just made with Nick.

Jennings could do good work. He was sure of it.

As Nick started stretching under the careful watch of Julian, Peterson trotted over to Michael’s side. His eyes were baggy, and there were extra wrinkles all along the tattooed dragon’s back. The man was in serious need of a few days off from kids and brothers and women of the Hewitt variety.

“What’s this about Jennings hiring Nick?”

“Don’t look at me.” Michael shrugged and busied himself with his food. “If you don’t like it, you have no one to blame but your own sorry ass. You’ve got me prancing on Shakespeare’s stage five days out of the week, but the farm needs muscle to run. This is me, killing birds with stones. Or a bola. I always wanted to try one of those.”

“Be serious for one minute. Are you sure this is a good idea? Nick hasn’t kept a job longer than a week in I don’t know how long, and he’s got to have at least five recreational drugs in his system as we speak. I’d hate to think of him taking advantage of your cousin.”

Michael laughed. Such a thing wasn’t possible. “Do you remember that first year we met, when I was twelve and there was that whole week where I couldn’t eat anything without puking my guts out?”

“Yeah.” Peterson sank to the ground next to him. “Jules and I thought you were faking it to get out of the haggis-eating competition.”

“Please. Haggis is delicious.” As if to prove his point, he took a large bite of his food. “That was a few days after I started working with Jennings. My mom was concerned about the fourteen-year-old neighbor girl corrupting me. Oh, man—that was the summer. I’d lay on the ground under her tree for hours as she climbed and swung. She always wore a skirt. No panties.”

Peterson sputtered. “You’re making this up.”

“Maybe. But that’s what they thought was happening, so my mom shipped me to Jennings to keep for a while. Said I needed toughening up—and let me tell you, Jennings took that shit seriously. That first day, he attached a plow to a harness around my waist and made me work the field like a horse. You wouldn’t believe what that does to a boy’s abs.”

“Builds the hell out of them?”

Michael raised his cardboard container in a mock toast. “Thank God for Jennings.”

Peterson wasn’t convinced. “But that was years ago, Michael. No offense, but you were a golden boy compared to that brother of mine.”

“Hey, now—I had my corrupt moments. Still do, actually.”

“I mean it. He’s not like we were at that age—our shit was done mostly for fun, pranks and the occasional bag of pot. His is… I don’t know, but it’s worse. And it’s coming from some dark place I can’t understand. Besides—can you guys really afford to pay him?”

Michael waved him off. “It’s fine. And if it makes you feel better, I’ll take the day off from the theater and make sure Jennings doesn’t beat your brother to a bloody pulp. But believe me—if Nick can even lift up his dick to piss with by the time Jennings is done with him, it’ll be like tits on a duck.”

“I’m not even going to ask what that means,” Peterson muttered, but he looked pleased. He cracked his neck with a twist of his head and looked out over the field to where Nick was lying on the ground, flipping Julian off as he counted off pushups the younger man refused to do.

“It means trust me,” Michael said confidently. “Nick’s never going to know what hit him.”

Jennings was not the sort of man on whom emotions were clearly visible. Over the years, Michael had come to recognize that his thin, wet lips pursed when he was angry, his left eye ticked when he was
really
angry and he stroked his thin wisp of a beard when he was thinking.

As he leaned against the doorway of the centuries-old barn, Jennings exhibited none of these signs. In fact, he was cackling in untoward glee.

That meant exactly what it sounded like.

“Fence posts? That doesn’t sound so bad.” Nick looked at the post-hole digger Jennings extended his direction. It was basically a metal shovel with two cutting edges at the end—a tool Michael remembered well but not fondly. “I just dig a little hole and shove the wood in?”

“Yeah, kid,” Michael said, smothering a few cackles of his own. “It’s as easy as that. All along the eastern field—you’ll know where. The neighbor’s goats have been getting in there for weeks.”