Jennifer Greene - Wintergreen

“All right, then,” Stan said easily. “You talk to your friend about the manuscript, and come to dinner on Saturday night.”

“That would be fine,” she agreed. Her smile radiated all the relief she felt at having coaxed him into a more professional judgment of her work. Her smile hovered, though, as she spotted Matthew and Johnny coming in the front door. Matthew was carrying a large, flat white box; the aroma of pizza wafted to Lorna’s nostrils. Matthew glanced up, his eyes stopping first on her, then on Stan, and the muscle in his cheek suddenly worked like a tiny little pulse.

“I’ll be looking forward to seeing you again, Lorna. Should we say seven, or would you rather make it earlier?” Stan was smiling, putting on his coat. Then he turned around as if he just realized there was someone else there. His eyes went first to Matthew and then back to Lorna.

“Stan, this is Matthew Whitaker. Matthew, Stan Valicheck. And this is Johnny.” Lorna rested her hands on her son’s shoulders.

Stan relaxed the moment he heard Matthew’s last name. Lorna could imagine the wheels turning in his head; visiting rights for estranged fathers were common in today’s society. Awkward, perhaps, but a different problem entirely than if he’d judged Matthew competition. He acknowledged Matthew with a nod, but didn’t hesitate to offer a hand to Johnny. “Your mother was telling me about you. And I was telling her that we have horses. I told her you’re welcome to come with her, if you think you’d like to see the stables.”

“Gee, I sure would,” Johnny breathed, his eyes sparkling as he silently questioned his mother.

“We may, sometime,” Lorna hedged.

“Well, fine, then.” Stan grabbed his coat and put his hand on the doorknob. “Seven on Saturday then, Lorna?”

“Yes.”

As the door closed, Lorna pasted a brilliant smile on her face, pretended Matthew’s eyes weren’t boring into hers in brooding silence and picked up the flat white box. “You brought pizza, you darlings! I haven’t been this hungry in an age. Thank you, Matthew!”

Lorna took a small, delicate nibble of the pizza, failing to notice that a long strand of mozzarella cheese was still attached to the second pizza triangle on her plate. The gooey rope refused to break, just stretched on and on as Lorna tried to pull it free. It came loose finally, along with all the rest of the cheese on the slice. Not exactly a graceful business, eating pizza.

She swallowed and searched for a napkin. There was none. All of the napkins had been spoken for by Matthew and Johnny, both of whom were devouring their pizza slices without the slightest anxiety, while drawing diagrams of fission and fusion on their napkins. She got up and washed her hands at the sink, knowing she couldn’t eat another bite.

“Got a napkin, Mom?” Johnny asked absently.

He needed the napkin to draw a rocket on, for some unknown reason. Ah, fission.

Not Lorna’s forte. She leaned back against the counter drying her hands with a dish towel. Her stomach was doing cartwheels. Matthew sat there all cool and collected…and every word of his conversation so far had been directed at Johnny.

Somewhere beneath a solid layer of nerves, anger was gradually building up in her…or was it fear? She knew he’d drawn the wrong conclusions about Stan. She just knew…

The doorbell rang. Lorna was heartily sick of the sound. Normally, no one rang the bell; Freda and Brian just walked in. Neither man nor boy looked up, and Lorna tossed the dish towel on the counter and stalked out of the kitchen. Never, she thought, never was she going to get close to another man who judged her without a trial, who became jealous and suspicious before he even gave trust a chance. He could at least have asked her…

You asked for it. You wanted to believe things that couldn’t be true. Matthew is still a Whitaker… Her head aching abominably, she pulled open the front door, and promptly frowned. “Mr. Baker?”

Her neighbor from across the street did not make a habit of calling. In fact, they were barely on speaking terms from the time a year ago when Lorna had called the police about a raucous party at Baker’s house. A little noise was fine to welcome in the New Year, but she’d been frightened; there’d been bottles thrown in the street, and the burly revelers had been knocking on doors at four in the morning.

“I’m here to talk about that brat of yours,” the man said angrily, and stepped in, furiously stomping the snow from his feet.

“I beg your pardon?” She stared at him, unconsciously taking a protective step back when he put both hands on his hips. A full head taller than she was, R. A. Baker had a belly to rival Santa’s, but nothing of the cheerful temperament. Brown hair bushed around his ears below a bald patch on his crown; mud-brown eyes were set close together in thick, sluggish features. Normally. At the moment, his face was florid with rage, and his eyes were almost obsidian.

“That damn kid of yours put a rock through the picture window in my living room!”

“I believe you’re mistaken,” Lorna said stiffly.

“The hell I am. I saw him, first thing this morning. I would have called the police then, except that I had to get to work. I should have called the police-”

“To begin with, Johnny didn’t do any such thing. And if he had accidentally-”

“This was no accident, lady. And don’t tell me it wasn’t your kid. I saw that towhead of his, and I saw the brown coat-”

“Thousands of children have brown coats-”

“You get that kid of yours, and you get him now!”

Lorna pulled herself up to her full five feet five. The man did a fair job of looking totally intimidating, and she hated bullies. “Take a hike,” she said succinctly.

His jaw dropped an inch and a half, and his cheeks turned purple. “You want me to go ahead and call the police, I sure as hell will,” he said furiously. “I was willing to settle for having you pay for the window, and maybe give that hooligan of yours a good talking-to-”

“Hooligan!” He’d be lucky if he left the house alive.

“Misha.” Matthew’s hands clamped on her bristling shoulders from behind. She whirled into him, so outraged there were tears in her eyes. “This man-” she began furiously.

“Just tell me.”

She tried, with Beer Belly interrupting every third word. If Johnny had accidently broken a window, he would have told her. Since he hadn’t told her, she knew he hadn’t done it. Johnny would never sneak into a neighbor’s fenced-in yard, certainly not in the wee hours of the morning…

“And I heard you had plenty of trouble with the kid before,” the neighbor slipped in.

“Not that kind of trouble. And as for your false accusations, this-” she motioned furiously to Matthew “-is my attorney. So before you-”

“Misha.” Matthew’s hand went to the small of her back and tugged hard at the waistband of her pants, his knuckles pressing intimately into her spine. His message, so privately delivered, could hardly fail to get through. She gathered that he wanted silence, and glanced up at him. Almost imperceptibly, he motioned toward the kitchen door, and her eyes focused on a white-faced Johnny, staring at her with sick, guilty eyes. Her heart crashed five hundred lonely feet.

“How much will it cost for a new picture window?” Matthew flatly addressed the neighbor.

“Six hundred dollars.”

Lorna blanched. “But…” she started hollowly.

“Misha.” Matthew turned back to the man, and released his grip on Lorna, pulling a business card from his shirt and handing it to Baker. “You have insurance?”

“Sure I got insurance. But that’s not the point-”

“No,” Matthew agreed bluntly, “it isn’t. But then neither is coming over to vent your temper on someone half your size. I hope if felt good, because you’re all through now.” Matthew opened the door, not wasting any polite smiles.

“You listen here-”

“Your window will be taken care of. If you have any further problems, call the telephone number on my card. I believe we’re all through talking,” Matthew said pleasantly.

The other man opened his mouth and then closed it again. “Look. I have every right to be angry.”

“You have every right to be angry because your window was broken, but you have no right to be angry at the boy’s mother or to take it out on her.”

“If he was my kid-”

Matthew closed the door before Baker finished the sentence. Lorna was standing in white-faced silence, staring at his rigid features. She could easily read the contempt in his dark eyes, and she knew it was for her big-stomached neighbor. But was some of it for her as well? For a woman he simply assumed had been an adulteress; for a woman who raised a towhead who broke windows? Not how she wanted to represent herself. Nor, undoubtedly, had Matthew planned, when he invited her for a romantic interlude in Quebec, to be bogged down with the decidedly unromantic details of her life. He’d taken the man on for her, but she had a sick feeling in her stomach, and she dropped her eyes, feeling defensive and shaken up.

“Sit down, Misha.”

His voice came out quiet and gentle, but she shook her head. “Where did Johnny go?”

“I’ll take care of Johnny.”

She shook her head again more firmly. “Of course you won’t. I’ll take care of-”

“Sit down.”

Since her knees were caving in, she had little choice. The cushion of the chair was like a haven; she leaned back, closed her eyes and took deep breaths. She hated men who could walk into a situation and immediately take control of it.

Matthew was gone a long time. Then, suddenly, he was bending over her, his long arms straddling her chair, his eyes unreadable as he bent to press a swift, hard kiss on her temple. When he straightened up, she studied him. He was wearing a very strange expression, a wry glimmer in his eyes, a crooked slash to his mouth, a pervasive stiffness. “Baker was lucky he just called Johnny a hooligan. Anything worse and he’d probably have been on the floor with a concussion. Not that you have any violent tendencies where loyalty to your son is concerned, Misha.”