Page 27 of Love & Rockets

Chapter 6

Darla scrunched her nose and stretched her mouth into an exaggerated grimace as she looked down at her sauce-spattered tennis shoes. Though her feet ached, she didn’t dare unlace the shoes, much less toe them off. Someone had to pick Grace up from school, and she was the only someone for the job. Rolling her head to the side, she squinted at the clock on the microwave. Twenty more minutes.

Long ago she’d learned these little pockets of time were to be cherished. There were very few minutes in the day she could truly call her own. Now, she had twelve-hundred whole seconds when she wasn’t at anyone’s beck and call. She wasn’t anyone’s waitress or Grace’s mother. Not that she didn’t want to be either of those things. Her steady employment at The Pit had kept them afloat, and being Gracie’s mama was her greatest achievement in life. A person simply needed a few precious moments in a day when she could simply be.

Blowing out a long breath, she dropped onto the sofa and flexed her toes inside her too-snug shoes and winced when she heard the telltale pop of nylon separating itself from rubber. Squeezing her eyes shut, she sent up a silent but futile prayer she hadn’t torn them. New shoes weren’t in the budget. And they wouldn’t be for another two or three weeks.

Her hand fell limp at her side and she blinked twice, giving herself a moment to determine if she was prepared to face reality or not, then she bit the bullet. Swinging her knees to the side, she eyeballed the side of her hot pink running shoes. Oh, crabcakes. There was a tiny tear in the sauce-crusted mesh along the sole near her pinkie toe.

She groaned. These were the first pair of good sneakers she’d had in the better part of a decade. The name brands had something more than cache and a big price tag going for them—for the past eight months, high-tech insoles cushioned her arches and provided the kind of support Darla yearned for herself. All enveloping. Sturdy. Soft, but unquestionably solid.

They’d been a particularly sweet bargain bin deal. One of the few perks of being only a few inches taller than a cookie-making elf was her ability to find clothes and shoes on almost any clearance sale rack. Even at the MassiveMart. Still, even with the sale price the shoes had been a splurge. One she wasn’t likely to repeat anytime soon.

Heaving a sigh, she hoisted herself off the couch and headed toward the kitchen to grab a granola bar and a pack of string cheese. Grace would be ravenous. She always was these days. Food in hand would keep her from gnawing holes in the upholstery on the ten minute drive home. She paused in the tiny galley, trying not to picture Jake taking up all of the doorway, like he had the other night. She definitely didn’t let herself dwell too hard on The Kisses.

Or the fact that he didn’t kiss her again when he came back a few nights later.

Okay, so he was there to help Grace narrow down her project theme and decide on an experiment. And he did. For the past two days, her daughter had done nothing but babble about gravitational fields, magnetic repulsion, and neighborhood cleansing—or whatever they’d discussed.

He’d shown up with Giovanni’s pizza in hand, bumping him even higher on the list of Grace’s favorite people. The whole next day, she’d gone on and on about Jake, not-so-subtly pointing out all of Dr. Dalton’s many attributes.

They were mostly the pluses a twelve year-old girl thought a woman of her mother’s advanced age should find attractive. He had really white teeth. His hair was super-pretty—thick, not all wispy and greasy like Mr. Moran, her Social Studies teacher. He had a nice car and wore nice clothes. His nails were clean.

Tucking the snacks into her purse, Darla smiled. All of Gracie’s observations were unequivocally true. He was also charming. In turn smooth and self-possessed, then indisputably dorky. Sexy, despite the streak of awkwardness that sprung up any time there were more than twelve inches between them.

And, before he left, he informed her he was taking her to dinner Friday night.

He hadn’t asked her if she wanted to go out with him, he’d simply told her in his mildly stumbling but decisive way he’d pick her up for dinner at Saus Friday night at seven. She knew she should be outraged by his high-handed assumptions but couldn’t quite seem to work up the ire. She’d caved to his caveman, me-take-you-out, approach, but there was something about the guy that made her want to say yes. To anything and everything.

Jake Dalton wanted to take her to dinner. On a date. A grown-up dinner date with wine and nice napkins and no talk of magnets, planets, or arguments over which astronaut was the coolest.

Suddenly, she was a sophomore again.

The night she walked out of the hotel kitchen to find him deep in earnest discussion with her kid, every spark of girlie crush she’d ever harbored for Jake glowed a little brighter. Whenever she saw him, one of those low-burning embers seemed to flare. First, there was the way he was with everyone. Friendly, if a little distracted. Sober. Serious. Intent.

Those chicory coffee-colored eyes went from focused, to fuzzy with thought, then back again, and each time her skin rippled with anticipation. He’d look like that in bed. She knew that much instinctively. Determined. Intense. Then, ultimately, lost.

Jake wasn’t the kind of guy who did things by half-measures. Something made him a little more dangerous than the yahoos she’d dated since Gracie came barreling into her life. Over the years, she’d known more than a few men who thought they could get in her pants by buttering up her kid. Wrong. Most guys weren’t used to dealing with a grade-schooler with an IQ dozens of points higher than their own. Gracie was no easy sell, which made Darla’s love life—if she could claim to have much of one—both a challenge and a breeze.

Being a single mom was a double-edged sword in terms of socializing. Darla didn’t have the freedom most single people enjoyed. She’d lost track of the number of times she had to explain parenthood to the guy in her life. No, she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, simply take off for a weekend at the beach. Yes, she really did choose to stay home and rub mentholated ointment on her baby’s rattling chest rather than spend a wild night in Joey Bishop’s drafty hunting cabin. Granted, some sacrifices were easier than others, but rather than finding motherhood restrictive, Darla figured she had an indestructible and indisputable get-out-of-jail-free card.

She wanted to taper off on the catering jobs now that Grace was a teenager. She knew most parents looked forward to increased freedom as their children grew older, but Darla planned to take the opposite approach. Kids needed more attention from their parents as they were faced with more critical decision moments, and she planned to be available for every one of Grace’s. Even if putting Grace first meant putting off making choices for herself.

She liked the way Jake had simply not given her one.

Day after day, she was the one who had to call the shots. Most of the time, she liked it that way. But if she was being completely honest, sometimes being the one to choose…everything was a bit exhausting. She set the day’s schedule. She was the one who decided what they’d have for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. She scheduled dental and doctor appointments, monitored what little there was in her checking account, and switched the lights out when the day was done.

But not tonight.

Whatever happened tonight was totally out of her hands.

Well, maybe not completely. She’d arranged for Grace to stay with Connie Cade. The supervision wasn’t coming cheap. She’d withstood thirty minutes of grilling on the telephone before Harley’s mother finally consented to care for her honorary granddaughter. Barely thirty seconds passed between the time Darla ended the call when she heard the chirp of Grace’s phone. But unlike Darla, her kid had taken on Connie’s questioning with a saucy grin and a side of relish.

Gracie had roamed the hallway between their bedrooms while she made the arrangements. The girl was so smug. A lesser mother might have sought to wipe the grin off her teenager’s face by explaining exactly why she’d arranged for Grace to stay with Connie overnight.

But she wasn’t one of those moms. As a matter of fact, she was an exemplary mother. She hardly said anything at all about her plans to play a little doctor with her daughter’s favorite rocket scientist. If she wasn’t reading the long, smoldering look he gave her when he informed her of their dinner plans wrong, it wouldn’t take much to launch her mission.

Darla pushed away from the counter. A glance at the clock on the microwave told her she was cutting things close. Checking her bag to be sure she’d actually placed the snacks inside rather than imagining them there, she pulled her key ring from the morass and hustled for the door.

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