Page 54 of No Kind of Hero
She didn’t say it like she was paying attention. She was looking at Beth, and not in an “Isn’t this wonderful” kind of way. Beth said, “Gracie’s so sweet. It must be nice having a grandchild.”
“Uh-huh,” Angela said. “It is. I didn’t realize you were living in Wild Horse.”
“Visiting,” Beth said. “For a month or so. I’m on vacation, housesitting for Dakota and her stepfather.” And all right, she’d tossed that out in a pitiful bid for approval. But there was something in Angela’s face, and it wasn’t delight.
“I’m going to get Gracie,” Evan said. He headed down the hall, and Beth thought,Wait. Don’t abandon me.She got some idea how Evan had felt all those years ago when her mother would walk into the room and find Beth painting trim beside him. She’d swear Angela’s expression right now was exactly the same.
Angela asked, “Did you all have a good evening?”
Beth tried not to think about the fact that her hair wasn’t as neat as it had been a few hours ago, that despite her sweater, her dress wasn’t as opaque as a lady’s ought to be, or that, worst of all, she might smell like sex.
So what, though, if she’d just made love with Angela’s son? They were both adults. Surely a mother would want her child to be happy, and she’d made Evanveryhappy. She concentrated on her breathing and said, “Evan took me to Busano’s in his boat, and we ate on the deck. It was beautiful out there.”
Fortunately, she didn’t have to hear Angela’s answer, because Evan was coming out of the bedroom, the diaper bag over his shoulder and a blanket-wrapped Gracie in his arms. Beth forgot about Angela, because the sight of the sleeping baby, her mouth pursed in sleep, her eyelashes like starfish against her round cheeks, and Evan’s arms holding her so securely . . . well, it was what she’d told Evan. A biological response. Babies weremadeto give you that feeling. Women got it more than men, even if the baby wasn’t theirs. Brain scans proved it. It was science. Unfair, but that was Nature. Unfair all the way.
“We’ll head out,” Evan said softly, being careful not to wake Gracie. “Thanks, Mom. See you tomorrow.”
Outside again, he put Gracie gently into her car seat and buckled her in, and the baby stirred, made a little complaining noise, but didn’t open her eyes. Beth climbed into the passenger seat and Evan got in beside her, then pulled out of the driveway. When he got back to the main road, though, he turned his head to look at Beth for an instant, then looked back at the road and said, “What?”
“I don’t think your mom likes me.”
He smiled. “Yeah, well. Guess you have to expect that.”
“I do? Why?”
“Is it so amazing that your parents might not be the only ones? Parents care about how people treat their kids. If it’s not good enough, look out. Moms could be a little bit worse than dads, though I’m not so sure. It’ll be a while until I really test it, but I have a feeling I could be about as bad as it gets.”
“Wait. Sheknew?About you and me before?”
Another quick glance. “It’s a small town.”
“So everybody keeps telling me,” she muttered. “So what’s wrong with me now? Or is it still my general awfulness lingering over the years?”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “Could be nobody’s good enough for me. Or could be she doesn’t forgive easy. Not on the big stuff. And that she’s worried it’s going to happen again.”
“You say that like I cheated on you. Stole your money. Slept with your best friend.”
“Nope,” he said, making the turn into his driveway. “Just broke my heart.” She was still reacting to that when he said, “Look at it this way. I don’t imagine I’ll be on your parents’ good list either once they find out how you’re spending your summer vacation.”
He got out of the car and took Gracie gently out of her seat. Beth grabbed the diaper bag and shut the van door, then said, quietly so she wouldn’t wake the baby, “But you see, that’s where you’re wrong. I already told my mother you’d probably be climbing through my window. Who’s hanging onto the past here?”
She could still go home, Beth thought. But she didn’t. She and Evan both knew where they stood, after all. Nobody was fooling themselves, not this time. It might even be good for them. It was uncomfortable to face the past, sure, but it was important. Closure, they called it.
Well, notclosure,exactly, but . . .
All right. Sex, and maybe even some romance. Reminding herself what a good man—her kind of man—looked like. Tough in the ways that mattered, big and bad when you needed it, and still able to hold his little girl like that. A man who would take you to see dragonflies and dance with you on the dock. And then . . . yeah. Everything else he could do. And if some of that was about him showing the town, or her parents, or even her, that he was more than they thought, that he could win? Maybe she owed him that.
Anyway, wasn’t it all about being your whole self? Supposedly. She might have had better insight about exactly what was going on here if she’d done any of that self-improvement reading or meditating during her reboot instead of focusing on being outdoors, Jane Austen, smutty novels, and the pleasures of the flesh. But who wanted to be careful all the time?
She’d tried being careful. She’d checked off every box. She’d scored the highest in every single metric for nine long years. And look what had happened.
Maybe your self was like a pie, all the different slices of who you were, and the slices on the opposite side were exactly . . . well, opposite. Like the way you only saw one side of the moon, but that dark side was there all the same. But if only a few slices were acceptable, and you had to hide the others even from yourself, so you ended up narrowed down to that one thin little wedge? That was too tight a space. How could you breathe in that wedge?
Or it could be something much less high-minded. Maybe she just wanted her next A-plus to come in Kink 101, and she didn’t need Mexico for that, because she had some pretty good help right here. She’d been honest about what she was doing, and Evan wasn’t complaining.
What the hell. Which had never been her philosophy one bit, but she followed him into the house anyway.
What the hell. She was on vacation.
