Nothing Personal (8 page)

“Hmm.” Still smiling. “Maybe you don’t know me quite as well as you think
you do.”

“Could be
,” he said with a grin of his own. He loved watching her let go of that caution, that ever-present focus. Letting herself have fun. “Maybe I’ll find out. Catch you riding your Harley down Third Street in your leathers. Though I still think it’d make sense to go together. And, just to get all wild and crazy here, maybe we could even get together for coffee, since we’ll both be
there.”

She sighed. “It’s called a personal life
, Alec. We both have them, and it’d probably be better if we kept that separate from the work, don’t you think?”

No.
“Yes. Sure. OK.” He eased himself off her desk, grateful that he could safely stand up again. “Speaking of which, I’d better get back to work, let you finish up too.” Because although the arousal still lingered, what he was mostly feeling now was rattled. Off-balance. And, for the first time in a long, long time, completely unsure of where he stood with a woman.

The arm came around from the front. She watched the hand beneath the buttoned shirt cuff groping towards her, shrank against the seat again, pulled her legs as far to the side as they could go.

T
he questing fingers finally touched a piece of white paper that was lying on the floor, and the hand closed around it and scrunched it, the paper wrinkling up.

There was a jerk
that flung her away from the window, and then they were going sideways, spinning around, and there was a screeching sound that went on and on, and somebody screaming. And then the
boom,
the crunch that cut the screaming off, even as she felt the wrench of something grabbing her hard around the middle, the crack as her head hit the window, the sharp pain blossoming, hot and red and spiky, until it filled every bit of her.

And it hurt really bad, and she wanted her mom. But her mom didn’t come.

Her sobs woke her
. She was lying in bed, the tears wet on her cheeks, her head aching as if she had hit it just that moment and not 25 years earlier.

She rolled towards her bedside table and reached for her
water glass, grabbed a corner of the sheet and wiped it across her eyes, over her cheeks. The dream was still there, vivid in her head along with the pain, and she switched on the lamp to chase it away, sat up and reached for her phone to check the time.

Four o’clock
. The witching hour, when the bad things came back to haunt you.

“Tell my girlfriend that I missed her. Give her a big smooch for me.”

“I will.” She smiled at Philip as she slammed the trunk of the car on her suitcase, then reached out for him, felt his arms wrapping around her,
squeezing her tight, and had to blink back a couple tears at the comfort of it.

And then
Javier, giving her a hug of his own. “Merry Christmas. Drive safe. And oh.” He reached for the red bag he’d set on the sidewalk beside the car, handed it to her with a flourish. “Something to make Christmas Day a little more festive.”

“Ooh, champagne,” she said with a quick peek. “
Cool. Thanks, guys. We’re going to be two loopy ladies after we toast with this.”

“
Hmm.” Javier tapped a finger against his chin. “You
could
use it for that, or you could invite Mr. Alexander Alpha Kincaid over and get toasted with
him.”

“
Which would be . . . hmm. Yeah. A
very
bad idea.”

“Really? Because,
baby girl, excuse me for saying it, but you need to get laid. You’re getting dark circles under your eyes.”

She had to laugh.
“And sex helps with that? Really? I never heard that one.”

“
Gets the blood flowing,” Javier assured her. “Sends oxygen to all those important places. Like your . . . brain.”

“Oh, yeah. My brain. I’ll remember that.
Gotta go. Merry Christmas, guys. Have a great one.”

“Bye.
” Javier gave her one last kiss on the cheek. “But if you get that man under the mistletoe, take that chance. Oxygen. Blood flow. I’m just sayin’.”

Philip and Javier were almost the only people who had touched her at all during the past two months, bar the occasional handshake, she realized as she drove off with one last wave out the car window. She hadn’t been able to get back to Chico since she’d started the job, even for Thanksgiving. Which would have been all right, because her grandmother always came to visit her for a few days in December. Ostensibly to walk around Union Square, look at the decorations in the store windows and the big tree, exclaim over the huge, decorated marble lobbies of the grand office buildings, and go for a ladies’ lunch on the top floor of Macy’s, have tea with little sandwiches and cakes. But actually because it was a time when it was better to be together.

But this year, her grandmother hadn’t come.

“The drive’s getting a little long for me,” Dixie had told her. “So you’ll have to go see all the lights for me, and tell me all about it.”

“Are you not f
eeling well? What does your doctor say?”

“Oh, I’m fine,” Dixie insisted. “
Nothing to bother a doctor about. I’m not sick, just a little tired. Just getting old.”

“You aren’t old, Grandma. You’re not even 75 yet.”

Her grandmother laughed, the familiar smoky whisky sound. “Well, then, just say I’m old enough to deserve a rest, how’s that? I get to lie around on the couch all day and eat bonbons if I want, I’m such a lady of leisure. I’ll miss our treat, but that’ll make it even nicer to see you, and hear about all that important stuff you’ve been doing.”

Desiree laughed herself at that. “If you want to hear about me yelling at t
he phone guys to check the lines, I guess I could tell you about that. I don’t do the exciting parts, all the big meetings and the important people. That’s Alec’s job.”

But she wasn’t thinking about Alec when she’d left the congestion that was I-5 on the day before Christmas Eve and was riding the back roads, quiet and empty, lonely or peaceful depending on your point of view, a series of right angles and straight lines arrowing across broad stretches of pancake-flat farmland, bringing her ever closer to Chico. The branches of the trees in the fruit and nut orchards were bare now, the sky a wintry pale, the heater on against the chill that even the Central Valley couldn’t escape in late December.

It was the dream that had brought it back. The drea
m. The back seat. And Christmas approaching.

She’d struggled and struggled on that long-ago December morning, her face getting hotter despite the chill in the apartment, her hands getting clumsier, her hair falling in her face because she didn’t know how to get the barrettes to shut. She got the tights on at last, but they felt funny, and they pulled at her legs, and she didn’t know how to fix them.

She went to the door of her room, peered out. He was there, sitting at the kitchen table, looking down, with a glass of something brown next to his hand. Maybe it was apple juice. She’d got herself
a bowl of cereal when she’d got up, but she hadn’t been able to find juice, and her dad had been asleep, she’d seen when she’d tiptoed down the hall and peeked into the bedroom. Maybe he’d made some juice, though. Maybe she could have some, because she was thirsty, and her legs were scratchy.

“Dad?”

He raised his head and stared at her, but his eyes were funny. She moved tentatively into the little kitchen, shifted from foot to foot.

“What?” he finally asked.

“I can’t do my tights right.” He’d told her to put on a good dress. After that, she’d thought, maybe he’d take her to see her mom. So she’d put on her Christmas dress, the one she and Mommy had found in the thrift store. It was green, and soft, and you could pet it like a cat.

“
You can wear it for Special Occasions,” Mommy had said, “when you want to be extra-pretty. When you go to birthday parties.”

Desiree
had known that she wouldn’t be going to birthday parties, but she hadn’t told her mom that, because it would make her mom sad. The pretty girls, the ones whose headbands always stayed on over their shiny hair, the ones with cute shirts that said
Princess
in sparkly letters
,
they were the ones who opened up the white envelopes in class, and giggled and talked about going to get manicures. Desiree wasn’t sure what manicures were, but she knew that skinny girls who were too tall and had red hair and glasses and raised their hand every time didn’t get them.

But her friend Olivia would invite her to her birthday, she thought hopefully. She probably would. And maybe she could wear her dress then. And at Christmas. And now.

So she got the dress off the hanger and unzipped it and pulled it on, and reached behind her and found the little end of the zipper at last and pulled it up from the bottom, and then scrunched her arm down and pulled it up from the top. So that was good. But then she tried to put on the tights, and she kept getting the foot all twisty, and she felt like she was going to cry. But she didn’t want to cry, not if she was going to see her mom.

So she
went in the kitchen and asked her dad, but her dad just looked at her.

“They look fine to me,” he said. “Go put your shoes on.”

“Then do we get to go see Mommy?” she asked.

His face twisted up, and her stomach felt funny again, like she was going to throw up.

“No,” he said. “She’s gone.”

“But when can I see her?” she asked again. Maybe it was because they couldn’t go in the car, because the car was gone too.

“Maybe we could go on the bus,” she said. She and Mommy took the bus sometimes. The bus went lots of places, she knew that.

He shoved his chair back with a sudden movement
and a screeching sound that made her jump and tremble, and she wrapped her hands together and twisted them in front of her.

“We’re
not going to see her,” he said. He stood and picked up his glass of juice and took a big drink. And she wanted to ask him for some, but she didn’t, because she wanted to know about her mom.

“But
why?”
she asked, trying not to cry. “Where did she go? When is she coming home?”

“She’s dead!” he shouted, and he banged the glass down on the table, and Desiree shrank back against the wall of the kit
chen as he continued to shout. She pulled her arms together in front of her and put her elbows in front of her face and her hands over her ears, and now she couldn’t help it. She started to cry.

“She’s not coming back!” He was still shouting
. “She’s dead, and she’ll always be dead!”

And Desiree pressed and pressed and pressed herself into the wall, and tried to disappear.

That
had been the worst thing. But then her dad had gone away, back to his room, and she had gone back to her room. And later on, she had heard the sound of the doorbell, heard her dad opening it, and then she heard her grandma’s voice, and her grandpa. She wanted to go out and see them, but she didn’t, because everything was wrong, and she didn’t know what she was supposed to do.

So she sat on her bed. She put
her feet together so they lined up exactly, and held onto the edge of the bed, and looked down at her shoes. At the cutouts in the toes that had the red around them, that her mom had bought for her with her new dress. Her party shoes. She pressed them together, stared down at her red cutouts, and listened.

“Where’s Desiree?” That was Grandma Dixie, and her voice wasn’t right either. It wasn’t all laughing and bubbling like usual, it was sharp, like the pain in Desiree’s head, that still pounded in there like somebody was hitting her.

Tap. Tap. Tap,
went the spikiness in her head.

“I don’t know. In her room.” That was her dad.

“In her
room?”
Her grandma again, and her voice was even spikier now. And then the rumble of her Grandpa Henry’s voice, deep and slow. His voice still sounded the same, just slower.

And then her grandma
was there, in her doorway. Coming over to her, and her face was still her grandma’s face. It was still right.

“Oh, honey.” Grandma Dixie was crying too, but her tears were warm, and they fell on Desiree’s red hair that was still not in barrettes, because she didn’t know how.
Her grandma sat down on the bed with her, and Desiree was gathered in her skinny arms, pressed into her warm chest.

And
she cried and cried and cried, and her grandma cried some more too.

And then her grandma fixed her tights.

Now, s
he passed the Mexican restaurant, and the tire shop, and the last few orchards that remained this close to town, and turned in at the sign for Country Club Estates. Slowed to ten miles an hour, inched around the kids on their way to the playground. Waved a hello to Mrs. Chang and Mrs. Sanderson, out for their evening stroll, and received waves and smiles in return.

She
went around the final curve, pulled to the curb. Saw her grandma’s car parked beneath the neat carport, and smiled a little at the sight of it. Alec had got the white Corolla right, he’d just got the generation wrong.

Her grandma had a new lawn ornament
, she saw. A donkey, a basket on its back planted with pink petunias, standing amongst the neatly trimmed bushes that filled the tiny area at the front edge of the mobile home. Well, he could keep the windmill and the gnomes company.

By the time she’d emerged from the car and gone around to the back to pull out her suitcase and the gifts she’d brought, her grandmother was coming down the wooden steps of the deck that Grandpa Henry had built for her when Desiree was a little girl. Dixie wasn’t
hustling, like she usually did, and she rested a hand on the wooden banister as she descended. But her smile creased her thin face, caused her rosy cheeks to round into apples.