Sunshine and Shadows (5 page)

As Sister Ursula would say, "You must be sick."

And as Sister Clementine would say, "No, she's not sick. She's in love."

Chapter 2

For his part, Jay Quillian was sure that he would never marry. As he drove back to his town house in Jupiter after showing Lisa the sketches, he congratulated himself for remaining free of entanglements until the age of twenty-eight.

So why was he thinking about this woman, this Lisa Sherrill? During one short afternoon and evening, she had invaded the space of his mind, convinced him that she shared his compassion for the people of Yahola and reminded him that his sex life was inadequate.

Loneliness. Maybe that was it. He didn't admit to it often, and when he did it was usually in a fit of self-pity that he managed to overcome by immersing himself in work.

He could have understood his fascination with Lisa if she'd been a great beauty, but if he'd been pressed for a description, he would have described her as
cute.
How else would you describe a pixie kind of a person with wispy blond hair, eyes that sparkled even when she tried to appear dignified, and a figure that was diminutive but very appealing to him?

Not that those eyes merely sparkled. He had seen for himself how they could glow with excitement, crinkle with humor, and deepen with emotion. He could only imagine how they might darken with passion, but why was he thinking about that?

He waved at the guard at the gatehouse to the development where he lived, decided that he should backtrack to his office and pick up a folder of work to bring home, and just as quickly changed his mind. He didn't want to face another evening spent with his nose buried in his work.

He parked his car in its usual slot beside his town house and unlocked the gate to the cypress-fenced courtyard. Hildy, his half mutt, half Old English sheepdog, ambled painfully out of her doghouse and nuzzled his knee.

He bent down to scratch her behind the ears. Poor old Hildy was getting along in years. He could remember the days when she used to come bounding out of her doghouse at the sound of his key in the lock and plant her big paws in the middle of his chest to welcome him. Often as not, her greeting would include a loud slurpy kiss. Nowadays, she was hard of hearing and barely managed to wag her tail when she saw him.

What would he do when she was gone and there was no more Hildy to greet him at the gate? He didn't like to think about it. The truth was, his town house smelled of loneliness—a smell of too many store-bought frozen dinners and rooms left closed all day to incubate a faintly doggy smell.

"Hildy, old girl, how about some chow?" He let them both in the front door, and she waited eagerly as he poured kibble into a dish beside the kitchen closet where she slept when she stayed inside.

He wasn't hungry. The meal he'd eaten in the dining hall had been delicious, and it had seemed to be a hit with the people of Yahola, too. He was glad that the mission had decided to hire a dietitian and to start a meal program. Some of the kids in school had a hard time concentrating on their lessons, and he knew the reason was that they didn't get enough to eat at home.

Lisa didn't look like the type to isolate herself at a nowhere kind of place at the edge of the 'Glades where her coworkers would be nuns and where poor families predominated. She looked as if she'd be more comfortable in classier surroundings.

But perhaps she wasn't what she appeared to be. Some of the things she'd said tonight made him think that maybe she felt the same way about the mission as he did, which was probably impossible. He had begun his association with the mission out of atonement, but he continued it out of love.

The first time he'd ever driven to Yahola, he'd been overwhelmed. First of all, the camp was in a wilderness dominated by water. Silent water, slipping through the saw grass toward the sea; lazy water, green with algae, lapping at the sides of the canals on both sides of the road; water that weltered out of the sky in great thunderstorms, the likes of which he'd never experienced anywhere else in Florida or in Tennessee, the only other state where he'd ever lived.

Then there were the nuns at the mission, exceptional women who were devoted to the migrant children with a passion that burned so strong that he was in awe. And of course there were the kids, who were the main reason for the mission's existence in the first place. He had grown to love the children, two hundred or more of them, whose lives and futures held little good fortune and even less promise.

Of course, Sister Maria disagreed. "Many of them will succeed in ways that their parents have not. If we enable just one to finish high school, to go to college, to find hope in the midst of despair—then we have succeeded," she'd told him.

At first Jay didn't know if it was possible to change the courses of the migrant children's lives even with the single-minded devotion of the dedicated Sisters of Perpetual Faith. He only knew that art could make a difference and that self-expression was an outlet for young people who had no other way of getting their feelings out in the open. In this he was no less dedicated than the good sisters.

He could have been a partner in a busy Palm Beach law firm after he graduated from the University of Tennessee law school, but he'd turned down the offer. Instead, he now shared a partnership and a cramped office with another up-and-coming young lawyer, and their office was by no means located in the best area of Jupiter. He made enough money to support himself, and his practice was growing. The growth worried him. He didn't ever want to give up his work at Faith Mission School or renege on his commitment to Connie, his prize pupil.

The first time Jay had seen Connie Fernandez in class, she was tightly gripping a blue crayon and concentrating on a picture she was drawing. Her thick black hair curved over her cheekbones, and she had brushed it behind her ears from time to time with a distinctively impatient flip of the wrist. She was a beautiful child with that brown skin and black eyes, but that wasn't what had impressed him the most. It was Connie's sheer raw talent and her own placid acceptance of it that struck him on that first day. It was only later that he realized Connie's rare capacity for interpreting the human condition with her head as well as her heart.

Three years ago, when he had first remarked upon her, Sister Maria had told Jay that Connie was the brightest student in the third grade. Since then Connie had never earned less than an E for Excellent on any of her report cards.

Connie looked to him, her beloved art teacher, for guidance, and he'd done his best. One life, a twelve-year-old girl's life, hung in the balance. Art could be her salvation, so it was up to him to offer encouragement and show her that there were better ways to live than the way she was living now.

After Hildy ate her dinner and retired to her bed in the kitchen closet, Jay flipped on the stereo and flung himself down on the couch in the living room. He should throw in a load of laundry, clean up his studio, coax Hildy outside for a walk.

He should have, but he didn't do any of those things. Instead he pictured Lisa Sherrill, who looked like a child when she was wearing overalls, like a mother when she was taking care of children and like a temptress when she wore a short skirt. And who would have expected to find a temptress in the dining hall at the Faith Mission?

* * *

"Sister Maria, you can do me a favor," he said on the following Wednesday, his regular day at the mission.

"I'd give you the world if I could," she said, beaming up at him from the desk in her office.

He sat down in the chair across from her.

"I don't need the whole world," he said. "Only a phone number."

"I'd give you the phone number to heaven itself if you asked," she said. "But, then, we have other channels to God, so perhaps it's one of his angels you'd prefer to speak with."

"Maybe she is at that," he said lightly. "It's Lisa Sherrill."

Sister Maria lifted an eyebrow. "Lisa Sherrill. Yes, she's delightful, isn't she?"

"Don't go getting any ideas," he warned.

"Ideas? Me? I'm sure you only want to discuss business with her, right?" Sister Maria blinked innocently at him from behind her bifocals.

"The children are going to paint panels for the dining hall. I need to discuss it with Lisa, and she's not in the kitchen this afternoon. Sister Clementine said that she's gone to West Palm Beach for a meeting," he said.

"Yes, a meeting of professional dietitians, I believe. Here it is in her personal folder—her land line and cell phone numbers." The nun scribbled on a scrap of paper and handed it across the desk to Jay.

"Thanks," he said.

"Jay," Sister Maria said when he turned to go.

He looked over his shoulder, saw that she looked unusually serious, and halted in the doorway. He turned around to face her.

"Jay, you really should have more of a social life. I worry about you," she said.

Sister Maria was the only person at Faith Mission who knew why he gave so much time to their work; the two of them had mined this conversational ground before.

"I'm fine, Sister," he said patiently.

"It isn't natural for a young man like you to hang out with a bunch of children and nuns."

"For me it is," he said quietly. "You know why."

"It's not a good enough reason. You deserve a life, and what you have isn't much of one by most people's standards."

"I don't live by most people's standards—not any more."

"I never want to lose you as a volunteer at the mission, but even I can see that it's not enough for you. If you're thinking of becoming friends with a young lady, you couldn't find a nicer one than Lisa. By the way, the advice is free."

"The trouble with giving me advice is that someday I may want to repay you with the same currency." His voice rose on a teasing note, and he grinned at her.

She laughed. "Fortunately, yours is always welcome. You don't know how happy we are to know a lawyer to call when we need one."

"Thanks for the help," he told her as he left, and she called out a
de nada,
Spanish for "you're welcome."

He dialed one of the numbers that night. The phone rang for a long time, and when someone answered, it wasn't Lisa. When he asked to speak with her, the voice, which was female and for no reason that he could fathom distinctly hostile, said, "Lisa's not here."

"When do you expect her back?" he asked in his most businesslike tone of voice.

"I don't know," was the tart reply.

"I see," he said, halfway unwilling to leave a message with someone who sounded so angry.

"I'll tell her you called," said the woman on the other end of the line before she slammed the phone down in his ear.

Jay clicked off his phone, thinking that he would have laughed if he hadn't been so disappointed. The woman couldn't very well inform Lisa that he had called when he hadn't even given her his name.

The best thing that he could say about his abortive effort to reach Lisa Sherrill was that it had produced information about her. She lived with a woman, and from what he could gather from the sound of her voice, it was an older woman. And if Lisa lived with an older woman, she probably wasn't living with a man. Encouraging news, indeed.

* * *

Lisa had expected Adele to be nodding in front of the television set when she arrived home that night, but the house was dark. As Lisa opened the door from the garage into the kitchen, Adele shuffled in wearing her bathrobe and old terry-cloth scuffs.

"A man called," Adele said abruptly.

"A man? What man?" Lisa asked, suddenly alert.

"I don't know," Adele said. "He didn't give me his name."

"Great. I haven't been out with any decent guys in the past six months, and you didn't get his phone number," Lisa said with more than a little exasperation. Adele refused to consider getting Caller I.D. She said that she'd be less inclined to answer the phone if she knew who was calling.

"Want to play a game of gin rummy?"

Lisa fought an urge to pursue the discussion about the importance of taking telephone messages because past experience had taught her that it would do no good to argue. Instead she said, "I'd rather not. I'm tired after a whole day of meetings."

"I remember when I taught you and Megan to play gin rummy," Adele said reminiscently as she sank down on one of the kitchen chairs. "I thought one of you would never catch on."