Turnabout's Fair Play (11 page)

“You’re too heavy to carry around like this, you know, Liam.” She dropped him on the floor, which he protested with a
meow
and a head-butt to her shin—before he started rubbing against her legs and weaving in and out of them.

“I know, I know, I’m almost an hour late feeding you dinner. Mercy, you’d think I hadn’t fed you this morning, either.” She crossed to the pantry and pulled out a granola bar for herself and a can of salmon-and shrimp-flavored food. She’d never had a cat before two years ago, when a neighbor’s cat had a litter and Flannery fell in love with this one’s cute face and blue eyes. She’d quickly learned that if she didn’t want him waking her up at 4:00 a.m., she needed to feed him dry food in the morning and save the canned stuff for night. That way, he was always eager to greet her when she came home in the evenings…begging for his dinner.

He sat at her feet, fluffy tail twitching, meowing his heart out as she dumped the foul-smelling and worse-looking concoction into his bowl. She held him back with one foot when she leaned over and put the bowl back down on the mat at the end of the island. After emptying, rinsing, and refilling his water dish, she washed her hands and went through her bathroom from the guest entrance and into the closet that connected the bathroom to her bedroom to change clothes.

She hung the skirt and blouse—she’d wear them again tomorrow to the singles’ group cookout—and changed into long knit pajama pants and a cotton tank. Grabbing her laptop computer off the stand attached to her treadmill, she carried it to the bed. It was too early to sleep. It was a holiday weekend, and she’d promised herself she wouldn’t work at all; but she didn’t have any new books just begging to be read at the moment.

So that left her with only one thing to do.

Settling several pillows around her, she grabbed the wooden lap desk and got comfortable while the computer started up. She crunched on the granola bar and sipped her soda while she checked her personal e-mail, smiling when she saw Zarah had sent her and Caylor a message letting them know they’d arrived safely in Las Cruces and were on their way out for dinner at a restaurant called La Posta.

Out of habit, she started to pull up her work e-mail—but stopped before she opened the in-box (which showed more than twenty new messages just since yesterday when, okay, she had gone through and read the forty-odd messages that she’d gotten since Friday).

No, instead…she pulled up an e-mail account she didn’t check very often, because the only messages that came into it were notifications, not anything she could respond to directly. She had one new message. She opened it:

I’ve never written to anyone through one of these sites before, but I just wanted to let you know I like what I’ve seen so far
.

Aw. That was sweet. Not overtly creepy like a lot of the other notes she’d gotten through this site. She wasn’t going to respond to it. She hadn’t been a member of this site very long, and she still wasn’t sure about communicating with anyone directly through the e-mail feature, especially if it meant risking that someone might figure out a way to learn her true identity. Because she didn’t want anyone knowing she’d ever even visited a site like this, much less joined. If anyone found out …

No, that was unthinkable. No one could
ever
know.

Chapter 7

E
ven as he checked out of the hotel Monday morning, Kirby prayed for his youngest granddaughter. Though she’d tried to laugh it off and change the subject, he hadn’t missed the pain in her eyes and voice when talking about her friends and her fear of being forgotten by them.

He took a couple of wrong turns on his way to the food bank, but he managed to pull up just as some others from the senior adult group arrived. He and a few others who’d never been before were taken on a short tour of the facility and then back to the warehouse, where they would be making up weekly meal boxes.

He spotted a flash of red hair and smiled to himself. Looked like there was an open spot right next to her.

Maureen O’Connor looked up and smiled her broad, beaming smile at him. He could almost pretend he was a young buck seeing the girl he was sweet on with the little leap in his chest. Either that or his defibrillator had just given his heart a kick.

“I thought I saw you with the tour group. You didn’t have any trouble finding the place?”

“No, no trouble.” Just a few one-way streets leading him in circles. “So what are we doing?”

Maureen showed him what went in the boxes. He took her lead and set five boxes in front of him to do multiples of each product at a time.

“You seem pensive this morning.” Maureen stacked cans of green beans in her box.

“I suppose I am.” Kirby reached up to a high shelf and brought down a flat of canned soup to share with her.

“Anything I can help you with?”

She probably had daughters and granddaughters with similar experiences to Flannery’s. “My youngest granddaughter has me a little concerned. Her two best friends recently got engaged, and she’s worried that they’re going to forget all about her and leave her behind. I understand her worry—her sisters did that to her when she was younger. But she’s talking about applying for jobs in New York City just because her friends are getting married. She thinks she’s losing everything.”

He finished adding his products and pushed the first of his boxes down the rollered belt for the next volunteer to continue filling. “Have you ever gone through this with your girls?”

Maureen’s expression turned pensive. “I never had girls. One son, one grandson. I would have thought that as a pastor for so many years, you would have helped church members through problems like this before.”

“Oh, I know. I should be adept at giving counsel in these kinds of situations.”

“But when it’s your own child—or grandchild—that makes a big difference.” Maureen nodded, experience echoing in her voice. “If I may speak from my own experiences…?”

“Yes, please.” Kirby took her completed box and sent it on down the line with two more of his.

“It’s very hard on a young woman to see everyone around her getting paired off, engaged, and married. Especially when she doesn’t have a boyfriend herself. I do understand her fear of losing her friends or feeling left out. When my husband was still living, we had a very active social life—dinners and parties with friends from work and church, dancing on the weekends, concerts…. Everything I asked to do, we did it. But then after James died, I couldn’t go and do all the things we’d done as a couple—the dancing, the concerts. And couples we’d been friends with for decades slowly stopped inviting me around—not only was there the issue of my widowhood reminding them of the fragility of life and making them unsure of what to say to me, but there was also the fact that I made for an odd number at dinner parties. So it was easier for them not to invite me. But it was especially hard on me because I was so young. I didn’t fit in anywhere.”

Kirby paused, his hands resting on the flap of the box in front of him. “How young?”

“Thirty-seven. There was no ‘singles’ group’ back then. There were the young people—in their twenties, just out of college. Career girls, we called the women. But their highest priority was in finding husbands. I definitely didn’t fit in there. All the other widows in the church were old”—she smirked—“around my age now. So I didn’t fit in there, either. And I had a fifteen-year-old son who was angry and resentful that God would take his father away like that. So we stopped going to church. If it hadn’t been for four dear friends from college who rallied around me—around us—we never would have made it.”

Kirby seized on that. “You were friends with those women before you married?”

Maureen nodded, not a hair of her brilliant red hair moving out of place. “Yes. We shared a suite together in the sorority at college. After James died, I was ready to cut myself off from everyone simply because of those who had cut me off. But Trina, Lindy, Sassy, and Perty wouldn’t let me do that. Instead of leaving me out of invitations, they made a special effort to make me—and Jimmy—feel included in everything. And they wouldn’t take no for an answer.”

She finished off another box and pushed it toward him. “Does your granddaughter have friends like that?”

“I think so—I hope so. These two girls she’s afraid are going to leave her behind have been friends of hers for a long time. In fact, she and Caylor grew up together. The one who married this weekend moved in with them in college a few years back.”

Maureen’s painted eyebrows rose. “Caylor…not Caylor Evans?”

“Yes, Caylor Evans.” He knew the tall redhead almost as well as he knew his own granddaughters; she’d been around for so many of Flannery’s childhood events.

The volume of Maureen’s laugh drew the gazes of several nearby volunteers. “Caylor Evans is the granddaughter of my dear friend Sassy—Celeste Evans. You met Sassy in Sunday school—and at the game night Saturday. That would mean that your granddaughter is Flannery—of course! She was with you last Sunday on your first visit.” She touched her fingertips to her temples. “How easily I forget details these days! I don’t think your Flannery has anything to worry about. There will be a transition, certainly, as Caylor and Zarah figure out the new balance in their lives, but those two girls are spitting images of their grandmothers—at least as far as their personalities go. There is no way they’ll allow Flannery to slip away from them. And I’ll put a bug in Trina’s and Sassy’s ears, just to make sure.”

“Thank you.” Kirby set up several more empty boxes for both of them. “Flannery did say that she’s agreed to allow her friends to set her up on some dates.”

“That’s good. No one will know her tastes as well as they do.” Maureen fell silent a moment, chewing on her bottom lip.

“Now
you
seem pensive.” He pulled down another flat of canned green beans and opened it.

“Oh—I was just thinking…. You know, there’s nothing that says a grandfather can’t also help his granddaughter find the love of her life.”

Kirby chuckled. “I would have no idea of where to find eligible young men—and that’s on top of the fact that I know nothing of her preferences when it comes to that.”

A whistle blew, drawing their attention. Kirby turned and stepped aside so Maureen could see past him. A young woman wearing a shirt with the food bank’s logo on it stood on a chair. “Thank y’all so much for coming out and helping us pack boxes this morning. We’ve more than filled our quota for this two-hour time slot, and we’d love to have you come back out anytime.”

Maureen looked at her watch. “Goodness—I can’t believe we’ve been at this for two hours already.” She looked up at Kirby. “Are you still planning to come over to the shelter to help with the barbecue luncheon?”

“I am.” Kirby wiped his forehead and the back of his neck with the red bandanna he kept in his back pocket.

“Good. Because someone’s going to be there whom I want you to meet.”

Jamie jumped, stretching his hands up as if to catch the red rubber ball but letting it just slip through his fingers. The young girl who’d kicked it squealed a giggle and then ran toward first base.

“Good job!” Jamie clapped his hands and turned to watch as she ran to second base. The kids defending the bases jumped up and down, yelling for the outfielders to get the ball in to them so they could try to get her out.

Yes, a game of kickball had been just the thing to keep the kids out of the way while Cookie and the other senior adults worked to get the food ready. And just the thing he needed to blow off the steam that had been building since last night—when he’d lain in bed, trying to sleep and been bombarded with questions. After the shock of seeing how much he’d have to pay for COBRA, he needed to find a less expensive health-insurance alternative until he found another job. But what if he couldn’t qualify for individual health insurance? And what if he couldn’t find another marketing job? Should he consider changing careers? What about going back to school to do something else? What else could he do? What else did he want to do?