FLASHBACK Page 4

  On his way out through the kitchen he glanced longingly at the coffeepot, but didn't have time if he wanted to be back again in time to eat breakfast with Sara. Quietly, he let himself out of the house and walked the few blocks to the McNair place.

  He picked up the tools and lumber he needed and negotiated his way upstairs through the tangle of colored tape until he was in the master bedroom. Laura had added a new blue cross, he noted, at the doorway to the third floor. He grinned in the dim light.

  She hadn't changed much from the feisty girl who never turned down a dare, climbed every tree he did and probably risked her life on several occasions pretending she wasn't scared. He'd put her in danger again yesterday, and he'd worried all day that she might fall into that damned hole.

  He flicked on the lights, moved the boxes away and set to work on the floorboards with the craftsmanship he had spent years learning. When he was finished, it would be almost impossible to tell the floor had been patched. He could see this room coming alive under Laura's talented hands, and he felt at peace working in the same room where she had worked yesterday and would work again today. He wished he could patch the hole he'd made in her heart as easily.

  She'd never married. Gran didn't tell him anything about her boyfriends, and he didn't ask. He wondered who this Peter was. Did Gran know about him?

  Jack should have known. He should have been a part of her life in the years since she'd grown up and moved away. He wondered how everything had got so mixed up.

  She'd just been this great kid, the little sister he never had. She'd worshipped the ground he trod on, and he'd let her tag along.

  Then one day, they were in the orchard of this very house. He was nineteen, so she would have been sixteen. He was a big shot then, out of school, working as a carpenter's laborer to earn extra money for college, a football scholarship in his back pocket. Oh, he'd had the world by the tail.

  She'd been looking up at him, adoration in her eyes, as usual, and it was a powerful aphrodisiac. Suddenly, and for the first time, he'd seen the budding woman. Without thinking what he was doing, he'd leaned forward and kissed her.

  At first her whole body, including her lips, had been rigid with shock. Then she'd melted against him, and he'd discovered there was a woman's body underneath the jeans and baggy shirt, a woman's passion just waiting to be explored.

  She didn't have much kissing experience, but what she lacked in technique she made up for in enthusiasm. Pretty soon, necking with Laura got to be a regular occurrence, and she got to be pretty good at it.

  Looking back on his teenage years in this small town, where he knew everybody and their grandparents, he remembered being one pulsing hormone, constantly aroused, constantly frustrated. He'd had no business messing around with Laura. She was too young and he knew it.

  One rainy afternoon, they'd been necking in the basement when his parents were out, and she'd looked up at him all vague and starry-eyed. "I love you," she said.

  "Whoa, slow down" was his great comeback line. He was panting; so was she.

  "I do. I love you. I want to … you know, I want to do it." Her face was crimson…

  "Ouch, damn it!" Jack yelled. He'd been so busy reliving the past he'd gone and hammered his own thumb. He often wondered what would have happened if they had "done it" that day. Probably the course of history would have changed. But an odd chivalry had always possessed him where Laura was concerned.

  He'd kissed her gently and said, "Not yet, Laura. Wait till you're older, when you're sure."

  There were tears in her eyes when he'd pulled away. "I am sure. I love you. I'll always love you."

  "I'll wait for you," he'd promised. And at the time he'd meant it.

  *

  No green truck lurked outside the house when Laura arrived, which meant one less encounter with Jack. She relaxed her shoulders and walked through the front door, a portable stereo in one hand. She noted he'd removed the big yellow X in front of the stairway.

  It was as she trod across the floor of the master bedroom to plug in her stereo that she noticed the neat patch where yesterday a hole had gaped. With a soft gasp of surprise, she dropped to her knees and ran her fingers over the hairline join.

  She didn't know when he had sneaked back to fix the floor, but she knew she was looking at several hours worth of work. Her top teeth sank into her bottom lip while she took in Jack's message. Let's let bygones be bygones, he was saying, as clearly as if he'd sent a printed greeting card.

  Maybe I'm not ready yet.

  Soon she was perched on her stepladder, classical music playing in the background as she began the laborious job of stenciling a whimsical border of cabbage roses on twining green stems.

  The stenciling brushes scrunched against the walls as she worked her slow and tedious way around the room, letting the soft strains of Vivaldi ease her boredom, while she tried not to feel warm and gushy that Jack had fixed the floor overnight.

  He'd probably done it for his own satisfaction, or maybe even just to annoy her, she reasoned – but the warm and gushy feeling persisted.

  Temporarily.

  Before long she heard the banging and bonking that signaled she was no longer alone in the house. Then the hammering began. She turned her stereo up. Suddenly, the sound of loud rock music entered her space like a bad smell.

  Jumping down with a thump, Laura turned the Vivaldi up, way up.

  Within minutes Vivaldi and Bruce Springsteen were performing an unlikely duet at full blast. Upstairs it was the Four Seasons in Italy, downstairs it was unquestionably the U.S.A.

  Then an electric saw added to the cacophony; Laura's brush jerked, jabbing pink all over where a green stem should be. She opened her mouth to scream in frustration when there was sudden silence – and all the lights went out.

  The house had taken part in the quarrel and blown a breaker.

  Ashamed, she jumped down and pulled the plug on her stereo.

  After the lights came on, only the noise of the saw floated upstairs.

  * * *

  Chapter 4

  «^»

  "Want some coffee?"

  Laura jumped at the sound of Jack's voice. He stood outside the bedroom door, two ceramic coffee mugs and a stainless steel thermos thrust through the doorway – and a hopeful expression on his face. "Peace offering?" She glanced down from the top of her stepladder. The very idea of coffee made her salivate, and her neck was literally aching for a break. "Yeah, I guess. We never did like the same music." He followed the coffee stuff into the room. She paused, knowing it was a bad idea to get too close to Jack. But right in the middle of the floor was that new patch of flooring … and besides, the coffee smelled so good.

  "I'd love some. Just let me finish this bit."

  Behind her she heard the clink of metal on ceramic, the hiss of pouring coffee and then nothing. She had the idea Jack was watching her.

  Determined to act casual and friendly, which she supposed were terms of the truce, she asked a question she'd been wondering about. "How come Laroche suddenly wants this house fixed up, after all these years?"

  "A developer put in a bid to buy the property. He plans to knock down the house and build condos."

  Her stenciling arm stalled and she turn to stare at Jack. "Condos?"

  He chuckled. "From the sound of disgust in your voice I'd say you don't approve."

  "Of course not. Do you?"

  He shrugged. "It's progress, Laura. It might bring some new people into Laroche, and that would help the economy."

  "Oh, come on. You love this house as much as I do. Remember when we used to sneak up here?" He'd loosened a few of the boards nailed over the windows, so he could pull them aside and they could peer into the dusty depths of the empty ground-floor rooms. It would have been easy to sneak right into the house, but, by unspoken agreement, they never had.

  "Why do you love it so much?" Jack had asked her once when they were standing side by side peering in the window.

  She
'd turned to him in surprise. "Can't you feel it? There's happiness in this house. It's a house built by love."

  He'd snorted in adolescent male superiority. "Love? It was built with first growth timber, that's what's great about it. Your grandpa told me the beams in the house are real trees, some with the bark still on 'em. And the wainscoting in the dining room is in four-foot-wide panels – can you imagine trees so big you could cut four-foot panels out of them?"

  Laura hardly listened, She was dreaming, bringing the past and the future together in her fantasy. She heard Jack say in his cocky way, "This place'll be mine someday."

  Ours, she'd promised silently. The rooms were empty and sad, bereft of the family that had made the house a home. But Laura's imagination painted all the rich colors of life back into those rooms.

  "I guess that was the first time I thought about interior design as a career," she said aloud.

  "That was a long time ago." He sounded almost sad. Maybe he missed their early friendship as much as she did.

  "Yeah. But it's kind of amazing that we both ended up working on the house." She scrubbed and swirled the paint along the rest of the wall and into the corner where two walls met. A good place to stop. She climbed down the ladder, letting her neck roll.

  Jack relaxed on the floor, long legs stretched out, his back propped against the wall. He held a steaming mug up and she took it gratefully, squatting down beside him.

  Okay, a truce. I can do this. "So how's the downstairs coming?" she asked.

  "The stenciling looks great," he said at the same moment. They stopped.

  He looked at her, his eyes crinkling. She felt her own eyes twinkling back.

  "If you want to put your classical music back on, it's okay with me." He leaned over her to switch on her ghetto blaster, his arm brushing hers in a light, warm touch. Vivaldi's musical "Spring" blossomed in the room.

  She cradled the mug, trying to pretend the warmth flooding her came from the coffee and not Jack's casual touch. Her coffee mug was bright yellow and advertised a building supply company. Jack's mug was a faded red. A picture of a prize ribbon announced #1 DAD. She smiled.

  Jack's eyes followed hers. "Sara gave that to me for Father's Day a couple of years ago."

  "She must love you very much."

  "It's not like there's a lot of competition for her affection." He said it quickly, bitterly. As Laura looked at him, surprised, he seemed to collect himself. "But we do all right."

  "It must be tough being a single parent." It was hard to think of Jack as a father. Laura rubbed her sore neck absently, in her mind's eye seeing the young Jack racing down the school playing field, football clutched under his arm. This was how she always pictured him. "Do you regret giving up the football scholarship?"

  "Only every day of my life." He turned to her suddenly, his eyes intense. "You don't know what it's like. You got out of this little town. Almost everybody we knew got out. Even Cory cut out after five years. Everybody except me." He looked away, frowning.

  "But Jack … I always thought you loved it here."

  "I do, but that doesn't mean I want to stay in a place where everybody knows your name and what vegetables you like and checks your laundry line so they know your favorite brand of underpants."

  Laura laughed. "It can't be that bad."

  "Trust me. I'm the one who does the washing and buys the underpants. While other guys worry about what shirt to wear to a meeting, I'm trying to figure out what to buy for dinner, checking homework, getting the dishes done so we have something to eat off at night and still trying to get to work on time. There ought to be a union."

  "Why, Jack, you're a feminist."

  He couldn't have looked more shocked. "I am not!"

  "Sure you are. You gave up your chosen career to look after your child, and you resent the lost opportunities. You've picked up every woman's burden. Kids, housework, dishes and a job. Now you know what women have been complaining about for years. Maybe you should burn some of those underpants in protest."

  He looked down his nose disdainfully. "And what do you know about it?"

  "Enough to stay single."

  He shrugged.

  She felt his pain and wanted to reach out in some small way and help him, amazed at how easily they seemed to pick up the threads of their old friendship. "Jack, couldn't you take Sara with you if you want to leave town?"

  "And take her away from her friends? Her home? You of all people should understand how important that stability was for her when she felt abandoned by her mom."

  Laura felt stupid not to have seen that. Her own mother had been totally caught up in the hippie era. Especially the free love part. Laura knew she'd been conceived in the back of a van on a moonlit night, and that, consequently, the boy who was her father wanted to name her Moonbeam. Gran had naturally put a stop to that. She'd even made the hippie parents get married. Then she and Grandpa had brought Laura up, while her mother dropped in from time to time. A lovable and exuberant houseguest, but nobody's idea of a mother.

  Laura wondered if Sara missed having a regular mother as much as she had. It was still tough to imagine a real girl, Sara, when she thought of the baby. A baby growing up with a single dad who never got his chance at glory. "I'm sorry, Jack."

  He looked even more uncomfortable. "You make a mistake, you take responsibility for it." He looked down at the mug. "What am I saying? She's not a mistake, she's the best thing that ever happened."

  Laura nodded. "She just came too soon," she said softly.

  He took a sip of the steaming brew. "Yeah," he murmured.

  She thought for a moment. "You know, one of the things we feminists agree on is that both parents have to take responsibility for kids."

  His head shot around and the scent of citrus shampoo wafted into the air. "One of the things Cory and I agreed on when we got divorced was that Sara stay put. This is her home. And until she's eighteen it's my home, too. That's it. I'm not having her trail around half the year from TV studio to TV studio after her mother."

  They both drank coffee silently for a while. Laura knew when she'd hit a brick wall, and Jack's tone was solid brick. Then he touched the hand that was still rubbing her neck, making her jump. "Turn around," he ordered.

  "It's nothing, just a cramped muscle."

  "It'll get worse if you ignore it."

  She tried to turn her head to glare at him, and yelped.

  "Trust me, I can fix it." He waved his hands like a magician in front of her. "I'm the handyman, remember?"

  Deciding it was easier to give in than to argue, Laura turned her back to him. His long fingers settled on either side of her neck, not rubbing, just touching, pressing their way down until he connected with a lump of pain and she grunted.

  His fingers were firm and soothing as they kneaded her muscles, starting just under her jaw and working slowly down. By the time he slipped his hands under her bulky sweater and moved onto the naked flesh of her shoulders, she was beyond protest. She could feel the corded muscles in her shoulders loosening under the magic of Jack's hands. She tried to think only of those hands and ignore everything they were connected to, but it was impossible. There was a warm space behind her, heated by his body. She heard his breathing, even felt it, soft on the back of her neck. He felt so good, so warm and solid. If she just leaned back into that warmth…

  She jerked upright, rigid. What was she thinking?

  "Did I hit a tender spot?" His voice rumbled behind her.

  "No, no. It feels much better, thanks." She heard the false brightness in her voice. "I better get back to work now."

  She jerked to her feet and he followed suit, raising his arms over his head.

  "If you do some stretching before you start, and at the end of the day, it should help stop the muscle spasms. And remember, there's a doctor in the house."

  "Who'd better check the health of the rest of the bedrooms up here. I'll be finished this one by the end of the week." She turned and wagged a finger a
t him. "I find your butt sticking out of another room I'm working on and I'll use it to score a field goal."

  "Overworked and underpaid," he grumbled on his way out. She heard the smile in his voice, felt the answering tug of her own lips.

  Laura was halfway up the ladder when he popped his head back in. "I have to go downtown this afternoon to look at another job. Anything you need done that can't wait till tomorrow?"

  "I don't think so, I'll just be finishing…" Her gaze landed on the gigantic bed pushed against one wall. She climbed back down the ladder. "Oh, there is one thing. Can you help me move the bed away from the wall?"

  "Oh, no, you don't. You and your neck will not move heavy furniture for a while." Even as her lips formed a protest he shook his head. "Doctor's orders. I'll get a buddy to help me move it before I go."

  "That's ridiculous. I'm no wilting flower, Jack." She took a step toward the bed.

  He moved in front of her and glared. "This has nothing to do with gender bias. If you end up flat on your back and can't finish the job, the house won't be ready in time. That's bad for my reputation. And I have to make my living in this place where everybody knows everybody's business. Got it? I'm not being chivalrous, I'm looking out for my own interests. Moving furniture is on my list."

  "Well, make sure it's moved before I get to that wall."

  He left without another word.

  She stalked after him. "You were never this domineering when we were kids."

  He turned, looking down the bridge of his nose at her. "You were never this much of a pain in the—"

  "Ja-ack, you in there?" a hearty male voice boomed from below.

  "Up here," Jack shouted back.

  Footsteps pounded up the stairs then a dark head emerged into the upstairs hallway. "Hiya, Jacko!"

  "Hey, Chipper!" The two locked hands in some weird, twisted handshake. "I didn't know you were in town."

  "Just here for a few days, to start getting the place ready for summer." If ever a nickname suited anyone, Chipper's did. He was the bounciest person Laura had ever seen. He was never still, and his round girth only added to the bouncy-ball look of him.