Текст книги "Because of The Brave"
Автор книги: ZA Maxfield
Соавторы: Laura Baumbach,Josh lanyon
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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 10 страниц)
“What if someone finds out and tells? Can't you just leave now?” Carson couldn’t help it, the fear of further exposure and official retaliation against China all too real in his mind.
“'Don't ask, don't tell' is their policy but mine is ‘don't run, either’.”
He could see there was no point in resisting. “It'll be the longest five months of my life,” Carson pressed harder against China’s comforting hand, returning the same intense and determined stare, “but I'm not running either.”
Jumping Off Places
Z. A. Maxfield
Because of the Brave
As if he needed one, Peter Hsu discovered another reason to hate flying commercial. The first, and most obvious, was that they wouldn’t let him jump out of the plane.
He also hated being trapped into the tiny but affordable coach seats, even though he wasn’t the biggest guy in the world. A man needed breathing room. He was torn by his desire to watch the sky out the window and the need to establish his right to get up and move around the cabin from the aisle seat, something he hated to do over two sets of knees. He’d opted for the window today because fast moving clouds would be opening up to glimpses of cultivated green farmland. Since he was flying into Minnesota, the land of ten thousand lakes, it would look like someone dropped a mirror, the bright scattered bits and chunks blown all to hell on dark earth. He regretted that decision when he saw Aisle Seat Guy.
Aisle Seat Guy shoved his large rolling pilot case up in the overhead bin, making it impossible to retrieve the case with Peter’s laptop. He was also around six foot five inches tall, clocking in at 300 easily, and Peter knew if he had a beer he’d probably have to pee in a paper cup because there would be no moving the big man if he fell asleep.
It was when Aisle Seat Guy leaned over to say a great big “Howdy, hello, how’re ya doing, dontcha just love flyin’? Doesn’t it get your blood goin’?” that Peter briefly considered which of the passengers might be an air marshal and whether he’d notice if Peter reached over and cut Aisle Seat Guy’s throat just a little.
“My therapist said I shouldn’t talk to anyone until I get to the rehab center, just to be on the safe side.” Peter was careful to keep his expression blank. Okay, maybe the rehab thing was a lie, but nobody had to know that.
Aisle Seat Guy apparently couldn’t take a hint. Later in the flight he’d had to add, “I’m sorry, I think I should let you know that even if the seatbelt sign is on, if I tell you I need my medication you’re going to have to move fast, okay? Just so there’s no…” Peter let his eyes say the rest, and for the remainder of the flight no one made eye contact with him. Which was just the way he liked it.
Peter Hsu was going home.
The cab passed the house a third time. The driver told him that he’d be happy to keep driving back and forth past the rural home all night, except sooner or later he’d have to go back to town for gas. Peter figured as long as his cash held out he would never actually have to go inside the two story blue building where his mother was living, but knew that wasn’t very fair.
Hopewald House seemed like a nice place, actually. It was a color he associated with his mother’s pricey porcelain vases, and it had a lot of windows, but not in that staring-at-you kind of way. His aunt had converted the overlarge farmhouse in the eighties when her husband had died and—from all accounts– was happier now that she ran a residence for hospice patients.
Four square windows glowed with faint light, from a hallway maybe, on the top floor in a row, two downstairs besides the extra large picture window that seemed to look in on a television room. The porch was pleasantly lit now that it was dusk on this northern early summer night. The facility-as Peter had been calling it-was accessible to the handicapped, and featured ramps and pathways hemmed in with bright spring flowers. He recognized tulips and daffodils, all tucked into a riot of plants that all looked gray in this light but were so thick and
lush that if someone fell it could cushion them so well they probably wouldn’t choose to get up again.
All in all, Peter hated it on sight.
Its very cheeriness mocked him from where he sat in the back of the cab on the fourth trip. He wasn’t feeling cheery. He didn’t want to do this. Home was the first stop on the way to nowhere, and he didn’t want to go there.
“Stop.” He pulled his wallet out of his jeans and handed the driver his fare and a tip. He was standing in the street with his gear, looking up at the house when the cab took off and drove away behind him.
Peter knocked on the door, and for a long time nothing happened. He heard scuffling noises, like the scattering of insurgents when he was raiding a suspected enemy combatant’s compound. More than one person headed to the back of the house, and someone, he could hear from measured footsteps, was coming toward the door. He fought his instinct to take cover and prepare for battle, standing his ground instead and waiting patiently for the door to open.
“Yes?”
“I’m Peter Hsu.” He kept his hands to his sides. “I’m here to visit my mother?”
“Peter?” The sound of locks grinding in their housing followed, after which, the door opened. The sight that greeted him was exactly what he expected, and yet he still wasn’t prepared for it. His aunt Lyndee, at sixty-one, stood before him as wide as she was tall.
“Peter!” She enfolded him in her gargantuan bosom and ruffled his hair warmly. No matter that he was a head taller than she and in his late twenties, his mother’s sister never failed to manhandle him and leave him with the vague impression that she was sure he was going to need her to walk him to the library for picture books.
“Hi Aunt Lyndee.”
“We weren’t expecting you tonight, hon.” She clucked at him and fussed with his clothing. “I thought you were staying in the cities until—”
“Slight change of plans.” He’d wanted this over with. “I’m sorry I didn’t call, I thought I’d make it sooner but there was a delay.” Another reason to hate flying commercial.
“It’s okay, you can just bunk down on the couch in my office for tonight.”
He realized he still hadn’t let go of his duffle. He didn’t want to. “Mom wrote a while back and told me her car was here. Maybe I could take it and go back to the house…?”
“Baby that car hasn’t worked in three months. I know for a fact that at the very least the battery is dead and it needs new tires. Robin was driving Shelly back and forth to her appointments but when Hospice took over…well, she hasn’t gone anywhere since.”
“I see.”
Lyndee took his arm and led him to the room with the big screen. It cast an eerie bluish light over the tableau of old people and furniture he’d seen from the street. “C’mere and talk with me for a moment, Pete, will you?”
“Can this wait till tomorrow Aunt Lyndee? I’m beat.”
“No.” She sat at a small table in the corner he thought might be intended for cards or puzzles, but which looked odd and unused in this space where people sat staring at the TV. “I need to talk to you now.”
Peter shrugged and sat down, his fingers still wrapped around the handles of his duffel. His best-case scenario, taking his mother’s car to her house and getting a good night’s sleep was a no-go. The next best thing would be if he could sack out someplace and repair the car in the morning. The less time he spent here the better. He was adept at hiding what he was thinking, but a place like this could grind a guy down and make him careless. A place like this would make him crawl out of his skin.
“Shoot.” He tried not to flinch.
“The doctor put your mom on hospice about three months ago, do you know what that means?”
“Yes.”
“Everything that it means?”
He looked at the toes of his boots. “Yes.”
“In case you don’t—”
“I do know what it means, Aunt Lyndee. It means she’s circling the drain and she doesn’t want to be pulled out if she starts going down it.”
“Peter.” Damn. She still had the look. Like he let one fly in church.
“I’m sorry. I’m used to being blunt.”
“You can be blunt but be decent. Your mother’s disease has progressed to the point where no intervention will save her life. It will only prolong her pain.”
“I see.”
“Once she’s on hospice, caregivers simply manage her pain and keep her comfortable. It’s her wish to let nature take its course.”
He snorted. “Mom never had much use for nature up until now.”
Lyndee pulled a pamphlet from basket on the bookshelf behind her and hit him over the head with it. “You read this,” she said between clenched teeth. “I’m cutting you some slack because you’re my favorite nephew and because you never could react to anything in a logical way.”
“What…?”
Peter remained still while his Aunt Lyndee did that thing. She grabbed his head and pressed a sloppy kiss to it, smudging her lipstick on his skin and then wiping it off with her thumb until his forehead burned. She always did that thing when he couldn’t or wouldn’t conform and she wanted to let him know that she was on to him, inside of him, looking around, feeling through his guts and getting a pretty good picture of what he was thinking regardless of what came out of his mouth.
“You’re still a pain in the ass.” She removed her thumb from his skin. These days she could—and did—smooth age lines away.
Peter remained silent as she led him to a room behind the wide, upgraded kitchen, with its professional appliances and food service work areas. They came to a door marked ‘Private’ and ushered him inside.
“I’ll get you linens and a pillow for the bed, and there’s a bathroom right here.” She opened a door and he saw it was a tiny powder room. “We can get you to your mom’s house in the morning and you can shower there. Look—”
“Thanks Aunt Lyndee.” He held up a hand. “I’m just tired, can we talk more tomorrow?”
She peered at his face and sighed. “Sure hon. You get some rest and we can finish up in the morning.” She busied herself shutting the blinds on the windows behind her desk and then fumbled through a cupboard, finally unearthing a blanket and a small pillow with a pillowcase folded on top.
“Thanks again.” He caught her hand just as she was about to leave the room. “Really. Thank you.”
She smiled and he felt its reassurance rush like water through the resistance he’d caked onto his emotions to dam them up. She left quickly enough that the structure held. Only Peter knew how close he had come to a cataclysmic breakdown.
Bright light jarred Peter awake. He threw an arm up to shield his eyes, even as he leapt to his feet, looking for something—anything—he could use for a weapon.
“Good morning sunshine,” said a man’s voice, cheerfully devoid of the sarcasm Peter usually heard along with those words. “And how are you on this very fine June morning.”
“Are you trying to get yourself killed?” Peter growled, only to hear the voice chuckling at him from the doorway.
Rich and musical, the man’s voice held nothing but amusement and the remnants of a Jamaican accent. “Oh, I don’t think you can kill me with that, Peter, although if you should try I would have to tell you where to stick it…” The man’s laughter floated back to Peter where he stood letting his eyes adjust. “Breakfast is almost over and don’t expect me to be carrying it in here for you. I do for your mama only. She’s looking forward to seeing you.”
“Who. The fuck. Are you?”
Peter could see the man’s mouth form in an O of surprise. “You mean to say my fame has not preceded me?”
Peter only gave the briefest thought to the way the man’s accent lent more syllables to each word, giving mean two and preceded four. “I…No.”
“Well, Peter Dylan Hsu, your fame has certainly preceded you. Shelly believes you hung the moon, and looking at you now, I’d say she had that about… half right.” The man’s white teeth shone in the midst of his dark rich skin when he grinned.
Peter looked down and blushed to discover his fully erect cock pushing out of his briefs. He never remembered his dreams, he’d probably taken it out in his sleep and—“I’ll be out in a minute.”
“Take your time sunshine. I’ll fix you a nice plate. I was just teasing about you missing breakfast. You’re mother would never forgive me. I’m Robin. I’ve been with her since she was first diagnosed, and I came to work here at Hopewald House for your Aunt Lyndee when your mama transferred here. Your Mama’s my special girl.”
Peter turned away. “Thank you. I’ll be out in a minute.”
His mother’s—Robin—hung there in the doorway for a minute like he was expecting something. Peter looked again, taking in the deep blue scrub pants and top, over which he wore a kind of uniform warm up jacket with his name
embroidered in white over the breast pocket. He had several buttons and pins attached to his coat, the most familiar and telling was the Lambda, beside which he wore a set of dog tags with Love on one and a rainbow on the other. Robin wore his short hair in braids that stuck out from his head like a halo. His wide white smile was embedded in a handsome, rich black-coffee colored face. He looked like he was going to say something more, but then he just drifted out, closing the door behind him.
Peter sat back down on the couch and tried to imagine this was just another day. Maybe he’d have a cup of coffee and check out his mom’s car. It was a classic, a 71 Road Runner with a 426 Hemi, and as far as he knew there was nothing wrong with it he couldn’t fix or build from the ground up if he needed to. If he had the time. It looked like he was going to get the time. He was pretty sure he could cover the cost. Fixing up the car that was his mother’s pride and joy for thirty-eight years could possibly mitigate the guilt he felt for not visiting more often. And it might go a long way toward making her feel…if not better, at least not worse.
If there was a voice in the back of his head saying that fixing a car was the least of his worries he ignored it. Set on his course, he went to the kitchen for coffee, just in time to see Robin lifting a tray that had covered plates and a vase with a flower in it like a hotel room service waiter.
“This is your mama’s, follow me and let’s show her what the cat dragged in last night.” The man grinned.
Peter moved in front of Robin and headed for a coffeemaker on the pristine stainless steel counter. “Uh. Look Robin, I—”
Robin moved up and practically herded him, using his large body and the tray he carried, out of the kitchen and down a long hallway and up the stairs. “Just say hello and as soon as I’m finished serving my princess I will get you breakfast of your own, all right?”
“But—”
“One time only offer, man, lots of coffee?” Peter shrugged and Robin grinned again cheekily. “Right you are. In here then.” He held the tray in one hand and pushed a door open with the other.
Peter’s first look at his mother took him by surprise. So much so that he didn’t respond at all until he felt Robin’s hand at the small of his back pushing him forward.
“Look what I found. Breakfast and a show. Your son appears to be catching flies with his mouth, Shelley. Very talented boy.”
Shelley lay silently, her mouth slightly gaping. Her eyes were closed and Peter could see her struggling for breath. He stood frozen in a spot by the door, watching as Robin put the breakfast tray on a rolling table, which he pushed into position over the bed.
“Shelley,” Robin said, and Peter thought his voice held a warning. “It’s no use, you know. We can both see you’re not dead. Open your eyes and say hello to the man.”
“I’m sure I must have died by now, Robin,” she said in a reedy voice. Peter looked to Robin for a clue how to proceed.
“Shelley, you are not dead. You’re not hungry but you must eat your breakfast.” Robin looked at Peter and then back to Shelley again. “Pay no attention to her Peter. She’s enacting the death scene from ‘Terms of Endearment’ again.” Robin turned back to his mother. “Do I look like Shirley Maclaine to you?”
“How should I know,” she turned her head away as he held a cup of water to her lips. “To hear her tell it she’s been enough people; she could certainly have been you.”
“Drink,” Robin commanded. “You’re not dead.”
“How do you know we’re not both dead?”
“I’m frankly shocked by that suggestion, my Shelley. I am not dead. You are not dead.”
Robin pulled the cover off what looked to be French toast and scrambled eggs, cut up into precise squares. “You are a mere shadow of your former self and unless you eat every bite of this breakfast I will double your lunch or feed you grub worms like in Survivor.” He placed a towel across Peter’s mother’s sunken chest, over her delicate shoulders and smiled as he gave her tiny bites of eggy bread from a small fork, holding a napkin and dabbing occasionally at her face. He did this with such practiced ease and good humor that Peter hated him for it.
Between bites she said. “If you can see me enough to feed me you must be dead.”
“If I were dead I’d be someplace where you’d quit your bitching at me woman,” Robin matter-of-factly scooped up a piece of French toast. “Here, open.”
“I want Tabasco.”
“Fine. I will bring it in a minute. You eat this now, and then you can drink Tabasco from the bottle. If I put it on your eggs you will tell me you won’t eat them because they taste bad, just like you did yesterday.” Peter watched for what seemed an eternity as his mother took several small bites.
“You’re onto me.” She chuckled.
“You haven’t fooled me since the pepper flake incident.” Robin smiled down at Shelley and Peter saw-at last-that the relationship wasn’t adversarial, which he’d believed at first.
“I like spicy things.” Peter’s mother fairly glowed with warmth.
“I know you do,” Robin said gently. “The medication makes things taste different, is all. You know that, my Shelley.”
“I know.”
Peter didn’t know what to say so he stood still until his mother acknowledged him.
“How are you, Petey? Don’t I look dead to you? I was sure I was dead.”
“No.” Peter stood still. “You don’t look…the same, but you don’t look dead.”
Peter’s mother rolled her eyes. She breathed in time with a sucking, bellows kind of sound that came from the floor behind her bed. “Liar. You always were a lousy liar. Don’t let the equipment bother you.” She gestured to her nasal canula. “I’m told blue is not my color, so they keep feeding oxygen into my nose. I breathe through my mouth when they’re not looking to piss them off.”
Peter didn’t respond. His mother’s appearance, her delicate blue-veined hands, the bones of which were clearly visible behind translucent skin, shocked him. She’d always been slim, but now appeared skeletal; dark smudges buoyed up eyes that were cloudy with pain. Her hair, which had gone a silvery color early on and had been one of her most striking features, was shorn off at about an inch long all over.
“Well. At least say something,” she prodded.
“I didn’t know what to expect,” he said carefully. He admitted to himself, even if to no one else that he’d tried very hard not to expect anything, and still he felt shocked. Maybe a little sick.
“Don’t be hard on the boy, Shelley.” Robin opened a carton of orange juice and put a straw in it. “You’re terrifying.”
“Really?” She seemed pleased. “Do you find me terrifying, Petey? I’ve always wanted to be terrifying.”
“I’m—” Peter turned and headed for the door, exiting into the hallway, running down the stairs and through the kitchen. He headed out the back door and into the fresh spring morning where he leaned over a bush to vomit, but found he had nothing in his stomach that wanted to be disgorged.
As he gathered himself, he tried breathing normally again. He knew two things absolutely. One, he wasn’t going to be able to handle his mother’s illness; he could do nothing but stand there and watch helplessly as others cared for her.
And two, He didn’t need to worry about that because she had a new pal named Robin and Robin was feeding her French toast and making her laugh while all her son could do was gape at her and hate her for dying.
Peter poked at the battery terminals under the hood of his mom’s Road Runner with a wire brush, idly scouring away a lot of corrosion. He had plans to remove the battery and take his aunt’s truck into the nearest thing that passed for town, Hadleyburg, such as it was, where he would purchase a new one so at least the car would be drivable. He hoped.
He glanced aound the large barn Lyndee now used for storing automobiles and excess furniture and equipment. Even inside the mostly empty structure the car had been covered carefully, protected against the elements. It was clean, and sported a good coat of wax, the victim of only a small amount of corrosion from the salt of winter. His father had always babied and protected the car and its use had been firmly regulated with an eye toward longevity, even though neither he nor his son really ever understood why his mother had become so attached to it.
The end result was that the car was-in actual fact-the proverbial vehicle driven by the little old lady from Minnesota to and from church on Sundays and not much more. Things had worn out and been replaced. Gasoline formulas had changed; but the Road Runner, with a lot of care and some very clever reupholstery and mechanical work, looked very nearly as good as new.
Now, looking at the guts of the thing, it wasn’t hard for even Peter, who knew he was thick as a brick emotionally, to see that his dedication to the car sprang from the well of inadequacy he felt when it came to his mother.
Peter heard footsteps, unmeasured and purposeless, coming toward him from the direction of the house. “Here you are.” Peter looked up to see Robin lean in an indolent way against the rear fender on the driver’s side, a cigarette in his hand. Robin took a drag. “I thought I would find you with the car, although you’re mother said you’d be long gone by now.”
Peter put the brush down and crossed his arms. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Robin blew a thin stream of smoke from between lips that were thick and soft looking and hid a faint smile, but he only shrugged.
“I probably would have, if I’d had wheels,” Peter admitted.
Robin had an arm crossed in front of him and rested his elbow on it while the hand that held the cigarette hovered close to his mouth. He looked at Peter-peered at him really-but that hand, with the smoke rising in curls from it, obscured his thoughts as neatly as if he’d put on a mask.
Peter hated to admit it, but the hands attracted him. They’d been gentle and caring with his mother but looked strong and capable. Long fingered and elegant with well-manicured nails. He’d always liked hands; always liked competent and efficient professionals. Robin struck him as both easygoing and sensitive. The way he stood there, silent and still made Peter feel… not good precisely, but not bad either.
“Does it shock you that I want to leave?” he asked finally.
Robin rubbed his littlest finger across his full lower lip, and on another man Peter might have thought it was a deliberate way to call attention to a feature that was dead sexy, but Peter thought in Robin’s case it might just be something he did unconsciously. There were lots of things about Robin that Peter found hot and not the least of them was that he was man enough to handle the gentle ministrations required to care for a deteriorating human.
“You think wanting to run away is weak,” Robin said finally.
“It is weak.”
Robin shook his head. “Wanting to run is normal.”
He took another drag on his cigarette, and when Peter walked over and took the half burned smoke from his hand, asking for a drag with his eyes, Robin’s brown ones sparked with interest. “Running is weak.”
“Easy for you to say.” Peter puffed and held the smoke in his lungs. It had been a while since he’d quit, a couple of years. Watching Robin, watching his hands and—mostly—his mouth as the filter touched his lips, Peter had the overwhelming desire to put it to his own.
Robin closed his eyes and shook his head. “Not easy.” He still grinned, but in a more self-deprecating way. “I wasn’t able to do it for my own mother. I think that’s why I can do it with yours.”
“What’s it really like? Her days here?”
Peter still held Robin’s cigarette. Robin got a fresh one from the pack when Peter didn’t relinquish it and he lit up.
“I feed her when she’s awake.” That accent wrapped around the words and caressed them. The soft cadence of it; its musicality wrapped around Peter a little too. “Then I give her pain medication and she drifts back off. When she wakes again she eats a little more. Her appetite is dwindling. She’s sleeping more and when she can’t she’s restless and uncomfortable. I spend a lot of time adjusting fabric and pillows. Soothing. Like the princess and the pea.”
Peter grinned, although he felt like he should want to cry. “I don’t doubt that.”
“She is going downhill fast, Peter.”
Peter tried to imagine a world without his mother in it. Maybe not nearby but somewhere. A vague presence he could refer to when he was about to do something stupid or dangerous or even heroic; mother would hate this, mother would like that. A boy’s magnetic north. A point on the compass long after boyhood is a memory.
“How long?”
“I can’t tell you that.” Robin put one of his elegant hands on Peter’s arm and Peter stared at it for a minute. When Robin misinterpreted his interest in it and would have removed it, Peter caught it in his own hand and held it there, gripping the fingers tightly.
Brown eyes looked at him curiously, but the fingers stayed where they were. They stood and smoked together for a little while longer.
Peter finally spoke. “My mother has no idea who I am.”
Robin met his eyes. “It’s time you told her.”
Peter crushed his butt under his foot and picked it up again, years of conditioning that made him hold it till he could throw it in the trash. He walked toward the bin. “I can’t.”
“Then you have no idea who she is either.”
Peter stopped in his tracks. “Maybe not.”
“Don’t wait too long to find out,” Robin said. On his way out of the barn he reached a hand out and squeezed Peter’s shoulder, and as Peter watched him walk back toward the house he couldn’t help but admire the man’s build and the fine way he moved underneath the fairly shapeless scrubs he wore.
The fantasy was right there, his imagination worked overtime, yet that was part of the reason he’d come home. Part of why he couldn’t bear to talk to his mother. Sooner or later, he’d have to tell her that it might not be possible for him to go back to the job he knew made her so proud. Her hero, just like Dad.
Peter pulled his mom’s car battery out and put it on the floor of Lyndee’s truck on the passenger side. When he returned to the kitchen to wash up and get a last cup of coffee he found Lyndee supervising the cooking of the noon meal.
“Hi, I was just going to come and get you,” she told him, returning her attention to a girl he thought was probably college age. “You put the cheese on the sandwiches, hon, just not Ed’s; he’s lactose intolerant.”
Lyndee followed him when he took his coffee to the side of the room and stood, sipping it. “I made up a guest room for you, so it doesn’t look too much like a room for one of my guests, if you know what I mean.” She wrinkled her nose. “I think you should stay here.”
“Aunt Lyndee, I—”
“Don’t do it, Petey.” She rose up toward him and took his face in her hands, pulling it down. He wanted to pull away but he couldn’t find the will to hurt her feelings so he stayed where he was. “Don’t throw away the last chance you have to be with your mom.”
Lyndee let him go and he turned away to finish his coffee. “I’ll stay tonight. I have to get some things from the auto supply store for the Road Runner.”
“Don’t forget that while you’re caring for that car its owner needs a little TLC as well.”
Peter chugged the bitter dregs of his cup and held the mug, wondering if he should give it to Lyndee or take it to the sink and rinse it. “Robin seems great; she’s in his capable hands. She doesn’t need a lot more than that, I’m thinking.” He hated himself for the way it sounded to his ears. He knew his aunt would call him on it.
“Your best girl stepping out?” Lyndee gave him a hard stare. “It’s not like she’s got any choice in the matter.” Taking his mug, she leaned in again and whispered directly in his ear. “He is paid to give her care. She needs her family. Don’t fuck this up or you’re going to regret it.”
Peter was a little shocked by Lyndee’s use of the f-bomb, but she’d moved back into the food prep area and started tossing a large salad.
“I’m taking the truck, okay?”
“Fine, the keys are on the wall there.”
“I got them earlier, but I thought it was polite to ask.” He grinned at her and at last she gave him the all-clear smile.
“I made up the room next to mine. When you get back, take your things from my office and put them up there.”
“If I stay.”
“You always do the right thing in the end, Petey.” She picked up the salad and made her way into the dining room. “Regular as clockwork. But it’s
frustrating as hell to watch you flail. It’s getting so my heart can’t take the strain anymore, so sooner, rather than later, would be good.”
She gave him another long hard look and left him standing there to drink his coffee in peace.
Peter put Lyndee’s keys in the ignition just as Robin came out of the house-not in the scrubs he’d been wearing but in a pair of jeans and a tight T-shirt, carrying a messenger bag. Peter watched as he calmly walked in front of the truck to stand at the driver’s side window, which was open.
“Are you headed to town?” Robin asked.
“I am.” Peter leaned his head on his arm, propped up on the door. He didn’t need to make it easy for Robin to tag along. He had no idea what he would do with the man at the tire center, and had a bad feeling that Robin needed to run errands or shop. Or that he intended to make it a time when they would talk. The last thing he wanted was to talk to his mother’s…Robin.
Robin’s lips twisted into a kind of resigned smile. “May I please come along?”
