'Tis the Season (20 page)

Filomena hadn't known that, either. Actually, she'd never thought about it one way or the other. She hadn't been looking for a sexy guy, urban or rural or anything in between.

She certainly hadn't been looking for Evan.

She finished her conversation with Patty and hung up the phone, then settled deep into the pillows propped against her headboard. Closing her eyes, she pictured her crowded, sunless efficiency apartment near the Columbia University campus. She imagined the constant drone of traffic outside her dingy window, the people swarming Upper Broadway at one in the morning, the combative wit and the tumultuous lives of her friends.

It all seemed so far away.

She'd missed that excitement, the clamor and intrigue and the soap-opera melodramas of her pals when she'd
first arrived in Arlington. But lately, the only noise that mattered was the high-pitched chatter of Gracie babbling about hair clips and candy, marriage and magic, and the more solid, responsible discussions Billy engaged in, his eyes as dazzling as his father's. The only traffic she thought about was the rush-hour buildup on Dudley Road as she drove to the Children's Garden Preschool to pick up Gracie. The only friend she seemed to need was Evan.

Once again, she recalled his fingers twining through her hair, and something clenched inside her, dark and lush.

She'd grown attached to him only because she was emotionally vulnerable. He'd caught her at a bad time. She'd been bereft over the death of her mother, so she'd turned to him.

A low, helpless laugh escaped her. Yes, she mourned for her mother. But grief wasn't what had made her turn to Evan. Loneliness wasn't what attracted her to him.

He'd asked her to have dinner with him and the kids because he thought it would be preferable to eating alone, but that wasn't why she'd said yes. She'd had dinner with him and the kids because being with them—with
him
—was preferable to a whole lot of things. Being with Evan, basking in his enigmatic smile, observing his bony wrists when he rolled up his sleeves and the contours of his throat when he opened the collar button of his shirt, eyeing the lanky profile of his body and wondering what his chest would look like, what it would feel like, what it would taste like if she pressed her mouth to his skin…

She was in trouble. Big trouble.

Abruptly, she pushed away from the pillows, swung her legs over the side of the bed and crossed the room to her dresser. Her tarot cards sat in a neat stack, wrapped
in a silk handkerchief, exactly where she'd left them after taking them away from Billy and Gracie last night. She carried the deck to her bed, sat cross-legged at the center of the mattress and shuffled the cards.

She didn't actually believe the tarot could predict the future, but she saw no harm in using the cards. If they helped a person to think something through, to clarify her wishes, to define her goals, why not?

She pulled the queen of pentacles out to represent herself, then shuffled the rest of the deck, focusing on a question:
What will happen between Evan and me?
Then she dealt out the cards in a Celtic array.

The card representing her current situation—the four of swords—stood for retreat and solitude. Well, that made sense. She'd come to Arlington to collect her wits and figure out how to live the rest of her life as an orphan. Crossing her—the fool. She grinned. The Fool indicated that she was facing a choice. She knew what that choice was. The cards were supposed to tell her how to make it—if she took any of this seriously.

She truly didn't—but she kept going. The cards said she was facing financial struggles—the reversed Ten of Pentacles warned of a lost inheritance. The reversed Ace of Wands predicted that some enterprise might not be realized. The sale of the house? Or her thesis, perhaps? Would she wind up not getting her doctorate, or getting it but not getting a job, not becoming a university scholar like her father?

The Moon card made an appearance. It almost always did for her, although she wasn't sure why. This time it appeared upside down as the final card, the one that supposedly answered her question. According to the cards,
her answer was that she would find peace, at a cost. She'd be practical.

The practical thing to do was to take care of Evan's kids and let him pay her for her time—and to stop thinking about him as a desirable man. The practical path would carry her through New Year's Day and straight to the office of a real-estate agent, who would list this house for sale. The practical solution would be to make her last month in Arlington a serene one, devoid of emotional entanglements and upheavals, and then to return to New York City.

The Moon card was telling her to forget about Evan.

She gathered the cards, rewrapped them in the square of blue silk and carried them to her dresser. After setting them down with an angry thump, she turned her back on them.

She didn't believe in that nonsense. She honestly didn't.

But this time, she suspected, the cards were telling her the truth.

E
NTERING THE ROOM
at the YMCA where the Daddy School met, Evan spotted a familiar face among the men pushing metal chairs into a circle at the center of the room. He grabbed a chair, carried it with him to the circle and unfolded it next to Dennis Murphy's chair. “Murphy!” he greeted his lawyer and poker buddy. “What are you doing here?”

“Catching a refresher course,” Murphy said with a grin. “When you talked about Daddy School last week at the game, it got me to thinking I could benefit from a booster shot.”

“Really?” Evan unzipped his battered leather jacket, shrugged out of it and draped it over the back of the chair. “All this time you've been telling me you're the perfect father.”

“I am. Only a perfect father would know when it's time for a booster shot.” He laughed as he settled into his chair. “The thing is, the kids have been way too wired lately,” he explained. “Pre-Christmas excitement, I think. When I tell them to take it down a notch, they drag Gail into it. She doesn't want to play referee between them and me, and she doesn't want to be put in a position of taking sides. So she told me to sit in on a few Daddy School classes and get some fine-tuning.”

“So you're doing it because your wife pressured you into it.”

“That about sums it up.” Murphy shrugged, obviously not perturbed by his wife's pressure tactics. “Anyway, I was curious to see how you were doing.”

“You could have waited till tomorrow night to see how I was doing,” Evan reminded him. Tomorrow was their poker night.

“I meant, in the context of your kids. I was thinking about you over the Thanksgiving weekend, wondering how the holiday was treating you.”

“We did fine,” Evan assured him, hoping his smile would deflect more questions. When he was paying Murphy five hundred dollars an hour to handle his or Champion's business, he was pleased by Murphy's tenacity. But when they were pals, sitting side by side in an evening class at the YMCA, he didn't want to be interrogated.

Unfortunately, Murphy was in an interrogating mood. “I would have invited you to have Thanksgiving dinner with us, but we had the whole gang—Gail's sister Molly and her husband, my mother and Gail's parents. It was a huge family bash. Practically unbearable.”

“No problem. We had a great Thanksgiving.”

“Just you and the kids?”

Evan considered his answer and realized he had nothing to hide. “Fil was also there. Filomena.”

“The baby-sitter?”

“Well, she's…” He paused, then decided what the hell. “She's more than a baby-sitter at this point.”

“Yeah?” Murphy looked intrigued. “It's about time. It's been, what? Two years since your divorce?”

“You ought to know—your firm handled it.”

“And we did an excellent job, too,” Murphy recollected. “You got the house, you got full, uncontested custody of the kids, you didn't get hit with any alimony payments and you got to keep every penny of your assets.”

“She didn't want my assets. All she wanted was a superstar lover,” Evan reminded Murphy. Even though he didn't miss Debbie at all, it hurt to remember why she'd left him—because he wasn't exciting enough, charismatic enough.
Good
enough.

Allison Winslow entered the room, giving him a convenient excuse to push aside that depressing thought. The din of conversation melted away as she sauntered to the circle. “Boy,” she said with a chuckle. “Everyone falls silent when I enter. Should I be flattered?”

The Daddy School students laughed, then waited patiently as she removed a colorful down parka, fluffed her curly red hair and smoothed her shirt into the waistband of her pristine white slacks. Her sneakers and her turtleneck were as white as her pants. She must have come to the YMCA straight from her nursing job at Arlington Memorial Hospital, Evan guessed.

As hectic as his day had been, he was glad he'd been able to go home and have dinner with Billy and Gracie before attending the Daddy School. He'd broiled swordfish steaks and immersed himself in the glorious minutiae of his children's lives: Gracie's long-winded description of the snowflakes she and her classmates cut out of folded construction paper, Billy's stellar performance playing a game of dodgeball in gym, Gracie's desperate need for Silly Putty, Billy's heartfelt longing for snow.

How could Debbie have walked away from that? Evan
wondered. Could a superstar lover really be worth sacrificing the joys and challenges of raising one's children?

Evidently, she'd thought so. And Evan thought she was an idiot for having made that choice.

“This evening, I want to talk about the women in your children's lives,” Allison announced, startling Evan—and apparently several of the other men in the room. They sat up straighter, shifted in their seats, eyed one another dubiously.

“I know, this is the
Daddy
School,” she said. “But some of you have wives, some have ex-wives, some have girlfriends—or even mothers and neighbors who help out with your kids. This class is about improving your fathering skills, and one of the most important ways you can improve those skills is to improve the relationships between your children and the women who are central to their lives.”

A couple of fathers grumbled. Evan guessed they were caught up in contentious child-sharing arrangements with ex-wives. In his case, his ex-wife was the exact opposite of central to his children's lives. But there were still women essential to them. Not just their teachers, their friends' mothers or their grandmother, but the woman who'd shown up at his front door five minutes before he'd had to leave for the YMCA.

He swallowed a reluctant laugh. Even at the Daddy School, which ought to have nothing to do with Filomena, there she was, nudging her way back to the front his mind.

“Now, usually I teach Daddy School classes to fathers of newborns,” Allison said. “Or sometimes even fathers whose babies haven't been born yet. These fathers are anxious. They feel ignorant or incompetent when it
comes to child care. They believe their female partners know much more about child care than they do—and often, they're right,” she added with an easy smile. “Then you guys take a class like this, and you learn to be complete experts in father-child relationships—” this brought rousing guffaws from the men “—and you forget that one of the most important jobs fathers have is to help your children relate better to the women in their lives. If you don't nurture that relationship, you're failing in your job as a father, just as the women who deal with your children would be failing in their jobs if they didn't nurture the children's relationships with you.”

Evan listened as Allison discussed some of the things men could do to support their children's relationships with mothers and other female caregivers. He agreed with some of her suggestions and disagreed with others—for instance, her assertion that lots of men felt threatened by a strong mother-child relationship. He didn't feel threatened by his kids' affection for Filomena. Quite the opposite—he thought it was wonderful. The only downside to their relationship with her was that the more attached to her they grew, the harder it would be on them when she left.

He couldn't bear to watch his kids lose Filomena. They'd lost the woman in their lives once, and he hated the possibility of their repeating that painful experience. Not that Filomena was their mother, not that she was in any way bound to them as Debbie had been, but…he just couldn't let it happen.

On the other hand, Filomena had been in their lives for only a couple of weeks. She would be in their lives for only a few weeks more. Surely they could survive her departure. If he kept them busy enough, if he started
coming home from work earlier—which he would once the holiday-sales season ended—they might not even notice that Filomena wasn't around.

Kids were resilient. And his kids had him, and he was never, ever going to leave them.

“So you need to remember that just as you like to have special time with your kids, those women like to have special time with the kids, too. Men tend to think that because women spend so many hours with the children, they don't need that special time. But if all a woman is doing with her children is feeding them and shopping for them and taking them to the dentist, that's not the same thing as playing go-fish with them, or taking a walk with them, or going to see a special movie with them.”

Filomena was free take the kids to as many saccharine-sweet movies as she wanted without any interference from him, Evan thought generously.

“Men have to be unselfish when it comes to special time,” Allison lectured. “They have to contribute more to the not-special stuff. If you're married and it's your routine to go off and play with the kids after dinner while your wife cleans the kitchen, think about occasionally volunteering to clean the kitchen so
she
can play with the kids. That's good fathering. Even though you're not with the children, you're being a good father to them. Do you see what I'm getting at?”

The men began speaking up. One was truly hostile toward his ex-wife; Evan was glad he didn't fit into that category. Next to him, Murphy settled back in his chair, his legs stretched out before him and his arms folded across his chest. He'd had a reasonably amicable divorce, Evan recalled, and now he was happily remarried, raising his twins with his new wife. Not a bad outcome.

Evan had no idea what outcome awaited him and his children. Two years after their family had fallen apart, they were still in limbo. If Filomena left—damn, it hurt to consider that possibility, but he'd be a fool to pretend it didn't exist—he was going to have to take steps to socialize more, to try to make his life complete. With or without her.

They weren't in love, after all. Not yet, and maybe they never would be. But as Murphy had pointed out, it was time Evan started building a new life.

Filomena's arrival had forced him to acknowledge that he was ready for a new life. Which alone was reason enough to love her, he thought with a wry smile.

 

F
REDDY THE
P
IG
just wasn't doing it for her.

She'd been neglecting her studies terribly. She knew her graduate adviser would forgive her for falling a bit behind schedule in her thesis work. She'd lost her mother, after all. Her life was in turmoil. She'd be ready to teach a section of the Modern American Literature survey course next spring; the curriculum didn't change much from year to year, and she'd taught the class before. This fall, she'd planned to dedicate the bulk of her time to compiling her research, organizing it and writing the damned thesis.

But the magic was gone.

She used to find excitement in the pages of Walter Brooks's books, his tales of barnyard animals exemplifying the best and worst of humanity. She used to take joy in analyzing the interactions of Freddy and Jinx the cat, and Mrs. Wiggins the cow, and the befuddled but kindly Beans, the humans who foolishly believed they were actually in charge of the farm.

No more. Magic existed in Filomena's life, but it didn't lie in the pages of her books—or, for that matter, in the stack of cards wrapped in silk on her dresser.

The magic was in a house on the other side of the woods. The magic was in her imagination, drawing her to the Myerses, making her want what she most feared: becoming dependent on them.

Bad enough that she depended on them for company, for a purpose and a routine in her daily life, for the spark of energy that fueled her as she continued her room-by-room assault on her own house, preparing it for sale. Far worse was that she depended on Evan and his children for the magic in her life.

Tuesday was her day off. Evan had his poker game that night, and he arranged his workday so he could escape from the office early and pick up the kids himself. Given that she'd spent Monday evening with them so he could attend his Daddy School class, she deserved Tuesday off. She ought to appreciate the tranquillity of an evening without Billy and Gracie.

After finishing a meal of shrimp and herbed rice, a fresh spinach salad and a glass of wine, she lit candles around the living room and put Handel's
Water Music
on her portable stereo, and tried to remember what her life had been like before that night, exactly two weeks ago, when she'd caught those two scamps snooping through her window.

Peaceful. Lonely. Dull.

She wanted to buy them Christmas presents. She probably ought to confer with Evan first, to make sure he wouldn't mind—but she wanted to buy him a Christmas present, too. If she did, would he think she was pre
sumptuous? Would it be embarrassing if she gave him something and he had nothing to give her?

Sitting in her living room, her candles glazing the air with whispers of golden light and Handel's celebratory music embracing her, she took a sip from her refilled glass of wine and found courage in it. The hell with whether Evan considered her presumptuous. The hell with worrying about embarrassing herself. She had been many things in her life, but embarrassed wasn't one of them. When, as a teenager, she'd capsized a kayak in water so shallow she'd actually bumped her head on the river bottom, she hadn't been embarrassed. When she'd started her solo a measure early during the spring glee-club concert at her college, she hadn't been embarrassed. Embarrassment had always seemed to her a waste of emotional energy.