Family Blessings (43 page)

"Just one of those days I could have done without."

"What happened to Judd?"

"I started legal proceedings to try to have him taken away from his parents permanently."

"What started it?"

He told her about the lunch tickets, the cocaine, the scene in the principal's office and taking Judd to the foster home. "The thing is, after all that kid's been through, I'm still not sure I'm doing the right thing."

"But, cocaine . .."

I know. I know." He held her loosely, needing the feel of her warmth and closeness, the faint pressure of her arms bolstering his back.

"But I've been there, Lee, and I know how it feels. It's home, but it isn't like other kids' homes. Still it's the only one you've got, and if you lose your mom and dad, how do you know there'll be anybody there at all for you I saw it in Judd's eyes today. I felt it when he latched onto me so damned hard I thought he'd break my neck. Then he said, I want to live with you, Chris," and I had to say no. Jesus, Lee, you should have seen him. There he sat on that hard office chair, looking like some little refugee dirty, bedraggled, smelling bad. He didn't even have on a decent winter jacket, and I knew damned well nobody'd fed him breakfast . . .

and I've got an empty bedroom, and I make enough money that I could easily take good care of him, but what am I going to do with a boy of twelve when I work nights half the time and there's nobody to watch him?"

She had no answers. She only held him and let him go on whispering gruffly, working out his feelings.

"They warn you not to let this happen, never to get too close to kids like him, but what kind of a heartless human being would I be if I didn't?"

"Judd is warm and fed and being taken care of tonight. You did that much for him."

He sighed and rested his chin on her head, closing his eyes. He tried to draw strength from her, enough to blot out the difficult memories from that day, but they persisted. In time, he said, "The kids are the hardest part of this job. Not the felons, not the crooks, not even the accident victims. It's the kids that get to you."

"I know," she said, rubbing his back. "Greg always said the same thing."

"A couple years ago, the first year Greg joined the force, I got a call from the North Side saying someone had spotted a little girl walking down the street barefooted. It was a beautiful summer day, about two o'clock in the afternoon when I found her.

I'd guess she was about three years old or so, and I swear to God, nobody had done one single thing for her that day. You could tell by her clothes that she'd dressed herself, poor little thing. She was wearing some dirty little dress and no panties underneath it at all, and then those bare feet, and her hair all scruffy and snarled. She was just toddling down the street dragging a hairless doll by one arm, blocks away from home. She'd just wandered out and nobody had even missed her. When I pulled the squad up beside her and got out, she was sucking on her fingers and crying, and even before I got to her, she reached up both arms, and once she'd put them around my neck, nobody could pry them loose. I had to call for a backup because she cried when I tried to let her go to drive my squad. I took her to the emergenCy foster home myself, and when I tried to give her to the woman there she sobbed and refused to let go of my neck." He was quiet while, then added, "I'll never forget that day as long as I live."

When he grew quiet, she said, "You mustn't feel guilty for not taking Judd."

"But I do. I started this big-brother relationship with him and I feel like I'm letting him down."

"You're too softhearted."

"How can a person be too softhearted?"

"Dear Christopher, this is one of the reasons why I love you."

"Oh, Lee . .." He drew back and took her face in both hands, holding it like a chalice from which he would drink. He kissed her in gratitude, in beatitude, then continued holding her face.

"Tonight I wasn't sure if I needed a lover, a mother or a wife.

So I came to you for all three."

"A wife?" she repeated.

"Cops have to lay a lot on their wives and I haven't got one." He grazed her cheeks with his thumbs. "Thanks for being here."

"If I was any help at all, I'm glad, but I have my own reasons for opening my door to you, and they're not totally altruistic."

She went up on tiptoe and reached up one arm to draw his head down. "I thought about you all day long."

They were kissing when Joey came out of his bedroom and walked down the hall, stockingfooted. He entered the living room from the opposite end and came up short at the sight of his mother standing beyond the far archway of the room in the shadows of the entry hall, wrapped tightly in an embrace with somebody, kissing him.

He got a funny feeling in the pit of his stomach. A lift. A stir.

An odd buoyant sensation that made his inner thighs feel liquidy and weak. It was Christopher, Joey was pretty sure, though all he could see was his jacket sleeves and his hands on his mother's back and head.

He knew that jacket, though. Chris's left arm slipped down and caught his mother around the hips, pulling her deeper against himself. She whispered something Joey couldn't make out, and the murmur from a masculine voice confirmed that it was Christopher whose open hands came down and grasped his mother by both buttocks while she went up against him the way he'd seen in the movies.

He felt a blush cover his body and backed off into the hallway standing motionless and undetected. He listened to their quiet murmurs and the long silences in between, then the more novel sound of slurpy kisses and humming sounds like he himself made when eating something he liked.

He peeked around the corner again and saw Christopher's hand leave his mother's back and slide up under her sweater. The edge of the archway cut off his view, but he knew perfectly well Christopher was feeling up her breasts. Jeer! His mother? She still did stuff like that at her age?

Wow, then they probably went all the way, too. Joey got all hacked-up feeling, all strange and tight and hard everyplace, and his breathing got windy. He took one last peek, then slipped silently into his mother's bedroom where the house's second telephone sat on her nightstand. He closed the door noiselessly, picked up the receiver and dialed by feel in the dark, then flopped on his back in the middle of her bed and said, "Hey, Denny, this is Joey. I gotta talk to you about the weirdest thing that just happened . .."

Chapter 16.

THE judge ruled in favor of leaving Judd in foster care until a formal court hearing, which was scheduled for late February, though he denied Christopher the appointment as Judd's guardian, stating that the boy already had a county attorney and a social worker looking out for his welfare.

Christopher returned Judd to Mrs. Billings's house and left him there with the promise that the two of them would work out together in the police weight room every Tuesday that Chris's schedule permitted.

Joey Reston decided he wouldn't tell anyone but Denny Whitman what he'd seen in the front hall at home. If he told Janice, she'd break up Christopher and their mother, and that would be the end of the rather sexually stimulating scenarios such as the one that had so fascinated him he'd decided to try a little of that stuff with Sandy Parker. Of course, he'd have to talk it all over with Denny first and make sure that when he finally put the move on his girlfriend, he did it right and didn't scare her off.

Janice had returned to college, and Lee made plans for an unabashed sexual reprise with Christopher on the first night it was possible.

She called him and said, "Joey has signed up for a class to get his driver's permit. He'll be gone for two hours tomorrow night, starting at seven o'clock. What are you doing?"

"I'm off. Can you come over?"

"Yes." She released a pent breath. "Just try to stop me."

"And I've got Friday off, too. What are you doing Friday night?"

"Nothing. And Joey's going to a basketball game."

"Two nights in a row. Shazam."

"Oh, Christopher, I haven't felt like this in years."

"Like what?"

"You know."

"Maybe I do, but tell me anyway."

"Sexy. Turned on. Thinking about it all the time. I suspect I should feel guilty, but I don't."

"Why should you feel guilty?"

"I'm lying to the kids."

"No, you're not. You're just reserving some of your private time for me and not telling them about it."

"A slanted view if I ever heard one."

"I've told you, anytime you want to tell them, straight to their faces, I'm dating Christopher," just let me know. I'll come and tell them with you."

"Not yet," she said, a hoarder savoring her booty, "not just yet.

I want you to myself for a while."

A silence fell while they pictured each other, and felt lucky and happy and yearny, as all new lovers feel when they must be apart.

"I wish I was with you now," he said.

"So do I."

"Are you in bed?" he asked.

"Yes." She called him every night at eleven, after lights out.

"Are you?"

"Yes, in the dark. What are you wearing?"

"A really ugly old faded flannel nightgown. It must be ten years old."

"Are you lying on your back?"

"No, on my side, curled up with the phone on the pillow."

"Is the nightgown caught between your legs?"

His question did unbelievable things to her libido. "Is this one of those kinky telephone conversations I've heard about?"

. "Yes, I suppose it is, but I've never had one like it before either, so don't go thinking I make a habit of this. Only with you. Is the nightgown caught between your legs?"

: "Yes," she whispered, then closed her eyes, breathing as if his hands were upon her, picturing his face, his sturdy fingers, his unclothed body, while only silence connected their two telephones.

"Lee?" he whispered after a long while.

"Yes."

"Don't waste a minute getting over here after you drop Joey off."

She didn't. At 7:07 she was walking through his door, and by 7:09 neither of them had a stitch of clothing on. They didn't make it as far as his bedroom but tumbled to the living room floor where the radio was playing and two lamps were lit beside the sofa.

This time, she hadn't a single inhibition about being seen in the light, but rolled with him, and spread her limbs at his bidding, and let him kiss her in the most intimate of places, which had been scented for that purpose.

Their coupling was greedy and untamed, a splendid natural compulsion carrying them from one pleasure to another after their forced celibacy.

They explored poses balletic and profane, submitting. completely to the unutterable joy of this act.

, They had been kneeling, face-to-face, when she fell back, her arms upflung, her ribs forming a bridge where he spread one hand.

Her words came as an afterbeat. "I can feel you . . . clear up to .

.

. my heart . . . my God . . . my God . . . my God . .."

"I never thought you'd be like this."

"I've never been . . . before . .."

He hauled her up and she came with the same loose freedom as she'd fallen back, to kiss him and move upon him and mess his hair and wet his mouth with her own.

"Lee . . . Lee . . . I still can't believe I'm with you, and doing this."

She was forty-five, and flying free, and making up for so much lost time.

When she climaxed, he stifled her cry with a sofa pillow, afraid the tenants in the apartment below would hear. When he climaxed, she watched, smiling down their bodies, taking joy in the sight of them joined. In paroxysm he was beautiful, bowed back upon her with his jaw fallen open and his breath strident. She touched his damp brow and ran a finger into his open mouth, which settled closed as his eyes came open.

Afterward, they lay on their sides on the turfy texture of the carpet, holding one another with their legs and their gazes. Near their heads a branch of the ficus tree fluttered in the forced air rising up through the hot-air vent. The low bass beat of the radio reverberated along the floor and up into their ribs.

Outside, snow pecked at the windows and wind prowled, but in the saffron light from the lamps Christopher and Lee felt warmed from within.

"You're something," he said, exhausted.

"I don't know where it came from."

"Too long without it."

"Something more, I think. This is a different me."

He touched her lower lip, misshaped it and let it spring back to its natural contour. "When I first started thinking about you in a sexual way, I imagined that you'd be very straight, very proper about it."

"I used to be. You've changed me."

"How did I manage that?"

"I don't know. You just . .." She rolled to her back, one elbow jutting up, one breast flat and stretched, attracting his idle hand while their bodies remained in a liquid link below. "There you are, thirty and sturdy and making me into this sex-crazed woman where I used to be so . . . well, so functional, so oriented all day long at work.

Now I lose track of what I'm doing, and I scheme to get away from the shop to meet you and do this, and a day without you seems like a month."

"It's the same for me. But it's more than sex. You're there for me in more ways than that."

"What ways?" she said, still lazing backward while he ran a fingertip over her ribs and around one nipple, down to her navel, inside it, then back up her center.

"The day after New Year's when you came here at noon and we couldn't make love, I felt contented just sitting with you on my lap in the sun.

And when my job gets me down and I can come to you the way I did the other day when I put Judd in that foster home . . . that's all part of it for me. And that part is just as good as this part."

Smiling lazily, she rolled her shoulder toward him slightly, giving shape to her breast once more, so that it fit nicely into his hand.

"Just as good?" she teased.

"Well," he amended, grinning, "just about as good."

Her throat fluttered in a silent chuckle, then she rolled to lie face-to-face with him, lifting the hair at his nape with four fingers, studying his features while her laughter dissolved into something much more profound.