Authors: Sugar Jamison
“But I don’t want to go there. There’s hardly anybody left anymore.” He couldn’t ignore the sadness in her eyes.
“Then where would you like to go? I’ll send you anywhere on the planet.”
“If it’s all the same to you, sir, I would rather stay here. With everybody gone who’s going to do all the cooking and cleaning?” She got up shaking her head. “You need me to stay. I’ll come back and the house will be in shambles. Oh no. I can’t let that happen.”
His eyes followed her as she left the room still mumbling to herself and he spotted Dina standing just outside the doorway with a small smile on her face.
“Hello,” he greeted her.
She walked into the room much more dressed than she had been the last two times he saw her. She wore an unadorned gray dress that probably would have looked plain on another woman but suited Dina very nicely. It hugged her lush-looking body and flattered her curves. Her thick hair was neatly brushed and braided and she looked … perfectly appropriate. But he kind of missed the sight of her long bare legs and the hint of pink underwear he saw every time she moved.
“Hi.” She walked in the room seeming almost shy around him. “I wanted to bring Dash up, but the shopping trip wiped him out. I don’t think he likes to cruise the sales racks as much as his mother does.”
“Maybe next time you can leave him here with me.”
“Maybe.” She walked towards him, a small piece of paper in her hand. “I wanted to give you this.”
He unfolded the paper to find that it was a receipt from her shopping trip. Dovie was right; Dina barely spent anything at all. Just over two hundred dollars for her and Dash at a discount department store.
“What’s this?” He looked up at her. “When I sent you to the store to buy things you needed, I expected you to buy things you needed.”
“I did,” she said quietly. “Okay, so maybe I didn’t need the nail polish, but the rest of the stuff is legit. I need to wipe Dash with the hypoallergenic wipes or he gets a rash. I know they are more expensive, but—”
“I don’t care about the wipes. I expected you to buy more. If you are going to be my wife I expect you to be clothed in an appropriate manner.”
“We aren’t married. We might never be. I don’t want you supporting me. And minus the things I bought for Dash, I owe you seventy-five bucks.”
Her statement surprised him so much he didn’t know what to say.
“Besides, I think I look pretty good.” She did a dramatic turn and he got a glimpse of how her dress really curved over her backside. “This dress only cost seven dollars and I got the boots on sale for nineteen.” She turned back to him, her face serious. “You don’t like the way I look?”
She was beautiful in her seven-dollar dress and cheap boots. Just as beautiful as she was in her ratty T-shirt. “You look fine, but that’s not the point. I wanted you to get whatever you wanted. For these next two weeks I don’t want you to worry about money.”
Her eyes lit up for a moment, but she briefly closed them as if she were putting out her own flame.
“What is it?”
“There is something I want. But it’s not something I can get from the store.”
“Tell me.”
“This is Dash’s first Christmas and I want it to be special for him. But this house.” She looked around her. “It doesn’t feel like Christmas. I want it to feel like Christmas for him.”
* * *
Dina didn’t know what she expected from Ben when she told him what she wanted. She half-expected condescension or laughter or snark, but he got up from his desk, took her by the hand and led her out of his office without a word. They traveled through the long quiet hallways of the house in silence. She knew she should wonder where they were going, but instead she was focused on the way Ben’s hand felt around hers. Nobody simply held her hand. She never thought of herself as a hand-holding girl, but feeling his big, warm fingers around hers was kind of nice. She felt almost protected when she was with him, and she didn’t know why. He was a stranger to her. A stranger who offered her marriage. She didn’t trust him. She shouldn’t trust him. So why was there a part of her that felt like she was safer here in this museum-like house than she had been anywhere else in her life?
“Where are we going?” she finally asked as he led her up a narrow, dark staircase in a part of the house she didn’t know existed.
“To the attic.”
“Are you going to chain me to the wall?”
“Not today.”
“Are you going to show me your large collection of sex toys?”
“I keep that in the basement.” He looked back at her and for the first time she saw a little mischievousness in his eyes.
“I find basements are too damp for my sex toys. Mold is a bitch.”
He shook his head at her comment before coming to a stop at the small door. “I haven’t been up here in years, but I imagine that everything is still the same.”
He stepped aside to let her in. The room was vast, running the length of the entire house, but all she saw was white dust sheets from floor to ceiling. She looked back at him, unsure of what his purpose was.
“This is where Christmas is.” He looked around the attic. “Somewhere up here.”
“You mean, we are going to have to look through this big, huge, dusty attic to find the Christmas decorations?”
“No, you are. I’m going back to work. Good luck.” He turned away from her.
“Hey!” She grabbed his suit coat. “You can’t leave me up here.”
“No?”
“Well, you could at least send some of your servants.”
“I can’t. I sent them home for the holidays an hour ago. Except Dovie, and you don’t expect a seventy-five-year-old lady to go digging through boxes, do you?”
“It’s just you and me here?” She didn’t know what to think of that. He must have sent the servants home every year for Christmas. There could be no other explanation as to why he would make it so they were practically alone.
“Not just you and me. Dash and Dovie are here too.”
“Well then, buster. I suggest you take off that pretty suit jacket, because you might get blood or dust on it.”
“Blood or dust?”
“Dust from the attic if you stay or blood from your nose if you don’t.”
“You threatening me, Dina?” He smiled at her, fully smiled at her for the first time, and she was blown away by how his whole face changed. Before she thought Virgil was the charmer, but Ben, there was something about Ben too.
“Yup.” She nodded. “I think I am.”
He slid his jacket off and she watched as it dropped to the floor behind him. “Just for the record, you’re not big enough to take me.”
“Oh no?”
He took a step closer, studying every inch of her body, and if she didn’t know any better she would say she could feel his gaze like it was a touch. But she did know better.
He looked in her eyes. “Not a chance in hell, little one.” He turned away from her, breaking eye contact, leaving her feeling a little bereft. “Let’s start in the middle. You take the left side; I’ll take the right.”
An hour later they were still searching with no luck. “Why can’t we just go to Walmart like everybody else and get decorations?” she complained for the third time.
He turned from the box he was digging in and frowned at her. She smiled at him. He was pretty cute when he frowned.
She went back to looking through the boxes. In actuality she didn’t need to look through the boxes—once they took the dust sheets off she could see that the boxes were labeled and stored together by function, old furniture in one section, old books in another—but it was fun to look through other people’s stuff. She was learning more about Ben, Virgil and the Rowes just by seeing the things that they kept for so long. A small box marked “Photos” caught her attention. There were hundreds of them, snapshots, baby pictures, the Rowes’ family history, all without frames, just left in a box to fade. Suddenly she felt sad, for the forgotten pictures and for herself. She didn’t have very many photos of her baby. Just a few that she had snapped with her shitty cell phone. But the Rowes were different. Their whole lives seemed to be documented in photographs.
She dragged the box over to an antique settee she had uncovered some fifty feet back and sat, pulling a handful of pictures out of the box. It was the picture on top that intrigued her. She stared at the beautiful blond woman in black and white who was sitting so elegantly on a checkered blanket. Dina could tell that the woman, even sitting in the grass, had more poise in her little finger than Dina had in her whole body. She tried to ignore the feeling of inferiority that crept up inside of her, but she knew she didn’t belong there in her seven-dollar dress and cheap boots. She would never truly be comfortable in a life that was so different from the one she had led.
Ben sat next to her, his big body taking up all the remaining space on the settee, his side pressed against hers, and she quickly lost that train of thought. He gently took the picture from her hands and stared at it. “My mother,” he said in a quiet voice. “She was very young here. My father used to consider himself somewhat of a photographer when we were young, but it seemed like most of the pictures he took were just of her.”
“Your parents loved each other?”
“Yes,” he said, looking down at the picture, his thumb lightly stroking over his mother’s face. “More than they loved anything else on the planet.”
“Oh,” was all Dina could say. There was pain there. She could hear it in his voice. Something had happened to her. Virgil had never talked much about his family except to complain about Ben. It now struck her that she had spent six months with a man, given birth to his child and never known anything substantial about him. “What happened to your mother?”
“She died.”
“Ben…”
He looked up at her, knowing that she needed to hear more from him. “Aneurism. I was eight. Virgil was five. Things were never the same after that.”
“I’m sorry.”
“You shouldn’t be.” He looked back down at the picture. “I’m glad you found this. I hadn’t seen her in a very long time.”
There were no pictures up, Dina suddenly realized. Not in his office. Not around the house. It was so different from her own childhood home, where her mother would frame every photograph and school picture and drawing and hang them until there was no space left on the walls.
Dina picked up another picture, this time of two tiny boys snuggled together in a rocking chair.
“Virgil was six months old there,” Ben said quietly. “He looked so much like our mother even then.”
She looked away from the picture and up into his handsome face. “You two look very happy here.”
The corners of Ben’s mouth turned up a bit. “I guess I was. I so wanted to be a big brother.” He fell quiet for a moment still gazing at his younger brother. “I wish I could have protected him better.”
“How can you protect somebody from themselves, Ben?” She had known what it was like to be self-destructive and selfish and have the world try to save her. But in the end she was the only one who could pull herself up. Virgil was the only one who could have saved himself.
“I wish I knew.”
“Can I have some of these pictures?”
Ben blinked at her, surprised by her request. “Why would you want them?”
“For Dash. I want him to know about his family.”
Ben nodded slowly and searched her face as if he was searching for the truth. “I would like that.”
He looked away from her down to the stack of pictures in her hand. The next one was of another elegant blond woman, but this photograph was much more recent than the others and when Ben looked at it she felt his entire body grow tight.
“I think we looked at these enough,” he said tightly.
“Is this your wife? Is this Karen?”
“Let’s find these decorations so I can get back to work.”
“Why won’t you talk about her?”
“Because I can’t!” he snapped.
He moved to get up, but something inside of Dina screamed,
No! Not yet!
She didn’t want him to walk away just yet even though he had barked at her. She grabbed his arm and pulled him against her in a tight hug. He might not have wanted it, but he needed it. And she needed to be the one to give it to him. There had been so much loss in his life. His parents, his wife, his brother.
“What are you doing?”
“Um…” How could she explain it to him when she couldn’t even explain it to herself? She was holding on to a man she didn’t even like. Only that wasn’t so true anymore. She was holding on to this man because she knew what he was feeling. She knew what it was like to feel loss. “Stalling. I really don’t want to look through any more boxes.”
“Fine.” He pulled himself away from her. “Then I am going back to work.”
Chapter 6
Deck the Halls …
Ben couldn’t sleep that night. He didn’t sleep much these past few years, but tonight the exhaustion that usually overtook him failed to come. He didn’t know what to call the feeling that was rolling around in him, but if he had to name it he would call it guilt.
He had disappointed Dina. He saw it in her face the last time he looked at her before he walked away, but he had to get away from her. She had pulled up a picture of his wife, of Karen. She looked so happy there because it was the day she found out she was pregnant. Two months later that happiness died; two months later the woman he had fallen in love with had started to disappear. He hadn’t wanted to think about it then because he had spent years thinking about Karen and how their marriage had fallen apart. He wanted to escape that moment, but then Dina hugged him, she held him to that warm, lush body of hers and a whole set of unwanted feelings rushed him. He wanted more of her. He wanted to sink into her warmth, and smell her smell and taste her skin and feel her beside him at night and that alarmed him. How could he feel such a heavy attraction for her, the woman who loved his brother, when he was still in love with his wife? This wouldn’t work. A marriage of convenience, of simple friendship, wouldn’t work if he wanted Dina, and he knew in that moment he had to get away.
He found himself going to the nursery. He had learned through Dovie that Dina agreed to let Dash sleep there at night. He was glad for that. The room was meant for children, not to sit empty forever. It had been a very long time since he had been in this room. He avoided it on purpose. But Karen had spent time here. Days. It was almost sick, but when he walked in and saw little Dash in the crib all of those thoughts melted away. He reached down, stroking Dash’s soft cheek with the back of his finger, amazed by how connected he felt to this little person he had just met. This boy was the only piece of Ben’s family left and he needed to keep Dash in his life. Seeing this boy grow up was something that had to happen or else he would regret it for the rest of his life. That meant he needed to keep Dina around.