Jo’s stomach rumbled, and she considered asking Becca to stop at a Dick’s Drive-In en route to Capitol Hill. She didn’t know what Patricia Healy considered decent manicotti, but it was not whatever had inhabited Jo’s plate tonight. Dick’s offered an excellent cheeseburger. She glanced at Becca’s still profile and decided against it.
“I didn’t like the way he spoke to you.” Jo hadn’t intended to say this aloud, but it was the truth.
“What?” They were the first words that had passed between them since Becca pulled away fast from the stately house in Kirkland. “What are you talking about?”
“The way he made you feel. I didn’t like it.” Jo struggled to shut up. Her voice revealed too much emotion, too much of the protectiveness that was still so new to her. “Your uncle talked to you as if you’re simple, as if your opinions don’t matter. It was so different the other night, with your friends. They respect you, Becca. I could hear it in their voices. They treated you the way people who love you should. But your face changed tonight when your uncle spoke to you. You got smaller in your chair. It made me angry.”
“Jo.” Becca’s hands still clenched the wheel, but at least she wasn’t “Joanne” anymore. “Mitchell and Patricia took me in when I was five years old. They never expected to be parents, never even wanted kids of their own. But they raised me kindly. They did the very best they could, bringing me up. And I didn’t always make it easy on them, I promise you.”
“I find that hard to believe.” Jo looked at Becca’s features, lit softly in the light of the dashboard, and realized she found them lovely. “Except for your phobia, and perhaps your too-hardy appetite, I’d think you’d be easy enough to raise—”
“Jo, you have to listen to me.” Becca’s voice was less chilly, but still firm. “I’m telling you that you don’t have my permission to be rude to the people in my life. However you might feel about my uncle and aunt, Rachel, my friends, you’ve got to be courteous to them. If we’re going to spend a lot of time together, you have to understand that. You have to do better.”
Jo stared miserably out the window, flecked now by slanted dots of rain. “I’ll try, Becca.” It was the best she could promise. She had been trying for courtesy all her life and falling short of the mark.
“Thank you.” Becca glanced at her, and her eyes warmed before she returned her attention to the road. Jo understood she was on her way to being forgiven. She realized she didn’t need to consult her files on microexpressions to know the truth about Becca anymore. This was puzzling, as they’d met only eight days ago. Jo didn’t trust herself to interpret the motivations of many people in her life, even after years of acquaintance. Becca’s face seemed familiar to her now, open and expressive and honest.
They chugged up the steep rises of Capitol Hill, but the silence inside the car was more comfortable. Another welcome oddity in Jo’s sparse social life, not having to struggle to fill perfectly good quiet with empty talk. She watched Becca’s fine-boned hands on the wheel, her wrists delicate in spite of the strength in her arms. She imagined Maddie Healy’s hands had been much like her daughter’s.
Becca pulled up in front of the house on Fifteenth Avenue with a squealing of brakes, and the engine harrumphed several times before dying.
“Doesn’t the state pay their social workers enough to buy decent transportation?” Jo hoped Becca would hear the teasing in her voice.
Becca chuckled and tapped the steering wheel. “Well, the state pays me more than the staff makes at my aunt’s shelter. Basically, I’m too cheap to buy a decent car. Or decent sneakers. I love to get out of the city on weekends, so I save all my dinars for trips.”
“Where do you trip?”
“Cannon Beach. Lake Crescent. I seem to run for pretty water whenever I get a chance.” Becca was still tapping the wheel. “I’m stalling. You can tell, right?”
Jo nodded. “It’s hard for you, going back into this house.”
Becca gazed out her window, to the dark cemetery across the street. “It’s going to be hard for me to sleep in this house again. We don’t know how long we’ll have to stay here?”
“There’s no telling, Becca.” Jo was sympathetic but resolute. “If it’s any comfort…I’m not sure why it would be, but if it’s any comfort, you won’t be alone in there. I’ll be with you every minute.” She smiled. “You won’t hurt my feelings if you scream in dismay now and run away again.”
A brief laugh escaped Becca. “Both of us are pretty private people, Dr. Call. If we’re alone together every minute, for days on end, I can imagine we…”
Jo wasn’t sure what Becca was imagining until she started to imagine it, too. Becca’s gaze changed, deepened, as she studied Jo more intently. They stared at each other, and the warm confines of the car seemed suddenly close and confining.
“Pop the trunk,” Jo said. “I’ll get our bags.”
Becca reached beneath the dash and popped the trunk.
“We should plan to sleep in this room, and spend most of our time here.” Jo was tinkering with a silver radio on the coffee table in the living room, so she didn’t see Becca’s look of dismay. “It’s best if we consolidate all of our resources in one area.”
“We’re going to sleep in here?” Becca said faintly. “Not in the bedrooms upstairs? I don’t think I can do that.”
“Why can’t you? We’ll be perfectly comfortable.”
There were a vast number of things Becca felt incapable of at the moment, but she decided to focus on dealing with this one, this thing with Jo. She didn’t want to keep ignoring what was happening between them. She continued her slow circle of the living room. “Listen, maybe we should talk. I don’t want to make you uncomfortable, but it’s my way to be direct about things like this.”
“What is it, Becca?” Jo sat back on her heels, turning a tiny screwdriver to tighten a recessed screw in the radio.
“There’s a funny energy between us.” Becca hoped she wasn’t making a mistake. Khadijah said Becca’s willingness to confront elephants in the room was admirable, but this elephant was Joanne Call. “We’ve had a couple of moments, lately. In the cemetery, and just now, in the car. I think I’m starting to feel some attraction to you, Jo.”
Jo kept working, her long fingers nimble and sure on the machine. “It doesn’t matter.”
“What?”
“Your attraction to me doesn’t matter.” Jo positioned the radio carefully on the tabletop and adjusted its many dials. “It’s nothing we’ll act on.”
“Okay.” Becca felt a flare of embarrassment, which didn’t surprise her, followed by a pang of disappointment, which did. “We won’t act on this attraction because we’re working together? Or because I’m alone in feeling it?”
“Becca, what difference does it make?” Jo switched on a small screen in the box, which cast her austere features in a ghostly amber glow. It was an unfortunate effect that rendered her almost alien. “I don’t sleep with the subjects in my studies. That’s a basic tenet of ethics in any credible research.”
“Joanne, I wasn’t suggesting we ravish each other tonight on the Pendleton rug.” Becca felt her cheeks flush with heat. Even knowing Jo’s limitations, it hurt, putting herself out there honestly and meeting such brusque rejection. “I just don’t believe in ignoring my feelings when they’re this strong. Not when I believe you might share them.” Good Lord, had Patricia spiked her manicotti? What in the world was she doing?
Jo’s back straightened slowly and she pivoted to face her, moving with the feline grace Becca couldn’t stop noticing. “You’re the most transparent person I’ve ever met, Becca, so I’ll respond in kind. I’m not capable of the kind of emotion you’re talking about. I never have been. I don’t do people. I can be your guide in this project, and your ally, even your protector. But I can’t be your friend or your lover. I’ll never be those things.”