“Whoa, there.” Grady stood and took her elbow.
“Sorry. Just a little unsteady. Sorry. I’m not used to this much champagne.”
“I’ll walk you out to your car.” He was still holding on to her arm.
“Actually, I walked to work this morning, so I’ll be walking home.” She leaned on the back of the chair to steady herself.
“Are you sure you’re all right?”
“Hey, you try standing in these four-inch heels for…” She checked the wall clock. It was nine-thirty “… thirteen and a half hours.”
He looked at her feet. “I don’t think they’d fit.”
She peered down at his. “Well, the straps are adjustable.”
“Yeah, but I don’t know how that plum color would look with my white athletic socks.”
“Oh, dear God, don’t put pictures like that in my head,” she groaned, and Grady laughed.
“Come on,” he said, “I’ll drive you home.”
“I need to say good night to everyone first.”
“Let’s do that.”
They made the rounds-hugs and kisses and see-you-in-the-mornings-then made their way out to Grady’s rental car.
“You just go to the stop sign and take a left at the first street,” she told him as he opened the passenger-side door for her.
“I remember.” He slammed the door and walked around to the driver’s side and got in. “Your house is almost to the end of the third block. Lots of pink and purple tulips in the front yard.”
“Right.” She smiled to herself, pleased that he’d remembered, that he’d opened the car door for her, that he’d offered her a ride home. “Thanks for the ride, Grady.”
“I couldn’t have you walking three blocks after”-he checked the clock on the dashboard-“fourteen hours in those shoes.”
She was still smiling when he pulled into her driveway.
“So what do you think of our little town?” she asked.
“I like what I’ve seen of it, land and sea. I noticed a lot of old buildings-like, late 1700s, early 1800s-around the square. But I’m not going to ask about them now. I’m saving all that for my tour on Sunday.”
“I wouldn’t think of spoiling it for you.” She unbuckled her seat belt. “But I will tell you, that’s the oldest part of town. Hal lives up in that area, right off the square. His great-grandfather built the house he lives in.”
“He’s one really interesting guy. While we were out on the boat the other day, he was telling me about how when he was younger, he played with a minor-league baseball team. He might have had a shot at the majors if he hadn’t been sent to Nam.”
Vanessa nodded. “All true. He has a scrapbook with all these press clippings in it. Pictures of him when he was a young man. He was quite the good-looking fellow in those days.”
“I guess that’s around the time when your mother met him.”
She stared at him for a long moment. Before she could respond, he said, “Sorry. Wrong thing to have said, apparently, judging from your reaction. I apologize.”
“It’s not that. I just wouldn’t have expected him to bring her up. And yes, that’s when my mother met Hal, when he was a dashing, soon-to-be-professional ballplayer.”
“He talked about her when we were out on the boat today.”
“He did?” Vanessa was wide-eyed. “He never talks about her to me or to Beck. What did he say?”
“Just pretty much what he said last night, that he’d always thought he’d have a family, but it didn’t work out for him the way he thought it would. That having Beck in his life, even if he hadn’t had him as a little boy, and having you, even as late as you came to him, made it all right, in the end.”
“He said that?”
Grady nodded. “He’s really proud of both of you.”
She stared out the window. “I don’t know what I’d be doing, or where I’d be, if not for Hal. It’s really hard to explain what he means to me.”
“The father you never had. I get it.”
She shook her head. “That isn’t the half of it. I mean, yeah, it’s true that he filled that role, since I never had a father, but it isn’t the whole of it. Before I came here, no one had ever had any expectations of me, including me. I never figured to amount to very much.”
“Why would you feel that way?”
“I was the girl in high school who wore too much makeup and who dated guys who were way too old for me. The girl with the flighty mother who moved around a lot. I never asked much of myself because I didn’t know I could-or should. No one ever had. Hal was the first person in my life to believe in me, to make me understand that I could be more than what I was, but that I had to demand more from myself.” She shrugged. “I was late catching on.”
“Hey, that’s a lesson that some people never learn.”
“You know, if he and Beck had just been friendly and cordial to me when I first came here, I’d have gone back to where I came from, or gone somewhere else and had the same kind of life I had before, because I didn’t know any better. But they took me in, right away, made me family, never asked a damn thing of me, gave me a place, but even more than that, they made room for me in their lives. And because of them, now I do know better. And I will never go back and I will never settle for less.”
She cleared her throat, surprised that she’d said so much, revealed so much. “Too much information, right?”
“Not by a long shot.” He shook his head. “Not enough.”
“Well, maybe enough for tonight. Right now I have several dozen unglazed cookies waiting for me and I have an early day tomorrow. I appreciate the ride home.”
“It was my pleasure. But I could help out with those cookies, you know.”
“Thanks, but I can handle it.”
“If you’re sure…”
“I am.” She unbuckled her seat belt and opened the car door and stepped out onto the drive. She turned to say, “See you tomorrow,” when she realized he’d gotten out of the car, too.
“I’ll walk you to your door,” he told her.
She smiled to herself. Does the cowboy think he’s about to get lucky?
He took her arm, but when the space between her fence and the car narrowed, his hand slid down her arm to her hand, and they walked single file to the sidewalk. He began to say something, when Vanessa stopped cold in her tracks.
“Oh my God. What the hell…?” She stood openmouthed at the foot of the path leading to her front door.
He followed her gaze to the ground, where here and there, tulips lay scattered, bent and broken.
She could barely believe her eyes. “It looks like a tornado went through here.”
“How do you suppose this happened?”
“I don’t know. Cujo, maybe.”
“Cujo?”
“The Kleins’ dog. They live behind me and over a couple of properties. They have this dog that gets out every chance he gets. He always runs through my yard on the way to the park.”
Grady squatted and picked up a broken stem. “How much does this dog weigh?”
“Probably forty or fifty pounds. Why?”
“Because whatever flattened this flower had some heft behind it. I’m guessing more than forty or fifty pounds’ worth.” He picked one up and held it for her to see. “Any kids in the neighborhood who might be prone to a little vandalism now and then?”
“The Carr boys from around the corner get into trouble once in a while.” Vanessa began to pick up the flowers that lay on the ground, gathering the ones with stems intact into a bouquet.
“What kind of trouble?”
“Eggs behind the car tires and toilet paper in the trees on mischief night. That sort of thing. Nothing serious. But I wouldn’t want to accuse them. I’ve never had a problem with any of them myself.” She held the flowers in one hand. “If you knew how long it took me to plant these bulbs… damn. I was so proud of my little garden.”
“Why don’t we just clean this up right now,” he suggested.
“There isn’t enough light out here,” she said. “I think it’s going to have to wait until the morning.”
“You sure?”