"Hi," Elizabeth said sickly.
"I saw you at the festival last night. Did you enjoy it?" Her eyes were snapping back and forth between the two of them.
"I had a great time," Thad replied, since the question had obviously been directed toward him.
"How nice. They can be such fun." No one said anything for several seconds. "Well, see you."
"See you." Elizabeth knew that it would circulate through the membership of the PTA that she was more than a casual acquaintance with her date to the Fall Festival. They had been seen shopping together on a Sunday afternoon. That implied… Well, one's imagination could run rampant.
She waited for the woman to move out of earshot, then took the chips and beer out of her cart and shoved them back at Thad. "I just remembered something else I need to get. Thanks for the offer to carry in my groceries, but you'd better get home. I'm sure halftime is over by now. Bye."
She was off before he had time to argue. Since the room mother had headed for the dairy case, Elizabeth picked the produce section on the opposite side of the store. She'd browse there until Thad had had sufficient time to leave.
"What gives?"
Elizabeth dropped the orange she'd been squeezing and spun around. Thad was standing only inches from her, a grocery bag propped on his hip. It was the first time she'd ever seen him in an angry mood. His brows were lowered into a near scowl.
"I don't know what you mean."
"Why'd you give me the classic brush-off?"
"I didn't."
"Didn't you?"
"No. I–I remembered that I promised the kids a pumpkin to carve a jack-o'-lantern out of." He glanced down at the orange bin, trapping her in her he. "I just hadn't gotten around to them yet," she said defensively.
She deserted the oranges and pushed her basket toward the display of colorful pumpkins. Halloween was still a couple of weeks away. Any jack-o'lantern carved out now would be furry with mold and wrinkled with old age by then, but she had to give her lie validity.
Every pumpkin in the pyramid-shaped display received her careful scrutiny. Thad was subjecting her to just as careful a scrutiny. She was glad she was wearing the old pink knit sweat suit. Dressed this unglamorously, she hardly looked like a widow trying to entice her bachelor neighbor.
He was dressed just as casually as she, but still managed to look attractive in a rumpled, comfy, Sunday-afternoon way. He was wearing jeans that were almost bleached white, run-down deck shoes without socks, and a sweatshirt so old that the university seal on the front had bleached to indecipherability.
He looked like he'd just gotten out of bed and pulled on the first available clothing at hand. Why that should be such a sexy thought, Elizabeth couldn't imagine. Except that she could see it happening… with her lying in bed watching as he stepped into the snug jeans and zipped them.
She didn't want to notice anything about him. Not the way he was dressed, or the way he smelled, or the way his hair was endearingly uncombed. Unreasonable as it was, she was miffed at him for not making a pass at her last night. He'd had several golden opportunities, but had capitalized on none of them. Of course, she would have turned him down flat, but he could have tried. Was she that undesirable? That unappealing?
She'd awakened that morning to the nameless-lover fantasy again. Only this time, the lover's features had been disturbingly similar to the man who was now studying her with remarkable blue eyes as though trying to figure her out.
"Picked one yet?" he asked.
"Which one do you like best?"
"I like the chubby ones."
"So do I. What do you think of that one?" She pointed at a fat pumpkin.
"Looks good."
"I'll send the bag boy over for it then."
"I'll carry it."
"Really, Thad, don't bother. You're missing your ball game."
He looked hard at her for a moment before relenting. "Okay. Maybe later tonight I can come over and help you carve it our."
"I can manage, but thanks."
"These things can be tricky. One slip of the butcher knife—"
"I'm perfectly capable of carving a Halloween jack-o'-lantern for my children."
Her tone was just plain bitchy. His scowl told her he didn't like it a bit. She had guessed he wouldn't back down from a fight and she was right. He set his grocery bag on the bin of Golden Delicious apples and leaned forward, purring his face to within inches of hers.
"All right, forget the carving, forget the pumpkin, forget the groceries. Let's talk about something else. What bee got up your butt since last night?"
Her jaw went slack and she took a step backward. His deliberate vulgarity shocked her. "I don't know what you mean," she said, lying.
"The hell you don't. What happened between last night and this afternoon to make me persona non grata?"
"Nothing."
"That's what I thought. So why aren't we friends anymore? Was it that broad we just ran into? Did you let her curiosity get to you? Are you afraid of the gossip that'll circulate if we're seen together?" He ran a hand through his sexily mussed hair. "Look, Elizabeth, they're going to talk about you simply because you're a young widow with a pretty face and a great body. They'll gossip about us whether we ever go to bed together or not."
"Which we won't!"
His eyes narrowed. With one vicious swipe of his arm, he picked up his sack of groceries. Golden Delicious apples went tumbling over the edge of the bin to the floor. "You've got that right. Chameleons are just lizards as far as I'm concerned. They give me the creeps."
"He's gonna get all mushy by Halloween."
"Then we'll carve another one," Elizabeth told her dubious children.
"Why did you put him in the back window Mom?"
"Don't you think he looks good there?"
"Yeah, but nobody can see him but us."
Us and the neighbor who lives behind us, Elizabeth was thinking. That's why she'd put the largest candle possible in the pumpkin shell before placing the sneering jack-o'-lantern in the kitchen window. The fact that the neighbor's house was dark and his Jeep wasn't parked in the driveway took a little gilt off her triumph. That and the fact that one of the jack-o'-lantern's eyeballs had been cut out when the butcher knife slipped. She'd had to secure it back in place with toothpicks, but that wouldn't be noticeable from Thad's screened porch.
"He's for our enjoyment," she said with a bright, brittle parody of a smile. "When he gets yucky, I'll buy another pumpkin and we'll carve him too. Now, help me clean up this mess.
"Can we toast the seeds?"
"Not tonight. It's bedtime."
It was an hour later before bedtime became official and the children were tucked in, prayers said, last drinks of water gotten, final trips to the john taken. Thad, she was dismayed to hear, had been added to each child's list of God blesses along with her, Daddy in heaven, Aunt Lilah, and Grandma and Grandpa from each side of the family. Depending on their behavior any given day, Mrs Alder's inclusion was optional. She wondered if Thad would become a permanent fixture on those lists.
His Jeep still wasn't in his driveway when she blew out the candle in the jack-o'-lantern and went upstairs to bed. She read for a while, trying to get sleepy, but she couldn't concentrate on the tedious plot of her library novel.
How dare he talk to her like that? "What bee got up your butt since last night?" What was she supposed to have done when he walked into the grocery store? Act all aflutter? Lower her eyelashes demurely and humbly thank him for accompanying her and her children to the Fall Festival?
And he had called her a chameleon! One second he'd been mild-mannered Clark Kent and the next he'd been a vulgar-talking heel with a wounded ego. She would be better off to nip this blooming friendship in the bud. He was too volatile. Actually she knew very little about him. Now she didn't want to. Things should have stayed the way they had been before the day Baby got trapped in the tree. Mr Thad Randolph had been a distant neighbor, somewhat of a mystery man. She wished he had remained so.