LITMIR.BIZ

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      Chapter 4

      “Don’t want to dance,” Molly insisted as Nicole shepherded both her daughters from the preschool and into the SUV. The rain had stopped in the night and an October sun peered through high, thin clouds.

      “Why not?”

      “Don’t like it.” Molly climbed into her car seat and started hooking the straps together while Mindy waited for her mother to snap her into place.

      “Next year you can play soccer and we’ve got swim lessons in the spring. Until then, I think we’ll stick with dance. I already paid for the lessons and they won’t hurt you.”

      “I like to dance,” Mindy said, casting her more outspoken sibling a look of pure piety. “I like Miss Palmer.”

      “I hate Miss Palmer.” Molly crossed her chubby arms over her chest and glowered at the back of the passenger seat as Nicole slid behind the steering wheel.

      “It’s not nice to hate.” Mindy lifted her eyebrows imperiously and glanced knowingly at her mother. The angel, making sure Nicole knew that Molly was being the embodiment of evil.

      “Hate’s a pretty strong word,” Nicole said and started the SUV. The engine fired on the first try. “Atta girl,” she added and Mindy nodded, thinking her mother was praising her. Dark curls bounced around her head as she sent her twin a holier-than-thou look of supreme patience.

      “Quit that! Mommy, she’s looking at me.”

      “It’s okay.”

      “I want ice cream,” Molly insisted.

      “Right after dance.”

      “I hate dance.”

      “I know, I know, we’ve been over this before,” Nicole said adjusting the heat and defrost. Sun or no sun, the air was still cold. She drove over a small bridge and past a strip mall to the older side of town where an old brick grade school had been converted into artists’ quarters. She parked, took the girls inside, and rather than stay and watch them go through their routine, she drove to the service station where the mechanic looked under the hood of the SUV, lifted his grimy hat and scratched his head.

      “Beats me,” he admitted, shifting a toothpick from one side of his mouth to the other. An elderly man with a barrel body and silver beard stubble, he frowned and wiped the oil from his hands. “Seems to be working just fine. Why don’t you bring it in next week and leave it—can you? We’ll run diagnostics on it.”

      She made an appointment, mentally crossed her fingers, rounded up the girls and managed to stop at the grocery store and ice-cream parlor before they had a total meltdown.

      “Why doesn’t Daddy live with us?” Mindy asked as they pulled into the driveway of their house.

      Nicole parked and pocketed her keys. “Because Mommy and Daddy are divorced, you know that. Come on, let’s get out of the car.”

      “And Daddy lives far away,” Molly said, drips of bubble-gum ice cream falling from her chin.

      “He don’t come and see us. Bobbi Martin’s daddy comes and visits her.”

      “Would you like for your father to visit?” Nicole had opened the back door and was unsnapping the straps to Mindy’s car seat.

      “Yeth.”

      “Nope.” Molly shook her head. “He don’t like us.”

      “Oh, Molly—” Nicole was about to argue and then saw no reason to defend Paul. He’d had no interest in the twins since the divorce. Sending Nicole child support payments seemed to fulfill all his requirements as a father; at least in his opinion. “You just don’t know your father.”

      “Is he going to come see us?” Mindy asked, her eyes bright, her ice-cream cone forgotten. The single scoop of cookies-’n’-cream was melting into her fingers.

      “I don’t know. He doesn’t have any plans to, not yet. But, if you like, I could call him.”

      “Call him!” Mindy swiped at the top of her cone with her tongue.

      “He won’t come.” Molly didn’t seem upset about it; she was just stating a fact. “You can have the rest,” she said, handing her mother the cone and bolting from the rig. She tore off across the wet grass to the swing set.

      “Can’t you undo this yourself?” Nicole asked lifting the safety bar of the car seat.

      “You do it.” Mindy smiled impishly, then, still clutching her cone, slid out of the car.

      You’re spoiling her, Nicole told herself as she juggled the grocery sacks and carried them into the house. You’re spoiling them both, trying to be father and mother, feeling sorry for them because, they, like you, are growing up without their father.

      Was it her fault? She had a lot of reasons for moving away from San Francisco, for wanting to start over. But maybe in so doing, she was robbing her daughters of a vital part of their lives, of the chance to know the man who’d sired them.

      Not that he’d shown any interest when they still lived in the city. He’d never seen the girls for more than a couple of hours at a time and his new wife had been pretty clear that she saw his twins as “baggage” she didn’t want or need.

      So Nicole wasn’t going to beat herself up about it. The twins were doing fine. Just fine.

      Patches, who had been washing his face on the windowsill, hopped lithely to the floor. “Naughty boy,” Nicole whispered, but added some dry food to his dish, unpacked the groceries and watched her girls through the back window. They were playing on the teeter-totter, laughing in the crisp air as clouds began to gather again. Nicole pressed the play button on the answering machine.

      The first voice she heard was Thorne McCafferty’s.

      “Hi. It’s Thorne. Call me.” He rattled off his phone number and Nicole’s stomach did a flip at the sound of it. Why he got to her after all these years she didn’t understand, but he did. There was no doubt about it. She knew that he’d been her first love, but it had been years, years since then. So why did he still affect her? She glanced to the windowsill where she’d placed the bud vase with its single white rose—a peace offering, nothing more.

      Sighing, she wished she understood why she couldn’t shake Thorne from her thoughts. She wasn’t a lonely woman. She wasn’t a needy woman. She didn’t want a man in her life—at least not yet. So why was it that every time she heard his voice those old memories that she’d tucked away escaped to run and play havoc through her mind?

      “Because you’re an idiot,” she said and finished unloading the car. She remembered seeing him for the first time, the summer before her senior year in high school. He’d been alone, dusk was settling, the sky still glowing pink over the western hills, the first stars beginning to sparkle in the night. The heat of the day hung heavy in the air with only a breath of a breeze to lift her hair or brush her cheeks. She was sitting on a blanket, alone, her best friend having ditched her at the last minute to be with her boyfriend and suddenly Thorne had appeared, tall, strapping, wearing a T-shirt that stretched over his shoulders and faded jeans that hung low on his hips.

      “Is this spot taken?” he’d asked and she hadn’t responded, thinking he had to be talking to someone else.

      “Excuse me,” he’d said again and she’d twisted her face up to stare into intense gray eyes that took hold of her and wouldn’t let go. “Would it be all right if I sat here?”

      She couldn’t believe her ears. There were dozens of blankets tossed upon the bent grass of the hillside, hundreds of people gathered and picnicking as they waited for the show. And he wanted to sit here? Next to her? “Oh, well…sure,” she’d managed to reply, feeling like an utter fool, her face burning with embarrassment.

      He’d taken a spot next to her on her blanket,

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