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“Completely?”
Slipping down farther into the water, she concentrated on keeping her phone dry. “Yes.”
“Too bad.”
Yeah, well, a girl had to do what it took to save herself from mental and emotional breakdown.
“I meant what I said.” His voice had dropped down to a very quiet but powerful tenor. “Tomorrow night is a real date.”
But he’d only asked because of Darin and Maddie.
“Okay,” she said, and left the phone beside the tub after they hung up, pretending he was still there as she let the hot water touch her body and fantasized about what he looked like naked.
* * *
GRANT HEARD DARIN moving about just before he crawled into bed Friday night and, pulling on a pair of boxers, walked in to find his brother at the computer, playing a game of solitaire.
It was an exercise his occupational therapist had recommended years ago. One that Darin struggled to complete with any accuracy.
“I haven’t seen you play that in a while.” Was this what Darin did at night? Kept trying to succeed where he’d failed? Grant had thought his brother had given up on ever getting solitaire right.
“I was wrong to quit,” Darin said now. “Quitters never get anywhere.” He sounded like himself at fourteen, going out for the high school baseball team.
And again Grant was struck by the sudden changes in Darin. If having a girlfriend was going to have this kind of effect on Darin, then Grant had to do what he could to encourage the situation.
At the same time, he had to maintain enough control that no one got hurt. Because while Maddie and Darin could experience adult emotions, they were unable to discern between what was doable and not, what was good for them and not. They were both unable to see pitfalls that a normal adult would get from the start.
“I’ve got some good news,” Grant said, watching as Darin moved an ace up to the plateau to place it on a two of the same suit, rather than moving it up to the home four and adding the two on top of it.
At least he was putting the right denominations on the right suit.
“What good news?” Darin asked, trying to put a king up where the aces were supposed to stack.
“If Maddie says yes to a date, we can go.”
His brother turned around so swiftly he knocked his mouse to the floor. His mouth hanging wide-open, he stared at Grant.
And Grant wondered, for one horrible, shameful second, how any woman would want to go out with a grown man who didn’t always swallow his spit.
Then he thought of Maddie. Who also drooled on occasion when she was talking or eating.
And he remembered sitting at his mother’s grave site after all the cars had pulled away, remembered Darin coming to find him and sitting with him there. Just sitting. Until Grant had been able to get up and leave his mother so irrevocably behind.
“Grant?”
He blinked.
“I said she said yes.”
He tuned Darin out sometimes. Especially when his brother was jabbering like a little kid. But he wouldn’t have missed a phone call.
“How do you know?”
“I already asked her.”
“When?”
“Today. When you were loading up the truck after I didn’t get to see her after therapy. We don’t know when we’ll get to walk together again since you want to watch my therapy and she’s busy at the day care and Lynn needs her, so I said we should go on a date because then we could spend the whole time together on purpose.”
Grant grinned. His brother had taken control of the situation. “Well, call her back and tell her it’s tomorrow night,” he said. He felt like whooping right along with his brother.
Instead, he left the room, shutting the door firmly behind him when Darin picked up his phone.
* * *
“HI, MISTER, WHATCHA DOIN’?”
Grant looked up from the narrow trench where he’d been busy burying an electrical line and was greeted by a pudgy little face topped by reddish-brown curls. Kara’s big blue eyes glinted with curiosity.
“Putting lights in your yard so you can see out here, even at night.”
In jeans, a T-shirt and tennis shoes, Kara was obviously dressed for her flight later that morning.
“Mama said you was stalling. She said I bettaw not get in the way.”
