The Grand Finale

Chapter Five

It was close to eleven o’clock and Berry’s street was dark. With the exception of the bar on the next block, this was an early-to-bed, early-to-rise neighborhood. Berry summoned her last ounce of strength and dragged herself out of the car. She glanced into the window of the Pizza Place, noticing that it was empty, except for Jake. Thank goodness. She didn’t have the energy to be nice to any more customers. She pushed through the heavy glass door, tossed the money bag onto the counter, and slumped into a chair. “Another day, another dollar.”

Jake gaped at her. “You look awful!”

Berry pointed to her wet ringlets and water-splattered shirt. “Water balloon.” She raised her leg to display torn jeans. “Dog.”

“Does this happen every night?”

“Some nights are worse than others. Where are the ladies?”

“I sent them home in a cab. They looked all done in.” He took her hands and pulled her to her feet. “You look even doner. Let’s go home.”

“I have to clean the ovens, the floor-”

Jake pointed vehemently. “To the car, woman!”

Berry was too tired to argue. She followed Jake to the car and sat beside him, remembering the way he’d said, Let’s go home, as if it really was her home, too. Wouldn’t that be nice, she thought, succumbing to the hypnotic drone of the engine. Imagine if that lovely Victorian house could actually be my home. It’s nice to see Mrs. Giovanni’s geraniums, but Jake’s house has trees and a real lawn. She closed her eyes and imagined what it would be like to be barefoot on that lawn. No responsibilities, no plan to follow… just bare toes and soft grass.

When Berry opened her eyes she was in the garage.

“Come on, sleepyhead,” Jake said. “We’re home.”

Berry looked at him drowsily. There was that word again. When Jake Sawyer said home, it took on spiritual proportions. Home was an ark: a refuge against flood, pestilence, and rude drivers; a haven for the harried; a cure for the sexually deprived.

Berry followed Jake into the kitchen and wondered what it was that made this house so homey. It was empty of furniture. Voices echoed in rooms not yet softened by curtains or carpets. By all standards the old building should have felt inhospitable. But it didn’t-it felt like a home. Berry could practically smell butterscotch pudding cooling on the counter.

Suddenly the ghosts of crushed dreams tugged at her heart. Dreams of towheaded children getting tucked into bed at night, dreams of a husband who nuzzled her neck in the kitchen and told her important things, like I took the car to get a new muffler today. She’d entered into marriage anticipating a family, fantasizing about a big old house that would be filled with noisy love and security taken for granted. What a dope she’d been to look for domestic bliss in a marriage to Allen. It had never really been a marriage at all. It had been a living arrangement. She’d expected so much, and she’d left with so little.

She chewed on her lower lip. No, that wasn’t entirely honest. The dissolution of her marriage wasn’t a totally barren experience. She’d walked out on her emotionally shallow husband with renewed self-esteem and a hard-won sense of purpose. Somehow, an individual had emerged from the muddle of matrimony. She was proud of that.

“Looks like some heavy thinking going on behind those pretty blue eyes,” Jake said.

Berry struggled for something to say. “This house feels like it should be filled with children.”

“I agree. It’s going to be perfect for a pack of kids and a couple floppy-eared dogs.”

Berry stared at him in confusion. He didn’t have kids, and he didn’t have a dog. What was he telling her? Had he bought the house for someone else? An investment? Was he only living here temporarily? Lord, did he have a pregnant girlfriend in Spokane?

Jake leaned against the counter. “I have a plan.”

“What sort of plan?”

“When was the last time you ate?”

Berry blinked at the change in the conversation. “I don’t remember when I ate last.”

“Did you have supper?”

Berry’d had a candy bar for supper. She’d intended to have a sandwich, but somehow she’d never gotten to it. “What’s this got to do with your plan?”

“Nothing. Everything.” Jake opened the refrigerator door. “There’s not much food in here.”

“So, I’m not the only one who forgets to eat.”

“I’ve been eating out. Mostly at my sister’s house. She’s only a few miles from here.” He put a half gallon of milk on the counter and found a box of raisin bran in the overhead cupboard. “I’ve only got breakfast food.” He located a spoon and poured her a bowl of cereal.

Berry aimlessly pushed the raisins around with her spoon. “I’m not sure I have the energy to eat this.”

Without saying a word, Jake poured some milk into the blender. He added an egg and searched through a small box sitting on the counter, finally extracting two bottles. “A little vanilla, a dash of nutmeg,” he told Berry. He whipped the mixture and poured it into a large glass. “Here. You don’t have to chew this.”

“It has a raw egg in it.”

“Eggnog usually does.”

“Hmmm.” Berry cautiously sipped at it and licked a milk mustache off with the tip of her tongue. He had a plan. Swell. Another plan. The world needed one more plan.

Jake took the empty glass and put it in the dishwasher. He slung an arm around Berry and eased her toward the stairs. “Let’s go to bed.”

“Don’t I sleep on the couch?”

“I had beds delivered today. The ladies all have their own rooms.”

“And?”

“And you sleep in my room.” He opened the door to his bedroom and motioned her in with a Sir Walter Raleigh flourish.

“Oh, no,” she groaned, “not tonight, Jake. I’m too tired.”

Jake grinned at her as he turned down the bed linens. “No. Not tonight. When I share a bed with you for the first time I want you wide awake and panting.”

Berry stood blank-faced in front of him, too tired to formulate a retort, her mind focusing on the fact that he’d said when I share a bed with you, not if. Was it that inevitable?

He draped the royal-blue silk pajama top across her shoulders, kissed her on her forehead, and left, closing the door behind him.

Berry surfaced through the drowse of sleep, stretching her legs, then her arms. She was in the biggest, most comfortable bed she’d ever slept in. “Yum,” she sighed, rolling onto her back, feeling the delicious silk pajama top slide over her breasts. This was a lovely way to awaken, she decided. Slowly and luxuriously. If only she didn’t have this peculiar feeling of being watched. The feeling crept along her neck and tingled in her scalp. She cautiously opened one eye.

“Morning.” Jake grinned down at her.

Berry pulled the covers up to her neck. “What are you doing in here?”

“I need some clothes. Want to take a shower?”

Berry looked at him suspiciously. He had a towel slung over his shoulder. “Aren’t you going to take a shower now?”

“Yup. But I’m a good guy. I’d be willing to share it with you.”

“What a pal.”

“I can do wonderful things with soapsuds.”

“I don’t think I want to hear this.”

Jake sat on the edge of the bed and ran his finger along the blue silk collar. “I like the way you feel under this material. Now I know why they make pajamas out of it. It never felt like this when it was on me.”

Berry liked it, too. It was fun to wake up feeling pampered and feminine for a change.

He ran the material between his fingers. “You would feel like this in the shower, when you got all lathered with soap.”

Holy cow. No one had ever said anything like that to her before. Not even her ex-husband. Especially not her ex-husband!

Jake’s desire was obvious in his dark eyes as his finger traced a trail over the small swell of her breast. There was something incredibly carnal about his lazy exploration of her pajama-clad body. She licked her lips in anticipation of his good-morning kiss. When it happened, it said, Good morning, good golly! His hands headed south, and Berry didn’t want him to stop. He went from Montana to Salt Lake City and paused at Phoenix. Berry really needed him to continue on to Mexico.

“Don’t stop,” she whispered.

His hands were warm on her belly, his fingertips resting on the thin elastic band at the top of her bikini panties. “Once I cross the border, there’s no going back.”

Berry exhaled. Crossing the border wouldn’t be good. Pleasurable? Yes. Smart? No. There would be no going back in more ways than one. She groaned and pushed away and straightened her nightshirt.

“I need a moment,” she said. “It’s the first time I’ve ever felt anything like this.”

“You were married for four years. Didn’t you ever make love?”

“It turned out that I gave love, and he took love, but we never made love. We went through the motions on a regular basis, but nothing ever happened for me.” She rolled her eyes. “This is so awkward.”

“I hope I never meet this guy. I don’t think I could keep from flattening his nose.”

“It wasn’t entirely his fault. I was very young. Allen and I both thought marriage could be a panacea for our own problems. Allen was very smart. He had direction to his life. He wanted to be a doctor. There I was floundering through school, changing my major every semester, barely passing half my courses-and Allen walked into my life. He was like the calm in the center of a hurricane. Cool blue eyes, perfectly combed hair, always a crease in his trousers. I think, unconsciously, we each felt incomplete. I needed order and purpose, and he was lacking emotion. I suppose we thought if we joined the two of us together we’d get a complete human being.

“Unfortunately, life doesn’t work that way. Marriage intensified our problems. The longer we were married, the less sure I became of myself, and he grew more withdrawn, less communicative. When it became clear that the marriage was a failure, Allen began looking to other women for comfort.” Berry shrugged. “Maybe cheating was a last-ditch effort for him. Maybe he was trying to convince himself that he wasn’t deficient.”

“Maybe he was a creep.”

Berry hugged her knees and laughed. “That was my original conclusion. Time and personal growth have softened the edges of my animosity.”

Someone obtrusively clumped down the hall, stopping short of Jake’s bedroom door. “Anyone wanting to use the bathroom should do it now,” Mrs. Fitz hissed in a loud whisper. “They should get into the bathroom before Mrs. Dugan gets up!”

Berry was the last to arrive at the breakfast table. She quietly slid onto a packing crate and poured a bowlful of cereal, being careful to avoid looking at Jake. She was practically senseless with embarrassment. She’d gone bonkers listening to him talk about soap. She couldn’t have felt more exposed if she’d come to the breakfast table naked. She’d told him her life story. Lord, she was such a boob. She kept her eyes trained on the cereal without really seeing it. She added milk and stirred.

Pow! A kernel of cereal flew past her ear. Pop, ping, pow. Her cereal was exploding!

A kernel bounced off Mrs. Dugan’s forehead. “I’ve been shot!” Mrs. Dugan cried. “Someone shot me in the forehead.”

Mrs. Fitz dived under the table. “You haven’t been shot, you old dunce. It’s the cereal.”

Jake jumped to his feet and clamped a dinner plate over the almost empty bowl.

“What is this stuff?” Berry asked, her eyes wide.

Jake cautiously removed the plate. The cereal was bloated with milk, making soft snuffling noises. “I don’t understand this. It never did this before. Maybe it was the way you were stirring it.” He took the box of cereal and Berry’s bowl and descended into the basement with them.

Mrs. Dugan shook her head. “This never happened when we lived in the Southside Hotel for Ladies.”

Mrs. Fitz picked cereal out of her hair. “Yeah, that place was boring. Filled with old people.” She shivered at the thought.

Miss Gaspich folded her napkin. “I like it here. I wish he hadn’t taken that cereal away. I wanted to try some.”

Berry stared at the cellar door, wondering what was down there. Dr. Jekyll’s laboratory? Finally her curiosity grew stronger than her embarrassment. She excused herself from the table and cautiously opened the basement door. “Jake?”

“Mmmm.”

“Can I come down? Will anything else explode?”

“Take your chances.”

Berry looked around the cluttered, well-lit room. Kites, model airplanes, wind socks, and bicycle wheels hung from the ceiling. The walls were lined with bottle-laden shelves and crowded bulletin boards. Countertops held robot innards, computer equipment, and sacks of rice, whole wheat, and corn. There were toys everywhere: decapitated dolls, fuzzy bears, motorized skateboards, boxes of puzzles. Jake sat at a massive oak desk, intently staring at a soggy particle of cereal speared on a long skewer. Berry moved behind him. “I feel like I’m visiting Gyro Gearloose.”

“Most of this stuff belongs to my sister’s kids. I’m the toy fixer. The trouble is they break them a lot faster than I can fix them.” He looked around the room. “Some of this is mine. The kites and planes and wind socks are mine.”

Berry looked sidewise at him. “You told me you didn’t have any toys.”

“There are all kinds of toys. These are little toys. I didn’t think we were talking about little toys.”

“So you have exploding cereal and a bunch of little toys. Are there any other surprises I should know about?”

“I almost never have surprises. My life is an open book.”

“Un-hunh.”

“Go ahead, ask me anything,” Jake said.

“Did you give me that exploding cereal on purpose?”

Jake feigned outrage. “Moi?”

Berry sat on a tricycle. “Okay, so go ahead and tell me. What’s this big plan you’ve got?”

Jake leaned forward, resting his elbows on the desk. “We’re going to get married, buy a couple dogs, and have a whole bunch of kids. Maybe a hundred. Although I’m negotiable about the kids. One or two would be enough.”

“I don’t want to get married. Been there, done that.”

“Not ever?” Jake asked.

“Maybe someday, but not for years and years.”

“I don’t want to wait years and years. I’m pretty much ready to get married now. Today or tomorrow would be good.”

The man was insane, Berry thought. Fun… but insane.

“I have work to do. I don’t have all day to stand here and talk about marriage,” she told him. “I have to make pizzas. I have to wash the floor. I have to study for an art history test. And by the way, you’re a nutcase.”

“I’m not a nutcase,” Jake said. “I’ve met a lot of women and I’ve waited a long time for the right one to come along. And you’re the right one.”

“How can you be sure?” Berry asked. “How do you know?”

“How long do we have to discuss this?”

Berry looked at her watch. “Seven minutes.”

“Not nearly long enough,” he said. “You’re going to have to go with the short version. I know, because I just know.”

Mrs. Fitz spooned sauce on the pizza rounds laid out on the paddles, and Berry added green peppers, onions, and crumbled sausage. Six large pizzas, always the same, every day, for the lunch buffet at the Hill Top B &B.

“How did you come to live at the Southside Hotel for Ladies?” Berry asked.

“When my Edward died I couldn’t see living in our big house anymore, so I sold it and bought a racehorse.”

Berry froze in mid-pizza making. “What?”

“His name was King Barnaby Von Big Bucks. Didn’t seem like I could go wrong buying a horse named Von Big Bucks.” Mrs. Fitz sighed. “Just goes to show.”

“Why on earth did you buy a horse?”

“I took one of them senior citizen bus tours of big houses with gardens and such. And this one house was a horse farm and one thing led to another and I ended up selling my house and buying a horse.”

“Must have been some horse.”

“Yeah, he was a beauty.”

“What happened?”

“Turned out he was pretty, but he wasn’t real fast. I think that horse liked coming in last. I owned him with two other people and they wanted to send him to the glue factory, but I just couldn’t do that. So I bought them out with the rest of my house money and gave King Barnaby to some nice young couple that had a lot of land and wanted a horse as a pet.”

“And then you were broke?”

“Well, I didn’t have my nest egg anymore, but I had social security and some money from Edward’s pension. It was enough to pay for my apartment but not enough to buy one of the new condos. And what with the cost of living now, it’s hard to find another apartment I can afford.”

The door to the pizza shop opened and a rangy, scraggly-bearded kid strolled in. Berry assessed him at late teens. He was wearing a lumpy, wrinkled raincoat and a navy knit hat over brown, shoulder-length hair. It was mid-morning and not a lot of people came in for pizza midmorning.

“Can I help you?” Mrs. Fitz asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

His eyes darted around the room, taking in the ovens and the workstation and the three small tables with chairs for walk-in customers.

“We don’t have any pizzas for take-out made up yet,” Mrs. Fitz said. “But we’d be happy to take an order.”

The kid took a semiautomatic out of his raincoat pocket and pointed it at Mrs. Fitz. “How about you just empty your cash register,” he said.

Berry and Mrs. Fitz froze.

“Now!” he said.

Berry carefully moved to the cash register. “We haven’t got much money,” she said to him. “We just opened up.”

“Whatever,” the kid said. “Just hand it over.”

“Honestly,” Mrs. Fitz said to him. “Don’t you have anything better to do than to rob two women? You should be ashamed.”

“And you should be dead,” the kid said. “How old are you, anyway?”

Mrs. Fitz narrowed her eyes and gripped the sauce ladle. “I’m not too old to take care of you. You need to learn some manners.”

Berry had a hundred dollars in twenties and fives in the cash register. She gathered them up and held them out to the kid.

The kid moved to Berry, reached for the money, and Mrs. Fitz whacked him on his head with the sauce spoon. Pizza sauce splattered everywhere, and the kid’s eyes went blank for a moment. Mrs. Fitz gave him another klonk on the head, and he staggered back and dropped the gun.

“Are you okay?” Mrs. Fitz said to him. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

The kid shook his head and looked at his hand. “I’m bleeding. You just about killed me.” And he turned and ran out the door and down the street.

“It was pizza sauce,” Mrs. Fitz said.

Berry dialed the police and reported the attempted robbery.

“They’re sending someone over,” she told Mrs. Fitz. “Lock the door until the police get here and leave the gun on the floor. And don’t tell anyone else about this.” Especially don’t tell Jake, she thought.

It was ten o’clock at night and Berry and Jake sat in the dark, looking out the window of his station wagon.

“I’ll be right back,” Berry said. “This is the last pizza of the night. As soon as I get this sucker delivered we can go home.”

“Sit tight,” Jake said. “I’ll deliver it.”

“Thanks, but I’ve got it.”

“The hell you do. I’m delivering this pizza.”

“It’s my job, my Pizza Place, my pizza.”

Jake looked at the dingy yellow brick apartment building. “It’s late, and that’s a four-story walk-up in a lousy neighborhood. I’m not going to sit here cooling my heels while you’re in some dark hallway quietly getting mugged.”

“I’ve delivered pizzas here before.”

“Good. Now it’s my turn,” he said, grabbing the pizza box. “Lock the doors when I get out.”

Berry grabbed the other side of the box and tugged. “You’ll deliver this pizza when pigs fly.”

Jake gasped and looked out the window. “Look at that!”

Berry strained to see. “What?”

Jake jumped from behind the wheel with the pizza and slammed the door shut behind him. “Flying pigs,” he called to Berry.

Berry narrowed her eyes. “Son of a beet!”

She stomped into the building and climbed the stairs, catching Jake on the third floor.

“I hate being told what to do,” Berry said to Jake. “Nobody can tell me what to do. This is my business. That was my pizza.”

“After we’re married this will be a community property pizza. You might as well get used to it.”

“Read my lips. We’re not getting married.”

“You’ll come around,” Jake said, knocking on an apartment door.

“If I wasn’t so tired from all those stairs, I’d kick you in the knee,” Berry said.

The door opened and an old guy with a lot of tattoos and gray hair tied back into a ponytail looked out at them. “What is this, tag team pizza delivery?”

“She’s crazy about me,” Jake said to the old guy. “Follows me everywhere. That’ll be ten bucks for the pizza.”

The guy handed the money to Jake. “I should have problems like that,” the guy said.

“It’s not as good as it looks,” Jake told him. “She snoops in men’s windows and once she smashed my pizza.”

“She don’t look violent,” the guy said.

“Looks can be deceiving.”

Berry turned on her heel and stomped down the stairs. She was all the way to the foyer before Jake caught up with her.

“That was embarrassing,” Berry said to Jake.

“Yeah, but he gave me a nice pity tip,” Jake said. “We might have something here.” Jake opened the downstairs door and stared at the empty street. “Where’s the car?”

It was almost one o’clock in the morning when Jake and Berry trudged through the front door of his house. They silently made their way to the kitchen and began fixing a midnight snack of gigantic proportions. They carried the contents of the refrigerator to the round oak table and in the silvery light of moonbeams scoffed down pickles, sandwiches, ice cream, potato salad, and a pint of strawberries.

Jake pushed back from the table while Berry picked at the last strawberry.

“It’s okay,” Jake said. “I’ll rent a new car in the morning. The police were pretty reasonable, considering that’s the second car we’ve had stolen in less than a week.”

“In less than a week I’ve squashed a Jeep, I’ve had two cars stolen, and my apartment’s been charbroiled.” And I’ve almost been robbed at gunpoint, she silently added. “Do you think someone’s trying to tell me something?”

Jake shrugged. “That’s just the negative side. What about the plus side?”

“What have I got on the plus side?”

“Our friendship.”

Berry’s heart got happy. Jake Sawyer thought their friendship was important. Imagine that. He liked her! He really liked her. She thought about their earlier conversation in the basement and his cavalier assumption that they’d get married. Was he serious? She rolled her eyes. Of course not! You don’t just come out and announce to a woman that you’re going to marry her and have a hundred kids and community property pizza. Besides, he’d had plenty of time to continue the conversation in the car on the way back to his house, but he’d never raised the subject. A wave of disappointment washed over her. Oh, great, she thought with a grimace. Disappointment. I’m in big trouble here. My emotional clock is not in tune with my plan.

She would have to be strong. She would refuse to fall in love-and if she already was in love she would refuse to admit it. What she needed was some good old-fashioned hostility. A mean streak to cover up all those cozy feelings.

Jake took her hand in his and tenderly kissed the inside of her wrist.

Berry snatched her hand away. “Don’t kiss my wrist.”

“Okay. What would you like me to kiss?”

“I don’t want you to kiss anything.”

“What a load of baloney.” He took her hand back and kissed the soft center of her palm. “How about if I kiss your-”

“Don’t you dare!”

He sucked on the tip of her index finger. “Can I kiss it in the shower?”

“We’re not taking a shower. Stop that!” She swallowed hard when he resumed the sucking, this time touching his tongue to the tip of her finger. She bopped him on the side of the head with a bag of bread. “I said stop that.”

“Playing hard to get, huh?”

“I’m not playing anything.” Berry stood at the table. “You’re going to have to go home.”

“I am home.”

“Oh, yeah. I forgot.” She carted the pickle jars and packages of lunchmeat to the refrigerator, feeling like the village idiot. She wasn’t good at this sort of thing. She was too inexperienced, too overwhelmed by his sexuality, too easily flustered by her own attraction to him.

Upstairs a door creaked open, and one of the ladies padded down the carpeted hall to the bathroom.

Jake put the last of the dishes in the dishwasher. “I’ll bet you a dollar it’s Mrs. Dugan. I can tell by that authoritarian thump, thump, thump of her slippers.”

“Mrs. Dugan’s keeping her eye on you.”

“I know. She has her radar tuned to the sound of lips meeting.” He pulled Berry into the circle of his arms. “I think we should put it to a test. Let’s see how fast we can get Mrs. Dugan out of the bathroom.”

She really shouldn’t be kissing him, she thought, but this was sort of a scientific experiment. Who was she to stand in the way of science?

“This is the first of the good-night kisses,” Jake told her. His warm lips brushed hers, and his hands splayed across her lower back, pressing her gently into him. When he spoke, his voice whispered into her mouth. “There are all kinds of good-night kisses. There are good-night kisses when you’re done making love and you know it’s been a very special night.” He kissed the sensitive spot just below her ear and moved his hand to her breast. “And there are good-night kisses that are the prelude to making love. Kisses that are hungry and impatient.” His hand tightened slightly.

The bathroom door opened and feet traversed the upstairs hallway, stopping at the head of the stairs. “Somebody down there?”

“It’s just us, Mrs. Dugan,” Jake answered. “We were having a bite to eat before coming to bed.”

“It’s late. It’s time nice young ladies were in bed.”

“I’m trying,” Jake sighed.

“Alone!”

“Why couldn’t you adopt a bunch of old ladies who were hard of hearing?” Jake asked Berry.

Berry smiled in spite of herself. “And then there are good-night kisses that simply say, Good night.”