The Rocky Road to Romance

Chapter 4

Daisy pulled into the ShulsterBuilding underground garage and was relieved to find the newscar still in its parking space. Steve had left in a huff last night. Actually, she’d sort of kicked him out. He’d insisted she didn’t have a job, and she’d threatened a lawsuit. She was sure she’d been discriminated against, but she wasn’t sure exactly how. This morning she’d woken filled with resolve to do the traffic report. She figured she was on the winning side. If Steve knew anyone else who could do the traffic report, he would never have given the job to her in the first place.

Her optimism vanished when she saw him lounging against his Explorer four cars down. He had his arms loosely crossed over his chest, his mouth was firm and unsmiling, his eyes were dark and brooding. If she’d run across him looking like this three days ago, she’d have panicked. Today she stiffened her spine, tipped her nose up a fraction of an inch, and told herself he was a man like any other man. She knew it wasn’t completely true. But for her purposes this morning she preferred to delude herself into thinking he was average and manageable.

She parked her car and left it unlocked. The locks were rusted out, and besides, as far as she was concerned, if anyone was dumb enough to steal her wreck, then he deserved to have to drive it. She walked over to Steve and stood toe to toe with him.

“Well?” she said.

“If I wasn’t so damned frustrated, I’d probably admire your nerve.”

“I’ll be fine.”

“I hate to hear you say that! What am I supposed to do with all my macho protective instincts? Why are you making my life so difficult?”

“Gosh, I never thought of it in those terms.”

“Well, think about it.” He pulled her to him and kissed her. The kiss deepened, his hands slid the length of her spine and crushed her to him.

The kiss was disturbed by the pager on his belt. He pushed her away and swore softly. “I have a meeting.”

“I promise to be careful.”

“Good. As an added precaution I’m hiring a guard to ride with you.”

“What?”

“The agency is sending three people. You can interview them and take your pick. They’re to meet you at the park in two hours so arrange your route accordingly.” Before she could answer he turned and strode away.

“I don’t want a guard!” she shouted, but he was gone.

At one o’clock he called on the car phone.

“How’s everything going?”

“Couldn’t be better.”

“Do you have a guard with you?”

“Yup.”

“Good. I’ll meet both of you at the garage tonight. I want to make the terms of the job clear to him.”

Daisy gave her last report at three-fifty-five, and the newscar reached the garage ten minutes later. Steve was waiting for her. Daisy got out and waved to him, and an old lady followed her. The old lady had steel gray hair curled neat and tight against her skull. She was shorter than Daisy and as slim, but not so curvy. She wore clean white tennis shoes and carried a big patent-leather purse with a gold snap top. There wasn’t anyone else in the newscar.

“What happened to the guard?” Steve asked.

“I didn’t feel comfortable with any of them,” Daisy told him. “So I got my own guard. I hope that’s okay.”

The old lady held out her hand. “Elsie Hawkins. Rough and Ready Security Guard Service.”

Steve felt his mouth drop open. He shifted his weight and looked at both women, trying to determine if this was a joke. “I’ve never heard of Rough and Ready Security Guard Service.”

“It was one of them mail-order courses,” Elsie said. “But it’s legit. I got a certificate and everything. I did it while I was on the mend in the nursing home.”

“You’re not serious.”

“Damn serious,” Elsie said.

“You graduated from guard school while you were in a nursing home?”

“Yup. I broke my hip skiing in Vermont, and they had to put one of them steel contraptions in, so I took this correspondence course to keep from going nuts in rehab.”

She lifted her right leg. “See? It’s almost as good as new. Except of course I have to be careful about going out in an electrical storm with all these metal parts.”

Steve searched for words but couldn’t find any.

“That’s a joke,” Elsie said. She shook her head at Daisy. “He’s a looker, but he’s not too bright.”

“Excuse us,” Steve said to Elsie, pulling Daisy by the arm. “I’d like to talk to Miss Adams in private a moment.”

He walked Daisy five cars down and backed her against a van. “What’s going on? What’s with the squirrelly old lady?”

“She’s not squirrelly. She’s perfectly capable. And she really did graduate from the Rough and Ready Security Guard School. I saw her certificate. We had a nice ceremony for her at the rehabilitation center.”

Steve pulled Daisy back to Elsie Hawkins. “I’m sorry, Miss Hawkins, but I don’t think this is going to work. Miss Adams’s life is in danger, and I need a real guard.”

“Stop the presses,” Daisy said. “Elsie is a real guard, and she’s the one I chose.” She thumped herself on the chest. “I’m the one who has to spend all day with this guard person.” Another thump. “I’m the one who should be concerned about her qualifications.” She tossed her hair over her shoulder with a snap of her head. “I’m the one who is ultimately responsible for my personal safety. So I should have the last word in picking out my guard. And another thing. It would be hypocritical of me to discriminate against the elderly.”

“I’m the one paying the bill. And I’m the one losing sleep over it,” Steve said.

Elsie made a disgusted sound with her tongue. “Well, make up your minds if you want me. This isn’t the only security-guard job in town, you know. And I got better things to do than to stand here and watch you two argue. I gotta be home by six to see a TV show about blood pressure.”

Steve smacked his forehead with the heel of his hand. “I don’t believe this. This is insane.” He looked at Daisy. “What is this woman going to do if someone threatens you?”

Elsie pulled a.45 magnum long-barrel out of her pocketbook and leveled it at Steve’s zipper. “I’d shoot him in the privates. Some people aim for the heart, some people like to gut-shoot a man, but I always aim for the privates. Word gets around when you shoot off a man’s privates. People get to be real careful of you. Yessir, I could blow a hole in you the size of a potato with this baby.”

“Holy cow!” Steve pushed Daisy behind a car. “Where’d you get that bazooka? And what are you doing carrying it around in your pocketbook?”

Elsie put the gun back in her purse and closed it with a firm snap. “Got it at a yard sale in the District,” Elsie said. “A woman’s got to protect herself. I’m an old lady, you know. It isn’t like I could give some pervert a karate chop.”

“It isn’t loaded, is it?”

“Of course it’s loaded, but you don’t have to worry. I know what I’m doing. You sure are a jumpy one,” she said to Steve.

“You have a license to carry a concealed weapon?”

“People keep asking me that. One of these days I’m going to have to look into it,” Elsie said.

Steve loosened his tie and popped the top button on his shirt. “I need a drink. Something cold that’s going to make me numb.”

“Drinking rots your liver,” Elsie told him. “And an ounce of alcohol kills a thousand brain cells.”

Steve thought it was pretty clear Elsie didn’t think he could afford to lose that many brain cells.

“I gotta roll,” Elsie said. “I’ll be back tomorrow.” She climbed into a blue-and-white vintage Cadillac and rumbled away with a V-8 engine and dual exhaust system that sounded like distant thunder.

“I’ll follow you home,” Steve said to Daisy. “How about discussing this over dinner.”

“Sounds great, but I have to work at the nursing home tonight.” She looked at her watch. “I better get going, or I’ll be late.”

“How about after work?A late dinner?”

She chewed on her lower lip. It was tempting, but she was behind on her dissertation schedule. “Can’t. I have a ton of reading to do for school.”

His life wasn’t going well, Steve decided. Everything used to be so smooth. Women never said no, old ladies used to think he was bright, people he employed followed instructions. At least he had a dog. The thought lifted his spirits. He’d go home, take Bob out for a burger, and then they’d go run a couple fast miles together. Afterward they could watch television and maybe put a frozen pie in the oven for dessert. Pretty damn domestic, he thought to himself. He’d turned into a regular family man. An SUV, a dog, and a frozen pie.

Life didn’t get much better than that. Not tonight anyway.

When Steve got home there were seven notes tacked to his condo door about Bob’s howling and an eviction notice from the superintendent stating he’d violated the no-pet rule of the condo building. When Steve opened the door, Bob rushed out to the elevator. Steve pushed the emergency express button, but they only made it to the second floor before Bob humiliated himself. They continued on down to the basement parking garage, where they quickly exited the elevator. Steve pushed the elevator button for the penthouse, then he and Bob went out in search of a Realtor.

“Don’t worry about it,” Steve said to Bob. “It wasn’t your fault. You did the best you could. I guess a dog doesn’t belong in a condo.” Bob looked depressed, so Steve patted his head. “We’re going to buy you a nice house. One with a big fenced-in yard.” A house that was closer to Daisy, Steve thought. A house that had enough room for a few dozen kids-just in case. Omigod. Did I just have a thought about kids? Where’d that come from?

“Do you like kids?” he asked Bob.

Bob woofed and wagged his tail.

Two hours later Steve and Bob had a house to live in. The owners had already moved out, so Steve and Bob could rent the house until closing. It was amazing what you could do when you were willing to pay top dollar and didn’t need financing, Steve thought grimly. His bank account was dwindling. He hadn’t realized a dog could be such an expense.

When they returned to the apartment building they took the stairs. Steve put the pie in the oven and started packing essentials. Tomorrow he’d call a mover and pay whatever was necessary to get an immediate move. By tomorrow night he’d have his own tomato bush, a cozy fireplace, a gas grill in his backyard. Until recently he’d thought he hated all those things. He told himself he was buying them for Bob, but oddly enough, deep down inside, he was looking forward to watching his tomato bush grow.

Steve and Bob met Daisy in the garage the following morning. Daisy was wearing a khaki jacket, orange T-shirt, and khaki shorts that looked like a skirt except they had cuffs. She had a styrofoam cup of coffee in her hand and dark circles under her eyes.

“What’s Bob doing here?” she asked.

“He wanted to see where I work.”

Daisy nodded sleepily, as if it were perfectly normal for a dog to go to work.

“Have a tough night?” Steve asked.

“I got home late from the nursing home, then I had all this reading to do.” She yawned and sighed. “Kevin tried to do the papers for me, but he delivered some of them to the wrong people, so I had to go out and fix things.”

“I thought you were going to give up the paper route?”

“I told them I’d finish out the week.”

Tomorrow he’d help her with the paper route, he decided. His new house was only half a mile away from her town house. He’d get up early and walk around with her, then they could have breakfast together in his cozy breakfast nook that overlooked his tomato bush.

Elsie pulled up in the Caddie. She slammed the door and locked it and marched over to them. She was wearing a purple-flowered dress with a little lace collar, and she was carrying the big black handbag. “Morning.” She looked more closely at Daisy. “You look like the devil.”

“I was up late last night. Then things got kind of rushed this morning because I had to squeeze grocery shopping in between my other jobs.” She gave an enormous yawn and sighed. “I’ll be okay once I get on the road. I’m used to being tired.”

“Maybe Elsie should drive today,” Steve said. He gave Elsie a twenty-dollar bill. “Take the portable scanner and go somewhere for breakfast.”

“She’s overcommitted,” Elsie said. “She’s headed for burnout. If she don’t watch her step, she’s gonna end up someplace where they feed you strained peas and make you sleep in a rubber room.”

Steve scrutinized Daisy. She looked tired, but she didn’t look ready for the rubber room. He wasn’t so sure about himself and Elsie.

He could see blue sky lurking beyond the open garage door. Inside the dark garage it was cool, but the air was already heating up outside. In another hour the cement pavement would be shimmering. In another hour he’d be on the air-conditioned broadcast floor and Daisy would be cruising south on the beltway through Maryland. He didn’t like the arrangements. He wanted to be with Daisy.

He reached out, touched a silky curl, and let it wrap around his finger. “I think I’ll carve an hour out of my schedule today so we can have lunch together. I’ll get some potato salad and fried chicken and we can have a picnic.”

He arrived at Belle Haven at twelve-fifteen with a packing crate filled with food and the quilt from his bed draped over his arm. Bob bounced around beside him, following close on his heels, never taking his eyes off the food box. They spread the quilt under a tree not far from the car, took the portable scanner, and set out the lunch.

Elsie looked at the quilt and shook her head. “Once I get down on that thing it’s gonna take a forklift to get me up. I can do most anything with this hip except picnic. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take my food back to the car.”

Steve gave Bob a bag full of burgers and a vanilla milk shake. “Don’t eat the carton,” he told the dog. “Last time you ate the carton, and it made you sick.”

Daisy took some fried chicken and fruit salad. “This is lovely. You’re a good person.”

“I was hoping you’d notice.”

She smiled at him. He had ulterior motives. How nice.

“I have some big news,” he said. “I bought a house last night.” He took a napkin and wiped milk shake off Bob’s face fur. “It’s a terrific house. It has a fenced-in backyard for Bob and little print wallpaper in the dining room. Actually, I don’t know if I like the wallpaper, but the Realtor said it was Williamsburg and very classy. Maybe you could take a look at it and let me know what you think. I’m not much of a judge when it comes to wallpaper.” And while she was there she could also look at the bedrooms-especially the one with his big king-size bed.

Bob had finished his burgers and was inching his way over to the chicken.

“You can’t have chicken,” Steve told him. “It has bones in it, and you’re not supposed to have bones raw or cooked.” Steve dumped a glob of potato salad on a paper plate, added a deviled egg and a biscuit, and fed it to Bob. “Save some room for dessert,” he told him. “I bought a cheesecake.”

Daisy slanted a look at Bob. “He always eats like this? What did he eat for breakfast?”

“We didn’t have much time this morning. We were up late last night packing. We stopped on the way in to work and got coffee and doughnuts.”

“You fed him coffee and doughnuts for breakfast?”

“I made sure the coffee was cool. Yesterday was better. Yesterday we had orange juice and eggs and whole wheat toast.”

“Doesn’t he ever eat dog food?”

“I bought some for him, but he didn’t like it.”

Daisy ate half of a melon ball. “You ever have a dog when you were a kid?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I never had a pet of any kind until Bob. We lived in a high-rise in Houston for most of my childhood. Very posh. My dad and my mom do lots of traveling. They were never very interested in the hearth-and-home stuff. Home was a place to entertain business associates.”

“You probably had servants.”

“Mmmm.” He gnawed on a chicken leg and tossed it into the cardboard bucket. He glanced at Daisy and thought she looked a little wistful.

“Must have been nice.”

He shrugged. “It was right for my mom and dad. They both came from very poor beginnings. When the oil money started coming in they went uptown. My grandfather Crow was the only member of the family who stayed on the land. I spent a summer with him once and hated it. I must have been nine or ten. I look back on it now and think it might have been the best summer I ever had.”

Daisy curled her legs under her and picked at a biscuit. “What made you change your mind after all those years?”

“I don’t know. Gut feeling. My grandfather Crow lived on a flat piece of cracked red dirt. The house was a small wooden thing patched together with pieces of jerry can and chinked with sun-dried mud. He swept the inside with a broom. He didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. He had electricity but only used it in the winter to run the heater. No electric lights. He said they made the life cycle unnatural. He said when the sun went down a body was supposed to look at the stars for a while and go to sleep. And if you couldn’t fall asleep right off, you hadn’t worked hard enough that day.”

His grin was lopsided, self-deprecating. “This philosophy went over big with a ten-year-old who’d never known a day without servants. I didn’t know how to pour my own milk on my cereal. And I thought watching television was an essential body function- eating, sleeping, watching television. Grandpa Crow had a garden behind his house that he worked on every day. He had to keep whacking at the red dirt to keep it from baking hard and dry around his plants. He had a goat and a flock of scrawny chickens. He had an old Ford pickup that was in worse shape than your klunker, and every Saturday we’d go into town for some canned food and mail and Grandpa’d get a bottle of whiskey. When he was alone I think he might have been drunk a lot of the time, but when I was there he’d just sip at the whiskey and get more talkative.”

The grin broadened. “By normal standards more talkative wasn’t exactly chatty. Grandpa Crow was a man of few words.”

“Is he still living on his land?”

“Yeah. I went to see him two years ago. He’d moved into a trailer. Very spiffy, but he still wasn’t using lights. At least that’s what he said, but I think when no one’s around he pulls out a television and makes microwave popcorn.”

“How about you? Do you have servants now?”

“Someone comes in to clean.” He polished off another chicken leg. “I learned how to pour my own milk when I was in college, so I was able to do away with the butler and the cook and the manservant.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Sometimes the cook.Once in a while the manservant.Never the butler.”

Daisy gave him a long look. “Are you at all like your grandfather?”

“Not much. I’m also not much like my parents. Lately I’m not even like myself.”

“Are you having an identity crisis?”

“I think I’m in a period of transition.”

“Ah-hah.”

Steve sighed. She was so incredibly pretty, sitting there with her feet tucked up like a cat and her blond hair dappled in sunlight. Very feminine. He reconsidered the word. Feminine didn’t feel exactly right. Womanly was better. There was a ripeness to her, a lushness of personality. She didn’t whine or flirt or make excuses. She went about the business of living with open exuberance. In an odd way she reminded him of his grandfather. His grandfather Crow was much more taciturn, but there was depth to him, and there was depth to Daisy.

In the beginning Steve had felt the pull of her blue eyes and soft curves, and instantly falling in love with her had been half-serious, halffolly-a private joke on himself that held an element of truth. This morning he woke up and realized that he wasn’t just enamored-he liked her. Really liked her. She was brave and bright and honest. And there was a lot of passion bubbling below the surface. He suspected she hadn’t fully tapped into it yet. There was a breathless element to her kisses. It was as if she were always astonished, always pleasantly surprised by the chemistry that existed between them. He understood that astonishment. He felt it, too.

“Oh my Lord,” Daisy said, jumping to her feet. “Look at the time!” She dashed to the car, stuffed the plug in her ear, and grabbed the two-way.

After a few minutes, she came back and dropped onto the quilt. “Just made it. I put the plug in my ear when the cue came up.” She looked guilty. “I gave the same report as last time. I’m probably not supposed to admit that to my boss.”

“It’ll cost you. I might fire you, if you don’t agree to help me figure out the gas grill tonight.”

“Job harassment.”

“Absolutely.”

“I’m not worried. You’ve tried to fire me before.”

“Does that mean you won’t help me with the grill?”

“Of course I’ll help you with the grill.” She stretched out on her stomach with her head resting on her arm. “After all, what are friends for?”

“Is that what we are? Friends?”

She felt heat flood to her cheeks. “I don’t know what we are. Friends seems like a good place to start.”

He watched her eyelids drift closed and studied the fringe of blond lash that had received a cursory swipe with the mascara wand. Her breathing slowed, her mouth softened. She was asleep. He glanced at his watch. If he canceled the rest of his day, he could do the traffic reports and let her sleep. He mentally reviewed his agenda and grunted. There’d be hell to pay if he canceled his afternoon. He couldn’t do it.

He packed up what remained of the food and clicked the leash on Bob. He went to Elsie and spoke quietly so he wouldn’t wake Daisy.

“I have to get back to the station. Let her sleep as long as possible. She has to broadcast another traffic report in ten minutes.”

“She’s one of them givers,” Elsie said. “Never says no to anybody, but there’s only so much responsibility a person can take on.”

Steve was on the beltway when the next traffic report cued in.

“Hello, hello?” An elderly voice came over the airways. “I don’t know if I’m working this dang thing right, but if you can hear me I’m gonna give a traffic report. This is Elsie Hawkins and I’m only gonna tell you all this stuff once so you better listen up…”

Four days ago he would have been emptying the aspirin bottle, Steve thought. But here he was smiling at Elsie Hawkins. He and a couple thousand other listeners. Eventually Frank would get his cast cut off and he’d be back doing traffic in his clipped, no-nonsense manner. In the meantime, it was summer, and the listening audience was in a more relaxed frame of mind. Everyone seemed to be enjoying the offbeat reports.

Bob was sitting next to him with the seat belt clipped around his shoulders and his head out the window. His ears were flapping in the wind, and his tongue flopped out of the side of his mouth. His expression was blissful.

Steve looked at him and woofed, but Bob just kept smiling.