Page 520 of Summer Heat
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Cody played in the park, on the swings and merry-go-round and the slides, tumbling and running and hollering. Afterward, they had their cocoa at the B & B Café.
And all day, men flirted with Tamara. At first, it puzzled her. It wasn’t something that happened to her very often. Never had. Valerie always told her she put out touch-me-not signals.
As the day wore on, Tamara wondered in some confusion if Lance had found the “on” button. Something had certainly changed. The old man at the gas station, who never wore his teeth and shaved maybe every third day, gave her a gummy smile and a wink with her change. A biker guy in the park, who might have looked dangerous in his leathers and long hair without the bevy of toddlers he rolled with in the grass, smiled at her every time she happened to glance his way. Even a young man, barely out of his teens, looked over his shoulder as he walked by.
Must be the turtleneck, Tamara thought.
Their last stop for the day was at the supermarket for coffee. She ordinarily avoided Saturdays at the market, but there were things in life she wouldn’t do without.
As she turned the corner, Cody spied the carnival. “Oh, Mommy, look!” he said in the voice of awe reserved for children under five, and fourteen-year-olds in love. “A carnibal! Can we go?”
Tamara eyed the Ferris wheel and tented booths set up in the vacant lot beyond the grocery store, wondering how she’d missed its arrival. “I don’t know, Cody.” She did a few quick calculations, wondering if she dared take some of the tips from her earnings last night to do this for him. She had one week to gather the funds for the phone bill, or they’d cut her off.
But she did have a week and she worked every day between now and then.
“Pretty please with sugar on top?” Cody wheedled. He knew he’d won, and the bright blue eyes twinkled in his cherubic face. Tamara suddenly saw Lance in that twinkle, and wondered if he had been this adorable as a child.
“We’ll go,” she said. “But first you have to go home and take a nap. It’s more fun at night, when all the lights are on, and everything looks pretty.”
“Yippee! And we can get cotton candy!”
She patted his knee. “Yep, cotton candy. Pink for me.”
“Blue for me!”
“You’ve got it, kiddo.” She spied an empty parking space in the crowded lot. “Let’s go get my coffee and get you home for a nap, and after supper we’ll go to the carnival.”
As they entered the busy store, Tamara was caught suddenly by the strangeness of the place again. While she’d been growing up, Red Creek had been a sleepy, nowhere little town on the way to the ski resorts. This market had then been ten aisles wide, with maybe two variations of brands available, and the customers had been ranchers in pickup trucks, and plain-speaking natives in sensible clothes. Once in a while, a glamorous type from Denver or Aspen were forced to spend the night at the Sleepy Owl Motel, but they cleared out as soon as possible.
The wild expansion of the last few years had begun while Tamara was away at college, and the changes it had wrought still occasionally took her by surprise. The market was truly a supermarket these days, with twenty five aisles of high-gloss floors. The customers were young, or trying to remain so as long as possible, and took fitness very seriously in their newfound home. High end sportswear abounded. The ranchers, in their worn boots and Western-cut jeans and broken-in hats, looked as out of place as a coal stove in a gourmet kitchen.
But there wasn’t any other place to shop. And thanks to the rocketing rise of land prices, some of those laid-back ranchers were pretty well-off themselves.
Tamara liked some of it. In the coffee aisle, she could choose from scores of brands, packaged or loose, whole bean or ground. The produce aisle groaned with exotic offerings of every imaginable variety, and the magazine aisle carried everything from confessions to Martha Stewart.
Still it dazzled her at times. Today she swung Cody’s hand next to her, ambling through and watching people covertly. She took Cody to the coloring books and let him pick through them, all the while covertly admiring a woman in her late forties who wore black leggings and had the rear end of a sixteen-year-old.
A voice said playfully in her ear, “She’s not your type, I’m afraid.”
Lance. Tamara looked up, fighting the rush of welcome and heat she felt at the sound of his voice in her ear. He looked as touchable as always, blond and clean and gleaming, with just enough of a rakish air to be interesting. “I was just wondering,” Tamara said, “what she has to do to keep looking like that.”
He inclined his head, admiring the woman’s long legs and firm bottom. A slow grin crossed his face and he gave Tamara a wicked look, raising one approving eyebrow. “Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s worth it.”
Tamara chuckled. It was hard to argue with that logic.
An elderly woman with her glasses on a chain over her blue cardigan thrust a handful of coupons into Lance’s hands. “I don’t have time for all your flirtin’ today, boy.” She poked a bony finger at the top coupon. “See if you can find that brand for me. I’ll swear, these glasses still aren’t right.”
Lance shot Tamara a bright glance from the corner of his eye. “Mrs. Jordan, this is Tamara Flynn. She’s a friend of mine.”
“How do you do, young lady,” the woman said, looking over her glasses. “Is that your boy there?”
Tamara nodded. “This is Cody. Cody, say hello to Mrs. Jordan.”
Cody looked up. “Hi.” Caught by something on her sweater, he leaned closer. “Cool pin!”
“It’s a poison pin!” She exclaimed, and bent over to show Cody the antique pin with its empty container.
