Page 21 of Off the Mark
Tabitha’s eyebrows shot up. “I thought the same thing before I met Dean.”
I raised my hands. “But if I get tied down, won’t I be disappointing hundreds, maybe even thousands of women all across this fine city?”
Tabitha laughed while Dean threw a dishrag at my face. Casual dating, flirting, picking up women…it’d always been easy for me. I slid into that routinehardwhen I was playing ball.
And learned some routines are more difficult to shake than others.
People all around me were partnering up while I was here for a weekend fling, at most. It wasn’t until I’d watched Dean fall for Tabitha—literally in front of the whole block—that I wondered if I was doing something wrong.
I understood what my grandmother meant about my dad and the anvil. Got it on some level and could guess it felt really fucking great.
It still hadn’t happened to me yet.
Though when I realizedCharlie Maddox, of all people, was standing on the sidewalk, waiting to see me, I did get that weird chest thing I always got around her.
It was like my body had to alert my brain that it was about to get stupider.
Alice tenderly touched picture after picture while I continued to hold the book. “You joke now, Rowan, but we’ll be telling this as a funny story at your wedding someday.”
I wrapped an arm around her thin shoulders. “Alice O’Callaghan, can you see the future now?”
“Indeed, I can,” she said primly, but with mirth in her gaze. “Your dad pretended not to be interested in that sort of thing. But then…”
I made an explosion gesture near my ears. “Anvil time.”
“When you know, you know. Just like these two.”
We both looked up to catch Tabitha and Dean exchanging a sex look. At least it seemed like a sex look to me. I passed a hand over my mouth, hiding a smile. “Are you, uh…gettin’ out of here soon?”
Dean cleared his throat. “Unless you need more help in the kitchen?”
I waved them off. “Go, go. Have some fun.”
He stooped to kiss my grandmother on the cheek. “Your dinners get more delicious every week.”
She pressed a hand to her chest. “Dean Knox-Morelli, making an old woman swoon even after all these years.”
Tabitha swooped in for a long hug. “He’s good at that, and it’s kind of annoying. Some of us have work to get done and can’t be getting distracted by our swoony husbands.”
Dean rubbed the back of his head with a sheepish grin. Meanwhile, Tabitha stepped close to me for a side hug. “I know things are tough right now without Elaine. I thought some pro bono video work might inspire extra fundraising. What do you think?”
I blew out a breath. “I’d be forever grateful, that’s what I think.”
She winked. “Consider it done. I’ll swing by in a few days.”
After she and Dean left, I helped my grandmother up from her chair, walking her over to her favorite recliner by the front window.
“Do you want me to make you some tea before I go?” I asked, anticipating her answer and already mid-turn when she grabbed me by the wrist. She had tears in her eyes, which sent me crouching to my knees in front of her.
“Hey, hey,” I said softly, “what’s going on? Dean made you swoon that much, huh?”
She sniffed, smiling a little. “I wanted to look at those pictures of your parents with Tabitha because they make me happy. Iwantto talk about it with everyone on the block because I miss them. Terribly. It’s comforting to miss themwithother people. But then, after…”
I swallowed around a lump in my throat. “Then you still miss them. And it’s horrible. Especially in the summer.”
My parents had died during the summer. To this day, I couldn’t hear the sounds of air conditioning window units, or the jangly ice cream truck, without experiencing a collision of grief and memory, all at once.
Some summers were better than others. Some were worse. She hadn’t mentioned anything specifically, but I had a gut feeling this was one of theworseones. She’d been hovering around the photo albums and crying more than usual, staring out this window with a wistful expression.
