Redwood Bend. Робин Карр
to ask you something. Should I apologize for…you know…earlier?”
“Oh, please don’t,” she said, giving her head a shake. “That would make it seem like you regretted it. We are thinking of the same thing, right? The kiss on my porch?”
He nodded his head. “Oh, man, you’re going to get me in so much trouble…”
“Why?” she asked, stepping toward him. “You said you weren’t married. Oh, no, is there a girlfriend? A fiancée?”
“No…”
She grabbed a piece of his shirtsleeve and, lowering her voice slightly, asked, “Are you gay?”
“No! Jesus, did I seem gay?”
“I’m no judge of that,” she said.
“There’s no one,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s just that…” He straightened and tightened his hands on the bike grips. It made him very nervous to pretend to be normal. “Listen, how’d you like to go out for ice cream?”
“I can’t,” she said. “I have the boys.”
“We’ll take them.”
“What are you going to do? Put me on the back of the bike with one under each arm?” she asked.
“Sounds like fun, but maybe we should just drive. You have a car.”
“Where?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he said with a shrug. “Fortuna? It’s an adventure. What about it? You don’t have to recalibrate an engine or anything, do you?”
She made a face; it wasn’t unusual for people to tease her about her mechanical skills, especially men. “I suppose we could meet somewhere, if you had any idea where you wanted to go,” she said.
“How about if we really get crazy and go in one car?” he returned.
She looked at her watch. “I don’t know, Dylan. It might be a little too close to dinner to give them ice cream. I try to get a couple of nutrients in them before they pack on the sugar.”
He was stumped about what to do for a minute, looking at his own watch. “Well, how about pizza or burgers and then ice cream…?”
She frowned. “Are you sure you want to do that?”
“Katie! Stop making me work so hard!”
She laughed at him. “All right, park the bike and come with me.”
“I’ll drive,” he said, running his bike up alongside the school, turning it off and following her. And didn’t she get right in the driver’s side. He held the door for her and tried again, saying, “Come on, I’ll drive.”
“No, thank you,” she sweetly answered. And in a whisper, she added, “My car.”
He gritted his teeth into a smile and said, “I’m a pilot, let me drive.”
“No. Boys, this is Dylan. Do you remember Dylan? I don’t think you met him, but he helped change the flat tire. Dylan, jump in the car.” She smiled again. “Go ahead.”
With a grrrr under his breath, Dylan walked around the front of the car and got in the passenger side.
Katie twisted around and peered into the backseat. “This is Andy,” she said, pointing left, “and that’s Mitch behind you. Dylan suggested we go out for burgers or something and if you eat a nice dinner, there will be dessert.”
Dylan looked between the boys and Katie a couple of times. Without being asked she said, “You’ll figure it out.”
Dylan could not tell them apart. “There’s not even a stray freckle,” he said. “Seriously!”
“It’s subtle,” she said, putting the big SUV in Drive. Then she looked over at Dylan and said, “Seat belt.”
He did as he was told.
Even though Dylan had spent many hours with Lang and his family, often with kids aged two to ten climbing all over him, he still marveled at Katie’s ability to multitask. She drove that big SUV down the mountain with its winding roads while keeping her boys relatively manageable and trying to carry on a conversation with Dylan. It went something like this:
“Andy, seat belt stays on or I stop the car. So, Dylan, this is how you want to spend your time—by yourself in a town of six hundred, just riding around on your motorcycle? Mitch, window up, please. Huh, Dylan?”
It was kind of hard to know when to jump in with an answer. He gave the short one. “We don’t have any charters right now, so I thought I’d spend the time visiting local airports.”
“That must be a little uncertain on the pocketbook,” she said. And then she peered into the backseat and added, “Andy, if you don’t stop bouncing around, you won’t get ice cream. No, Mitch, I didn’t bring movies. Well, Dylan?”
“Sheesh,” he said, running a hand over his head. “We should’ve put harnesses on ’em and run ’em behind the car.” He turned to face into the backseat. “What did you do at school all day? Color? Nap?”
“It’s not school,” Mitch informed him.
“It’s summer program,” Andy explained. “So we don’t have to be really quiet or spell things.”
“It’s like babysitting,” Mitch said.
“And there’s some little kids who are like two!” Andy added with some disgust. “One of ’em bit another one today and everybody freaked out.”
“We definitely need a little more running and jumping in that program,” Katie muttered. “Well, Dylan? You didn’t answer me.”
He looked at her and, shaking his head, said, “I don’t remember the question!”
And she shot him a grin just as she reached one hand over the seat to snatch a plastic gun that made a very annoying racket out of Andy’s hand while she was maneuvering a curve in the road. “We’re not having that right now,” she said, bringing the weapon to the front seat and cradling it in her lap.
Dylan closed his eyes.
When they got to Fortuna, she was leaning over the steering wheel to look around as she drove and finally she said, “Aha! McDonald’s! You’ll thank me later.”
Dylan had no idea what she meant. They wandered in like a family of four, except that Katie took the lead and did the ordering for the three of them, getting her opened wallet in her hand. She looked over her shoulder and said, “Dylan? What would you like?”
He wasn’t having it. He nudged her aside with a hip, closed his hand over her open wallet to prevent her from pulling out her money, placed his order and paid the bill. “Thank you,” she said. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“I invited you,” he reminded her.
“Yeah, but I get the impression you had no idea what you were getting yourself into.”
It was pretty close to what he expected, but he didn’t share that. He’d had the McDonald’s experience a number of times, but they were his best friend’s kids. Never the kids of some woman who had him doing crazy things!
When their food came, Katie sat on one side of the booth, sandwiched between her boys while Dylan sat on the other side alone. While Dylan worked on his Big Mac and fries he watched with admiration as Katie managed her boys. When Andy laid out and aimed a ketchup packet toward Mitch, raising his fist high to bring it slamming down to fire on his brother, she caught his arm in midair while she was telling Mitch he had to eat at least half of his McNuggets to get dessert. When Mitch pulled a fistful of straws out of his pocket and began firing the paper covers into the air like rockets, she confiscated them while disarming Andy of more concealed ketchup packets.