Читать книгу Molly's Mr. Wrong - Jeannie Watt - Страница 13
ОглавлениеFINN WASN’T A guy who backed away from trouble—if anything, according to his dad, anyway, he ran forward and embraced it—however, academic trouble was foreign territory. And apparently he was traveling that territory with an expired visa. So what was he going to do? Quit school? Tough it out? Risk flunking?
After glancing around to make certain that no customers had wandered into the warehouse, he peeled out of his T-shirt and shook out the grain dust. The stuff made him itch like crazy and he had to wear a paper face mask when moving the bags, which put up dust every time he set down a pallet a little too hard. He was tired of itching.
Mike loved his business, and until he returned from the service, Finn had been perfectly fine working there, too. Now he needed more. When he’d gone overseas, he’d discovered what it felt like to be part of something important. To make a difference. It didn’t help that he was becoming more and more convinced that the store no longer needed him. Before he’d left, he’d essentially been the only employee with the exception of the bookkeeper. The place had been dusty and lonely and he hadn’t cared as long as he could hook up with his friends after work, or go home and work on his cars and trucks.
Those things were no longer enough. He wanted to teach automotives and shop and, as he saw it, he didn’t need stellar English scores to teach hands-on courses, but he did have to pass the class to get a degree. Molly Adamson was standing in his way and he still believed that their past was firmly tied to the score she gave him.
Finn pulled his T-shirt back on, grimacing as he tugged it into place. Still uncomfortable, but not as bad. He walked across the warehouse to the small dust-covered fridge on the opposite wall and pulled out a water. He fumbled the plastic top after opening the bottle and it fell, rolling across the floor. A split second later, Marcel, the cat that had adopted the place as a scraggly kitten years ago, shot out from behind the pallet and attacked. After whacking the cap into submission, the cat stared at it as if daring it to move, then hit it with his paw, causing it to slide across the floor like a hockey puck.
“Good one, Marcel.”
The cat gave him a golden-eyed blink, then disappeared back behind the pallets. The cat was certainly a whole lot tamer than he’d been before Finn had gone overseas, but actually, so was he.
He finished the water, dropped the bottle in the recycling container that Lola had put next to the fridge, then started across the concrete floor to the forklift. Before he could fire it up, Lola announced over the intercom that a customer needed loading. Eighteen bags of alfalfa pellets.
Codie James. It was her usual order.
Finn smiled a little. He and Codie had had some good times, and maybe that was what he needed. To go out with someone like Codie who enjoyed life and seemed to know what she wanted.
When he emerged from the warehouse and approached her big red Dodge, though, she was talking to a guy who nodded and then headed for the store proper, and as she handed him the load ticket, he noted a big rock on her left hand.
“Hey,” he said. “Congratulations.”
Codie beamed. “I know... I said I was never settling down, but I met this guy...” She rolled her eyes toward the sky and gave a goofy smile, which made Finn smile in return.
“Must be some guy.”
“He is. Hang around and you can meet him.”
Finn glanced at the ticket, then gave her a quick nod. “I’ll get this loaded for you.”
“Thanks, Finn.” She reached out to run her hand over his shoulder and down his arm. “Good to have you back.”
“Good to be back.”
After Codie and her beau, Colin, who did seem really decent, left, Finn disappeared back into the warehouse, even though he didn’t have that much to do. Chase would arrive soon and then he was free to do...whatever. Everyone, it seemed, was moving on, and it aggravated him that he’d barely started his own moving-on process before hitting a major roadblock named Molly. Maybe he deserved some comeuppance, because he’d been a jerk with that whole homecoming dance thing, but he’d been a self-centered, hormone-driven teenager at the time.
And she’d been an insecure, quiet girl whose feelings you didn’t give much thought to.
Finn snorted. Well, now she’d gotten a few licks in of her own.
A vehicle pulled into the lot as Finn reached the warehouse door. He didn’t have to look back to know it was Chase—the loud 427 under the hood told the tale. The kid really needed to get a tune-up and he probably couldn’t afford one.
Chase disappeared into the store and Finn walked into the warehouse, where he stood for a few seconds, watching the dust motes drift about in the sunlight filtering in through the fiberglass roofing. The obvious solution, the one in which he didn’t cut and run, was to change English instructors and see if someone new, someone without an ax to grind, had the same opinion as Molly.
But what if that instructor told him he was incompetent, too?
He was no coward, but after what Molly had done...yeah, kind of hard to face the prospect of someone else announcing via red pen bloodbath that he was stupid. And he’d yet to discover what the math teacher was going to do to him.
But he would. This was just a bump in the road. He’d overcome it, because if he didn’t go to school, then that meant he was stuck here in the family business, or in some similar occupation. The life that had seemed so comfortable before going overseas no longer fit him.
He needed a way out, and Molly Adamson was not going to stop him.
* * *
SHE’D DONE THE right thing. No question about it. She had to be honest. Right? She’d been no harsher on Finn than she would have been on anyone else. It wasn’t as if she’d written insults in the margins. She’d even tapered off marking it up toward the end, when it became apparent that he wasn’t joking—that he was actually trying to write an essay.
Unfortunately, there was a lot of red ink on the paper by that time, and...well, maybe she had felt a certain level of glee during the first couple comments. And usually she read through the entire essay without writing anything, but with Finn she’d started marking as soon as she saw something to mark, which had been in the first sentence.
Not good, that.
And then he’d reacted just as Blake would have—with extreme outrage that someone had dared point out his faults.
Well, the faults are real, buddy. There was probably a root cause that could be addressed, but he’d left before she could speak to him about it and then failed to show up at the next class.
Typical spoiled-jock behavior.
Molly gathered the grammar pretests she’d given her freshmen into a neat stack and put them into the wire basket on the edge of her desk. Actually, she was kind of surprised that Finn was in school at all. From what she’d gathered, he’d followed the classic peak-in-high-school path and joined the family business. Nothing wrong with that, but it wasn’t exactly ambitious. Molly liked guys who were open to new adventures—as long as they were safe and well-thought-out.
And she shouldn’t be spending so much time thinking about one student whom she’d probably never see again when she had so many who needed her attention.
Some of her students had some serious deficits in their English educations, which was something she had to address and remedy over the course of the next semester. But right now she needed to head home and remember that thing about not burying herself in work. Georgina was supposed to be cooking an actual meal and she was looking forward to food that wasn’t thawed or microwaved.
A muffled thud from the other side of the wall brought her head up. For the past thirty minutes or so, there’d been a lot of noise come from the art studio room next door—tables scraping along the floor and the odd thump.
Once upon a time, Molly probably would have ignored the noise, at least until she was more secure in her surroundings, but those days were gone. No more safe route. She needed to meet people before they sought her out. She needed to forget shyness and uncertainty and put herself out there, which was why she left her office and poked her head into the room next door on the way out of the building for the two-hour break between her afternoon class and evening class.
“Hello,” she called to the woman crouched next to a large cardboard box on the opposite side of the long room. The woman hadn’t been to any of the faculty meetings, and while the old shy Molly might have waited until the two of them had bumped into each other in the hall to introduce herself, the new Molly pushed herself to make first contact. She had no trouble addressing a roomful of students, but one-on-one always froze her up. She was working on it, though, so she smiled when the woman looked up, startled.
“Hi.” She got to her feet, pushing back the long blond hair that had fallen into her face while she’d been crouched over, and sidestepped a few boxes before starting across the room.
“I’m Molly Adamson, your next-door neighbor.”
“Allie Brody, and you’ll only be my neighbor one night a week. I’m teaching a community art class on Wednesday evenings.”
“Community, as in—”
“Regular Joes,” Allie said with a half smile. “Nonstudents. People who want to expand their horizons and get out of the house one night a week.”
“Sounds like fun.”
“It’s my first time teaching at the community college. I’m a little nervous.” She wiped her hands down the sides of her pants. “What do you teach?”
“English comp. Technical writing. One literature class.”
“Sounds like a lot of work.”
“I’m not going to lie. It is. Fortunately, I love what I do.”
Allie cocked her head. “You look familiar. Do we know each other from somewhere?”
“I don’t think we do...but I did graduate from high school here.”
“Me, too,” Allie said. “Born here, graduated here, engaged, married and divorced here. I’m a lifer, it seems.”
Molly laughed. “I’ve spent my life moving, but I hope to settle for a while.” The five o’clock bell chimed and she said, “I need to get going.” Georgina had texted her that she’d started dinner a few minutes ago. “But I’m sure we’ll run into each other again.”
“Do you have a class tomorrow?”
“No. But I’ll probably be here. I promise myself every year that I won’t work late and usually that promise lasts until the first big batch of grading lands on my desk.”
“Well, if you are here, I wouldn’t mind some backup if my class gets rowdy. I’ll just knock on the wall and you can come and save me.”
Molly laughed. “I’ll be happy to oblige.”
She continued on out of the building, glad that she stopped by, but feeling a little off center, as she always did on first meeting people. She’d love to be more like Georgina, who never met a stranger. Or her brother, David, who didn’t care what people thought about him. But she wasn’t like her siblings. Or her parents. She’d been the nose-in-the-book nerd who had a difficult time leaving her comfort zone. Not that she didn’t want to...it was just that the fear factor had been so strong. Then Blake had come along and drawn her out of her shell.
It wasn’t until she’d discovered that he was a serial cheater while on the road that she realized that Blake took after his father...and that she closely resembled his stay-at-home mother who’d turned a blind eye to her husband’s indiscretions and made life as easy as possible for Blake, his father and his two brothers.
Well, that wasn’t what Molly had signed on for. She’d refused to give Blake another chance, even though he’d worked up a few man tears, and she’d insisted that they put the house they’d purchased together—stupid, stupid, stupid—on the market, then packed up and left. After getting a new place to live and a new wardrobe, so she could give away all the clothing that reminded her of Blake, she’d buried herself in her work until she felt as if she could face the world again.
Being cheated on hurt like hell. And trust...what was that? Not anything that Molly believed in anymore.
But trust issues or not, she was going to put herself out there. Step out of her comfort zone socially. She owed it to herself not to let what had happened with Blake ruin her future...she just wasn’t going to get herself into any kind of an emotional bind with any kind of flashy too-good-to-be-true guy again. From now on she was dating her own species—as in guys who were reliable, honest, predictable. She couldn’t live with lack of trust.
When Molly pulled into her driveway, Georgina was not tending to dinner—she was in Mike Culver’s yard crouched next to a flower bed. She waved and got to her feet as Molly walked to the fence that separated the properties.
“Mike is teaching me about fall bulbs,” she said happily. “If we put them in now, we’ll have flowers next year.”
“I’d like that.” Just as she was going to like living in the same place come spring that she was in now. Molly had never lived anywhere long enough to get too deeply into yard beautification, and in Arizona, her house had been xeriscaped in a minimalist way, as was common in the desert. No spring flowers except for yucca, which were pretty, but not in the traditional way.
“The people who lived here before weren’t much for flowers, but I always thought that some tulips around the trees and maybe some narcissi or daffodils in front of the lilacs would be pretty.”
“There are lilacs?” Georgina’s eyes widened.
“Those bushes over there are lilacs,” Mike said, pointing to the hedge at the edge of their lawn. “The heavy flowering kind.”
“I love the smell of lilacs. I haven’t smelled them since we lived in Iowa. Remember, Molly?”
Molly remembered, but she was surprised that Georgina did; she’d been so young then. “Didn’t we have lilacs when we lived here?” she asked her sister, who gave an emphatic shake of her head in reply. “Nope. We had those big yellow bushes—”
“Forsythia, probably,” Mike said.
Georgina looked impressed at the off-the-cuff identification. “And those pink roses that had no scent. We didn’t have lilacs.”
Molly smiled a little. She didn’t remember much about the flowers. “I’ll take your word for it.”
Mike leaned his arms on the top of the chain-link fencing. “I was telling Georgina that I can put together a mix of bulbs from the store and bring them home or I can get you a catalog.”
“You probably know what grows best.” And she would pay for said mixture of bulbs, of course, but it didn’t seem like the time to make that point.
“That’s what I thought,” Georgina said. “And I love surprises.”
“Then I’ll fix you up.” Mike smiled at Georgina, then shifted his attention to Molly, and she saw that his eyes were the same color as Finn’s. A deep, rich hazel. More green than brown. Why had she noticed that? A trickle of annoyance went through her. “Got that drain fixed yet?”
“I have a call in to a plumber. He’s working me in this weekend.” Mike had been right about all the locals being contracted to the construction companies. The Eagle Valley was experiencing a mini housing boom. “I called four before I got one. O’Malley’s Plumbing and Heating? He promised Saturday and said he wouldn’t charge weekend rates, since it’s a simple job.”
Mike didn’t look as if he fully believed the guy would honor his word. “Crazy, all this rain,” he said. “We had floods a little over a year ago, then this summer was so dry that there were bad fires.”
“I heard,” Molly said. “Some people lost homes.”
Mike gave a nod. “My nephew Dylan’s fiancée lost her ranch house in the fire.”
“That’s terrible.” Molly remembered Dylan. She’d liked him. He’d been a year ahead of her, quiet and studious. Invisible in a way. Like she had been, except that he could have been as popular as Finn, had he chosen to be. Somehow she didn’t think that popularity was one of her options. “Who is his fiancée?”
“Jolie Brody.”
Brody. Of course. Allie Brody looked just like Jolie Brody, whom she’d graduated from high school with.
“Does she have an older sister?”
“Three sisters.”
“I just met an Allie Brody at the college.”
“She’s the oldest. She’s teaching a night class at the school. Painting or something.”
Small world...but maybe not. It was a small town, so ending up with a class next to Finn’s cousin’s fiancée’s sister wasn’t that unexpected. And the connection to Finn was a bit distant. Still, she was going to watch what she said around Allie about certain people.
Molly frowned as a memory crept into her brain. “Wait a minute...didn’t Jolie used to...” Mike waited for her to finish and Molly, who wished she’d kept her mouth shut, searched for a tactful word. “Bother Dylan?” Torture would have been a better word, but she was being polite. The strained and somewhat adversarial relationship between wild-child Jolie and quiet Dylan had been legendary in Eagle Valley High School, now that she thought about it.
Mike laughed. “Yes, she did. She and Dylan worked things out.”
“I guess so.”
Georgina was following the conversation with interest and Mike glanced over at her and laughed again. “I’ll get you that mixture of bulbs and maybe we can put them in this weekend.”
“We?” Molly asked on a note of amusement.
“If you needed help, that is.”
“I think we’ll need a lot of help,” Molly said with a smile. If he wanted to help, she wasn’t going to stop him.
They talked for a few more minutes about colors, and then Mike’s phone rang from inside his house and he excused himself.
“I like him,” Georgina said as she and Molly walked to their back door. She shot Molly a look. “You’re going to fill in the gaps about this Dylan guy and his fiancée. Right?”
“I don’t know a lot,” Molly said as she opened the front door. “Dylan was really quiet and hardworking and Jolie was outgoing. Kind of a live-for-today girl.”
“Just like you?” Georgina asked with mock innocence.
“Exactly,” Molly replied. Because she was going to be more like that. Work in progress, et cetera. “All I remember is that they somehow drifted into nemesis territory due to being partnered up in some class and her not taking it seriously enough and him being worried about his GPA.”
“And now they’re getting married.”
“Yes.” Molly headed for the fridge. So very romantic. She wished them well, but hearts-and-flowers romance had been stomped out of her by the lights of reality being snapped on in her own relationship, brilliantly exposing the truth that lay before her and leaving her blinking.
She was still blinking a little. Blake had not only robbed her of most of her savings, he’d robbed her of her hard-won self-confidence. She’d fought to rebuild it little by little, but she hadn’t been able to let go of her resentment. It’d be a while before she could.
“I thought we’d microwave lasagna tonight.” The microwave was truly their best friend with their crammed schedules—which was why having a two-hour break to eat an actual dinner between her afternoon and evening classes was gold. “I made a salad.”
Molly drifted over to the counter and pulled a small tomato out of the mixture of greens and popped it into her mouth. She’d skipped lunch and was famished. “Sounds good.”
Georgina pulled the aluminum tray out of the freezer. “This Dylan is hot prom guy’s cousin, right?”
“Homecoming guy. He is.”
“But you liked him better.”
He didn’t screw me over, so yes. “He’s a nice guy. How were your classes today?”
The corners of her sister’s eyes crinkled as Molly firmly redirected the conversation away from “hot prom guy.” “Excellent. How was your day?”
“Excellent.” Molly used the hand-carved wooden tongs she and Blake had bought on a Mexican vacation to lift salad into a bowl. She’d gotten rid of most of her past, but some things stayed, for practical purposes. “They’re always excellent in the beginning. You know—when everyone has high expectations for themselves and not too much reality has set in.”
Except for in Finn’s case. She’d slammed that reality home there.
She’d address that tonight. She wasn’t exactly going to apologize, but she was going to explain what she thought might be going on. Not a conversation she was looking forward to, but one they needed to have. If he showed up to class.
* * *
FINN DID NOT show up for class.
Molly found her head coming up every time she heard the door to the main entrance, only a few yards down the hall from her classroom, open and close again. Finally she closed the door to her room so that she focused only on her class and not on the reasons Finn wasn’t there.
She knew why Finn wasn’t there. But she didn’t know what she was going to do about it.
What could she do?
Relax and enjoy teaching.
Not having Finn there made her feel as if she owned her classroom again—which was annoying. Of course she owned her classroom, but when Finn was there...she felt as if she were being judged. It made her thoughts trip over themselves, which wasn’t conducive to great lesson delivery.
Tonight her lecture flowed. She gave amusing sentence examples, had the class engaged for the entire fifty minutes. No stumbling about for explanations, no quick glances to a specific area of a classroom just to check whether or not one specific student was smirking a little.
After class ended, she explained a few finer points of the essay assignment with Debra and Mr. Reed, a sweet man in his late sixties, listened to Denny’s take on higher education, then turned off the lights and locked up the room, telling herself she should feel great. Class had gone very, very well.
But you’re tougher than this. You should be able to teach regardless of who’s sitting in the back row, history or no history.
Molly hated it when the nagging little voice in the back of her mind pointed out things she didn’t want to hear. She’d returned to the Eagle Valley because she’d wanted a nice, stable, unsurprising life in a nice, stable community. Getting the position at the community college had been a godsend. She’d been so very happy with how well things were working out, so determined to do the best job she could teaching her new students—right up until Finn had appeared in her life again and she’d indulged in her red pen revenge.
That wasn’t what a good teacher did, and beyond that, driving students away wouldn’t do her professional reputation any good. This job was important to her. She didn’t want to jeopardize it.
* * *
THE CLOCK SAID English class was halfway over and Finn felt nothing but relief at the fact that he wasn’t there.
Liar.
Okay, part of him felt relief that he wasn’t there and the other part thought he should have sucked it up and gone. He’d never quit anything in his life, and not going to class bordered on cowardly behavior. But what was the point, when he was going to drop the class anyway?
The point was that Molly was going to think she’d won.
Finn flipped through the channels a couple dozen more times, then got to his feet and grabbed his jacket so he could head to McElroy’s Bar. There probably wouldn’t be many people there on a weeknight, but Finn needed to do something other than sit in front of the TV and feel like he’d let himself down.
The lot was almost empty when Finn parked, but he figured he’d have one beer, talk to Jim McElroy and then head home again. He enjoyed getting out, being around people, but when he pulled open the heavy wooden bar door, the usual pleasant anticipation for the evening ahead was replaced with the feeling that he was avoiding the real issue in his life. Probably because he was. He didn’t really want to go to McElroy’s. He just didn’t want to be alone with his annoying thoughts.
Finn walked into the bar and paused just inside the door. The place was relatively empty, as he’d suspected. Wyatt Bauer was there leaning on the bar, staring at the sports news that played over Jim McElroy’s head. His eyes were glazed over and Finn wondered if the guy was even aware of what was happening on the screen, or if he was asleep with his eyes open.
“Hey, Wyatt,” he said as he walked by. Wyatt grunted in return. He was awake.
“Usual?” Jim asked.
“Sure.”
Jim poured a dark beer and set it in front of the stool Finn had settled on. “Haven’t seen you much since you got back,” he commented.
Finn gave a casual shrug. “Readjusting.” Which was true. He hadn’t seen action overseas, but the experience had changed him in ways he hadn’t expected. For instance, he knew now, more than ever, that he did not want to end up like Wyatt—a walking cautionary tale staring glassily at the television screen.
Jim gave a casual nod, then glanced up as the door opened again.
“Look who’s here,” a familiar voice said from behind Finn.
“We thought you were missing in action!” an almost identical voice chimed in.
Finn turned on his stool as the Tyrone brothers came in. “Just lying low,” he said. “You know...avoiding people such as yourselves.”
“I assume you’re buying after insulting us,” Terry, the older of the two brothers, said as he clapped a heavy hand on Finn’s back.
“I hadn’t really considered it.”
“Best reconsider,” Lowell said.
Finn signaled Jim, who nodded before turning to the taps. Terry and Lowell pulled up stools and after Jim set the drafts in front of them, they commenced catching Finn up on who had done what during the time he’d been gone. Not that long of a time really, but it seemed as if there’d been a lot of marriages and breakups and job changes while he’d been away.
Terry glanced at his watch when Jim asked if he wanted another beer, then practically jumped off his seat. “Gotta go. I promised Janice I’d be home ten minutes ago.”
“Trouble?” Finn asked. Terry had never been all that concerned about getting home before, but then Janice was usually there with him.
“There have been some new developments on the home front,” Terry said with a half smile before downing the last gulp of beer and setting the mug back on the bar. “I’m going to be a dad in three months. Got to start setting a good example for my kids.”
“Plural?”
“Twins.”
“Unfortunately, his newfound Mr. Mom status is screwing with my social life,” Lowell muttered. “We never go out and when we do, we have to be home at nine. How am I supposed to meet women?”
“Go without your brother?” Finn said.
“I need a wingman.”
Sadly true. Lowell never did anything alone. “Do not look at me,” Finn said.
“What? You have something better to do?”
“Maybe I’m getting old.” He drained the last of his beer, then looked up to find the brothers staring at him. “It happens to the best of us.”
Finn lingered after the Tyrone brothers left. He could talk to Jim.
“So what are you doing now that you’re back?” Jim asked as he wiped the immaculate bar yet another time. He tossed the bar towel into the bin under the bar, then waited for Finn to answer.
“Working at the store.”
“Taking it over again?”
“For the time being.”
“It’s changed,” Jim said. “All those gifts and things.”
“It used to be a lot quieter,” Finn agreed. “It’s more pleasant now in a lot of ways, and Mike’s really happy, but I don’t know. I guess I’m not used to it yet.”
“Not the place you left.”
“Not even close.”
Jim smiled a little. “Time marches on.”
Finn nodded in agreement. He pulled out his wallet and found a ten.
“Come back on Saturday,” Jim suggested as Finn headed to the door. “I have a band coming in.”
Finn raised a hand in acknowledgment, then pushed his way out the heavy wooden door and stepped into the chilly night air, knowing full well he wouldn’t be back. A cloud moved over the moon as he walked to his truck, but the sky was relatively clear. The predicted rain had apparently bypassed them and he was okay with that. He had to replace one of the haystack tarps that had a rip.
There was nothing wrong with tightening and replacing tarps on haystacks. Not one thing. But it wasn’t what he wanted to do anymore.
