Читать книгу The 39-Year-Old Virgin - Marie Ferrarella, Marie Ferrarella - Страница 10

But instead of heading for the door the way he’d expected her to, Claire asked him to indulge her for a moment.

It occurred to Caleb that, up to this point, he’d actually been talking to the Claire from his past. Twenty-two years did a lot to change a person and he really didn’t know the woman beside him at all, just who she had been.

“Exactly what do you have in mind?” he wanted to know.

“It won’t take long, I promise,” she told him. As she spoke, she carelessly placed a hand to his chest, as if to hold him in place. She was a toucher, he remembered. It was one of the things that had set his young heart pounding and his mind spinning romantic scenarios. God, had he ever really been that young? “Wait right here.”

Puzzled, he did as she asked. He had no idea what was on her mind until he saw her burrow her way into the throng and corner a vivacious-looking brunette. The latter’s abbreviated dress appeared to be half a size too small in all possible directions.

The next moment, she was edging the woman out of the crowd. Bringing her back to the table. Trailing after the woman, looking mildly interested, was the man who’d just been gyrating with the brunette on the dance floor.

“Kelly, you have to watch the purses,” Claire told her friend. “Nancy got an emergency call so she went home, and I’m leaving.”

The woman referred to as Kelly looked past Claire and directly at him. The grin on the brunette’s face was so wide Caleb suspected he could have driven a squad car through it without touching either corner.

“You got lucky,” Kelly cried with triumphant glee, the man standing behind her temporarily forgotten. “First time out, too.”

“Yes, I got lucky,” Claire responded. “Because I ran into an old friend. He’s taking me home.”

The moment she said it, referring to Caleb as a friend, it felt a little odd. She’d never thought of him that way before. The last time she’d seen him, he had been wearing pajamas embossed with figures from a Saturday-morning cartoon show and his head had barely reached her chin. Short for his age, the boy she remembered bore next to no resemblance to the man standing by her right now. This man all but reeked of quiet self-confidence. And masculinity.

“I should have old friends like that,” Kelly murmured, her eyes sweeping over him appreciatively. “Go, don’t worry about anything.” She leaned into Claire. “Purses would be the last thing on my mind if I were going home with someone like that.”

Claire shook her head. Obviously, Kelly was going to think what she wanted to think. “G’night, Kelly,” she said, turning away from the table.

“Ready?” Caleb asked patiently.

“Absolutely.” She’d had enough of this kind of singles’ club to last a lifetime.

“Be gentle with her,” Kelly called after them.

When Caleb turned around to look at the brunette, she winked at him. Not flirtatiously, but as if he and she were privy to some shared secret.

Noting the wink, Claire picked up her pace, weaving her way to the front entrance.

The moment they stepped outside and the door closed behind them, Claire paused to take in a deep breath, savoring the cool air. It had been hot and stuffy inside; all those bodies packed into such a small space had generated a lot of heat.

She savored the quiet even more. The old line about not being able to hear herself think ran through her head. There was a great deal of truth in that, Claire mused.

And then she looked at Caleb. She was rather good at reading body language. His said he was running low on patience. Nodding off toward the left, he began walking.

“I’m sorry about Kelly,” she told him.

His hand lightly pressing the small of her back, Caleb guided her toward the side parking lot. As far as he knew, she hadn’t done anything annoying or offensive. “What are you sorry about?”

“Kelly views any male over the age of eighteen as fair game.” It felt awkward, talking about dating with him, even nebulously. That in itself felt strange. She’d never had trouble talking about anything before. She’d lost count of all the times she’d answered shy, misguided questions about sex from adolescents who hadn’t a clue about what was going on with them.

Well, she’d started this, she had to finish it. Gracefully, if possible. “Kelly seems to think I have to make up for lost time and I think she pegged you as my initiator.”

He stopped walking and looked at Claire. She’d lost him. “Initiator for…?”

She put it in as formal terms as she could. “My entrance into the world of romantic liaisons.” Caleb was shaking his head. Again, there was just the barest whisper of a smile on his lips. The Caleb she remembered was always grinning. What had changed that? she wondered. “What?”

He directed her over to his Mercury sedan, digging into the front pocket of his jeans for the key.

“You still talk flowery. I used to like listening to you talk, even when I didn’t have a clue what you were talking about. It sounded pretty.” The truth of it was, he loved the sound of her voice. He used to pray his parents would go out for the evening so that she would come over and babysit him. Or, as she had referred to it, “young man sit” with him. Looking back, he realized that she was always careful not to bruise his young ego. “I thought that maybe you were going to be a writer or something.”

That occupation had merited about five minutes of consideration before she’d discarded the idea. “I liked to read more than I liked to write, so I opted to become ‘or something.’”

Caleb unlocked the passenger-side door and then held it open for her. The thought that she had certainly become “something” whispered across his mind. “I always wondered, why a convent?”

Getting in, Claire buckled up, then sat back in the seat. She tried to relax, but some of the residual tension refused to leave her body.

“Lots of reasons, I guess. They all seemed very viable at the time.” She’d wanted to serve God and help humanity. Did that sound as hopelessly idealistic as she thought it did? She glanced at Caleb as he got in behind the steering wheel. “But they’re all behind me now.”

He knew she was saying she didn’t want to talk about it, that the subject was private. He could more than relate to that even though a part of him remained curious.

“Fair enough,” he allowed. “So you’re going to teach, huh?”

“Yes. I’m a little nervous,” she admitted freely. “But I am really looking forward to it.” The last class she’d taught was more than a year ago and it had been halfway around the world. They had been happy to get anyone. She considered herself lucky that the school here had accepted her. “I’ve always liked kids—and I’d like to think they like me.”

Leaving the parking lot, he nodded. “They probably do,” he said matter-of-factly.

Claire grinned. “And you know this for a fact.”

He surprised her by giving her a serious answer. “You don’t talk down to them,” he told her. “That’s what I liked about you.” One of many, many things, but he didn’t add that. The thoughts of a preadolescent boy belonged in the past. “You didn’t make me feel like some dumb little kid you could boss around.”

Never once did she lord it over him, even though he knew that he would have willingly submitted to her authority, just to have her there.

“That’s because you weren’t some dumb little kid,” she pointed out. “You were very smart—even if you pretended not to be.” His eyebrows narrowed in a quizzical glance he sent her way. “All those homework problems you used to ask me to help you with,” she recalled for his benefit. “I knew you could do them on your own.”

He’d forgotten about that. Forgotten a lot about his earlier life, the way things were when he was growing up and believed the world held so much promise. “What gave me away?”

“You ‘caught on’ much too quickly when I helped you with your math homework. You would have had to have understood the principle to some extent for that to have happened.” She smiled at him fondly, remembering evenings in the kitchen with books spread out, his and hers. She’d thought of him as the little brother she hadn’t been allowed to have. Michael, who had died long before he was a year old. “I think you were trapped between wanting me to spend time with you, helping you with your homework, and struggling to keep from trying to impress me with how bright you really were.”

He laughed quietly to himself. She’d hit the nail dead on its head. “You shouldn’t have become a nun, you should have become a detective.”

“I’ll keep that in mind as a backup career if teaching and nursing don’t pan out.”

He took a left turn at the end of the next long block, passing by a newly constructed strip mall. “You’re a nurse, too?”

She nodded. The order she’d joined had specifically encouraged her educational pursuits. “I thought getting a nursing degree would come in handy in the places that the order kept sending me to.”

“And that was?”

She rattled off the names of several small countries, some of which had already changed their name again. “Africa, for the most part,” she added, since that was the easiest way to keep track.

He could have easily made the yellow light up ahead before it turned red, but instead, he eased his foot off the gas pedal, switching to the brake. The vehicle slowly came to a stop.

The moment that it did, Caleb turned to look at her in sheer awe, her words playing themselves over in his head. Try as he might, he couldn’t picture her braving the elements, going from village to village, dispensing hope and medicine. It was difficult enough picturing her in the traditional garb of a Dominican Sister, swaddled from head to foot in black with white contrasts and roasting beneath the hot, merciless sun.

He couldn’t have explained why, but he was suddenly glad that was all behind her.

Very little really surprised him. Somewhere along the line, between his work and Jane’s death, he’d lost the ability to be amazed. But this came close.

“You went to Africa?” he finally asked. “On your own?”

Being in Africa for all those long periods of time had a great deal to do with who she’d been and who she had become. “Yes, why?”

He shrugged. The light turned green and they continued on their way. “I just thought you were in some cloistered place, far away from everyone.” Like Rapunzel in the tower, he remembered thinking. He’d been baptized Catholic at birth, but neither he nor his parents before him had ever really taken an active part in any organized religion. And Jane had been a free spirit, embracing everything, singling out nothing. His image of what nuns actually did was very limited. “Fingering your beads and praying.”

Someone else might have taken offense at the near flippant way he regarded those who had dedicated themselves to the religious life, but she knew he didn’t mean to sound belittling. Something else was going on, something he tried to keep buried. Maybe it had to do with his line of work. She’d known more than one burned-out police officer.

“Praying was a large part of it,” she acknowledged, “but God helps those who help themselves. In my case, I was the one doing the helping.”

“In Africa,” he repeated, the slightest trace of wonder creeping into his voice.

“That’s right.”

Caleb thought about some of the articles he’d read in the newspaper and heard on the news over the years. Stories about wars between African factions and atrocities that were committed. “Were you ever in any danger?”

She inclined her head. “At times.” Her tone made light of the admission. She’d never been the type to seek the spotlight for its own sake, only as a necessary evil when focusing on raising funds to buy the simplest of supplies for the villages she went to. “One of the biggest dangers I faced was finding someplace to wash that didn’t have a hippo in it. They’re not the docile creatures everyone thinks they are. They can get pretty nasty. Makes you see the world in a different light and makes you truly grateful for the simplest modern convenience.” She grinned. “Like toilet paper.”

He listened quietly. When she paused, he commented, “I can see why you’d want to leave that.”

He’d misunderstood her meaning, she thought. “I never minded the harsh conditions. It was a small price to pay for being able to help people, to do some good for those less fortunate. Some of the things I’ve seen could break your heart,” she said with a heartfelt sigh. “I might even opt to go back someday.”

He frowned. Was she having a change of heart? “Then you think you’ll reenlist?”

“Reenlist?” she echoed, amused by the term.

He made a sharp left. She caught herself leaning into him. “As a nun.”

“Anything’s possible,” she allowed. “But at this point, I don’t really think I’m going to ‘reenlist’ in the order. Besides, my being part of a religious order was neither a plus nor a minus when it came to the work I was doing in Africa. I can just as easily go back there as a civilian.”

In some ways, she added silently, it might even be easier that way. They wouldn’t be turning to her, expecting answers to the questions that troubled their souls. Because she didn’t feel as if she had the answers any longer. If anything, she shared their questions.

“Do you want to?” he asked bluntly.

Claire pressed her lips together, suppressing a sigh as Caleb drove down the street that led to the far-side entrance to her development.

“I’m not sure what I want right now,” Claire told him honestly. “Other than doing whatever’s necessary to make sure my mother gets well.”

“What does she have?”

The word all but burned on her tongue as she said it. “She has acute leukemia. It seems that she’s had it for a while now, but I just found out recently.”

He wasn’t all that familiar with the ramifications of the disease, but he knew it wasn’t anything good. “I’m sorry.”

She appreciated his sentiment, but she wasn’t going to let dark thoughts get the better of her. She was here to raise her mother’s spirits and do anything else she could for her, not to let her own spirits drag her down.

“It’s not necessarily a death sentence,” she told him. She’d done her homework. “There’ve been plenty of people who have had long remissions.”

He made another right turn, slowing his pace down to twenty miles an hour, then spared her a glance. “You’re still an optimist, even after working in third-world countries?”

Despite working in third-world countries, she corrected silently.

Working in Africa was what had started the ball rolling to her ultimately leaving the order. Ever since she’d been a child she’d been taught that God wasn’t to be questioned, that His ways weren’t to be measured by the same rules as those that were applied to the people He’d created.

But, try as she might, she just couldn’t help herself. Couldn’t completely lock away the horror and the feeling of disappointment she’d experienced, and kept experiencing, whenever she thought of all the children who had died of the plague in that one village. All the children she hadn’t been able to help.

She’d been sent there, she’d really believed, to act as an instrument of God—and still she couldn’t save them, couldn’t help.

Because He hadn’t helped.

These were all thoughts she couldn’t voice, couldn’t even find any relief by talking about to the people who could give her some insight into the matter. She knew she would be told she was being blasphemous. And maybe she was, but she couldn’t just accept that, in some way, God couldn’t be held accountable for all those young lives that had been cut so short.

Caleb glanced at her again and she realized that he was waiting for her to say something.

“Not as much of an optimist as I once was,” she finally replied, saying each word carefully.

“But you still are one,” he pointed out.

She supposed that was what kept her going, what made her still think that what she did made a difference in the grand scheme of things. “Yes.”

“Why?”

The single word was razor sharp. Was he challenging her? Or was he somehow asking her to give him an explanation so that he could find his way to optimism himself?

She did her best to make him understand. “Because without optimism, we can’t go on. Optimism is just hope dressed up in formal clothes. And without hope, the soul has nothing to cling to, the spirit dies.”

Caleb laughed shortly. “Yeah, tell me about it.”

Claire eyed this familiar stranger who’d reentered her life after all these years. His profile had gone rigid, as if he’d suddenly realized he’d just let something slip that wasn’t supposed to be exposed. Her need to help, to comfort, to make things better, surfaced instantly.

“Maybe you can tell me,” she coaxed.

“Sisters can hear confessions now?” Caleb said to her flippantly.

“Is it something you need to confess, Caleb?” she asked gently.

This was getting far too personal. He didn’t want her digging around in his life, even if her intentions were altruistic. “Just a play on words, Claire. I don’t have anything to confess.”

She regarded him for a long moment. “That would make you a minority of one.”

“No, just someone who doesn’t believe.” He squinted slightly as he tried to make out a street sign. This was the old development. He’d grown up here, but it had been a long time since he’d been back. His parents had moved shortly after Claire had left to join the order and he had had no reason to return.

“In confession?” she asked, although she had a feeling that his meaning was broader.

The next moment, her fears were confirmed. “In anything.”

There was loneliness in his words, whether he knew it or not. It horrified her that Caleb felt so alone, so adrift. But telling him that would only make things worse.

Still, she didn’t want to just drop the subject, either, so she tried to make light of it and hope that he’d wind up wanting to talk. “Well, that certainly is a sweeping statement.”

Where was all this coming from? He didn’t usually talk, much less open parts of himself up. Had to be because of what day it was, he thought.

I miss you, Jane. “Sorry, didn’t mean to get this serious.”

She hated to see any creature in pain, she always had. “If you ever want to talk, you know where to find me.”

“I don’t,” Caleb told her sharply. “Want to talk,” he clarified. “There’s nothing to talk about.” Pressing down on the gas pedal, he made short work of the last half block. “We’re here,” he announced.

Pulling up in the driveway beside the vintage vehicle her father had left her mother, he put his car into Park, but didn’t turn off the ignition. The car continued to hum quietly, like a tamed cheetah, waiting for the time it could stretch its legs again.

Claire got out of the car. She sensed that he wanted to make a quick getaway. Even so, she asked, “Would you like to come in for some coffee?”

Despite his desire to escape, he was tempted. For oldtimes’ sake. But he knew it was for the best if he just got going. So he shook his head. “I’m already pretty late.”

So he’d mentioned earlier, she thought. “Right. I’m sorry, I’m keeping you from your son and your wife.”

His expression darkened for a moment, as if something painful had gripped him in its claws, but he made no comment other than “G’night.”

The next second, he was pulling out of her driveway and speeding away.