Almost Perfect (10 page)

Snorting at the idea, Cleo climbed down. Stick with lemonade. That was at least something she knew how to do.

The kids started chattering the instant she carried the
tray of glasses into their hideaway. They blossomed with a little attention, and for a brief moment she felt as if she'd finally learned to do something right. Then she noticed how proudly they showed off their new clothes, and she knew she had only done it half right. Jared had gone all the way by interfering where she never would.

And she'd been wrong. Linda hadn't come after him with a hatchet for buying the kids what she couldn't afford. If it had been Cleo, she would have taken his head off with hedge clippers, but she had a hard time remembering other people weren't like her. One of her less intelligent traits.

She sat on a log, sipped her iced drink from a plastic cup, and listened to Gene chatter about the new wrestling coach they'd have next week. It had never occurred to her that she could simply walk into the school, give them money, and they'd buy equipment to start a team. There had to be more to it than that, but Jared had pulled it off. Maybe his famous name had helped, but she had to admire the guts and sense it took to go for it. So maybe she shouldn't be so hard on him. Just because he was handsome and rich and a jerk didn't mean he didn't have any redeeming qualities.

She was going to have to break down and thank him.

She postponed the inevitable by gesturing at Kismet's sketchpad. “What do the teachers at school say about your work?”

She didn't know a thing about drawing, as her pitiful mechanical sketches proved, but maybe she ought to show Kismet's book to Jared, see if he could encourage the girl. Unfortunately, Kismet was dismally shy. She'd disappear into the ground if Cleo tried pushing her too far.

Kismet shook her head, and smiled quietly as her fingers fluttered over the array of stubby pencils she'd collected
over the years. Cleo had bought her an expensive art set for Christmas, but she'd never seen it again after Kismet took it home with her. Cleo didn't think Linda could pawn an art set, but she might have sold it to a friend desperate for a last-minute Christmas gift.

There had been a time when she'd sold her own wedding ring and a birthday necklace from her sister to get a quick fix.

She didn't like looking back at those times. She was getting better. She'd never be cured, but even if she couldn't change her nature, every step she took away from the stress and horror of her prior life took her further from the evil temptations of her past. She had to believe that or kill herself.

“You know Jared draws, don't you?” she asked, uncertain how much Kismet actually observed or understood.

The girl nodded, and Gene wandered over to claim his share of the attention. “I showed her the cartoon in the newspaper,” he boasted. “He does them on the computer, not on any silly piece of paper.”

“He does them on paper, too,” Cleo said quietly. “I have one at the house. Remind me to show you when we go back.”

She didn't have time to register their reaction. The rustling of leaves warned someone approached, even if the peacock hadn't screamed an alarm. She hoped Jared's guests hadn't taken to straying this far inland.

Knocking back a hanging honeysuckle vine, Linda emerged into the clearing. Beneath the brassy blond of her thick hair, her dark roots showed, but Cleo assumed she must have been a natural blond once for the children to have the coloring they did. Succumbing to heaviness in the waist and hips as full-bosomed women often did, the kids' mother still maintained a figure that would stop
men in their tracks, particularly in the tight capri pants and belly-revealing knit tops she favored.

“I've been looking all over for you brats. Get on home now and quit pestering the neighbors.”

Cleo could smell the bourbon from here. Linda wasn't a polite drunk or a druggie who sprawled comatose in doorways. She could be belligerent and nasty-mouthed when under the influence.

The children didn't immediately leap to their mother's command but looked to Cleo for a reassurance she didn't possess. “They're not bothering me, Linda,” she said cautiously. “Want me to send them home in time for dinner?”

Cleo didn't like thinking about how she had looked and behaved when strung out on whatever drug her ex had brought home, but she did have some memory of being steered by a careful choice of words. She figured she had a fifty-fifty chance of that succeeding with Linda now.

Linda looked convincingly bewildered and disarmed enough to give in, but easily distracted she glanced up at the shriek of a peacock and the sound of someone trampling the path on the other side of the clearing.

Cleo uttered a litany of mental curses as Jared navigated the shrubbery. Damn, the man not only had bad timing, he had to look gorgeous while he was at it. With his white linen shirt half unbuttoned to reveal a bronzed chest and a hint of pectorals no nerdy cartoonist should have, his yuppie khaki shorts creased and exposing long, strong legs that would have done a runner proud, he looked the epitome of wealthy manhood. Linda would either run, screaming, in the opposite direction, or suck up big-time.

Cleo intervened before either could happen. “Linda, this is Jared McCloud. He's living down at the beach for
a few months. Jared, the children's mother, Linda Watkins. Kids, why don't you take the cups and pitcher back to the house, okay?” She'd be a real wheeler-dealer one of these days if she managed to keep all these balls rolling in the right direction without colliding.

“I want you brats home by supper, you hear!” Linda shouted after them as they hastened to obey Cleo. “I don't want you living over here no more.”

“You'll be staying home, then?” Cleo had to ask once the children were out of hearing. She noticed Jared kept his mouth shut, for a change.

“I'll have welfare out here nosing around if they don't stay where they belong. I don't want them cutting off my money.” She eyed Jared skeptically. “What you staring at, city boy?”

Cleo gritted her teeth and watched an ant crawl across a rock at her feet. It was so much easier not to get involved when she didn't have neighbors.

“Your children have been quite helpful,” Jared said with careful politeness. “I hope you don't mind if they visit once in a while.”

Cleo could just imagine the kinds of things Mr. America would be thinking about Linda—most of them accurate, if she was to be honest. Still, it rubbed the pain of selfknowledge deeper. She'd been Linda in a former life. Maybe she'd had the sense and the family to rescue her, but she'd been there and seen that bottom and rubbed her nose in the slime.

“Just keep your hands off my kids.” Swaying only slightly, Linda shoved her way back through the shrubbery in the direction of the shack she called home.

Cleo listened to Jared's soft curses for a minute before she settled the roiling in her stomach and managed to stand. She didn't want to look at him. Some days, she
didn't want to look at herself. She started off after the kids without speaking to him.

“Are you going to let those kids go back home to her?” he called after her in a tone of incredulity.

There it was, the challenge she confronted every day of her life. It came in different forms, perhaps, taking a different face each time, but always there. What if someone had said that about Matty and her? What if Maya had given up on her and taken Matty away, or let Social Services take him away? She'd be dead right now.

She snapped a twig from a wax myrtle and didn't face him. “She's their mother. They need her. She needs them. I'm not God.”

She left him to his shock and disbelief and strode away. Someone from his world would never understand. She didn't expect him to.

Let
him
plan for a sunny future and paint rosy pictures of throwing his coins around to make things better. She did well to put one foot in front of the other and survive from one day to the next. She had money now. She knew where the next meal was coming from. It didn't change the mind-set. She lived for the moment, and in that moment, she was leaving Linda to her drunken tirades.

Jared crashed through the bushes after her and grabbed her arm with a strength she couldn't fight. “That's a damned selfish attitude.”

Fighting fury, Cleo looked him full in the eyes. “She's their
mother
. She's the one who rocked their cradles and changed their diapers and gave them names. Do you think there is anyone on the face of this planet who will care for them any more than she does?”

“She's
incapable
of caring for them!” he shouted. “Good grief, woman, can't you see what she is?”

Cleo jerked her arm away. “Yeah, she's lost. She's the mother of two half-black bastards, ostracized by her
family and most of society, a victim of drugs and alcohol and probably abuse and possibly incest and heaven knows what else. Everyone she knows thinks she's worthless.
She
thinks she's worthless. Hell, for all I know, maybe she
is
worthless. I'm just not the one to lay that judgment on her. All right? The kids know where to find me when they need me. That's all I can do, all I'm gonna do. Now go play with your pretty toys and leave us alone.”

Shocked by her attitude, Jared let her go. Cleo didn't look any bigger than the children as she shoved through the shrubbery away from him, but he had the feeling that every fragile inch of that woman's body was packed with dynamite so volatile, it could blow him away. He knew better than to play with dynamite.

Still, the faint fresh smell of her soap stayed with him, mixed with a hint of tar. She'd probably been boobytrapping the road again. He knew she wasn't any sweetness and light socialite like his mother, pouring money on troubled waters. It shouldn't shock him when Cleo threw all his carefully cultivated beliefs back in his face with her callous attitude.

Or maybe shocking him was another one of her methods of scaring him off.

The logical next question was—why did she
want
to scare him off?

He ought to get back to the schoolteachers, but curiosity—probably driven by careening hormones— carried his feet along the path his mysterious landlady had taken.

Jared rolled his eyes in dismay as he reached the lane to the bellow of Cleo's burglar system threatening to shoot intruders, the flapping of her No Trespassing sign up and down in the road, and the sight of the high school vocational education teacher dismantling her nonworking swinging gate. Liz had draped herself over the gate to watch, and Tim leaned against a tree, arms crossed, absorbing the chaos. Having arrived in the forlorn hope of seeing some form of the overdue script, Jared's agent had wandered away from the party, probably looking for him. He now sat on the front step, searching under the porch eaves for the source of the bellows.

Jared saw nary a sight of Cleo and the kids, which was probably a good thing. A
real good thing
.

“I think your party may be getting out of hand,” Tim called from his tree trunk, lifting a beer bottle and gesturing. “They're talking about skinny-dipping down at the beach. I never saw so many teachers get loaded so fast.”

“Great party, Jared,” the vo-ed teacher called as he examined the mechanical gizmo from the gate. “I think I found the problem on this here gate.”

He hadn't found half the problem if he hadn't met Cleo yet. Maybe throwing a little get-together for the teachers to stifle some of the resentment he'd stirred by
finding sponsors for a wrestling team and not funding textbooks hadn't been such a hot idea. So, who knew teachers could cut loose on a few beers? He'd thought he was helping the kids.

“I'm not certain Cleo wants the gate fixed,” he said tentatively, gazing over the vo-ed teacher's shoulder at the broken gizmo.

“Miss Alyssum did this?” The teacher whistled in appreciation and began putting the mechanism back together again. “I need to get her into my mechanics class. Maybe she could persuade the little shits to build something besides bombs.”

“Hey, Jared,” his agent shouted from the porch steps. “How do you turn this thing off? It's creeping me out.”

“Stand up, Georgie,” Jared said wearily, wandering from the gate down the shell walk toward the house. He might as well give up any hope of Cleo speaking to him ever again in this lifetime. In this galaxy.

Bemused, his portly, balding agent shoved up from the step. The bellowing cop shut up instantly. George scratched his neck and inspected the step for wires.

“It's a motion detector, George. Why don't we go back to the house and discuss the extension clause on the contract and leave Miss Alyssum alone.” Jared shoved his hands in the oversize pockets of his khaki cargo shorts and watched the Idea Bulb go off in his agent's head. “Uh-uh, George. She doesn't write books or comics, and if it's a how-to manual you're after, the world isn't ready for it yet.”

“She's got something here, though,” the agent muttered, studying the flapping sign and the nonflapping gate as he wandered back toward the lane. “If I could just—”

“Nope, you can't. Believe it or not, all this stuff is here because Cleo wants
privacy
. Kinda hard to believe, isn't
it? No Trespassing signs meaning privacy? What will the world think of next?” Jared could almost hear Cleo's snicker at that. “Tim, make that damned sign stop flapping and round up your pals and get them out of here, or she'll be letting the snakes loose.”