"I'm leaving, Hank!" she yelled.
"You've got twenty minutes left!" he objected. "And you just took a break."
"I'm leaving, Hank!" she yelled again. "I have this ... problem."
She turned and stared at Kris.
"Really," he said, shrugging. "You don't have to ... "
She held up one hand, as if she were a traffic cop showing him the stop sign. His mouth snapped shut.
"Are you ready to go?" she asked sweetly.
"Better do it, man," came suggestions from three different booths nearby.
Kris craned his neck to see who had spoken, but all the men were busy with their meals. He winced as partially healed muscle strains in his neck made themselves known. One man glanced up and jerked his head toward Lou Anne. Then he was eating again, as if nothing had happened.
Kris stood up. "Really, Lou Anne, I ... "
"Get your coat!" she snapped.
There was a low murmur from the booths behind Kris. He was quite sure he heard a male voice say, "Get moving bud!" and another one say, "No fair!" He leaned over and picked up his coat, not sure what to think. He'd taken only two steps towards the waitress when she turned and strode out of the diner.
She didn't hold the door open for him.
Chapter Nine
Men were pressed up against the glass of the front windows as Lou Anne put her car in reverse and backed up.
"Damn!" said Randy Thornton and handed a dollar to Butch Flannery. "He actually made it into the car!"
"Keep watching!" yelled Tim Clark. "She's going to kick him out within two blocks."
"Bull!" snorted the Reverend William Hoskins, minister of the Third Avenue United Church of Christ. "She's an angel of mercy. I think our Lulu will take good care of the poor man." He watched as Lou Anne's car made it to the street light at the corner of Hickory and Madison, and held out his hand to Tim. Tim sighed and put a dollar in it.
"Don't you go to hell for betting?" complained Tim. "Or for saying bull?"
"Wasn't really a bet," said Reverend Hoskins. "I knew what she'd do." He smiled. "And bull is just a vigorous way of saying nonsense."
"Who do you suppose he really is?" asked Joe Peters, who had also lost money that morning.
"What's the skinny on him?" asked Phil Zucker. "I didn't hear about it yet."
"Turned up half dead over on Hopkins Lane," said Hank, who was watching with the rest of them. "He was lying in the snow, all by hisself, all torn up. Lulu put him in her car and took him to the emergency room."
"That little slip of a girl muscled
him
into her car?" Phil sounded doubtful.
"An angel of mercy," sighed Reverend Hoskins. "God gives strength to those in need."
Several men groaned at the impromptu sermon and there was a generalized movement back to their tables and meals.
"I heard he don't know who he is and can't remember nothing," said Gerald Witherspoon.
"One of us should have gone with her," said Tim Clark. "What if he tries to hurt her?"
"I'll take that bet," laughed Hank. "How much you want to lose, Tim?"
"I'm just saying," said Tim, picking up his fork. "Maybe he's fooling about not being able to remember anything."
"We'll just have to keep a watchful eye on him," said the preacher.
"How we gonna do that?" asked Phil.
"You all heard the man. He's got no car and no clothes. We'll just have to be neighborly and check in on him once in a while. I'm sure all you men have something you're not using that could make his life a little better."
"But he's an outsider!" complained Gerald.
Reverend Hoskins' voice was stern. "He's a man lost in the wilderness, Gerry, and he's with a young woman we all care a great deal for. It's our Christian duty to keep an eye on both of them." He smiled. "Besides, she just won me a dollar. I owe her."
The young woman the preacher was talking about was driving along, staring at the road ahead and not talking.
"Thank you," said Kris, trying to lighten the mood.
"Don't thank me yet," said Lou Anne. "We're taking a little detour before I take you home."
"Oh?"
"We're going to pick up my son and you're going to baby-sit him while I get some sleep. Then I'll take you shopping, to get the essentials, and
then
I'll take you home."
"You're taking me to your house?" His voice rose. "Isn't that a little dangerous?"
She looked over at him. Her hair covered her right eye, but the other one seemed to bore into his insides. "And why would it be dangerous?" she asked. "You said yourself, you're not a mobster."
"Well I'm not," he said. "But we just met. You're being awfully trusting."
"If I find out I can't trust you, I'll just cut your balls off," she said carelessly.
"What?" His voice held shock.
"Aren't
you
being awfully trusting?" she said, glancing at him.
They picked up Ambrose, which surprised Roslynn, of course. Ambrose didn't seem surprised, though, and got down to the business of being curious about Kris immediately. Roslynn was curious too, but not quite so openly. Her raised eyebrow expressed it to her charge's mother.
"It's a long story," said Lou Anne, picking up Ambrose and hugging him. "I'll tell you all about it later."
"I can't wait," said Roslynn, meaning it.
In the car Ambrose kept up a stream of questions from his car seat. He wanted to know who Kris was and why his face had all those marks on it and where he lived and if he had a little boy too. Kris turned around and talked to the boy, explaining that he couldn't remember very much because he'd been in an accident.
"Your mommy helped me," he said. "She took me to the hospital."
"The adventure!"
shouted Ambrose. "Mommy
told
me about it! I made you a card."
Lou Anne reached for the card, which was still in a tray under the dashboard, and handed it to Kris. Then she let them discuss the card and drove, wondering if she really was being foolish to take this unknown man to her home and trust him with her son. She slowed as she came to the place where she'd picked Kris up, and rolled to a stop.
"This is where I found you," she said.
He looked around and shrugged his shoulders. "If you say so."
They went on, while Kris continued to talk to Ambrose, telling him everything he could remember, with the exception of running over a man in a city somewhere. He was just finishing his story of getting served breakfast by Ambrose's mother when they pulled up to the house.
Lou Anne lay in bed. She couldn't sleep, even though she was tired. Her son was out there in the living room with a strange man. She'd tried to tell herself it was fine, that she had no reason to believe he was anything other than a nice man with amnesia ... but she still couldn't sleep. Even taking the keys to the car into the bedroom with her hadn't helped.
She got up, put on her robe, and went to the door silently. She eased it open and then crept down the hallway until she could peek into the living room. She could hear Kris' voice.
He was sitting on the couch, with Ambrose sitting next to him. They were reading a book. Kris read a line and Ambrose corrected him. At four, Ambrose knew what the book said, even if he couldn't quite read every single word without help.
"You're pretty smart," said Kris.
"Yup," said Ambrose, as if that were common knowledge. "Read some more. I'll help you when you need it."
It all looked so normal to Lou Anne. She felt her muscles relax and turned around. She had to get some sleep, then she could figure out what to do about the man who fate had decided to drop into her life.
She woke five hours later, knowing she'd heard a shout, and got up immediately. She almost ran to the living room, tying the belt of her robe around her as she went.
She found them in the tiny dining room and gawked. Her old computer, which had been sitting in a box waiting to be taken to the recycling center, had been set up on the table. Kris was sitting in a chair, with Ambrose in another chair beside him. Kris' fingers flew across the keyboard, while Ambrose talked.
"And then the robot stepped on the house -
smash!
" yelled Ambrose.
"Keep it down!" cautioned Kris. "Remember, your mother is still sleeping."
"No she's not," said Ambrose, pointing. "She's right there." He jumped off the chair and ran to get a hug.
"Hi," said Kris. "We're writing a story."
"I thought that thing was broken," she said.
"I think the connection on one of the cards was just corroded or something," he said. "I took the liberty of playing around with it. I didn't figure you wanted me messing with the new one." He glanced over at the computer Lou Anne had upgraded to.
"You fixed it?"
"It booted up," he said, shrugging. "I figured I'd try writing something. Ambrose was helping me. He's got a very vivid imagination for a four year old."
"Kris is writing me a book!" announced Ambrose.
"Well, a story anyway," said Kris, smiling.
"And I told him what to write," said Ambrose proudly.
"Well good for you!" said Lou Anne, roughing up his hair. "Now, I need to get you some lunch, then we're all going shopping and I'm going to take Kris to his new house. How does that sound?"
"Yay!" said Ambrose, jumping up and down.
"We've got a lot of stuff," said Kris, looking at the shopping cart, which was mostly full.
"Without a car you're going to have to survive on your own for a while," said Lou Anne. "Jess and I will check in on you, but it won't be every day. When you get the phone hooked up you can just call one of us when you need to go somewhere. Besides, you need to stay there most of the time. You have a book to write."
"I can do the outline with paper and pencil," he said. "But I don't think I want to write the whole thing that way. I'll have to get a computer, and a job so I have the money to do that."
"Why don't you use my old one?" she asked. "I was going to throw it out anyway."
"That would be really nice," he said. "You're being awfully nice to me, you know."
"Why wouldn't I?" she asked. "Now, what kind of vegetables do you like?"
When they pulled into the driveway, Kris was not just surprised-he was astonished. It was a nice house. The yard and house were covered with a thick layer of snow, but he could still see it was a well kept and spacious place.
"Wow," said Lou Anne. "Maybe you're rich after all. This is a lot nicer than where I live." She got out. "Should have gotten you a snow shovel."
"I'm going to be in debt for the rest of my life," he moaned. "We spent over three hundred dollars!"
"Well, you said you were going to get a job of some kind," said Lou Anne, picking up a sack of groceries.
Ambrose had carried the toilet paper and paper towels on his lap, and there had even been a sack of stuff between Kris' legs in the front. It took them eight trips to get everything out of the trunk and passenger compartment of the car. The depth of the snow prevented Ambrose from carrying anything except the paper goods and even then he struggled. By the time they got done, though, they'd packed down a trail from the driveway to the door.
The inside of the house was as nice as the outside, though barely above freezing. The first thing Lou Anne did was find the thermostat and turn it up. Then she unpacked bags and started putting things away in the cupboards.
"I can do that," he said.
"Of course you can," she said. "But you'd put them in the wrong places." She grinned at him. "I'll just get you started off right."
She inspected the refrigerator and pronounced it clean, then tested the microwave.
"It's good that it's furnished," she said, looking around. She climbed the stairs to the loft that overlooked the living room. "It's also a good thing we didn't get those queen sheets," she announced. "It's got a king size bed." She came back down. "I'll get you some sheets and bring them to you as soon as I can. You have the blankets for tonight and it's warming up already."
"I'll be fine," he said, looking around. "I can't thank you enough. You've done way more than you had to."
She turned and looked at him. "My grandmother used to say that if you saved someone's life, it belonged to you and you were responsible for taking care of it."