Small-Town Mom (4 page)

His mother appeared in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. “Hang on a minute. I’ll get my purse and come with you. I need a few things from the grocery superstore that I couldn’t get at the Grand Union in Schroon Lake.” She brushed past him to go to her room.

Eli stifled a groan. It wasn’t that he didn’t like his mother’s company. But every time they went out, she ran into at least five people she knew but hadn’t seen “in ages.” Inevitably, a short trip stretched into a major time drain. He’d hoped to be back to his place in time to catch the Army-Air Force football game at four o’clock. He checked his watch. He still might make it.

Sharing his down time with someone else was taking some getting used to. In the service, his time was regimented, but generally when he was off duty, he was on his own to do as he pleased. Since he’d been back in Paradox Lake, he’d seemed to have a lot more demands on his free time. His mother number one. It was almost as if she was trying to make up for the time he’d been away and her unintentionally ignoring him as a child when she was off in her creative world. His sister may have had the right idea settling in the Albany area, putting a hundred miles between her family and Mom.

“All set.” Mom flashed him a warm smile that made him feel about two feet tall for the unkind thoughts that had gone through his mind.

She hadn’t let the house fall into disrepair on purpose. For the most part, he was sure she hadn’t noticed. When she was busy painting, she didn’t notice much of anything. And the last five years or so, until Grandma’s death last year, Mom had spent winters with her in Florida and hadn’t used the studio here during the cold months.

“Okay.” He opened the door for her. “Do you want me to drop you at the superstore while I go to the hardware?”

“Oh, no. I’ll come to the hardware store with you. I don’t have anything else planned for this afternoon.”

Eli bit the side of his mouth. Mom genuinely liked his company. And it wasn’t that he didn’t like spending time with her. But he had plans for the afternoon. He released the storm door and let it slam shut behind him.

His mother chatted away the entire twenty-minute drive to Ticonderoga. As he pulled into the hardware store parking lot, he checked the dashboard clock and calculated whether he had enough time to take Mom shopping, get back to her house and install the new valve then get to his place in time for kickoff.

“Leah!” a familiar voice from the past called as Eli pushed the door to the hardware store open for his mother.

Edna Donnelly, his high school English teacher, waved them over to where she was standing at the checkout with Harry Stowe, his high school principal. Eli had to smile. The elderly couple was quite the item. After dating for three years, they were planning an all-out June wedding. Mom had kept him up-to-date by email on all of the Paradox Lake social news.

“Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll go back and get what I need.” Eli waved to Edna and Harry and walked toward the plumbing section. He lifted the valve he wanted from the display hook and turned toward the back of the store at the sound of a door opening. A woman emerged from the Employees Only area. Her gaze locked on his.
Charlie Meade—Russell now.
An unpleasant reminder of his past.

She quickly closed the distance between them. “Eli, I heard you were back.”

“It was time to come home.”

She wrinkled her nose in distaste.

“I’m surprised you’re still around.” In high school, Charlie’s number one goal was to leave Paradox Lake. And when his mother kept him up-to-date on Paradox Lake over the years, Charlie wasn’t someone she included in her updates.

“Where else would I be?”

Charlie couldn’t still be carrying a grudge because he hadn’t taken her with him when he left for the service. They hadn’t even been dating seriously. And the lies she’d spread about him afterward… He shook his head.

She glared at him. Evidently, she was still carrying that grudge.

“I’ve got to get back to work.” She turned on her heel and disappeared around the end-cap.

* * *

When Eli approached the checkout, Edna, Harry and his mother were still chatting, along with someone else blocked from his view by Harry and the magazine display.

“JR.” His mother used his childhood nickname, short for junior. The other woman turned, and his gaze locked with the warm brown eyes that had haunted him the past week in the guise of her son, Myles.

“Here’s someone I want you to meet,” she said.

“Eli.” Jamie’s greeting was tentative.

“Hello. Nice to see you again.”

Her eyes reflected the question he’d heard in her voice, as if she thought he was simply being polite. He didn’t do simply polite. It was nice seeing her. He enjoyed running into his students’ parents around town. It lent another dimension to working with the kids. Had his meetings with Jamie left her with that bad of an impression of him? He kind of liked her, and they needed to have at least a cordial relationship if they were going to work together for Myles’s benefit. Eli dismissed the flicker of concern in his gut. He’d only been doing his job.

* * *

“You know each other,” his mother said.

“Yes, he’s Myles’s guidance counselor.” Jamie ran her gaze over the tall commanding man standing next to the diminutive Leah and swallowed to extinguish the flash of attraction that flared. “I had no idea your son, JR, was Eli.”

Leah had been her daughter Opal’s preschool Sunday school teacher, and she’d often talked with Jamie about her son in the Air Force and his early tours in the Middle East as a helicopter pilot. Family in the military had been something they’d had in common when they’d first met. But the nickname, the fact that Leah’s last name was Summers, not Payton… Jamie hadn’t made the connection between them. And she’d stopped going to church long before Eli had returned to Paradox Lake.

Leah laughed. “That’s right. You’ve only been here a few years. You wouldn’t know he’s JR or that I kept my maiden name.”

“I’d never do that,” Edna said, resting her gaze fondly on her octogenarian fiance. “But I know a lot of my students have.”

“I thought I was such a radical back then.”

Leah’s pensive look made Jamie wonder if Leah had regrets, or if she was simply remembering a younger time when she’d made that “radical” decision. A time when she had a doting man like Edna did now. Now that some of her pain had dulled, Jamie found her thoughts going back in time more often.

“I hate to cut our visit short,” Edna said. “We have to get going. Harry wants to watch the Army-Air Force game at four. West Point is his alma mater.”

“Yeah, I want to catch it, too,” Eli said, checking his watch. “But you know I’ll be rooting for the Falcons.”

Harry chuckled as he took Edna’s arm. “May the better team win. And we all know which one that is.” He escorted the older woman to the door.

Eli stepped to the right of Jamie and his mother to get to the checkout.

“You’ll never guess what Jamie came to buy,” his mother said before he got there.

From the look on his face, Jamie could tell that what she came to buy didn’t even come close to making his list of things he wanted to know.

“Didn’t you want to get to the grocery store, Mom?” He checked his watch again, reminding Jamie of his clockwatching at their meeting last week. Either Eli really wanted to see his football game or he had a compulsion about time.

“She needs one of those valve things you came for. Why don’t you show her where they are?”

Eli lifted his gaze to the overhead fluorescent lights, and Jamie took pity on him. “No need. I see the plumbing sign over aisle eight. I’ll go look. I brought the old one.” She lifted up the valve in her hand. “If I can’t find one that matches, I’ll ask. That’s what the associates are here for.”

“No, my grocery shopping can wait a few minutes. JR doesn’t mind, do you?”

Obviously, Leah had missed Eli’s mumbled, “But the kickoff won’t wait.” Or she’d ignored it.

“Not at all.” A muscle worked in his jaw.

Jamie followed him to aisle eight. “You can ditch me here. I’ll ask for help if I need it.” She perused the display. “But I don’t. This looks like the right one.” She tapped the package with her fingernail.

He reached over and lifted it from the hook. “Let me see your old one.”

Jamie handed it over, although she was sure it was the right one.

“It is. See the model number matches.”

“Uh-huh.”

He tilted his head and looked at her for a moment. Did he really think matching model numbers would be an all-new concept to her? She’d figured that out years ago when John was on his first deployment and the water hose on her washing machine had sprung a leak.

She took the valve back. “Let’s check out. Maybe you can still catch most of your game.”

He cracked a smile and her knees went weak. When he wasn’t being austere and all business, Eli was attractive in that man’s man way that many women found appealing. Okay. She was one of those many women.

“Only if we don’t run into too many people she knows at the grocery store that she has to ‘just’ say hi to.”

“She does like to visit.”

“With everyone.”

Jamie laughed. “True. Tell you what.” She succumbed to the lighter, more jovial side of Eli she was seeing for the first time. “Why don’t I take her over to the supercenter? I have a few things I could pick up, and we haven’t seen each other in a while. It’s no problem. Her house is on the way home.”

“What about your kids?” His expression hardened.

“What about them?” She didn’t need another lecture from Eli Payton, Super Guidance Counselor, about spending time or not spending time with her kids. She’d much preferred the Eli-Payton-shopping-with-his-mother version of the man.

“If you have to know, which you don’t, the girls are selling Girl Scout cookies with their Brownie and Girl Scout troops at the Grand Union, and I dropped Myles off to snowblow the driveway for one of the midwives I work with here in Ticonderoga. No chance of him escaping before I pick him up.”

Eli glared at her. She probably should have skipped the sarcasm, but he’d provoked her. Where did he get off thinking he was in charge of her and her family in any way, shape or manner?

He shook his head almost imperceptibly. “I didn’t mean to sound like I was criticizing you.”

“But you did. It’s one of my hot spots. People comment about single parents. Ask your friend Neal. It’s not like I chose to be a single mother.”

Uncertainty flickered in his steel-gray eyes, tempering her irritation. He looked genuinely contrite.

“We should check out.” He started up the aisle.

Jamie caught up with him. “It’s okay. Your afternoon doesn’t seem to be going as you’d planned.” She knew he’d asked about the kids out of genuine concern and was willing to let go of her defensiveness. Oddly, it seemed important to her all of a sudden that Eli see her as someone other than a mother, even though that’s what she was. The mother of one of his students.

“You’ve got that right. You don’t mind taking Mom shopping? I really appreciate it.”

“Not at all. All I have planned is to install this.” She held up the new valve.

“By yourself?” He glanced at her and halted his step. “Wrong thing to say—again.”

She nodded. “Wrong thing to say. I do a lot of home maintenance. My aunt and uncle gave my husband and me a great home repair book as a wedding present. Neither one of us knew anything. Turned out I was a lot better at it than he was.” A qualm rippled through her at having criticized John. But she hadn’t really. She
was
better and over the years had collected a fair amount of experience. Moreover, she enjoyed it.

“Good for you. I haven’t had much experience with handy female civilians. But I’ve known a lot of very resourceful military wives.”

Jamie wanted to shout at him that she wasn’t military, hadn’t been military, didn’t want to be associated with the military. She had been, though. And had chosen that life path with John, fully aware of her choice—as fully aware as an eighteen-year-old could be.

But Eli didn’t need to know that. And if he were like any of the soldiers she’d known, wouldn’t want to hear it.

“I do what I have to do. Myles is a big help, too, when I run into something that’s a two-person job.”

“That’s a productive use of his time.”

Jamie’s temper sparked and ebbed. What was it about Eli that made her think everything he said was a comment on her parenting skills? Maybe it was the nature of his job, although Myles’s former guidance counselor, Erin Ryder, hadn’t had the same effect on her. She glanced at Eli’s profile and her heart did a traitorous flip-flop that wiped away her annoyance with him. Eli had several effects on her that Erin hadn’t.

“Did you find what you needed?” Leah’s voice pulled Jamie from her thoughts. She felt a blush tinge her cheeks.

“Yes.” Jamie motioned Eli to check out ahead of her.

His mother frowned when he placed his purchase on the checkout stand.

“Eli said you need to go to the supercenter. I can take you. I need to pick up a few things, too.” Jamie lowered her voice. “I think he wants to watch that football game Harry was talking about.”

Out of the corner of her eye, Jamie caught Eli giving her a thumbs-up. She started at the boyish gesture. It seemed out of character for Eli, or at least for the picture she’d formed of him.

“Oh.” Bewilderment laced Leah’s voice. “I didn’t catch that. I was going to suggest Eli go over to your house after we got back and install that part for you.”

“No need. Myles and I can handle it.”

Disappointment clouded Leah’s face.

Eli coughed, and Jamie stifled a laugh. Leah was matchmaking, and he must have found it as preposterous as Jamie did.

“You have the kids and your job. You shouldn’t have to do house repairs, too. I’ll send Eli over some evening next week to do it for you.”

This time Eli’s cough came out more as the choke he was trying to cover.

Leah waved him off. “Go ahead and watch your game. I’ll shop with Jamie. We can get in some girl talk.”

Jamie had a feeling Leah’s girl talk might evolve into boy talk. One “boy” in particular. Maybe while they were on the topic, she could convince Leah that she didn’t need Eli to help her with her plumbing. Or maybe Leah’s current art project would absorb her attention to the exclusion of everything else, as often happened, and she’d forget all about her offer.