The Heart of the Matter (3 page)

He groaned and let his forehead fall to the mat.

“You okay, Jason?” Philly asked anxiously in mid push-up. She was doing half push-ups from her knees, but she was doing them beautifully.

He rolled onto his back and drew a deep breath. “I’m great, thanks. Nothing that oxygen and a pacemaker wouldn’t cure.”

She laughed as the music stopped. “Glad to hear it. Worst is over. Now we’re cooling down.”

Jason survived the next two cooling-down numbers, and put on a brave face when the class was over and many of the women, disheveled but somehow vibrant, came to introduce themselves and welcome him to the class.

“Next time will be hell,” Martie warned with a sturdy thump to his back, “but after that you’ll get into it and it’ll feel so good you’ll never want to quit.” Then she shouldered her towel and her own personalized mat and left the hall.

Dixie rolled her eyes at the retreating figure that looked more thirty than seventy.

“We’re all chipping in to have her kidnapped and force-fed DoveBars.” She smiled at him philosophically. “You don’t have to do as well as she does, you just have to relax and feel good. See you Wednesday?”

No. They were never going to see him again. But he smiled and let her think it was an affirmative, and thanked
her for all her help. Then he fell onto one of the many folding chairs lined up on both sides of the room and pulled his bag toward him with his foot because he doubted seriously that he could bend. He was sure he’d pulled every muscle and stripped every gear in his body.

He’d eased his crippled muscles out of his sweatsoaked shirt and was pulling on a fresh one from his bag when he surfaced from the neck to find Laura standing in front of him, a big brown envelope bag over her shoulder. She’d combed out the ponytail and red hair fell in tight ringlets past her shoulders. Damp little curls sprang along her hairline. He thought they seemed like visible signs of her energy.

“You survived,” she observed with a cautious smile. “How do you feel?”

He rotated a shoulder and stopped because it hurt. “Like I’ve been worked over by Torquemada,” he replied. “I can’t believe you aren’t even out of breath.”

She tapped lightly over her heart. “Of course I get breathless, but I recover quickly because I have clear arteries. And I doubt seriously that the Spanish Inquisition was this much fun.”

“Fun.” He considered the word. “You probably mountain-climb on weekends, don’t you?”

She laughed. “No. But I do hike. You coming back Wednesday?”

He tried the same smile on her that he’d used on Dixie. “I appreciate your interest in me, Ms. Price.”

“You can call me Laura,” she said, and he could tell she’d read his mind, “if you come back on Wednesday. But if we’re just going to meet in my office, I’ll have to remain Ms. Price.”

She was teasing him about that, but he guessed on some level the distinction was true. The woman who was up-tight
and formal and serious about rubber food became someone else entirely when she put on tights and cranked up the music. She could let herself go here. He found himself wondering why she couldn’t always do that.

Jason made a production of getting to his feet, then realized his bag was still on the floor and he would have to bend for it.

“I imagine I’ll be paralyzed by Wednesday,” he said, bending for the bag and accepting immediately that it had been a terrible mistake. Strained muscles protested.

He straightened with difficulty.

“I told you to take it slowly,” she admonished, taking his arm and leading him toward the door as though he were ninety. But he was in too much pain to take offense. “Come on. I’ll walk you out to your car.”

“I
did
take it slowly,” he insisted, hobbling along with her, “but even
slowly
took every reserve of endurance
I
had. Where did you train, anyway? With the Olympic men’s triathlon team?”

“Honestly.” She scoffed lightly, taking more of his weight as they went down the few front steps. “A group of men play basketball once a week at the Y and think they’re commando material. Real fitness takes so much more than that. But you’ll feel it as you continue.” She stopped in the middle of the walk and looked up and down the street, which was empty except for a black Ford Explorer, and a station wagon that bore the church’s name on a magnetic sign on the side.

“Where is your car?” she asked.

“At home,” he said, aware that he was leaning on her. “I walked here to warm up.”

“Where do you live?”

“On Oak Hill overlooking the bay.”

She frowned. “That’s a mile and a half away. You
wore yourself out before you got here. How did you expect to get home after seventy-five minutes of exercise?”

He smiled blandly. “Hearse?”

She punched his shoulder.

He screamed.

She apologized and rubbed the spot. “Relax, Mr. Warfield. I’ll take you home.”

“You can call me Jason,” he said, hanging on to her as she led him toward the Explorer. “If I don’t have to come back on Wednesday.”

It was dusk when Laura pulled into the driveway behind a blue Mercedes wagon. She hurried around her vehicle to help her passenger out.

“Never mind, I can’t do it,” he said when she pulled the door open. “I’ll have to bend my head and move my legs, and I think everything has fused into a solid bar of rust. Just close me in and call a priest.”

“How you do exaggerate,” she said with a smile, crouching to look in at him. “And anyway, rust isn’t solid. It flakes, so I’m sure if you move just a little, you’ll find you can move a little more.”

“No, I don’t think so.” He lay back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Get my boys so I can tell them where the insurance policy and all that stuff is. And I want to be cremated.”

Laura couldn’t hold back the laughter. “Well, if you don’t get out of the car, I’ll have to perform the cremation myself and it’ll be a little crude. Come on. Give me your right leg.”

“Take it,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll come right off. It disconnected from the rest of my body somewhere during those leg lifts.”

She was really starting to like him. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

She took the fleece-covered calf of his left leg carefully in her hands and lifted until his foot was out of the car.

“Ow, ow, ow, ow!” he cried.

“Sorry,” she said, then moved the other leg in the same way. But this time she was aware of sturdy muscle. The rest of him might not be well-honed, but basketball had tightened his legs nicely.

She looked up into his dark brown eyes and discovered that he was reading her thoughts. The humor was still there, along with genuine physical discomfort, but over that, bright and clear, was…interest.

It collided with the interest she felt and made her want to withdraw. Nothing ever came of interest-for her, anyway. Interest always led one along a promising path then fizzled or died abruptly, leaving her with the conviction that there was something wrong with her.

She stood and straightened, needing to put some physical distance between them.

Then three boys came out of the house, a young teenager, a sturdy preteen and a little boy. She recognized them from one of the columns she’d read where Jason had taken his boys to a ball game.

“Did he faint again?” the middle boy asked anxiously, running to him.

“No,” Jason grumbled, then let the boy and his older brother team up to help him out of the car. “If you want the truth, I was murdered. This is Laura Price, guys. She leads the aerobics class. She did it. I’m sure you’ll want to avenge me.”

“Don’t you have to be dead if she murdered you?” the little one asked.

“Well, it’s a Zen kind of a thing,” Jason replied, “but you can be dead and still very much alive. Laura, that’s
Matt. This big guy on my left is Eric, number two son. This one’s Adam.”

In the glow of a floodlight over the garage, Laura saw three faces that bore strong resemblance to Jason’s, though the second boy’s coloring was fairer than that of the other two. They seemed concerned for their father, but a little amused, too, by his predicament.

“We tried to tell you, Dad,” Adam said, guiding Jason’s arm around his shoulder as Eric did the same on the other side. “You’re getting a little…you
know…antiquey
for this kind of thing.”

Jason fixed Laura with a pitiful expression as he beckoned her to follow them toward the house. “You love them, suffer for them, sacrifice and give them your good name, and what do they give you in return?”

Adam smiled up at him. “Their paper route money when you’re between royalty checks. But I thought you didn’t want us to tell anybody that.”

Jason laughed and lightly boxed his ear. “He’s going to take over the column when I get too old.”

“Which looks like it could be tomorrow,” Eric said as he sidled sideways to get Jason through the door.

Laura stopped on the threshold, lured by the warmth of table lamps and the sound of laughter coming from the television. She was also lured by the easy affection Jason’s boys had for him. It was no surprise that he’d decided to take her health and nutrition advice seriously. This seemed to be an atmosphere in which one would want to stay for a very long time.

But it belonged to him, not to her.

“Get him into a nice hot bath,” she advised from the welcome mat. “He still might be a little stiff in the morning, but he’ll feel much better.”

Laura turned to go, but the sound of her name shouted authoritatively through the open door made her stop.

“Laura!”

“Yes?” she asked.

She saw in Jason’s dark eyes the same confusion and uncertainty that she felt. Then it was vanquished in an instant by die male arrogance she’d seen in him when he’d commandeered the head of the conference room table. “Do you really think you can abuse me like you did and just walk away?”

She didn’t want to. She really didn’t. She wanted to step inside and know what that glowing, laughter-filled room felt like.

“Ah…”

“No, you can’t,” he answered for her. “You have to make the coffee. The boys don’t know how and I…”

“I alwa—Ah!”

Whatever Adam was trying to say was cut off abruptly when Jason shifted for balance and stepped on his toe.

“Sorry, son,” Jason said. “The boys don’t know how,” he repeated, “and I’m in no condition. And you’ve still got my gym bag. Matt, would you go help Laura get it out of the car, then bring her back into the kitchen?”

“Sure, Dad. Come on, Laura!” Matt took her hand with youthful charm, climbed into the back of the Explorer to retrieve the bag, then hoisted it with two hands onto his shoulders. His arms and legs were gangly, but his smile was bright. One front tooth was only halfway down and still scallop-edged.

“Adam makes the coffee all the time,” he told her in a whisper as he led the way back to the house. “‘Cause Dad doesn’t like the way it comes out when he makes it himself. I guess he didn’t want to tell you that.”

Laura promised to keep the secret. The coffee had been
an obvious ploy to get her inside. A ploy had been unnecessary, but she’d keep that to herself, too.

The room with the lamp was all she’d imagined. At the far end of a long, wide kitchen, it held an overstuffed sofa and chairs in green and burgundy, and a huge entertainment center in a beautiful oak cabinet, with floor-toceiling bookshelves on both sides.

A baseball game went ignored on the television except by a big yellow dog in the middle of the sofa who seemed to be watching it.

She had a vague memory of such a room in the deep recesses of childhood’s perfection. She remembered coming in from play just before dark to a living room glowing with soft light and the comfortable sounds of music from the stereo, or conversation on the television.

Then her mother would scold her for pushing the inby-dark deadline, and she would point through the window to the quarter-inch strip of daylight still visible on the horizon.

Her mother would hug her, serve her cookies and milk, and Laura would take it into the living room, climb into her father’s lap and eat it. That memory still evoked the security and contentment she’d felt then.

When she was eight, everything changed. Suddenly her father was always shouting and her mother was always crying. Soon she and her mother were living with her mother’s parents, and Laura visited her father every other weekend.

Eventually he moved out of town and came to pick her up only once a month. Often there were women in his small apartment. She recalled a few who found things to talk about with her, but mostly she remembered that she was ignored. She spent a lot of time on the apartment’s
little balcony with a book or a game, feeling very much in the way.

Eventually, her father stopped coming for her.

That happened all the time, according to her friends whose parents were also divorced. Fathers went on to new families and forgot the old ones. She thought she understood. She’d just been so sure that would never happen to her. Not
her
dad.

Matt pointed to the dog. “That’s Buttercup. He’s a boy even though he’s got a flower name. My mom liked it.”

Buttercup’s tail thumped against the sofa as Laura leaned over the back to stroke his head.

Matt tugged her toward the kitchen. “The coffee stuff’s in here,” he said.

The room was green and cream and brightly lit with overhead fluorescents. Adam and Eric had eased Jason into a chair at the head of a rectangular oak table in the middle of the room. Adam stuffed a pillow behind his back.

“She said you should get into the tub,” Adam was telling him.

“Well, he can’t go into the tub when he has a guest,” Eric pointed out from the cupboards, baseball cap on backward as he reached up for cups.

“If he used the
hot
tub,” Adam said, “he could take her with him.”

“What if she doesn’t have a suit?”

“Adults don’t worry about that stuff.”

Laura overheard that last exchange.

Jason glanced at her apologetically. “Children,” he said, “have a strange vision of how adults live.”

“I won’t stay long,” she promised the boys briskly, “and your father can jump into the hot tub when I’m gone.” She accepted a bag of coffee beans from Eric, who
pulled open a rolltop door to reveal a coffee grinder and coffeemaker.