Ms. Miller and the Midas Man Read online

  If he were King of the World he’d first tear down the fence in the backyard and then her front door, so there would be no physical barriers between them. He’d walk straight into her house and into her soul. He’d take her in his arms and hold her. Tight. Kiss her until she was too weak to resist him any longer and then he’d go right on kissing her until she felt no more pain, no more regrets, no more of whatever she’d been feeling when she slit her own wrist. If he were King of the World.

  He sighed heavily and sagged back in the swing, combing the fingers of both hands through his hair. This was a hell of a time for him to be falling in love with a needy woman.

  A needy woman? She was as ornery and stubborn as a mule.

  She was a Chinese puzzle with no beginning or end, no rhyme or reason. Nothing about her made sense in his head...and yet everything about her spoke to his heart.

  A new school year would be starting in less than three weeks. He had a new job to prepare for, a house to get in order, a life for himself and his daughter to arrange. Now was not the time to be falling in love.

  But he was. And he knew it.

  He glanced over at the house next door when the music slowly faded to an end. The last note floated in the air to be picked up and used as a first note by the crickets and night bugs, as they began their own nightly recital. He felt a strange sort of relief, as if his mind was suddenly his own again.

  He made a concerted effort to make a mental list of to-dos, frowned over the decision to paint Chloe’s room pink and surprise her or to let her pick out her own paint. He nearly broke a sweat steering his thoughts away from the woman next door and toward anything pertinent to his own life.

  Restless and scattered, he finally stood to go inside—maybe paint a couple more walls before he went off to toss and turn in bed, to dream of touching her, to ponder on the taste of her, to imagine her whispers in the dark...

  “Damn,” he muttered, opening the screen door and hearing another slam closed nearby.

  Vivaldi’s Four Seasons always made her melancholy, even though it was a favorite she loved playing. Maybe it had something to do with time passing and life changing, she ruminated as she slipped out the kitchen door to restore her little garden to its well-ordered, pre-nephews-and-neighbor’s-dog state of tidiness.

  She smiled a little, thinking of the boys and that huge beast, so mild-tempered and tolerant. And to think he’d frightened her, she chuckled softly, folding lawn chairs and stacking them neatly inside the garage door.

  The back porch light glinted off a soda can. Picking it up, she was tempted to toss it over the fence to...well, just to do it. To get back at Scott Hammond for making her feel this way. Restless and unfocused. She put the can in a garbage bag with a stray napkin and tied a knot in the top of it.

  Scott Hammond. Scotty. His name flirted with her mind as boldly and consistently as he teased her...

  “Do you like children,” he’d asked her, straight out and direct, breathless from playing human tackle dummy with the boys. She’d just received a sloppy wet kiss for tying Jake’s shoe and the question had caught her off guard.

  “Of course,” she said. “Sure. Most. Depends on the kid, I guess.”

  “I have a daughter. She’s five.”

  “Eric’s almost six,” she said, describing the extent of her intimate experience with five-year-olds. “I like kindergarten kids, and first-graders. They’re very eager to please.”

  He nodded, watching her. Something he’d been doing all afternoon. Something that was really getting on her nerves. Was he memorizing her gestures and expressions? Studying her as if she were a research project? Why couldn’t he look at her when she wasn’t looking back? The way she watched him? He had wonderfully broad shoulders and the nicest backside she’d seen in years, with long, well-shaped legs and...Damned if she was going to stare though.

  “She stays with me every other weekend,” he said.

  “That must be hard,” she said, thinking of her own childhood without an active father. He’d given up his battle with her mother when she was seven and avoided all three of them whenever possible.

  “It is,” he said, glancing at the back door as Howard came out of the house and started toward them again. “I hate it. I miss not having her around all the time. The worst part of it is, I think she’s handling the separation better than I am.”

  Now she did stare a little. He was speaking so candidly, looked so vulnerable. It was information she could use against him, hurt him with if she wanted to—but he was trusting her not to.

  “I believe women handle divorce better than men do,” Howard said, sitting down beside Gus to join the conversation. “I mean, in the overall scheme of things. It’s painful for everyone, but it’s been my observation that women tend to bounce back faster.”

  Scotty shook his head. It was his experience that no one handled a divorce very well. “I meant Chloe. She doesn’t seem to mind the weekends, it’s just the way things are for her. I’m the one who knows things should be different. Wants them to be different. I resent the time I can’t be with her.”

  “But that was another reason why you came back here, wasn’t it? To be closer to her?” Howard said, then, as if speaking for the entire town, he added, “We wondered what you’d do, when we heard Janis had moved back to Springfield.”

  He shrugged, and for an instant she thought she saw shame in his eyes, shame and something else...extreme discomfort. Though he was the one who had brought the subject up, perhaps he hadn’t meant to discuss it with Howard. He said, “There wasn’t anything I could do.”

  “How will you handle it now?” Howard asked, then chuckled. “When you’ve been single as long as I have, you come to know all the ins and outs of a divorce and visitation rights. I’m an authority on it, and I’ve never even been married.” He laughed.

  Scotty gave him a small smile and seemed reluctant to answer. “Janis and I will meet in the middle, an hour drive for each of us, on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons.”

  “Your little girl doesn’t have allergies, does she?” Gus asked, having a sudden brainstorm, not knowing why she felt so sorry for him, only that she did and wanted to help him, to protect him from any further prying.

  “No,” he said, looking confused.

  “Oh now, you shouldn’t sound so sure when you say that, Scotty,” Howard warned him, picking up on one of his favorite subjects. “Children can develop allergies overnight. To drugs. To food. They build up an intolerance over a period of time and—zap—it’s trips to the allergist twice a month. Or in milder cases many pediatricians recommend treating the symptoms with over-the-counter drugs...

  Several more minutes went by before Scotty’s eyes slowly trailed back to her face, the twinkle in them the only outward sign of his knowledge and gratitude of the good deed she’d done. She smiled at him briefly, then lowered her gaze away when she realized they were once again connecting, on a nonverbal level.

  Connecting with someone like Scotty Hammond would be a big mistake, she knew. Having had some time to think about it, about his attitudes toward fathering and his sisters and the town of Tylerville, maybe there was more to him than a great smile and a cocky attitude. What a shame. It was so much easier to think of him as a lazy, insincere cad than a responsible man with feelings and principles and ideals.

  The picnic table was heavy, and she had to move one end at a time, sort of walk it back to its place beside the garage.

  “Wait a second.” She heard his voice and jumped a little. “I’ll help you.”

  Why she was surprised to hear his voice and the latch lifting on the gate she didn’t know. So many times that evening, in the quiet of her little house, she’d heard his laughter, his voice commenting on a sister or describing his daughter or enthusiastically explaining his plans for the upcoming school year. Several times she’d turned around to see if he was standing behind her. This time he was.

  He took several jogging steps across her yard and took up
the opposite end of the picnic table. They swung it into place together.

  “Thanks,” she said, smiling and looking away as he grinned at her, self-satisfied. He was so tickled to have achieved the center of her consideration again, to know he was paramount in her mind for the moment, and to see she wasn’t oblivious to him.

  Oblivious, indeed. Her pulse was racing and her mouth had gone dry. She might have met a stranger in a dark alley with less anxiety.

  “My pleasure. My house may need paint, and my dog and I invite ourselves to dinner, but we can also be very handy to have around.”

  “So I see,” she said, trying to smile again, her face feeling stiff. “Is it also true that you can leap tall buildings in a single bound and that everything you touch turns to gold?”

  “Yes,” he said, and he didn’t hesitate to add, “I also hang the moon and the stars...at least that’s what I tell Chloe.”

  She gave an amused but nervous laugh. Howard was right, it was very hard not to like him, despite the way he made her feel inside. “I bet she believes you too.”

  “Of course. When you want to badly enough, you can believe most anything.” She was back at the bench, and he casually took up the opposite end to help move it. “Aren’t there things that you believe in, no matter how unlikely or impossible they might seem?”

  “No. Not anymore.”

  “The totally disillusioned Ms. Miller, huh?” He was studying her when she straightened up to face him. She couldn’t tell if he was feeling pity or disdain when he said, “That’s a shame.”

  Either way she didn’t like it.

  “Why? Why is that a shame? People don’t have to believe in fairy tales and superheroes. They don’t have to pretend life is better than it really is. That there’s some sort of magic involved. What’s wrong with being realistic? Life is unfair and people are human. That’s all there is to it.”

  He felt neither sympathy nor scorn, but he was curious. This wasn’t a pathetic disturbed woman speaking, this was a woman in pain. Hurt and beaten. A strong woman clinging to negatives to survive because they were simple and true, and all she had left.

  “What about dreams?” he asked, betting himself that she had none left.

  “What about them?”

  “Aren’t dreams food to the human spirit? Don’t people need dreams, as unrealistic as they might be sometimes, to keep them moving forward? To give their life meaning?”

  “Why do they have to be dreams? Can’t they simply be goals you set for yourself? Can’t they be realistic, one-step-at-a-time goals? Dreams are too easy to blow out of proportion. It’s crazy to believe in things that may or may not be real, things that can’t be, can’t happen.”

  “Crazy or painful?”

  She opened her mouth to answer then closed it. He knew. Two days, and already he knew she was a failure, a disappointment. Well, so what? She’d tried to warn him.

  “Yes. Crazy and painful,” she said, turning away to finish picking up. Unfortunately, there was nothing left to pick up. But to turn around and face him again was an intolerable thought.

  She could hear him coming up behind her and braced herself. Still she trembled, as if hit by lightning, when he touched her shoulders.

  “What happened to you?” he asked softly, the tenderness in his voice bringing tears to press and sting against the backs of her eyes. “Who hurt you?”

  He wanted to turn her around and hold her in his arms, but she was so tense under his hands, he knew it would be like holding a plank of wood. The tightness in his chest began to ache, making it hard to breathe.

  “No one,” she murmured, more than a little uncomfortable with the topic...and his proximity. She attempted to step away but was held fast at the shoulders, then turned, so he could see her face.

  “Tell me,” he whispered, his eyes black and bottomless in the porch light.

  If he hadn’t sounded so caring, been so gentle, she wouldn’t have laughed, wouldn’t have pushed his hands away so forcefully.

  “Look, I appreciate the help with the table, but it doesn’t entitle you to butt into my life. Why don’t you go turn something to gold and leave me alone?”

  She took steps to walk away from him, but he snagged her left wrist and held tight.

  “I can’t,” he said. “God knows I should. You’re mean and you’re nasty and...I can’t. I don’t want to leave you alone.”

  Had she thought him strange? He was just plain nuts. Couldn’t he see she was trying to save him from the curse of her life? Didn’t he know he was better off if her life didn’t touch his?

  “I’ll hurt you,” she said, explaining as best she could.

  “Go ahead. Take your best shot. I’m not leaving.”

  She shook her head. He didn’t understand.

  “No. I mean I’ll really hurt you.” He frowned in confusion at her seriousness and slackened his hold on her wrist. She stepped away from him. “Stay if you want to, Scotty. I’m going inside. I’m doing you a favor, believe me.”

  Okay. The best he could do was give her a high score for originality and watch as she walked into the house and closed the door.

  She was doing him a favor by not opening up to him? She was afraid of hurting him, not the other way around? Well, that was one for the books. Reverse rejection?

  The porch light didn’t go out until he was through the gate, which meant she was still watching him. But when he turned, the house was dark and he couldn’t tell from where.

  “I’m not afraid of you. You hear me, Ms. Miller?” he bellowed into the darkness, his voice echoing through the quiet neighborhood. “You don’t scare me. I’ll be coming back.”

  FOUR

  HE GAVE HER MONDAY to reflect on and reconsider her hasty decision to ignore him, to think about him and anxiously anticipate his next move. He gave her Monday to miss him—and because he wasn’t sure what he’d do next until Monday evening.

  Growing up, it had been a joke at his house when his father would reject the title of Principal Hammond in favor of Mr. Jack-of-All-Trades. “It’s not a part-time job,” he used to say. “People call me Principal Hammond whether I’m at the school or not.”

  Of course, that hadn’t meant much to Scotty until he was older, until he was old enough and wise enough to see that being principal was his father’s vocation, not just his occupation. It didn’t start and stop at the doors of the institution he was associated with. It was who he was, whether he was passing out diplomas at graduation or filling in nights for a sick janitor.

  Scotty liked the idea of being someone and belonging to something. Being a son, a brother, a husband, a father, and belonging to a family. Being a teacher or a principal and belonging to a school. Being a good citizen and belonging to a community. It was fundamental and solid, safe and simple. There was no confusion in being who you were.

  And so, when he’d accepted the position of principal at Tylerville High School he knew exactly what he was getting into. He knew how important high school was to a child’s intellectual, physical, and emotional development. He knew small-town schools had small budgets, staff shortages, and limited outside resources. He knew it was up to him to maintain academic excellence, to promote community interest and involvement, and to provide the best possible experience for the students.

  “I discovered almost immediately the loss of several intramural sports teams, the incorporation of the school newspaper into the English department curriculum, and that the drama club, debate team, chorus, and—for all intents and purposes—the entire art department had been cut away entirely by Mr. Kingsley to meet his budget. In essence, a lot of the fun stuff is gone,” he told an eager, if a bit wary, group of his peers during their first preseason team meeting on Tuesday morning. Faculty meetings were a necessary evil they endured, to present and maintain a united front to the opposing team, their students.

  The wariness that morning stemmed, no doubt, from the fact that he had been a lively player on the opposing team less than twenty
years earlier and had scored more than once on many of his present teammates.

  “Believe me,” he said, sounding very grown-up in his own disbelieving ears. “I understand budgets. And cuts like these are necessary to maintain the core of the curriculum. However, we all know that not every student’s talents will lay within the realm of the three R’s. Isn’t that right, Mrs. Fiske?”

  Mrs. Fiske, the English teacher at Tylerville High since the dawn of time, arched a brow and said, “Once upon a time, I had not the slightest hope for you in that direction, Mr. Scotty Hammond.” She paused. “Obviously, appearances can be deceiving.”

  He laughed and she smiled at him fondly.

  “Time will tell on that one, I suppose, but being a late bloomer myself, I have a special fondness for kids who have to check out all their options before they settle on a career. And I believe it’s our duty to expose all our students to as many adventures as they can handle. To give them every opportunity we can muster to try new things. To provide a safe testing ground for their youthful whims and dreams.”

  He gave that a few seconds to sink in, and when he saw heads begin to nod in tentative agreement, he continued.

  “I’ve been mulling over an idea that I’d like your opinions on,” he said humbly, knowing full well he could institute his idea without their opinions. “I haven’t quite figured out what to do about the sports we’ve cut, but I’ve been thinking of starting a new tradition here at Tylerville High School.” A pregnant pause. “A senior class play.”

  The silence that followed his announcement was ominous. Small towns were notoriously reluctant to change, and this included teachers in small-town schools.

  “I know that in the past, the drama club put on a yearly presentation. This would be basically the same thing, except it would be extracurricular and the seniors would be responsible for it. And any profits they made would go to a senior class campout in the spring.”

  “A senior class campout? In the woods? All night? Together? With boys and girls together?” they asked, in a garble of exclamations.