Chapter 19
Chapter nineteen
Lucy
Was it a date? Lucy asked herself, not for the first time, as she headed to Alex’s house the following Saturday.
Had Alex Kincaid really asked her out on a date?
And did she want it to be a date? She was here for only three more months, and he had two damaged daughters, and he was her boss, which might even make dating him illegal.
Maybe there was some school policy against fraternizing with staff. She couldn’t exactly ask.
After several days of deliberation she decided to play it the way Alex had pitched it: as a favor to Poppy. Stay safe. Not what she’d advised Juliet, but after witnessing her sister’s heart-wrenching near breakdown, she could see the merits in emotional cowardice.
In the few days since then, Juliet had gone back to her brittle self. And Lucy had let her, because she understood about needing to claw back some composure after you’d been rubbed so emotionally raw.
She stopped in front of Alex’s house, took a deep breath, and ran a hand over her frizzing hair. Before she could knock, the door flew open, and Poppy stood there, already dressed with a coat and backpack, grinning widely.
“You look like a sausage!” Poppy exclaimed.
“Umm . . . thanks?” It wasn’t the look she’d been going for, but Poppy seemed pleased.
“She means,” Alex said, coming behind Poppy and resting his hands on her shoulders, “that you’re wearing red and yellow.” At Lucy’s blank look he clarified, “Mustard and ketchup. Poppy puts loads of both on her sausages.”
“Ah.” Lucy glanced down at her yellow top visible under her unbuttoned coat and her red corduroy skirt.
A sausage it was. She glanced up again, taking in Alex’s weekend wear of faded jeans, a T-shirt, and a crew-neck sweater.
He definitely could rock the casual look, and deliberately she moved her gaze back up to his face.
Bella slouched downstairs, dressed all in baggy black, her arms folded ominously. Lucy braced herself. She was not going to spend the day trying to win Bella over. Been there, done that, and no desire for a repeat trip.
“Hello, Bella.” Her voice rang out, manically cheerful. Seemed she couldn’t keep from trying.
Bella muttered a hello back, which was better than silence, if only just.
“So I looked up this Crab Fair on the Internet,” she said, “and it looks wicked cool.”
Poppy frowned. “Wicked?”
“Sorry, that’s American slang for completely amazing.” She ruffled the girl’s hair gently, grateful that at least one of the Kincaid girls liked her. “Did you know about the gurning competition?”
“The what?” Alex asked, and reached for his coat.
“Gurning. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently there’s a competition to make the strangest face. How cool is that?”
“Oh, Daddy, you should enter,” Poppy cried, and Alex made a face that Lucy thought wouldn’t remotely win, but it was still kind of cute.
“Me? I don’t think so.”
“You should, Dad,” Bella said suddenly, and this surprising contribution to the conversation had them all turning to her.
“You think I should?”
“Do you remember how you used to make faces at us when we were little? To get us to take our medicine.”
Alex blinked, and Lucy felt her heart give a dangerous little twist at the sight of the bittersweet memory on his face. “I’d forgotten that.” He turned to her to explain, “Both Bella and Poppy were prone to ear infections, and they hated the rounds of antibiotics they were put on—”
“Daddy used to pull funny faces to make us open our mouths, and when we did, Mummy would spoon the medicine in.” Now Poppy made a face. “It tasted awful.”
Lucy smiled in sympathy, even as she felt a dozen different conflicting emotions collide inside her in a kaleidoscope of feeling.
Sadness, for the mother they’d lost. A little shameful jealousy, because Alex and Anna sounded like such a loving team.
And hope, because clearly there was more to Alex than the stern taskmaster he was at school.
“I think we should all enter the competition,” Lucy said. “Apparently you have to make the face through a horse collar, which just adds to the craziness. They call it ‘gurning through a braffin.’”
“What’s a braffin?” Poppy asked, wrinkling her nose.
“A horse collar, I guess,” Lucy answered. “Are we all ready?”
Charlie gave them all a morose look before Alex shepherded him into the kitchen and appeased him with a full water bowl and a dog treat. A few minutes later they piled into Alex’s car; Lucy noticed the papers littering the front passenger seat, along with a browning banana peel.
“Sorry,” he muttered, sweeping it all into a pile and tossing it into the back.
“I’ve never owned a car,” Lucy said, “but if I did, it would be a complete mess, I know. It would be like having another closet.”
He laughed, and Lucy saw Bella shoot him a sharp look before turning to stare determinedly out the window. Okay, so it was becoming clear that his daughter did not approve of her friendship with Alex. She wasn’t going to bend over backwards to make Bella change her mind.
They drove along the coast road towards Egremont, the sea sparkling on one side and sheep pasture on the other.
Lucy saw a sign for Buttermere and said, “Do you know I haven’t actually been to a lake since I’ve been here?
I saw Bassenthwaite on the drive down, through the fog and rain.
But considering this is the Lake District, I feel gypped. ”
“This is the Western Lake District,” Alex said. “We’re nine miles from the most westerly lake, Ennerdale.”
“Sometimes we walk Charlie there,” Poppy piped up. “He likes to swim in the water.”
“I’ll have to check it out.”
“You could go with us,” Poppy suggested blithely. “Couldn’t she, Daddy?”
Alex stared straight ahead, flexing his hands on the steering wheel. “I suppose she could.”
Which wasn’t the most promising invitation, and so Lucy kept silent.
The fair was in full swing by the time they arrived, after having spent a taxing twenty minutes trying to find a parking space while Poppy clamored to be let out and Bella kept sighing loudly.
“You’re going to wish you hadn’t come,” Alex told Lucy, when they finally made it down the hill to the town’s market square, where the fair’s main activities were being held.
“It takes a little more than that to put me off,” Lucy answered, and then wondered if he would read more into that statement than she’d meant—although she wasn’t even sure what she meant.
What was she doing, tangling herself up with this widower and his lonely kids?
Poppy ran back to tug on Alex’s sleeve. “Daddy, the parade is starting!” she cried, and they both turned to see a crowd of people coming down the high street, led by the year’s crowned Crab Fair Queen, a teenage girl in a ball gown and a tiara.
They watched the procession of classic cars, dancers, a brass band, several floats for various causes and charities, and finally the apple cart, which was the highlight of the parade.
Following the ancient tradition, apples were tossed to the children lining the street, and they ran around, laughing and shouting, as they gathered them up.
Even Bella got into it, although she tried to be cool, and Alex turned to Lucy.
“Why don’t you think you’re good with children?” he asked, and she blinked, disconcerted by the sudden, unexpected question.
“What—”
“You said you weren’t good with them before. Why?”
She shrugged, her eyes on the children scurrying for apples as she wondered how much she should say. Then she decided, for once, to tell the truth. “I suppose because the two I tried with the hardest were pretty unimpressed.”
Alex was silent for a moment, seeming to sift through her words before he asked lightly, “So who were these brats?”
“Their names were Will and Garrett. I don’t think they were actually all that terrible, but they certainly didn’t like me.” She paused, and then continued, “They were the sons of a man I dated for a couple of years. Thomas.”
Another silence, and Lucy kept her gaze on the hunt for apples. “And then what happened?” he finally asked.
“I suppose it’s really a question of what didn’t happen.
” She tried to keep her voice both light and matter-of-fact, the only way she knew of lowering the intensity of the conversation.
“They never accepted me, even though I tried so hard. Maybe because I tried so hard.” She sighed, her gaze still on the children, and decided to go for broke.
“I wanted to be part of their family. Thomas was divorced, and their mother married someone else and had a baby, and so Will and Garrett were kind of left out in the cold. At least I thought they were. But maybe that was wishful thinking. I wanted to fill a space in their lives that wasn’t really there. ”
“Maybe they were confused about their mother’s new relationship,” Alex suggested. “And they took it out on you, because that was easiest.”
“Maybe,” Lucy agreed. This was definitely starting to feel like a very charged conversation, although she couldn’t discern its actual currents. “But it certainly made me miserable, and I ended it, accidentally, I suppose, after everything blew up with my mother and the art showing.”
“What do you mean?”
“Thomas suggested I not come around for a while, because of all the media attention. He felt it would be bad for the boys.”
“Pillock,” Alex muttered, and Lucy shook her head although she was smiling.
“You really need a naughty jar.”
“So did you stay away?”
“I did the classic stupid female thing and gave him an ultimatum. I told him I was going to break it off if he didn’t support me and he said fine, more or less. Actually more. It made me realize how unimportant I was to him as well as to the boys.” She sniffed and looked away.