Chapter 14Rafe
Chapter 14
Rafe
I hadn’t turned on the bedside lamp yet, so it was still dark, being five thirty and early October and all.
I didn’t need the light to recognize that the life-sized cardboard figure in the corner was Movie Elvis, not Vegas Elvis. I’d been going to sleep with and waking up to the damned thing the last few weeks.
He flaunted that sophisticated look I’d never aspired to—polished boots, black slacks, brown linen sports jacket, black tie, crisp white shirt, gold cufflinks (shit, cufflinks ).
Frozen in time, maybe caught at the best time of his life, Elvis strummed his guitar, smiling that confident smile, flashing those bedroom eyes, singing directly to you.
Well, not me. I didn’t see the attraction of the music or the man.
But I wasn’t a woman…or a bitch. And by bitch, I meant the female dog type. I may have been growling under my breath, but I swore Princess had the hots for the King. At bedtime, I’d find her lying in front of the Elvis cutout, muzzle nestled between her front paws, gazing in adoration.
Females.
Without Rose’s permission, I wasn’t going to move cardboard Elvis into a closet, over to her house—or out to the garbage can. It might’ve been some too-sensitive reminder from her last days with her mom in the apartment. Why else would Jennifer have left it here when she cleaned out the place? And why hadn’t it made a guest appearance at her mom’s party?
I figured I’d ask Rose about it, maybe hear more about the Elvis backstory, when I went over for supper later today. I already had so many questions I wanted to ask her, things I wanted to find out about her.
But, fuck, I’d need to rein it in. I could tell she was still tired from her injuries, even though the cuts—hell, gashes—on her hands and knees were healing. And the dark circles under her eyes were fading.
With all she had going on, Rose was asking me to supper. Sunday supper. A first for me.
Sure, I’d eaten with my foster families, prepared meals with Pete, gone out to bars with army buddies, taken girls on cheap dates. But this was the first time I’d been invited by a woman for dinner at her home.
And not just any woman. Rose, a woman who was claiming more and more of my waking thoughts.
Yeah, I shook my head over her stubbornness, but it was her giving nature that drew me in. That and the physical impact of the sweet slant of her cheeks under those green eyes, the lushness of her lips, the soft fullness of her body.
No doubt I was imagining more than was good for me, or her, given that I’d be moving on in a couple of months.
Still, I needed to do this invitation up right—I wasn’t some raw recruit. Buy some flowers for her. Go by Jean-Luc’s and get him to choose a bottle of wine. Call her to see if it was okay to bring Princess, although I suspected I already knew the answer to that one.
Yeah, today was a first. My gut was aching as I laid there, twisting the top sheet in my hands. It was only supper—right?
It was the first time I’d seen Rose flustered. I was standing at her front door Sunday afternoon, a big-ass bundle of flowers in my left hand and a bottle of red in my right. Princess was sitting at my feet, no leash and on her best behavior, looking past Rose at her buddy Pirate.
We were right on time, if not a minute or two early. I knew Rose was still expecting us since I’d talked to her earlier in the day. She was even wearing a Chocolate Lab apron with a kitchen towel slung over her shoulder.
Yet she was flustered to the point of blushing, fluttering her hands, stuttering her welcome…and blocking the doorway. I pushed forward gently so she had to back up. Then Princess and I walked through, and Rose closed the door behind us.
I turned to her and pushed the flowers into her arms.
“Rose, these are for you.” Smooth, Rafe, who else? “I brought you some wine too.” Obvious, Rafe, what else? “Is everything okay?” Are you okay?
She dipped her nose into the flowers, took a deep breath and then raised her face with a breathtaking smile. “Rafe. This is the first time a guy has brought me flowers. They’re beautiful. Thank you!”
What about past boyfriends? What about recent dates? What about Finn’s father before he’d…what? Died, disappeared, flaked off?
Yeah, I had so many questions, but—thank fuck—I didn’t spew them all out on the spot.
Instead, I zipped it and followed Rose as she swayed her way through the dining room in her tight jeans, throwing comments over her shoulder all the while.
“I’m going to find one of Mom’s pretty vases for your flowers. Oh, you brought wine too? That’s too much! There’s a corkscrew in the drawer there—can you open it? I put some beer in the fridge to chill for you. I got a ton of choices. See if there’re any you like.”
While I opened the wine and chose a brown porter, she put the flowers in a big glass vase and the vase on the dining table. A long, dark wood table with curvy legs, surrounded by fancy matching chairs, already set for supper—yeah, we were eating at the dining, not the kitchen, table.
She then made her last comment, or I guessed, question, “May I borrow your muscles for a while?”
I had all sorts of answers to that, but being a smart guy, I kept my mouth shut and cocked one eyebrow. Rose laughed a little self-consciously and, damn, blushed again. Rose held up her still-bandaged hands on either side of her face, like she was surrendering, and then tilted her head toward a row of peeled, boiled, semi-crumbling potatoes on the kitchen island.
“Normally, I’d mash these bad boys myself, but my palms are still too sore to grip the masher hard enough. And to apply pressure.”
Again, I shut it and gave her a chin lift instead. She stepped over to the stove where the meatballs and cream sauce simmered in a big skillet, richness wafting into the air. Some sort of vegetable was cooking in a pot, and a small saucepan was steaming what turned out to be milk, butter and garlic.
“If you can move the potatoes back to their big stockpot over there on the counter, I can pour in the milk mixture while you mash.”
So that’s how I ended up with Rose tucked close to my side, holding my left shoulder to steady herself while she slowly streamed the milk-butter-garlic into the pot and I plunged the masher down again and again.
We both were a little heated when it was all over.
We stepped away from each other. Rose pulled up her apron to blot her neck and fan her face while I ran my forearm across my forehead. I hated to admit it, but she was the first to recover.
She grabbed serving dishes from her cupboards and issued orders disguised as requests. “Rafe, would you mind dishing up the mashies in this bowl while I get the broccoli ready? Rafe, would you mind ladling the meatballs and sauce onto this platter? Rafe, would you mind putting out this lingonberry sauce while I spread the pickled cucumbers on a little plate?”
I didn’t mind at all.
After the dogs were fed and directed to sit—and not beg—in the kitchen doorway, after our drinks—even my porter—were poured into nice glasses, and after Rose turned on some music—no Elvis, thank God—we sat down to supper.
We filled our plates, and then Rose declared, “You should be thankful it’s not Thanksgiving.”
“Why’s that?” I asked, taking the bait like a sucker.
“Because before you can eat, you have to present a three-minute, memorized speech detailing what you were thankful for in the past year,” she replied with a perfectly straight face.
“Each and every person at the table has to do this?”
“Oh, yes. We have a huge family-and-friends-giving here at the house.” She hesitated before adding, “So the speeches may last over an hour before we can dig in.”
Rose frowned and stopped talking, maybe thinking about the first Thanksgiving without her mom. Bet her mom had been one of those who made a big deal out of all the holidays. Bet she’d gone overboard in the best possible way—feeding everyone and their dog within shouting distance.
Rose looked sad, and I wasn’t going to allow that. Not that she didn’t have a right to be sad or to take as long as she wanted to grieve.
I wasn’t going to avoid asking Rose about her mom like people often did when somebody you loved died. I’d get her to talk and share stories.
When my mom died, nobody ever talked to me about her again. Nobody asked me what she’d been like. Nobody asked me if I missed her. Nobody even said her name again. And I’d been a kid, just seven. I didn’t even have one photo of my mom—before smartphones and too poor for cameras. And my mom’s family and my sperm donor had deserted us, so nobody was there to help.
Rose had photos all over the place—living room bookshelves, dining room buffet, even the kitchen counters. Framed pictures of her at all ages—with her mom, Finn, a gray-haired guy I took to be her dad, an elderly couple holding hands, her girl crew. Photos of Pirate and earlier generations of chocolate Labs filled an entire wall.
So, yeah, I was going to go there. I was going to talk about the elephant in the room. Or, in this case, the Elvis in my bedroom.
“You know, Rose, I had to promise Princess one of your mom’s meatballs to get her out of the apartment this afternoon.”
“Wait, what? Why?” I understood her shock—Princess always wanted to come over and hang out with Pirate in the backyard.
“I may be exaggerating a bit, but she loves that Elvis in the corner of the bedroom. Anytime we’re there, morning, evening, whenever, she lies pointed toward the guy, worshipping him with her doggy eyes. What is it with you women and Elvis? Why did your mom love him so much?”
“Oh my dog, I forgot he was there. I got that for Mom as a joke when she was sick. Jen must have left him behind when she cleared out the place. I can come get him out of your way!”
“No, don’t you dare. I think it would break Princess’s heart to see him go. But tell me more about your mom, about Ellie—why did she love Elvis so much?”
A grin lit up Rose’s beautiful face. I got distracted for a moment and then caught up to what she was saying.
“He was the entire package! Elvis could sing, dance, act—all wrapped up in those shaking hips, sensuous lips and hooded eyes. Mom was a teenager in the sixties, and that was pretty racy stuff for those times. She bought the records, watched him on TV and went to his movies. I’m surprised my grandparents permitted it, but Grandpa usually went along with what Grandma said. And it was pretty innocent compared to these times.”
She kept going, and I was happy to see her talk about her mom. “Elvis didn’t disappear entirely when Mom and Dad got married. He kinda took a back seat for a while. Grandpa was gone by then, Dad was busy setting up our first roastery, and Mom was helping Grandma in the coffee shop.”
Rose paused and ladled some more mashed potatoes, meatballs and sauce onto my plate. She popped up to push past the dogs and grab a couple of small saucers from the kitchen. As she came back to the table, she continued talking a mile a minute.
Mission accomplished.
“Now you’d think my dad would’ve been jealous—after all, they’d played ‘Love Me Tender’ at their wedding, and Elvis albums were background music in the coffee shop—but he was a wise man. He knew he was always number one on Mom’s hit charts. Dad even took Mom to Graceland a couple of years after it opened—I still have the photos somewhere around here.”
Princess and Pirate stood, tails and hind ends wagging hard, as they watched Rose spoon two meatballs each on the saucers along with a little sauce and broccoli. No mashies because…garlic. She set them on the kitchen floor just over the threshold, and the dogs gobbled their treats up. In five seconds flat. Like they hadn’t had their supper a half hour ago.
We smirked at each other and settled back into finishing our meal. Rose continued telling me about her mom and her lifelong crush on Elvis.
“After I came along—she was an older mom at thirty-nine, they’d tried for years before they had me—she’d moved on to collecting Elvis CDs and his DVDs. So I guess I grew up listening to Elvis and watching his movies. Even though”—Rose grinned at me here—“by the time I was in my teens, I was more into Beyoncé and Justin Timberlake.
“But Elvis was always our ‘thing’—especially in those final months. That’s when I found the Elvis cutout. That’s when we’d cuddle on the bed like a slumber party and watch movie after movie on an old DVD player connected to the TV.”
She’d turned inward, humming a little and singing under her breath. “Love Me Tender,” if I wasn’t mistaken.
She looked at me, her green eyes glassy, and said, “Thank you for asking, Rafe. She was a wonderful mother, and I miss her every moment.”
Rose paused, seeming to gather herself. “You’ve probably figured it out—I was a younger mom when Finn was born. As in, still-a-teenager young. And single, with his father not in the picture. I was so lucky to have my mom there. Dad was great too. Yet it was Mom who taught me how to be a mom. But that’s a story for another time.”
She stood abruptly and clapped her hands. The dogs jumped up, and I jumped a little too at the sudden change of direction. So immersed in her story—and in her—I guessed.
“Let’s clear the table and put any leftovers away. I’ll do the dishes later on,” she directed.
I started to protest, but she shook her head. “No worries. This way, we can take Pirate and Princess for a walk around the neighborhood, maybe down to the park, while it’s still light outside.”
We returned to Rose’s front porch about forty-five minutes later, after a leisurely amble around Dogwood’s streets—or as much as you could amble when the dogs stopped every two feet to sniff—and through the park. I offered, again, to come in and help her clean up the kitchen.
The stubborn woman smiled and shook her head. “You’ve been so sweet, Rafe, I really appreciate it. It made me happy to spend this time together.”
She stepped closer and rose on her tiptoes to aim a kiss at my cheek. Steadying herself by gripping my shoulder with one hand while holding Pirate’s leash in the other. At the last moment, I lifted my free arm and slid my hand around her cheek to the nape of her neck, my fingers weaving into her thick hair. I pulled her head toward mine and kissed her sweet mouth. Gently, gently, I kept my lips on hers and touched my tongue to the seam of her mouth. She let me in.
Meanwhile, the dogs wrapped their leashes around us, getting tighter and tighter.