Calm, Cool, and Adjusted (31 page)

“Simon.” I stop walking and face him. “What is going on with you?”

“I’ve just got a lot on my mind, Poppy. I’ve got to finish packing, and I shouldn’t have come over here. I have a million things to do to close up my own house. Hearing what you’re struggling with, and that I can’t help you right now—it bothers me, all right?”

“Simon, today was a good thing. I understand a lot more than I did yesterday.”

He grabs his back. “It doesn’t mean you have all the answers, Poppy. This is all fresh and you’re still going to fight the obsessions. You know that.”

As we approach the house, my father’s Lexus is in the driveway. My father, who’s supposed to be in Arizona.

“Isn’t that your father’s car?” Simon asks.

At that point, my father comes down the front stairs and waves at us. He’s wearing the same Tommy Bahama shirt Jeff wore on our date, and I can’t help but laugh at the sight. I run the last few steps towards him and hug him frantically. “Daddy, I’m so glad you’re here. What are you doing here?”

My dad keeps his arm around me and reaches out and shakes Simon’s hand. “Good to see you, young man. You’ve done a good job on the house.” His nod is his form of masculine thank you, and I watch adoringly as my two men meet each other in respect.

“Thank my friend, Jim. He’s the contractor.” Simon stretches out his hand again. “Well, it was good to see you, Mr. Clayton. If you’ll excuse me, I’ve got to get home and get the final things packed for Hawaii.”

“Going on vacation?”

“Something like that.” Simon starts for the car. “Poppy, if you need anything just ask Jim. He’ll take care of it.”

“Simon.” I go chasing after him. “You’re just leaving me?” I can’t keep up on my cast. “Simon, wait.”

He turns around, and his brown eyes warm at the sight of me. I know what he feels; I can see it. I just don’t understand what’s changed, and I know if he leaves, that will be it.

“Why is your cell phone not working?” I ask him.

“I’ll get a new one in Hawaii. I’ll call you when I get there, Poppy.”

“Do you promise?”

He smiles. It’s the warm grin I’ll always remember. The one that would light up a room. “I promise.” He tips my chin towards him. “Stay out of trouble.”

“Are you going to kiss me good-bye?” I ask.

He chastely kisses my forehead. “Stay out of trouble and stay off that foot. No running, do you understand?”

“I didn’t mean aren’t you going to kiss me on the forehead. If I want that kind of kiss, my father’s behind me.”

Simon laughs. “You’re asking me for a kiss? This is rich, Poppy. A man just has to redo your house for the privilege?”

“Jim redid my house, and I’m not asking him for a kiss, am I?”

“I’ll be sure and tell him.”

“Make no mistake, Simon. I am asking you for a real kiss, and you’re avoiding the subject quite adeptly. I’m starting to feel . . . Well, I’m starting to feel a little dissed, quite frankly.”

He steps closer to me. “I can’t have my best chiropractor feeling dissed.” He bends down and kisses me tenderly, but briefly on the lips.

“That’s it? That’s the best you got?”

“In case you haven’t noticed, your father is right there, and I’m not sure he thinks much of me.”

I turn around and look at my dad, who is indeed staring at us. “He’ll get over it.” I pull Simon down toward me, and I give him a real kiss. Whatever Simon’s saying to me, I can feel the truth on his lips. I pull away with a sly smile on my face. I don’t think Simon knows exactly how goal oriented I am, but I consider myself in training for not just a triathlon, but wrangling a slippery young entrepreneur.

“What are you up to?” he asks me.

“Just saying good-bye to a friend.” I shrug.

“That was
not
a good-bye. Everything in that kiss was a ‘hello, baby.’”

This makes me giggle. “I’ll be in Hawaii for the run in a month.”

“How are you going to run on a stress fracture?”

“You let me worry about that.”

He bends down and kisses me again, and I feel it to the tips of my toes. I feel like I could leave with Simon right now. I could walk away from everything, and we could set our goals together. But of course, that equates with stalking, and I have enough self-control to know better.

“You’re worth the wait.”

“What?” he asks.

I clamp my mouth closed. “I’ll see you in Hawaii.”

“Good-bye, Poppy.” Simon slips into his Prius and waves.

I walk back towards my father after watching Simon drive off and I just have all the confidence in the world that I’ll see him again soon. Though, in hindsight, he didn’t leave a phone number or a forwarding address. A lesser woman might think that was a bad sign.

“What’s that about? Poppy, are you interested in that boy?”

“Do you remember that time Mom pulled me out of the undertow?”

He grins. “I do. You were scared to death, but then you relayed how you got right back in, and that the water would never get you again.” He laughs again. “It did—the Pacific is faster than a six-year-old—but you were never afraid after that. You kept your cool.”

“That’s exactly what I plan to do with Simon, Daddy. In his own way, he plucked me out of the ocean again, and I’m going right back in.”

“Do you always kiss your patients? It’s not very professional.”

“Dad!” I start to laugh. “What do you think?”

“I just don’t know what you see in that guy. He’s all money and bravado. What’s attractive about that?”

“Dad, look at this house! What’s not to see in Simon? He takes care of everything. I like that in a guy. I know that I can rely on him.”

“Reliable is something you want in a mechanic, not a husband.”

“Actually, I think I want
both
a reliable mechanic and a husband. I’m particular that way.”

“What about passion? Does he move your senses at all?”

“Dad!”
I’m so not having this conversation.

“Sharon and I knew from the first moment. She looked at me, and I knew everything would be okay.”

That might be because you’d just lost your wife.

“What about Mom? How did you know with her?”

“Your mom was a good woman, Poppy, but she was too practical for real passion in many ways.”

It breaks my heart to hear this, because I don’t think for one moment that it’s true. My mother bore and bred passion. I think about her giggles at the beach, and her spinning me around in the house, and our sewing together, and her passion for art. Everything she did was done with zeal: the garden, her dancing, her baking. I think about my dad’s statement and I realize he doesn’t really remember my mom before Aura died. He just couldn’t and think she wasn’t passionate.

At the same time, I imagine my father forced the practical in her. Though my daddy may be passionate about a lot of things, work was never one of them. Don’t get me wrong—I love my father deeply, but I know his weaknesses well. He never grew up. When my mother finally died in her coma, Sharon helped serve food at the funeral.

I’ll never forget seeing her in the kitchen, wearing my mother’s apron, as though the interloper had made herself at home no shortage of time. Later she told me, “Men need to be married, Poppy, and I wasn’t about to let another woman get her hands on a good man like your father. In those cases, one must move quickly. Let mourning protocol be saved for kings and queens. You needed a mother.”

Yeah, I was her top concern.
But of course, Sharon was a good mother to me; she just wasn’t my mother. And it’s time I remembered the good in that.

“What are you doing here, Dad?” These memories temporarily wipe the empathy from my voice.

“I drove all night. I just felt there was unfinished business here. Something drew me back, and Sharon tried to talk me out of it. She’s worried about nesting for the kids before they get there. But I don’t know, Poppy, I just had to come.” He looks at the house. “It looks good, doesn’t it? Hard to believe we lived in it the way we did all those years.”

I nod.

“We have to get your mother’s things out of storage. It’s time. I’ll be back in a month for the wedding, but I didn’t think this could wait.”

Yes, it was time twenty years ago, but facing things head on is not something either me or my father is good at—unless we’re talking someone’s health issues. I can take all the conflict in the world for a bad kidney.

“Sharon didn’t come with you?”

He shakes his head. “She feels we should have done this ten years ago. She offered to.”

“Maybe we should have let her.”

“Come on, I’ll drive you to the storage locker. Simon said the key was in the left-hand kitchen drawer.”

I watch my father go into the house and schmooze with the plaster guy. He really could charm a snake from its hole, and this makes me smile. My daddy was the man every girl wanted in school, and I feel lucky to have him. Though money disappears in his presence, he’s worth every penny to those he delights.

He jangles the key in his hand. “Let’s go.”

Let’s go.
My thoughts exactly, but somehow I’m picturing white sandy beaches and a burly hero at the end of my travels. Simon’s picture invades my thoughts, but it’s a good thing because somehow going through my mother’s things doesn’t feel nearly as unpalatable as I might have thought.

My cell phone trills, and I pick it up hopefully. It’s Morgan.

“The bride is calling me? What did I do to be so special?”

“Lilly and I are worried about you, Poppy.”

Oh my goodness, how sweet is that?

“Worried about me? What’s to be worried about?”

“You’re dating a plastic surgeon who looks like he’s straight off Dr. 90210, you’re in a cast from over-exercising, you’re telling us you might lose your office lease, and you have the nerve to ask that question?”

“I’ll have the cast off for your wedding, and Jeff and I are just friends. The office will work out. My clients will follow me.”

“It didn’t look like friendship on the sidewalk,” Morgan says, referring to my brief lack of judgment.

“Were you spying on us?”

“Of course we were; what kind of friends do you think we are?”

I walk away from my dad so he can’t hear my conversation. “Well, I explained to Jeff all about Simon. Jeff felt sorry for me after the shower.”

“Simon? The guy you told Lilly about? The patient?”

“Not anymore. He’s moving to Hawaii. He was a patient for three years though.”

“And you’re telling me I shouldn’t worry. You finally have a crush on someone and he’s going to Hawaii and it took you three years to realize you had a crush?”

“Yes,” I answer. “But Hawaii’s just a plane ride away, and I easily enough when I get the new office settled.”

“What on earth? Poppy, you’re not thinking clearly. What supplements are you on now?”

“I’m on nothing, just a little kefir in the mornings. Listen, have a plan, Morgan.”

“Oh no, Poppy. A plan? It doesn’t include some magic potion you’ve concocted in your office, does it?”

“Ahem.”

“You’re not going to think this is romantic to have unrequited love scene, are you? You didn’t watch
Wuthering Heights
lately, did you?”

“Simon!” I shout with all the passion of Heathcliff on moors. But Morgan doesn’t laugh.

“That is not funny.”

“Come on, it was sort of funny.”

“Let me see if I have this straight,” Morgan says. “Jeff your date for the wedding. The guy you were snuggling with Lilly’s sidewalk, and the guy who you got a nearly perfect score on
The Newlywed Game
with, right?”

“Right.”

“But he’s not the guy you want.”

“That makes me sound flaky, Morgan. It’s not like that. needs a place to expand his business, and our landlord is going kick us all out, so Jeff hired a lawyer, but I’m not into that lawyer/lawsuit thing. Oh, no offense to George. But anyway, made Jeff a deal—”

“Poppy?”

“Yeah?”

“How does this have anything to do with the guy you supposedly want?”

“I’m getting to that. Okay, Simon, the man I want, comes but really never did anything about it because I was his doctor, he was my patient, that kind of thing. Then, Simon was in my office when my dad was there—”

“Oh, your dad likes him.”

“No, not really. So Simon overheard my dad say that I had this house in Santa Cruz that needed a lot of work.”

“Poppy, you’re making my head spin. If you want Simon, but he’s moved to Hawaii, explain to me how you think this is going to play out.”

“Okay, well, I don’t exactly know that yet. I just know that Simon is the man I want to marry. I’m going to pray about it, and you know, God says he can move a mountain, so Simon shouldn’t be all that difficult.”

Morgan sighs again. She seems to be doing a lot of that lately.

“So will Simon come to the wedding now as your date?”

“No, he’s going to be in Hawaii, aren’t you listening? Besides, he says he’s not serious about me, but I know he’s lying about it because when he kissed me— Oh well, just never you mind. But wow! This is it, Morgan. This is it.”

“I’m glad I called. Lilly reserved the spa for the weekend because she was worried about you, and I told her she was full of it, but now I think I must have been blind. Lilly thought we hadn’t spent enough time with you and wanted to get together just the three of us before the wedding.”

“Don’t you have a million things to do?”

“Poppy, you forget. I used to plan these parties weekly. George will be home for the weekend with Georgie, and this is our last chance to play free and clear.”

“That would be great.” I hold up a finger to my dad, who is tapping his foot outside his Lexus and ready to get this errand over. “I’ll explain about Simon then.”

We hang up, and I have a big smile on my face. Today, I remembered who my mother really was, and I learned how a broken heart damages everything. If Simon thinks he’s any match for my zeal, he’s got a lot to learn. I did not figure this all out for nothing.

I get into my dad’s Lexus and he dashes us to a nearby storage unit that looks like a good place for a murder. The metal cubicles are all locked, and of course I can’t help but wonder what’s inside each of them. Maybe I’ve watched too many movies of the week, but I keep hoping one won’t smell and there isn’t a body inside.