Carry Me Home (14 page)

“But the main thing you can get,” she told them, “is successful. Successful in your career. Successful at your life. If you like math, and you like science, even a little bit? Now’s your chance to give them your very best try. Even if you’re not sure you can do it, even if you’re the first person in your family to go to college. Because if you do the things everybody’s talked about here today, take those hard AP classes, do that hard work? You can use your brains and your drive and your ambition and your work ethic—and Cal’s money,” she added, getting another laugh for that one. “You can use all that. You can become the person that everybody talks about when you show up here for your own reunion. And you know what’s even more important? You can use them to become the person you want to be, to create the life you want.”

She stopped a minute, stood still, let it build.

“And if there’s somebody out there today,” she told them, “somebody like that girl up there on that screen, or one of those guys. If you’re not pretty, or not handsome. If you’re good at math and bad at sports
,
if you’re overweight, or skinny, or gay, or poor, or unattractive in any of the hundred and one ways high school students can find to make each other feel unattractive. To that person, wherever you are, whoever you are, let me promise you this. It gets better. It’s all out there for you. It’s all possible. If you commit, if you work, if you earn yourself some of Cal’s money, if you use it well. If you never stop trying. It gets better.”

DARK SECRETS

Cal had insisted on taking her out to lunch. “You’ve got to eat anyway,” he’d pointed out reasonably when they were back in Luke’s office so she could collect her purse, so they could both get their coats. “You don’t have class until, what?”

“Two,” she said.

“There you go. Two. And what are you going to be doing otherwise?”

“Uh . . . eating lunch?”

“Uh-huh.” He put two fingers to his forehead and closed his eyes. “I see . . . a peanut butter sandwich and an apple. Maybe carrot sticks, if you went wild. The vision gets a little fuzzy down there at the bottom of the paper bag.”

“No,” she said, trying not to smile. “A turkey sandwich. And celery sticks. And all right, you got me on the apple.”

“And you’re just dying to eat all that?”

She glanced at Luke, who was leaning back in his desk chair, his eyes going from one to the other of them as if he were watching a tennis match. He held up his hands. “Got to stay on school grounds. Kinda goes with the job. And yeah, I’ve got the sandwich in the bag, too. You don’t see Cal here offering to pick me up a big fat meatloaf sandwich and deliver it, do you? Guess I don’t count. Go someplace well lit with him and you could be all right. Keep some space between you, and remember what your mama taught you about what your knee is for.”

“Nice,” Cal complained as Zoe burst out laughing. “Next time, don’t help me.”

“Who’s helping you?” he asked. “I think I was talking to Dr. Zoe here.”

She went, of course. It was just lunch, after all. She had to eat lunch. She’d fixed her sandwich the night before, and it would be a little soggy. It didn’t sound that good at all. That was why she agreed to it. Of course it was.

“Now, in sports terms,” Cal said conversationally from his side of the table at the Garden Café, “we’d call what happened back there bringing in a ringer.”

“Pardon?” she asked innocently, taking a sip from her iced tea through the straw and smiling at him.

“Or,” he continued, “you could come right out and call it being sucker-punched. I’ve never been so upstaged in my life. You must be one hell of a teacher. You’re obviously one hell of a motivator.”

The glow spread through her, and she was smiling some more. “I can’t pretend I keep my students that riveted, though. If you came to hear me lecture, I’m afraid you’d be sadly disappointed.”

“I’ll have to give that a try,” he said. “Might even learn something useful about rocks. Or . . .”

“Hydrogeology,” she reminded him. “Of course, you’re an engineer yourself, so you might actually be able to stay awake. But it’s true that some subjects are easier to make fascinating than others. To the lay audience, that is. Anytime you want an analysis of the water table under your farm, though, please do feel free to inquire about my services. My rates are still quite reasonable, being so new in the profession and all. I’ll even do diagrams. Color-coded.”

“But will you use the pointer?” he asked. “That’s the real question.”

“For a consideration,” she said solemnly, “we can do slides and the pointer and everything. Of course, it may cost you extra.”

“So worth it, though,” he said. “Especially if you wear that.” He cast an appreciative eye over her V-necked sweater dress, which she could have sworn, this morning, wasn’t anything like too short or too tight. And certainly not anything like too sexy. “I’m doing my best to remember all those manners my mama taught me, but damn, Professor. I’m afraid that if I’m going to behave myself and get a shot at taking you dancing again, I might have to insist on the black suit next time, after all, because you’re way too distracting this way. Although red would be even better, don’t get me wrong. I’m still holding out for you in that red dress.”

“Really,” she managed to say. She was warming at his words, the look in his eyes, but then, what woman wouldn’t be? “Another vote in favor of the black suit, then, because this clearly isn’t professional enough.”

“Oh, you’re professional enough,” he said. “It’s just that you’re so much else, too. You can’t help it, and why should you have to hide it?”

That one actually took her breath away, and she couldn’t answer.

“So was that really you back there, in the picture?” he asked after a moment, taking a bite of his ham sandwich. “Hard to believe.”

“Oh, yeah,” she assured him. “And that was possibly one of the more flattering shots. Let’s say I didn’t exactly keep a scrapbook of my teenage photos.”

“And I’m going to throw out a wild-ass guess here,” he said, “that some of those jocks gave you a hard time in high school.”

“Some,” she admitted. “Although mostly, I wasn’t even on their radar. I was pretty much invisible.”

“You’re not invisible now,” he said. “And they didn’t know what they were missing. Not just how you look, but that person you are underneath. That’s some woman underneath.”

“Well, thank you.” She did her best to keep her balance, but he made it so hard. First he teased, and then he was so . . . so sweet. “They seemed to stumble through their days despite the loss, though.”

“So if not high school,” he said, “when?”

She took another sip of tea, a forkful of salad. “When what?”

“Jocks. Or
a
jock. What happened? And when? Tell me who it was, and I’ll go beat the . . . crap out of him for you. I promise.”

“Violence doesn’t solve everything.”

“Well, no,” he conceded. “But it solves some things. All I need is a name.”

She had to smile at that. “It’s a long story. And I’m fine.” She turned her attention to her salad, which featured way too much iceberg lettuce and carrots, and way too little of anything else, and wasn’t actually that much of an improvement over the sandwich in her drawer.

“I suppose it’s just going back to high school,” she said after a minute. “Even somebody else’s high school. Still a little painful, I guess, even though it was a long time ago. And it’s such a hard time for so many kids. It should be about the future, and instead, it’s all about the present. It shouldn’t be about looks and popularity, but it is. And sports, of course. It can be so hard on kids who don’t have any of the three, and that can keep them from focusing on that future, and that’s a shame.” She caught herself with a laugh. “But I guess you know how I feel about it. Since you just heard me give a whole talk about it.”

“You’re right,” he said. “That I know how you feel about it, and that it’s a shame. That’s why I gave the money, you know. Because I got lucky. And because I know that not everybody gets that lucky.”

She felt the hot color rise in her cheeks. “And now I’m ashamed,” she said. “I’m lecturing you, when you’re the one donating all that money and setting up the program to help those same exact kids. You’re so casual about it, I keep forgetting. Or maybe you’re just too hard to figure out.”

“I should go back to teasing you, you think? That make you feel better?”

“Maybe,” she said, losing the battle against the smile again. “Or maybe you could go on and let your guard down some more. But then, I know you don’t like to show your soft side.”

She got a smile from him for that, another of those Cal Jackson specials. Slow, sweet, and so sexy. “Could be,” he said. “And could be I’m saving my soft side for a special occasion.”

“Oh?” she asked, because she couldn’t help it. “That’s going to be your
soft
side? Oh, man, that’s disappointing.”

He laughed. “Damn, Professor. You’re just too good. Let’s go back to talking about you, because I’m losing. When did you get so pretty?”

“What?” she asked, off-balance yet again.

He gestured at her. Her face, and . . . the rest of her. “All that. When did it happen? Or do you not know it happened? I find that hard to believe.”

She looked down at her plate, stabbed at an anemic tomato wedge, and contemplated it on her fork. “Freshman year of college. No glasses, and no braces, of course. And most kids gain weight that first year. I lost it. Guess I’ve always been contrary.”

“And you got pretty.”

“Prettier, anyway.”

“Pretty.”

“You know what’s really terrible?” she asked him with a sigh.

He smiled again. “What? I can’t imagine.”

“That I can’t ask you to show me your picture from back then so I could laugh at you, too. Because I already saw it, right there above the trophy case in the front hall of your high school. You know, from when you led the team to the state championship. Of course you did. You looked pretty good in that uniform, didn’t you? But then, I think it’s obvious that you were born good-looking.”

“Nope,” he said. “I was born . . . I don’t know. Strong, maybe.
Luke
was born good-looking.”

“Yeah,” she said, eyeing him. “Your body’s probably better than your face.”

He choked on his ice water, had to spend a minute coughing into his napkin. “So if I put a bag over my head,” he managed once he could talk again, “you might consider it?”

“Well, I guess all of you is fairly acceptable,” she conceded, trying not to laugh and failing completely. “And you know it, so don’t pretend.”

“I thought good-looking wasn’t on the list,” he said. “Just a good smile. And by the way, you’ve got one hell of a smile yourself. That’s going on my own list for sure. Those pretty dimples of yours . . . I’ve lost a little sleep over those.”

The flush was rising again, for a completely different reason this time. “No fair remembering everything I say. Especially after a couple of beers.”

“So, I should be a dumb jock and just stare vacantly out of my not-good-looking face, is that it? Smiling, of course.”

“You’re not a dumb jock, and there’s no way anyone could miss it, all right?” she said with a sigh. “Except me, but as we’ve just discussed, I was prejudiced.”

“I like that
was
.”

“So,” she said, working determinedly on her salad again, “not so many dark secrets of your own, huh? Football star from about . . . oh, junior high, I’m guessing. Money, stardom, good-looking . . . body,” she added to another grin, “and the hometown hero, too? You really do have it all, don’t you?”

“Don’t have the football career anymore,” he reminded her. “Only have half the money, too, since the divorce. Less than half since that little gift to the university. Don’t have a wife, either. And as you pointed out,” he said with a sigh of his own, “I don’t even have a handsome face. Dang it.”

She wanted to ask him about the wife, but how could she? She was beginning to wonder why any woman would have left Cal, but that’s what had happened, according to Rochelle. “I suppose there are worse things than being the hometown hero,” she said instead.

“Yeah. The good part is, you get to live in your hometown again. The bad part is, you have to live in your hometown again. Not everybody loves a hero.”

She looked up from her salad. “Jealousy,” she guessed.

“Yep. Everything’s got a price. Most people around here take you for who you are, though. What I like about living here.
Why
I’m living here. It’s not about what you do for folks around here, or about how much you’ve got. It’s about who you are. If I set myself up all fancy, that wouldn’t impress anybody. Just the opposite. They’d think I was a jerk.”

“And you’re not.”

He shrugged. “Well, I don’t know. What do you think?”

“That it’s pretty obvious you’re not a jerk, not underneath. And,” she went on, because it had been nagging at her for days, “speaking of that gift of yours . . . I like this town, too, don’t get me wrong. But you do know, don’t you, that everything that goes on everywhere else goes on here, too?”

“Like what?” He looked startled, and no wonder. Why couldn’t she just flirt? Why did she always have to make things serious? Because she
was
serious, and she couldn’t help it.

“Thinking about recruiting women to the university . . .” she said. “We keep overlooking one thing. That they need to be safe there.”

“And they’re not?”

“Have you heard that statistic, that one in five women is sexually assaulted in college?”

“I have,” he said, shifting gears right along with her, because Cal was anything but slow. “And I believe it. I went to college on a football scholarship.”

“And were in a fraternity, I’ll bet.”

“Yes,” he said, “I was in a fraternity. Although I don’t think that’s the only place parties happen, or rape happens, if we’re putting it on the table here. But I wouldn’t have said this university has any worse record than anyplace else. Probably better. And aren’t there training sessions and things like that now? I’m sure I saw something about that recently. Kind of a big deal, isn’t it?”

“You’d think,” she said, “if things were really changing.”

“So this is happening? You’re hinting around, and I don’t have a clue. Where is this coming from?”

“Remember when we were in your truck,” she said, “and the police car went by so fast? And you said something about the university’s finest keeping the streets safe?”

“I’m not likely to forget that, am I? Scared me to death, with you not in a shoulder belt.”

She set aside the feeling that gave her. “Well, I don’t think your campus police, or the university administration, either, is exactly with the program. However well the sexual assault prevention program is working, and I’m not sure it is, because I’ve done some research this week. Even when you’ve got straight-up attempted forcible rape, the classic case, breaking and entering, they don’t seem nearly as concerned as they ought to be.”

“All right.” He set the remains of his sandwich down. “Let’s have the story.” He beckoned to her. “Come on. Let’s have it.”