Games We Play (13 page)

“No, it’s not Vivian…or maybe it is. I’ve never wanted to be like her. You do know that, right?” she asked.

“I know,” Myra said, looking at her oddly.

“She has always wanted me and Lark to follow in her footsteps, but we never did,” she said, watching as her aunt took two mugs from the cabinet and placed them on the counter, positioning two tea bags in each. She opened another cabinet and pulled out a small bottle of brandy.

“My secret ingredient,” Myra said, holding the bottle out for Kendall to see. “If it’s not Houston, then who or what is it? Out with it. What has you so bothered that you can’t sleep?” she asked, looking at Kendall again. “How much sugar?”

“One spoonful,” Kendall said, accepting the mug from her aunt. After her aunt poured brandy into her own mug first, she handed the bottle to Kendall, who poured some into hers.

“Okay, I’m listening,” Myra said, staring at the teapot. “On second thought, let’s finish making our tea first, and then we can sit and you can tell me all about your troubles,” she said. They didn’t have long to wait; a few minutes later, the teakettle started in with its loud whistle. Myra filled both their mugs with water, stirred her tea with a spoon, which she gave to Kendall, who did the same.

“I met someone today who accused me of being here to steal from you,” Kendall said, following her aunt across the kitchen to the table.

“What did he look like?” Myra said, taking a seat, waiting until Kendall sat down beside her.

Kendall took her first sip and coughed, and Myra smiled.

“Owns the Brewpub,” Kendall said when she stopped coughing, not up for guessing games.

“Cooper,” Myra said, watching Kendall. “I didn’t realize you’d gone to the pub.”

“I haven’t,” Kendall said.

“The golf course, then.”

“Yes. I’m not here to steal from you or to try and prove you incompetent. I’m not. I don’t know how else to tell you that,” Kendall said, not attempting to hide her frustration and hurt.

“I’m sorry that you were wounded by Cooper’s words, by whatever he said to you,” Myra said, covering one of Kendall’s hands with hers, as she studied Kendall in that way of hers, like she could see to the truth underneath. Kendall fought against the desire to squirm.

“He can be really protective of those he considers family. So I apologize on his behalf. I know he didn’t mean any harm. I’ll speak to him first thing tomorrow. I’d call him tonight, but I hate to interrupt him at work. I know he only wanted to protect me.”

“No, you don’t have to talk to him. I would really rather you didn’t,” Kendall said, taking another sip of her drink. She’d poured way too much brandy into her tea, and she was starting to feel the warmth of it seeping into her body.

Her aunt nodded. “Well, I’m sorry nonetheless. I told you what I suspected about you and your mother before you came to town, so you shouldn’t be surprised about that. And of course I mentioned your visit to a few friends of mine. Cooper is one of those friends. Actually, he’s more son than friend to me. I spoke to him and the others because I was worried. I did it in confidence, knowing that they would make sure I was protected. We all look out for each other, and it was probably in that spirit that he spoke to you.”

“I understand, really I do, as irritating and as hurtful as it was to listen to him. Still, I wish there was something I could do to show you that I’m not interested in anything other than getting to know you…that I’m interested in protecting you too.”

“I believe you. From the beginning, I believed you. I’m a very good judge of character, and I also called your father earlier this evening, just to be safe. Between his assurances and what I’ve seen of you, I don’t have the slightest bit of doubt. I just haven’t had an opportunity to speak to Cooper. I’m sure he only thought to help me, and that it wasn’t anything personal.”

“I understand,” Kendall said. “I don’t want him to think I was bothered by him, though.”

“I won’t mention it then,” Myra said.

“Thanks for listening,” Kendall said, yawning.

“Think you might be able to get some sleep now?”

“I do,” Kendall said, handing her mug off to her aunt. Myra placed both mugs in the sink, then watched as Kendall walked toward the kitchen door.

“Goodnight,” Kendall said, from the doorway.

“Goodnight,” Myra said.

Sunday afternoon

“Coop here,” he said into his cell. It was Myra calling, sooner than he’d thought. The professor must have told on him already.

“Hi, Cooper. Is this a good time?” Myra asked.

“I’m sitting in my office, so yes, now works,” he said.

“We made a mistake,” Myra said.

“Your niece,” he said.

“Of the many things I admire about you, number one on my list is your directness. You don’t beat around the bush. I hear you spoke to her,” Myra said.

“Yes.”

“She was really upset by it.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It’s okay, I guess it couldn’t be helped.”

“No, I don’t think so,” he said.

“She was more upset than I would have thought, given who her mother is.”

“Maybe she’s one of those women who are supersensitive,” he said.

“What exactly did you say to her?”

“I asked her reasons for visiting you. I told her that you weren’t alone here, and that she wouldn’t be able to harm you if that was her goal. It was the easiest and quickest way to have our answers.”

“That was it? That was all you said to her?”

“Yes.”

“How did she respond?”

“She was angry, and she said that she wasn’t here to harm you.”

“And you believed her?”

“I did,” Cooper said.

“I did too. I should have called you sooner, but I hadn’t anticipated that you’d run into her so soon. My opinion of her changed almost immediately after we met. She was honest from the start. She just came right out and told me that she wasn’t here for my money. I am finding her to be very different from her mother.”

“My heart goes out to her for having to live with my sister, who’s has kept her away from her father most of her life. Kendall told me that she and her sister have finally reunited with Butch. I called him too. He and I were good friends before his divorce from my sister. They are in contact with him now, and he thinks very highly of them both. They are not their mother’s daughters.”

“I met her over at the Quarry on Friday evening. We played a few holes,” Cooper said.

“That’s what she told me,” Myra said.

“You asked us to have your back, Myra, and that’s all I was trying to do.”

“I understand, I do. I’m just surprised by her reaction. She seems really hurt, which I wouldn’t expect, since it’s not the first time she’s been accused of being her mother’s daughter. She told me as much. I wondered if perhaps you might have said something else to her.”

He was quiet for a few seconds. “I also accused her being here for me, here after my money,” he said.

“Oh, Cooper,” she said, and he could hear the disappointment in her voice. “You have to let that go…move on,” she said.

“Celeste is back,” he said.

“Your ex-fiancée?
That
Celeste?”

“Yes.”

“Here in Coopersville?”

“Yes. Saturday was her first day working at the pub. Luis hired her. Plus she’s renting one of my houses.”

“Oh, Cooper,” Myra said. Both of them were quiet for a few minutes. “Well, I understand better now.”

“It was an honest assumption given what I knew at the time. You said so yourself—
like mother, like daughter
—and her old boyfriend Houston showed up here yesterday, and he didn’t have anything nice to say about her either. All of that, along with some of her comments during our golf match…Well, Celeste was the icing on top, reminding me of the harm women can do. So maybe I was harder on her than I should have been. But you can see how I might have been predisposed to think the worst,” he said, deciding to stop explaining, ’cause it was starting to sound more like he’d been in the wrong.

“Not all women are Celeste,” Myra said. She waited a few minutes for that to sink in. “Her ex-boyfriend was here? Houston, you said? When?”

“Yesterday afternoon?”

“He didn’t stop by the house,” Myra said.

“He changed his mind after he arrived. He was here with a friend who talked him out of it. They had a few beers, then left.”

“I understand, but I believe Kendall is very different from her mother and from Celeste.”

“I do too.”

“We have to fix this,” Myra said. He’d heard steel in her words before, and he knew she meant what she said. “We have to make this right. And you will start by apologizing. Can you come by the house this evening?”

“I don’t know about this evening, Myra. We’re busy here with the Memorial Day crowd. I’ll stop by if I can squeeze in some time. If not tonight, then first thing tomorrow at the park.”

“I feel awful about this. She is such a nice young woman. You better fix this—do you understand me?” Myra said. He could hear the determination in her voice again.

“Yes, ma’am, I do.”

Sunday evening

“What are you going to do about Celeste?” Luis asked. Cooper had brought his friend up to date on the latest conversation he’d had with his new employee, who was off today, and his conversations with Kendall and Myra. He’d had enough of conversations.

“Nothing. She’s here to do a job,” Cooper said. They were in the pub’s brewing room, tasting beer that had been brewed a week ago and was in one of the conditioning tanks. It was going to be kegged tomorrow.

“So…have you missed her? Do you want her back?” Luis asked.

“No,” he said.

“Not even a little bit?”

“No, not even a little bit.”

“You never did talk about what happened with her.”

“Nothing to tell, really. I loved her, or at least I thought I did. She said she loved me, but it turns out she didn’t. She found someone else after I decided to give away the Cooper family fortune, and now she’s back. This is good,” he said, pointing to his beaker, which was almost empty of the beer he’d been sampling. He drained the last of it and refilled it from the spout.

“You were going to give all your money away?”

“My family’s money.”

“It’s the same thing.”

“It’s not. You know how they were.”

Luis nodded. “Hell, I would have left you too. Dude, what were you thinking? Giving away all that money?”

Cooper gave him a look.

“So you’re going to leave her alone then?” Luis asked, returning to a safer subject. Cooper didn’t talk his family’s past. “Are you going to fire her?”

“No, she said she needed a job, so we’ll see if that’s the truth,” Cooper said, taking Luis’s beaker from his hand to refill it for him. And even though he was still surprised by her presence and didn’t quite trust her, so far she’d just worked—like she’d said she’d do, like she’d been hired to do.

Sunday evening

“I’m think I’m going to go for a run before it gets dark,” Kendall said.

Aunt Myra was sitting in front of the television, watching some show.

“Be careful,” she said, turning to look at Kendall. She’d been doing that a lot since their talk. It was like she needed to reassure herself that Kendall was fine.

“I’m fine,” Kendall said in response to her aunt’s look of apprehension. “And there’s no need to worry about me. I run all the time. I have my phone with me in case something happens.”

“That’s not what has me worried,” Myra said.

“I’m a big girl,” Kendall said, and smiled. She plugged her headphones into her ears and slipped out of the front door. She’d gone to church with Myra that morning and had met a whole boatload of people who loved her aunt. It had been a diverse group at the church, another surprise. The last bastions of segregation were giving way to change…all ethnicities in one church. And the world still managed to turn, at least in this one small corner of the globe.

It was a nice evening, and others seemed to share her idea about spending some time outdoors. There were people moving everywhere—kids on their skateboards, little girls with a mix of skin colors drawing on the sidewalk in a mix of differently colored chalk.

She was at the corner now, made a right onto Locust Street. She returned the wave from an older Hispanic couple, sitting on their front porch, as she jogged past. Cooper must have encountered someone like her mother, and it had left its mark on him in a big way. Being played by someone you loved, who you thought returned that love, could leave even the warmest men cold. She had plenty experience, having watched her mother at work so many times.

Three blocks, and she made a left turn onto Highway 1341, the main road—
the only road
, she corrected herself—into and out of this town. She slowed down to a walk. There were others out walking around here too. The air was filled with laughter, from people who appeared to be happy living here or visiting the good old town of Coopersville. They had all been friendly, many of them smiling or waving as she moved past, which was cool, ’cause she liked friendly, and it was something she’d gotten used to living in Austin.

She passed by the bingo hall, as the sign on door indicated, a really cool, old-styled building from another generation. Next to it was an ice-cream parlor, Ann’s Ice Cream and Sweets. She walked past tables that had been placed on the sidewalk in front of Ann’s. A family of two adults and three children sat around one of them, eating pink, white, and green ice-cream cones.

She walked past several more shops, a Laundromat, and a couple of clothing stores, all open, with people wandering in and out of them. She stopped at the corner of 1341 and New Quarry Road.
How many “Quarry” roads did they need in this town?
she wondered. Crossing the street would put her into the parking lot of the Brewpub, and she asked herself,
What are we doing here, Kendall?
This hadn’t been her intended destination, but here she stood nevertheless, some invisible string having guided her to it, an unspoken desire to get a closer look at him and the Brewpub.

She glanced at the city hall and its municipal buildings located across the street. She’d seen buildings like these a hundred times on her drive here from Austin, found in most every small town, remnants of the past. They reminded her of the ones she’d seen in old black-and-white movies. All with those parking spaces aligned diagonally in front of them. Next to the muni buildings were a bistro, a hair salon, and a diner.