The Weekday Brides 04 - Single by Saturday (21 page)

Zach kept a slight distance from Karen the rest of the day.

Mike, Hannah, and Judy joined them after the parade was over, only to usher them all to the courtyard outside the park. There, the mayor of Hilton presented the road sign that would go up on the highway a quarter mile before the exit.

Zach actually thought his brother looked uncomfortable when they unveiled the sign. H
ILTON
, U
TAH
…C
HILDHOOD
H
OME OF
M
ICHAEL
W
OLFE
…stood out in bold letters.

Someone from the school newspaper snapped a couple of pictures, then Karen asked that the entire family gather around the sign with Mike so she could get a shot.

“You should be in here, too,” Hannah said to her.

Karen wouldn’t have it and insisted that Mike and the rest of them scoot in close.

They walked around the town and shopped with several local vendors who painted or did some kind of artsy craft. Every so often, Zach would feel a set of eyes on him and he’d turn to find Karen watching him.

What he found interesting was how Mike was seldom by her side. He’d laugh beside her and then easily be drawn away. Zach had overheard Mike tell Rena that the bracelet looked good on her, reinforcing Karen’s words about how he hadn’t expected Karen to keep it. After watching the two of them with each other for over an hour, Zach then focused on Joe and Rena.

They juggled the kids between the two of them, but would often hold hands or sneak in a little kiss now and then. Even his father dropped his arm around his mother’s shoulders from time to time.

Zach guessed that maybe the fight between the Mike and Karen had caused the rift, but the more he thought about it, the less he remembered if they
ever
interacted like a loving couple.

They didn’t, but they also didn’t act as if they were a bickering couple.

So what did that leave?

Zach wasn’t sure, but he’d figure out what was going on between the two of them while they were up at the cabin. Observing from the sidelines was one thing…living with them would be completely different.

Chapter Sixteen

The road to the cabin wasn’t paved. In fact, it seemed to Karen that the next several days of her Utah vacation were either going to be organic to the point of dust-filled hair or in traction from the ride alone. In comparison to the vacations she’d had in the past couple of years, this was just this side of backpacking it in the high country of the Sierras.

Joe drove Rena and the kids up in one truck while filling the back of his rig with most of their luggage and food supplies. Zach drove another truck pulling a trailer with a couple of quads and motorcycles. Hannah and Judy tagged along with their older brother while Karen and Michael rode with Sawyer and Janice.

“Did you ever camp as a kid?” Janice asked Karen once they turned onto the dirt road.

“No.”

“This isn’t camping,” Sawyer pointed out. “It’s a cabin with a roof and a bathroom. Not exactly roughing it.”

Michael glanced at her. “Compared to LA, it’s like pitching a tent.”

“I’m not a shrinking violet,” she reminded him. “I’ve pitched tents with the kids at the center more than once.”

“That’s kind of like camping,” Janice snuck in.

Karen gave her mother-in-law a doubtful look. “Not really. A full kitchen, bathroom…everything was only feet away. It was more of a change of venue for the kids.”

“You spend a lot of time with the kids at the Boys and Girls Club?”

Michael snorted. “If Karen was paid for her time, she’d be rich.”

Karen giggled and Sawyer watched the two of them through the rearview mirror.

“I love it. At some point I want to open a center for runaways.”

Janice turned from the front seat. “Why not do that now?”

Karen glanced at Michael. “It’s not quite the right time. But someday. There are plenty of kids who need help that slip through the system because they don’t have a place to sleep at night. Many of them travel to a place like LA thinking they’re going to walk down Hollywood Boulevard, meet a producer who says they have the ‘perfect look’ for the part in the next blockbuster, and strike it big. But it takes a hell of a lot more than that to make it in LA.”

Michael huffed out a breath. “You can say that again.”

Karen tapped her fingers on his knee. The gesture so normal for her it was like breathing.

Michael smiled in her direction. “Poor kids need to worry about predators, con artists…any number of shitty personalities.”

“Not to mention drugs and sex for hire.”

Janice actually cringed. “We worried about all that when you were in college,” Janice told her son.

“I wasn’t a runaway,” Michael reminded his mother. “And I’d had over a year and a half of college before landing my first role.”

“You were still young,” Sawyer said.

Michael nodded and seemed lost in his own thoughts. “I guess I was.”

“But you were so confident in what you were doing. And once
that first movie came along, your father and I knew you’d never go back to school.”

“School wasn’t going to help me in what I wanted to do,” Michael said.

Karen couldn’t help but feel that the conversation was a first for Michael and his parents. Had they ever really talked openly about his choice in profession? Maybe on some disjointed level over the phone…but not this, not cooped up in a car on a dusty road up to a cabin.

“We worried Mike would end up like those kids you talked about. Such a stressful time for us,” Janice admitted.

“My first film made me a ton of money, Mom.”

“And for all we knew there was someone there taking it from you. Being a parent is hard work. Letting your children make their own choices…it’s not easy.”

“I’ve always thought you were disappointed.” The words seemed to escaped Michael’s lips before he realized what he said.

Janice swiveled in her seat. “We were scared, Mike…not disappointed.”

Karen made a point to look at Sawyer’s face when Janice spoke. He didn’t say anything, but she could tell by his tiny glances in the rearview mirror that he felt the same.

Karen squeezed Michael’s knee and felt his hand cover hers.

The cabin nestled between a backdrop of pine trees and a massive meadow in front. A crystal blue lake stretched out several hundred feet from the cabin and meandered beyond the road.

“It’s beautiful up here,” Karen observed aloud.

“We don’t get up here nearly as much as we should,” Janice said.

“Zach and I made it up here a lot when we were teenagers.”

“What a fabulous escape.” Karen would love to have had a place like this to run to when she was a kid.

Sawyer pulled his truck alongside the others and everyone piled out. The crisp air was at least fifteen degrees cooler than that down in Hilton. Karen couldn’t help but toss her arms wide and suck in the freshness of the open space. “My lungs aren’t going to know what to do with all this clean air.”

“Maybe we can convince you both to visit more often.” Janice’s words reminded Karen that this would probably be her one and only visit, a sobering thought.

The inside of the cabin smelled as all closed-in wooden structures do. A mixture of moisture, dust, and oak made Karen think of spiders and possible unwanted four-legged vermin.

Janice and Rena strode into the cabin and began opening all the windows to let the light in and the air out. Hannah took the stairs to what Karen assumed was the sleeping loft, and soon the mountain breeze could be felt in the middle of the giant open room.

“Girls are on the right and boys are on the left!” Hannah yelled from upstairs.

Eli ran up the stairs with his backpack and Joe set up a playpen for Susie on the front porch. After a few trips back and forth to the trucks, each one with armloads of supplies, food, and luggage, Karen finally made it upstairs to see where they’d be sleeping. It was like sixth grade camp all over again. Only instead of the boys being in cabins across the lake, they were in the same room with only a curtain separating the sexes.

Eli had tucked a personal blanket around what looked like a stuffed alligator into a small bunk and sat next to said alligator to talk to him.

“Eat spiders, Nate.”

Hannah ran downstairs and Karen found herself alone with Eli. Not that she minded. She’d always loved kids, even the small ones.

Karen sat on the edge of the bed closest to Eli’s and asked, “Does Nate eat the spiders?”

Eli’s eyes grew wide when he gave an enthusiastic nod. “Yeah.”

“Oh, well when he’s done eating the spiders can he eat them on our side of the room? I don’t like spiders either.”

Eli’s big deer-in-the-headlight eyes blinked several times before he shoved his chubby little hand into his backpack and removed another stuffed friend. This one was a small cat. He looked at the cat, then to Nate and apparently decided that the alligator would do a better job of protecting him from spiders so then he handed the stuffed animal to Karen.

She couldn’t help but think poor Eli was giving up his backup plan; she decided to make a game of the spider worry.

“That’s a very nice cat. What’s his name?”

“Kitty.”

“That’s a great name. Appropriate, too.”

Eli smiled.

Karen stood and wandered to her side of the huge room and looked around as if inspecting the most likely place for a spider to hide.

Truth was she had seen those awful B movies when she was a kid about giant spiders, or those who killed with one bite…or covered the entire house just dying to get in to kill the humans…spiders rated up there with birds, and she didn’t really want to think about birds right now and freak poor Eli out more than he already was.

“Where do you think Kitty will do the best job?”

Eli jumped off his bunk while hugging Kitty to his chest. He looked behind the bunks and mimicked whatever Karen did. She searched around the curtains, noticed a few dead eight-legged prey, and quickly lowered the shades back to their original place.

She made a show of scratching her head and moving back to Eli’s side of the room.

“I think maybe it would be best to keep Kitty close to the stairs,” she told the toddler. The stairs were close to his bunk and her words
brought a smile to his lips. “Cuz everyone knows that spiders love to climb stairs, but he can get ’em before they make it to the top.”

Eli shook his head as if Karen was the wisest person on the earth and looked around for the perfect spot to place Kitty.

Once he was happy with Kitty’s placement, he jumped back over to his bunk and removed several toys from his backpack. Noise from downstairs drifted up, but it sounded as if the majority of the family was outside.

Karen glanced over and found Zach standing on the top step watching the two of them.

Their eyes locked. Chills ran up her arms and her breath quickened.

The soft smile Zach bestowed threatened to break her. The want, which reached much further than desire, pulled at her with his eyes.

The magnetic pull of Zach threatened to undo her resolve of indifference. She forced her eyes away from his and focused on the pint-size occupant in the room.

From nowhere, moisture gathered behind her eyes. She sucked in her bottom lip and bit it gently to force the tears away. This week was going to be the hardest one of her life.

“Wow, Eli…great thinking putting that cat up here. I saw a spider running down the stairs on my way up. Must be halfway to Hilton by now.” Zach made his way into the loft space.

Eli forgot his other toys and ran over to where Uncle Zach stood and stared down the stairs. Then he picked up his chin and walked…hugging the wall, down to the main floor and out of sight.

“He really doesn’t like spiders.”

“That makes two of us,” Karen admitted.

She moved to her bunk and tried to put distance between her and Zach.

“You’re really good with kids.”

“Kids are great. Full of innocence and wonder at Eli’s age…discovery and questions when they’re older.”

From the corner of her eye, she noted Zach’s questioning gaze. Instead of leaving the quiet between them for long, she said, “Thanks for giving Nolan a job.”

“You already thanked me.”

She remembered the text. “Well, thanks again.”

The room grew quiet. Downstairs was void of noise, and outside she heard the sound of a quad, or maybe it was a motorcycle, turning over.

“We should probably go outside…join everyone.” Yet her legs stuck in place and her eyes found his again. She drank him in with one long gulp and then forced herself around him and down the stairs.

Note to self. Don’t stay in room alone with Zach for more than two sentences.

This was going to be a very long week.