A Mother's Wish / Mother To Be: A Mother's Wish

“You’re still here.”

“Like you said…deep roots.”

Winnie slid up onto a stool across from Flo, propping one booted foot on the railing at the base of the breakfast bar, her arms crossed. “I gather June was from around here, too?”

A shadow crossed the housekeeper’s features before she said, “Nearby. Next town over. Her folks’re gone now, too.” Her knife passing through a tomato in slow motion, she added, “Sometimes, I can almos’ still feel her presence.”

“Whose presence? June’s?”

“Yes. Especially as it gets closer to Los Días de Los Muertos. You know about that?”

“The Days of the Dead? Sure. Well, a little. A couple Mexican families back home observe it. I never really got it, myself.”

“You think it’s spooky, no?” Flo said with a grin. “But it’s not like that for us, it’s a celebration. We don’t go all out the way they do in Mexico, maybe, but it’s still important. We get together, we remember those who’ve gone on before, we laugh, we tell stories, we show them we haven’t forgotten them, that they still live in our memories. Our hearts. So in a way, they really do ‘come back’ to visit us, you see? It’s a time to show we’re not afraid of death, because it can’t really take our loved ones from us. Not in the way that most matters.”

“Oh. When you put it that way, it makes a lot of sense. But what if…?”

Flo’s eyes lifted to hers. “What?”

“Nothing,” Winnie said, refusing to let moroseness gain a foothold. Like wondering about people who die with no family. Who celebrates their lives? Who remembers them?

“You know,” Flo was saying, “everybody loved Miss June. She could cut a person down to size with three words if they had it coming, but Dios mío, I never knew anyone with a bigger heart.” Her mouth thinned. “I know people sometimes said things. Mean things. Because Miss June was so much older than the boss. But what does love know about age?” she added with a shrug. “About friendship. ‘Cause you never saw two people who were better friends. And I know he still misses her real bad.”

“I’m sure he does,” Winnie said, thinking, Okay, cutie, time for a reality check. That she was leaving the following day. That she was smart enough not to confuse chemistry and sympathy and loneliness with anything real. “You call him ‘the boss’?”

Flo smiled. “Miss June would call him that sometimes, just to get a rise out of him. They’d be arguin’ about somethin’, an’ she get this real amused look on her face, and go ‘Whatever you say, b-boss…’”

The last words were barely out of the housekeeper’s mouth before she dissolved into embarrassed tears. Winnie immediately went to her and wrapped her in her arms, getting the strangest, strongest feeling that if June had any idea how mopey everybody was around here, she’d be hugely pissed.

And that while Winnie was here, maybe she should see what she could do about that.

Chapter Seven

Winnie Porter was a strange bird indeed, Aidan decided as he sat across from her at the dining table, its dings and gouges probably hailing from New Mexico’s territorial days.

He’d hung outside the kitchen, listening to her and Flo’s conversation probably far longer than was politic, simply because he’d been too mesmerized to do anything else. Her moods apparently dipped and swerved like a roller coaster, with every bit of the accompanying dizziness and nausea. Women were hard enough to understand when they were levelheaded; one like Winnie…

“Why was six afraid of seven?” Robbie piped up, his mouth full of fresh, aromatic, bubbly-cheesed pizza.

“I have no idea,” Winnie said, aiming a wink in Aidan’s direction, and he thought, What? “Why was six afraid of seven?”

“Because seven ate nine!” Robbie said, both he and Jacob, exploding into knee-slapping laughter, which got Annabelle to barking and spinning in circles for no apparent reason. Winnie laughed, too, just as hard, even though Aidan sincerely doubted she’d never heard the joke before. Then she launched into a series of truly terrible riddles, half of which the boys already knew—which only seemed to make them laugh harder—and the laughter and the barking crescendoed until it seemed the very room would burst.

Winnie’s eyes touched his, begging him to join in.

Barely able to breathe, Aidan got up from the table to refill his tea glass, at which point he realized the jollity had apparently infected his housekeeper, as well. Now this is more like it, he thought he heard her say, although it didn’t really sound like her voice, it sounded like—

He shook his head to clear it. He was knackered, was all, having not slept well in months. Which probably accounted for why the room suddenly seemed brighter than he remembered, the reds and golds and rich blues vibrant in the warm overhead light. He squinted at the fixture: Had Flo changed the bulbs to a higher wattage?

His glass refilled, Aidan returned to his seat. Winnie looked up, grinning full out, breathless, her cheeks flushed, and Thank God you’re leaving and Too bad you’re leaving collided underneath his skull like a pair of daft footballers.

“Dad! Dad! Guess what Winnie taught us?”

“Three-card monte?” Aidan said drily, and Robbie said, “Huh?” as Winnie said, “Honestly, Aidan, give me some credit,” and Robbie said, “No—chess!”

Aidan looked at Winnie. “Chess?”

“Yeah, he had that beautiful set on the shelf in his room, I asked him if he knew how to play and he said no, so I taught him. Him and Jacob,” she said with the kind of smile for Robbie’s friend that young boys had been falling in love with since God did that little hocus-pocus thing with Adam’s rib.

Aidan swallowed down the flare of annoyance, that June had ordered the Harry Potter set for Robbie for his eighth birthday with explicit instructions that Aidan teach their son how to play. That Winnie knew how to play chess.

Not to mention everyone who crossed her path.

Except Aidan, of course. Aidan was immune to being played—

“It’s so cool,” Robbie said. “Almost as cool as Mario Galaxy—Hey!” he squawked as a bit of black olive bounced off his nose. “Who did that?”

“Who did what?” Winnie said, all innocence as she took a sip of her iced tea, and Aidan opened his mouth, only to close it again, refusing to let himself feel…

Alive?

“Somebody threw an olive at me!”

“It was you!” Jacob yelled, eyes alight, pointing at Winnie. “I saw you!”

“Was not,” Winnie said, picking a pepperoni slice off her pizza and chucking it at Jacob, which set off a whole new round of giggles. Then a mushroom bounced off Aidan’s forehead and the boys roared, and from the other end of the kitchen Flo threw her hands up and muttered something in Spanish that Aidan only half heard, and when he met Winnie’s gaze she cocked her head at him, grinning, her eyes full of mischief and mayhem, and he thought, No.

But not before the sucker punch hit. With far more devastation than the mushroom. Because from somewhere deep, deep inside him, a funny, fuzzy feeling bubbled up, like inhaling helium.

Go with it, babe…

Aidan picked up the artillerized fungus. “Lose something?” he said, his gaze locked with hers.

She grinned, full of herself. Smug. Dangerous. “Consider it a gift,” she said.

Only to shriek with laughter when he threw it back.

An hour later, Aidan sneaked a glance at Winnie’s face as his truck jostled down the mountain to take Winnie and Annabelle back to the Old House, then Jacob home. Behind him, the boys squealed every time the truck hit a bump. Beside him, Winnie smiled, thinking more secret Winnie thoughts. Aidan jerked his head back around, telling himself he wasn’t interested. In her thoughts, or…anything else.

Now there’s a lie for you.

Feeling his nostrils flare, a certain swift, hot kick to his groin, Aidan shifted gears as they navigated a particularly steep part of the road. Two years ago he wouldn’t have believed it possible that the time would come when he wouldn’t miss sex. Until June got sick, and things changed, and Aidan basically put his libido in cold storage.

Then June died, and what would have been the point in taking it back out?

Not that he didn’t occasionally still think about That Side of Things, as his mother would say. But not so much about having sex—or not—as how strangely easy it had been to simply disconnect one or two crucial wires. That he hadn’t felt deprived so much as disinterested.

Until tonight.