Baby, You're Mine

With a wiggle, Frances Bird braced her heels against the wooden porch boards and shoved, sending the swing careening to one side. “Don’t have any patience left. I am parched,” she said, all reasonableness as she stuck her face close to Phoebe’s. “And I would very much like a soda pop. With ice.”

At the moment, Phoebe would have settled for ice. A bucket full. She’d dump ice down the neck of her T-shht, slick the coolness over her neck.

“Maybe there’s a water spigot on the side of the house.” Standing up, Phoebe took Bird’s hand. “That’s the best I can do right now, dumpling.”

“If it has to be, it has to be,” Frances Bird said on a long sigh, straight-as-a-stick brown hair flopping into her eyes.

Watching her daughter’s woebegone expression, Phoebe decided the McAllister women were into sighing altogether too much. Sighing could become a real unattractive habit if she didn’t watch herself. She allowed her voice to take on an edge of tartness. “Come on, Frances Bird. Don’t mope. It’ll be an adventure.”

“Won’t be.” Frances Bird stood and clumped down the stoop with Phoebe, sneakers smacking each step.

They found the spigot at the back of Murphy’s house. “What a mess.” Frowning, Phoebe yanked at the weeds and woody vines screening the lumpy hose lying on the sandy ground. She wrapped the hem of her T-shirt around the hot metal faucet and twisted. Sun-heated, the hose bucked and heaved in her hands, spewing brown water into her eyes and down her arms. “Whoa!”

“Yuck.” Frances Bird leaped backward and wrinkled her nose at the murky brown water splashing onto her legs. “Hot!”

“Water’s water, sugar-dumpling. Let it run. It’ll cool in a second. And when it does,” Phoebe smiled teasingly and waggled the hose at her, “you’re going to be all wet, my darling girl”

“No!” Frances Bird darted behind Phoebe. “You. Not me.” She wrestled for the hose, and Phoebe let the soft plastic uncoil into Frances Bird’s hands. Soaking them, water sprayed and splashed in spar ling drops that clung to Frances Bird’s hair like a rainbow halo.

“It’s as cool as it’s going to be.” Phoebe held the hose steady while her daughter drank. “Well, dumpling, good thing you’re not all dressed up. You have as much water outside you as in.”

Frances Bird shook her head. Water arched, then silvered down to the ground. Looking up, she smiled. “Yes. Water,” she said blissfully and jumped feet first into the mud, happy for the first time that day.

Phoebe let her play. There was no rush. They weren’t going anywhere.

Squashing down her anxiety, she chased Frances Bird. Bird chased her back until they were both breathless, their bare feet covered in pale mud. “Enough, enough,” Phoebe finally panted as she shook sopping strands of hair out of her eyes.

With one final spray of the hose for each of them, she turned off the spigot, leaving the hose neatly coiled underneath. When they returned to the front of the house and its empty driveway, anxiety twisted the knots in her stomach tighter.

Still no Murphy. What would they do if he didn’t come home until after midnight? What if he’d gone out of town? She should have called, she knew she should have. Oh, what a fool she’d been not to call.

But she hadn’t. Couldn’t.

Every woman had her limits. She’d hit hers.

Hiding her apprehension, she plopped down on the step beside Frances Bird, gasping, but finally, blessedly cool.

The sun was edging the tip of the thick, moss-draped branches of the live oaks at the front of Murphy’s house when she heard the rumble of an engine.

She didn’t have time to catch her breath. He was just there, climbing slowly out of his cobalt-blue pickup, ambling right up to the foot of the stairs, his big, dark shadow falling over her. Murphy never moved fast. Like glaciers, he took his own sweet time.

“Hey, Murphy,” she said and stayed seated. Lord knew her knees would buckle if she stood up. Water still dripped from the ends of her hair, down the back of her T-shirt. “Long time, and all that.” She couldn’t seem to get a good breath. She rested one palm lightly on Frances Bird’s head. With her other, she gestured to the stash of cans and sawhorses in the back of his truck. “Busy?”

Strings hung from the armholes of his sleeveless, washed-to-cobwebs shirt By the grace of God and a miracle of thread, one button clung to the placket of his shirt. Sweat-plastered to his ribs, the shirt hung open, revealing a narrow streak of hair bleached to sunshine gold. Glowing in the bright light, that tapered line drew her gaze unwillingly down the taut muscles of his chest to the waistband of paint-kaleidoscoped jeans, jeans so worn on the seat that it was a wonder his ever-loving Jockey shorts weren’t on display. Or maybe Murphy wore boxers these days. Maybe Murphy Jones had turned trendy and wore designer thongs. Like lottery balls popping into the air, wild, unpredictable, her thoughts slammed into each other.

He rested one plaster-dotted work shoe on the step below her and leaned forward. “Well, bless my soul. Look what the cat dragged in. And on a scorching June day. What brought you to this neck of the woods, Phoebe?” He nudged her bare knee with a long, callused finger, blinked, stepped back and crossed his arms.

“Hospitable as ever, I see.” Laying her arm across Bird’s shoulders, Phoebe smiled brightly up at him and wished desperately she’d found time for that red lipstick and that her feet weren’t caked with dried mud. Fetching dimples would be a plus, too. “No how-do-you-do? No how’s life been treating you in the last, oh, how many years has it been? Eight?”

He paused as if he were counting them up. “Yep. Eight sounds about right.” The tip of his work boot nudged her bare toe. “Come for a visit, did you?”

From beneath the red and blue bandanna he’d tied over the top of his head and knotted at the back, damp, dark brown hair curled down his neck. A shine of sweat darkened his hair and skin, slipped down his temples to his jaw.

His glance slid to her daughter. The tiny bead of sweat vanished into the rumpled collar of his shirt. “Hey, kid,” he said, nodding.

Frances Bird beamed at him, tilted her head and batted her eyelashes. Her rosebud mouth curled with happiness. “Hey, Mr. Man.”

Phoebe almost sighed again, and stopped herself before she became a wind machine. Frances Bird had been born flirting. The result of an absentee father? Phoebe’s own failure? Or simply southern genes asserting themselves in spite of an aggressively midwest upbringing? Phoebe tried not to overanalyze her daughter’s lightning-bug sparkle around males. Tapping her daughter’s shoulder, she said, “Frances Bird, meet my—what are you and I to each other, Murphy?” She lifted her chin, giving him a little attitude, but she couldn’t manage the smile this time. “Not brother and sister.”

“Not by a damn slight” Murphy held her gaze.

“Family, anyway,” she said through a tight throat. “Family. That counts for something, even after eight years. Right?”

He didn’t say a word.

“Hey,” four-year-old Frances Bird said, her flushed cheeks dimpling with delight. “Me and my mom are going to live with you.”

“Oh?” Murphy didn’t move an inch. The pleasantly interested question would have fooled anyone who hadn’t grown up with him.

But his poker-faced acknowledgment didn’t fool Phoebe for an instant. She heard the dismay behind his affable drawl, and her anxiety increased, threatened to blaze out of control.

Avoiding his coolly distant perusal, she slicked Frances Bird’s wet bangs off her face. “Well, sugar, that hasn’t been decided.” The worst he could do would be to send them packing. And if he did? She’d handle that, too. She had no choice. “We’re here for an afternoon’s visit. To catch up on old times. That’s all. Don’t panic, Murphy.”

Bird’s mouth puckered up with stubbornness. “You said—”

“I know what I said, Frances Bird.” This time Phoebe couldn’t stop the sigh that came rolling up from her toes.

“And what did you say, Phoebe?” A breeze lifted the corner of Murphy’s shirt, brushed it back from his chest, died away in the stillness. “About coming to live with me?”

Frances Bird patted Phoebe’s knees comfortingly. “Tell him, Mama, what you decided.”

When Phoebe didn’t speak, Frances Bird leaned forward confidingly and rested her elbows on her skinny knees as she looked up through her eyelashes at Murphy. “We are bums on the street. So we’re going to live with you now ’cause we got no place else to go. And Mama said, home by damn—”

“Don’t swear, Frances Bird.”

“—is where when you go, they got to take you in. And that’s that, she said.”

“Yeah?”

With her hair swinging about her face, Bird nodded vigorously. Water dotted the faded blue of Murphy’s jeans. “And, Mama,” she said earnestly, “you say the damn word all the time.”

Stifling the groan that battled with yet another sigh, Phoebe lifted Frances Bird onto her lap. “Shh, baby. The grownups have to talk now.”

“That’s for damn sure.” He reached up and tugged at his bandanna, shadowing his eyes.

At Murphy’s use of the forbidden word, Frances Bird poked Phoebe’s face and rolled her eyes.

He studied them for a moment, a long moment that had Phoebe’s bare toes curling and heat flooding through her again before he said softly, “Bums on the street, huh?”