Baby, You're Mine

“Not quite.” Phoebe shaded her own eyes as Frances Bird leaped into explanation.

“Oh, yes. But we didn’t sleep in boxes. We stayed at a motel one night. With tiny pink soaps. Soooo pretty. I kept one.” Frances Bird batted her eyelashes again, smiled, and kept talking like the River Jordan, rolling right on down to eternity.

Phoebe yearned to sink through boards of the porch into a quiet, cool oblivion where Murphy Jones’s too-observant gray eyes couldn’t note her every twitch and flinch. Although easygoing, Murphy had never been a fool. Not likely he’d become one since she’d last had a conversation with him. This homecoming, if that’s what it was, was not going well.

“We got fired. and we got debts, and—”

“Enough, Frances Bird.” The hint of steel in Phoebe’s voice finally silenced her chatty daughter. Lifting her chin, Phoebe held his gaze. “Well, Murphy, are you going to keep us standing outside for the rest of the night?”

He rubbed his chin with his knuckles thoughtfully. “Seems to me, Phoebe, you’re sittin’, not standin’.” His drawl curled into the deepening blue twilight of the heat.

“Murphy’s right, Mama.” Frances Bird tugged the hem of Phoebe’s shorts. “We’re sitting.”

She stood up. “Fine. Now I’m standing. Everybody happy?” Turning her back, she marched up the stairs to the swing, anger crackling down her spine with every mud-caked step. This was worse than she’d anticipated.

More humiliating.

She was tired, worried sick, and Murphy was only going to torment her, tease her, and drive her crazy the way he had when they were young. She’d never understood her reaction to him, or his to her, but she was in no mood today to sit or stand for it. Sherman had marched on Atlanta and burned it to the ground and maybe she was burning her bridges with a vengeance, but at the moment she couldn’t care less if she left nothing but ashes in her wake.

And knowing his cool gray eyes were watching her every movement perversely fueled her temper.

She grabbed one of the battered suitcases and swung to face her daughter. “Bird, we’re on our way. Say nice to have met you to Murphy.” Wishing she’d pasted on that red lipstick after all, she stomped off the porch.

“Mama!” The frantic tug at Phoebe’s shorts didn’t stop her march down the steps. But Bird’s anxious whisper, a whisper that was loud enough to hear from five feet away, halted Phoebe with one foot dangling in mid-air. “We got no place to go. You said.”

“Come on into the house.” Murphy’s sigh echoed her earlier ones. Like chickenpox, sighing was apparently contagious. “Looks like that talk you mentioned can’t wait.” Metal jangled on the ring at his belt loop as he unclipped a key. The look he cast Frances Bird was shrewd. “Anyway, the kid must be hungry.”

“Very hungry.” With a lightning-fast mood change, Frances Bird smiled winsomely at him. “You got Jell-O? I like Jell-O. Red. With peaches.”

“No red Jell-O.” Murphy unlocked the door and flung it open. “Bananas okay?”

“I can make do.” Bird dipped under his outstretched arm and into the dim interior of the house. “Mama says it’s a skill us McAllisters got.”

In the spirit of making do, Phoebe planted both feet firmly on the bottom step and reminded herself that she couldn’t afford pride. Not today. Not tonight. Anger drained away, making room for the poisonous dread she’d been living with for weeks now. She met Murphy’s guarded eyes and took a breath.

His wide hand rested on the door as he waited for Phoebe to follow her daughter. “Come into my parlor,” he said, and the ironic edge to his low, slow words did nothing to settle the ping-pong bounce of her stomach.

“I know how that story ends,” she muttered, dipping, like Phoebe, beneath his arm.

“Of course you do. You’re a smart woman. And an educated one.” The polite bend of his head toward her was even more unsettling as he shut the door quietly behind her. “But you came in anyway, didn’t you, Miss Phoebe Fly?”

“Ms. Fly, please.” She sent him a sweet smile as she scanned the room filled with cardboard boxes. Maybe she couldn’t afford pride, but by heaven, she didn’t have to let him know exactly how much the beggar maid she was. She trailed a finger along a dusty stack of boxes labeled CDs. “Love what you’ve done with your place. I guess the minimalist approach has a certain...charm to it, Murphy, but you’ve been here two years.”

He was so close behind her that his boots bumped against her heels, and she could swear his breath fluttered the hair at her neck. “Kept track, did you?”

“Same address on your Christmas cards the last couple of years.” Hiding her dismay, she wandered through a maze of boxes toward the kitchen that she’d seen earlier through the windows. “No furniture?”

“Got a bed.” His teeth flashed in a lazy smile. “Maybe I can’t afford anything else.”

That smile had drawn the girls of their youth to him effortlessly. Murphy’d never had to work at collecting a string of shiny-haired, long-legged girls to him. Like bees swarming to the scent of flower honey, they merely appeared on the porch, beside his car, everywhere.

“No sofa. No TV. No chairs.” Bewildered, she shook her head.

“Maybe I don’t need much more. I’m a simple man, simple tastes.” His smile widened until it lit up the gray depths of his eyes, sunlight flashing on bayou water, turning her knees to mush.

With an effort, she herded her thoughts together and forcibly drove memories back into the past where they belonged.

“Don’t be irritating,” she said. “Anyway, I can’t believe you’re too broke for furniture.” Bending her head back, she examined the high ceilings, the crown moldings, and the heart of pine floors. Why on earth had he allowed this beautiful house to stay in such disarray for so long? “Murphy,” she said as patiently as if she were talking to Frances Bird in a snit, “I know how much these old houses cost. And this one’s in terrific condition.”

“Did the work myself.”

“Of course you did. But you’re living like a man who’s ready to pack up and hit the highway at a second’s notice. You haven’t even unpacked, have you?” Not bothering to wait for his answer, she sashayed through the wide arched doors into the kitchen and stopped so suddenly that he bumped slam up against her backside. “Oh, Murphy, this is beautiful,” she whispered as she saw the light-oak pot rack suspended from the vaulted ceiling. Hanging above a work counter, the copper-bottomed pans blazed with light. “It’s like the one—”

“In your folks’ home.” He stepped back, taking with him the comfort of his body against hers, leaving her desolate in a way she couldn’t explain. But the kitchen, and Murphy next to her—the rightness of that moment overwhelmed her.

“Your home, too.” She wouldn’t cry. But the pots shone so brightly and familiarly, and she hadn’t felt at home anywhere for so long. “Always your home, Murphy.”

“Your parents were good people.” He turned away from her and went to the industrial-sized refrigerator. “They gave me a...” he paused, his obvious discomfort painful to her.

“They gave you a home, Murphy. They loved you.” She couldn’t keep talking about her parents, about the past. Tears would make it impossible for her to do what she had to. “Mama and Pops loved you. You know that.”

“Here, kid.” He handed Frances Bird a black-skinned banana from the freezer.

“Cold.” She poked it dubiously and frowned. “Why do you put your bananas in your freezer?”

Murphy scratched his chin, ran a finger under the edge of his bandanna. “Because they were going bad?”

“Okay.” Frances Bird smushed the pulp out and into her mouth with a finger. “I like this.” She beamed a wide, smeary smile. Dragging a stool up to the table in the middle of the room, she said, “And you can call me Bird.”

“All right,” Murphy said slowly, his voice whiskey-warm and smooth.

With Murphy’s attention on Bird, Phoebe brushed the tears away from her eyes. Her gaze lingered on the table where Bird sat contentedly mashing frozen banana between her fingers.

Then, like an arrow piercing her, leaving her heart aching, Phoebe realized why the kitchen felt so familiar. “You have the old table from home. From the kitchen,” she murmured, her palm sliding across the smooth-grained walnut surface. She touched the vertical dent where she’d slammed down the turkey roaster in an argument with Murphy one Thanksgiving. If you could call it an argument when the other person stayed as calm and controlled as Murphy always did. She traced the dent again. “You kept it.”

“Pretty,” Frances Bird crooned, running her hand from one end of the table to the other, banana pulp streaking behind her small hand. “Pretty, pretty.”

Murphy’s palm lay on the table across from Phoebe’s, his fingertips stroking the wood as if he were unaware of his lingering touch against the grain.

“I needed a table. Your folks gave this one to me when they bought the new one. The chairs weren’t salvageable.”

“Oh.” She looked at the two painted ladder-back chairs lined up against the wall.

“I’m surprised you recognized the table. I refinished it.”

She swallowed. “I recognized it.” Oh, she couldn’t, wouldn’t, cry. Pain and yearning clamping around her heart, she swallowed again, looking blindly around the room that was like home.

Murphy didn’t want to see the glitter in Phoebe’s eyes. She had no right to go all teary-eyed on him over this damned table. It couldn’t mean anything to her.