The Major Gets it Right Page 6

  Once in the shower she also washed her hair, and afterward, while she was bent over to blow it dry—upside down, to add volume—she gave a lot of thought to what she was going to wear.

  By the time her hair was dry, she’d decided that even if her next job of the day was furniture moving, she was still going to wear one of her best butt-hugging pairs of jeans and a plum-colored T-shirt with short sleeves gathered at her shoulders and a sweetheart neckline that displayed a hand-crocheted lace insert.

  She argued with herself about wearing the sandals she wanted to wear, but that she knew were a bad choice as moving-furniture footwear, and instead chose something only somewhat less inappropriate—closed-in ballet flats.

  Then she applied more-than-daytime-but-not-all-the-way-to-evening makeup before she went to stand in front of the full-length mirror on the closet door for a final inspection.

  She wasn’t happy with herself for having had Quinn on her mind again as she’d gotten ready, but she felt good in what she was wearing, in the way she looked. Confident. And she told herself again that confidence could only help when she was dealing with him.

  Then she turned away from the mirror and texted him that the library was ready for them.

  Quinn had not dressed up to move furniture, Clairy thought when he arrived half an hour later. She watched him park and get out of his truck.

  He had on a khaki-green, short-sleeved crewneck T-shirt tucked into tan cargo pants that could barely contain his long legs and robust thighs. Again, a sexy scruff of beard shadowed his face, but still there was nothing that said he’d put thought into what he had on, and somehow that caused Clairy to feel slightly at a disadvantage.

  Not wanting that to show, she adopted an all-business attitude, squared her shoulders, grabbed her notebook, pen and tape measure, and went out to meet him.

  “Do you need to go inside for anything?” she asked.

  “Nope. But hello,” he said to her omission of a greeting.

  “Hello,” she echoed as she reached back into the house to close the door, hearing the irritation in her voice that he had no way of knowing was aimed at herself for having slightly overdone it to dress as if this was a casual first date.

  As they crossed the street to get to the town square again, he nodded at her three-ring binder and said, “What’s that for?”

  “I was here about a month ago and made some rough sketches of the library’s floor plan. I’ve been working on the layout of this, but I have a couple of different formations—I need to see what will work best for placement, for distribution of the displays, for flow.”

  “But Mac will still take front and center...”

  Clairy wasn’t sure whether that was to verify that nothing had changed from what she’d told him about the placement of the memorial last night, or if Quinn felt the need to protect her father’s interests. That possibility irked her, so when she answered, the irritation in her voice this time was directed at Quinn. “It’s his memorial and his money paying for it, isn’t it?” Clairy said as they reached the library and she unlocked the front doors.

  The inside was in much better shape than it had been the night before. There was no dust in the air or on any surface and the tile floor glistened. The wood and brass of the staircase and second-floor railing, as well as the wood-and-brass doors to the old elevator, had been polished. Every window sparkled, the walls had been washed, and the air carried the scent of cleaning solutions.

  “This is a big difference,” Quinn commented as he closed the doors behind them.

  “Are you kidding? They did a fantastic job! Way more than I hired them to do.”

  “Like you said, folks around here think highly of your dad—I’d say they pulled out all the stops for him.”

  “I guess so,” Clairy said more to herself than to Quinn, having a moment like many she’d had in her life when she felt at odds with the way her father was perceived and her own experience with him. And she wondered again, too, if the blame for her problems with him rested on her...for no reason she’d ever been able to completely determine.

  Certain that if she said that to Quinn he would tell her she was definitely to blame, she didn’t. She did what she’d done often—unless she’d been talking to Mim—and kept quiet.

  One of the smallest of the abandoned tables was near the entrance. The tables and bookshelves had also been polished to a shine, and Clairy used the first one she came upon to set down what she’d brought with her.

  Then she opened her binder, released three floor plans from the rings and spread them out separately. She explained to Quinn that she needed the exact measurements of the bookcases, the tables, the walls and floor space, and they went to work.

  Although it might not have been quite as precise, she could have done the measurements on her own. But when it came time to move furniture, she quickly realized that without Quinn she wouldn’t have gotten anywhere.

  The tables were so heavy they would have been difficult for her to even drag, but there was no way she would have been able to budge the three bookcases.

  In fact, she was awed by the fact that Quinn could. But with little more than the two of them tipping them onto his back and her guiding them as he slid them across the slick floor, that was what he did. It was a Herculean task that seemed to Clairy like asking too much of one man, but he managed it anyway.

  He also shocked her by how easy he was to work with—that he didn’t need to be the boss, that he took her instruction. It was one thing that was unlike her father.

  To her grandparents, Mac’s visits were not the arrival of an exalted military leader—they were merely having their son home. They’d frequently asked him to do things around the house that they needed help with. Clairy had never once seen her father doing those things without Mac discrediting what they wanted done, how they wanted it done and, ultimately, either doing it the way he saw fit or hiring someone he ordered around like a mule to do it his way. And always, it was whether her grandparents liked it or not.

  She’d anticipated that same behavior from Quinn and had been determined to stand her ground. But it wasn’t what she got from him at all, and that was a pleasant surprise.

  It was eight o’clock before they finished, and not only did Clairy end up with the work done and a slew of images of Quinn’s muscles and the man himself that she knew were going to linger, but she also felt guilty because of the difficulty of the work itself and obligated enough that she thought she should at least feed him.

  Which she told him when she invited him to go home with her for the beef bourguignon she’d had slow-cooking since early that morning.

  “After breaking your back, I probably owe you a massage, too,” she said as they locked up the library.

  Not until she saw the slow smile that erupted on his usually stoic face and the extra glint that came into his blue eyes did she realize that it sounded as if she was volunteering to do the massage herself.

  “Oh, I didn’t mean I’d give it... I meant I should probably pay for you to have one—given by someone else.”

  Her own faux pas flustered her, cost her a measure of dignity, and she waited for the old Quinn to make some kind of embarrassing comments that would make it worse.

  But as they retraced their steps across the square, he just laughed a little and said, “I’m fine.”

  Clairy wished she was and used the walk to take deep breaths and gain some control before they reached her house.

  He accepted the beer she offered him as she prepared the side dishes, but Quinn insisted on pitching in, unlike her father, who would have taken his beer and sat down until he was served.

  It wasn’t too long before her small round kitchen table and spindle-backed chairs were brought in from where the movers had left them in the living room and Clairy and Quinn were sitting down to eat.

  Quinn had high praise for her burgu
ndy stew served with mashed potatoes, salad and French bread. That, too, was not something she’d ever heard her father do. Criticize, yes. Compliment, never.

  Then Quinn said, “The place doesn’t look like I remember it.”

  “After Grampa died, Mim made a lot of changes, upgrades. The house was originally built by my great-grandfather on Mim’s side and not much had been done to it over the years, so it needed some work. Mim said while she was at it she was going to spruce it up because she was sick of living in a barracks. It was an argument she and Grampa had over and over—I guess it was his military side coming out, but he wanted everything green or brown, and he nixed anything he considered frilly or flowery or girlie. He and my dad ganged up on her every time she wanted to change anything, and she gave in until after Grampa passed. Then she did what she wanted—even though my father still didn’t approve.”

  “It isn’t frilly or flowery or girlie,” Quinn mused as he glanced around. “Just... I don’t know about that kind of thing... Brighter, I guess...”

  “Since I was next in line for the house, I got to be in on her decisions, and brighter, more open, was what we both wanted. Now I don’t really have to change anything—I’m just moving in. Which is nice.”

  “You didn’t want to feel like you were living in a barracks?” he joked.

  “I was never into anything military-ish.”

  “Is that how you rebelled?”

  “Maybe,” she allowed. “I know the things that my father was more interested in than me have always just not been...my favorite things.”

  Quinn laughed wryly before taking a slug of his beer. “Things like me,” he said. “And me not being one of your favorite things is a hell of an understatement.”

  He still wasn’t one of her favorite things, but she had to admit that she hadn’t chafed too much at the time she’d spent with him lately. In fact, she might have almost verged on liking it. A little.

  It was strange. And confusing. And certainly nothing he needed to know. So Clairy ate rather than respond to his remark right away.

  When she did, she decided to toss the ball in his court. “If our positions were reversed, how would you have felt? What if you’d been his son, dying for his attention, and I’d come along to take it all instead, leaving you out in the cold?”

  “I didn’t take all of his attention,” Quinn scoffed, as if she was exaggerating. “I mean, whenever he was in town I was here a lot, but—”

  “Every waking hour.”

  “No,” Quinn contradicted. “I was here in the mornings before you were even up, so I wasn’t taking anything away from you. Zero four thirty on the dot, which is when he told me to be here for PT—”

  “PT—physical training. The way marines are trained in boot camp,” Clairy said to make sure he knew that while she might not have been included, she was still well aware of that time he’d spent with her father.

  “You could have joined us,” he said.

  “I asked to. Mac said a loud, resounding no, that I’d get in the way. For years—until I was a teenager and finally gave up—I got out of bed every one of those mornings hoping he’d give in and let me do it, too.”

  That brought a deep scowl to Quinn’s face. Deeper than seemed warranted. “I didn’t know you were hanging out somewhere wanting to be there.”

  “I was sitting on the top step upstairs when he came out of his room. I made him pass by me to get to you, thinking that eventually he’d give in and tell me to come, too. But it was off-limits.”

  “It was just a workout, a tough one, but that’s all. It wasn’t anything you couldn’t have done...” he said, as if questioning the reasoning in her father’s exclusion of her.

  Clairy didn’t know why the information seemed to have struck him the way it did, but she merely went on, opting to voice her grievances since she seemed to have the opportunity.

  “You showed up here the first time he came to visit me—the first time. My mom had just died in a car accident, and the day after her funeral he packed me up and handed me over to Mim and Grampa to take home with them. For three months after that, there wasn’t a phone call from him, a letter, not even a postcard—”

  “He probably had a mission or something that didn’t let him contact you.”

  “Now you sound like Mim—making excuses for him. I felt like he’d died, too,” she admitted. “Then he finally came for a visit—I was already in bed for the night, and when I heard his voice, I came running out. He barely said hello to me and ordered me back to bed, said he’d see me in the morning. But in the morning—when he was still having his coffee and reading the newspaper, and I wasn’t allowed to interrupt—there you were, knocking on the door, asking to see him. He barely looked out from behind his paper, but when he saw you through the screen, standing there like a little recruit—that’s the way I heard him describe it once—he told Mim to let you in. And that’s all it took for you to have the attention I’d been waiting for. Then and from then on,” she said, her tone heating up. “He was going to make his kind of marine out of you—because the service needed more of them and was getting less, according to him.”

  “From my side,” Quinn said calmly, “I just wanted to be in the military like my dad had been—all my brothers did. When I started to piece together that Merritt was the civilian home to someone who I’d heard grown-ups say was on his way to military greatness, a bulb went off over my head—I got this idea that maybe I could get him to take me under his wing. I’d been waiting and waiting to hear that he’d come to town, so when my grandfather said it over breakfast that morning, I went running out without even eating and hightailed it to your place.”

  “To announce that you wanted to be a marine just like Mac,” Clairy said, derisively reiterating what Quinn had said that morning when Mim had let him in. “You couldn’t have said anything he wanted to hear more. And there you were,” Clairy repeated, “his own little devotee. After that, everything was a test to see if you really were or could be like him. A challenge that was right up his alley, that gave him something to do whenever he was in boring old Merritt to see boring old me... While he thought you were great.”

  “I just did whatever he told me to do—”

  “Following him around like a shadow—”

  “Not if it was during the school year—then I left here after PT and didn’t come back until later,” Quinn said, sticking with his claim that he hadn’t taken up all of her father’s attention.

  “That didn’t free up time for me to have with him—I was in school, too! And the minute I came home, you were here.”

  “Okay. But I was only here until dinnertime. Then I had to go home—”

  “There were plenty of nights when you went on night maneuvers or night marches or reconnaissance or night surveillance. And even when it wasn’t playing war, there were also more dinners here than I can count where you went from the dining-room table to the den for him to quiz you on strategy, tell you war stories, reenact battles with his dumb toy soldiers. Or you just sat around watching war movies with him!” she spluttered.

  “None of that happened until I was a lot older, until I had my driver’s license and could go out at night. For all those years before that, I had to be home to eat and then stay there. It was family time—the same as it was here.”

  “Ha!”

  “You’re claiming I didn’t have family time?” he asked, their debate at full steam although his voice was even and only Clairy was clearly angry.

  “I’m telling you that I didn’t have family time even after you left and that was your fault, too!”

  “Come on,” he scoffed again. “He was your dad... I didn’t have a dad, but I was still hanging out with my mother, with my brothers, with Big Ben. Don’t tell me that isn’t what you were doing over here with a father you only got to be with when he was in town. Especially when you were little, long
before he was running me through night training.”

  Quinn hadn’t had a dad? What was that about? Clairy wondered. Of course he’d had a dad—his father had served in the military and was slated to go into the library...

  But again, she saw this as her chance to give her side of things, and she wasn’t going to veer from it to ask what Quinn meant.

  “There was no such thing as family time with my father,” she said instead, as if Quinn was delusional. “If he was here on leave, he ate dinner in the dining room and he talked to Mim and Grampa—not to me, because children were to be seen and not heard, according to him. At least, that’s how it was with me—”

  “Not much different with me, then—I was just supposed to take orders.”

  “But he talked about you—he bragged about you, about the super marine he was making out of you, about how proud he was to be doing that. Sometimes he told them something funny you’d done or said that delighted him—he didn’t even talk about me.”

  “But you were here and I wasn’t,” Quinn insisted. “That should have counted for something.”

  “When it was still all about you? And how could I compete with the massive number of push-ups you’d done for him that day? Or the marsh you’d slogged through even after you’d slipped and were covered in mud? Or the funny question you asked him about latrines? How could he care about helping me with my spelling words when you had started to understand how to tell military time? When it was ‘all hail young Quinn’ everywhere I turned! One night I asked him to tuck me in and he said he was sure you didn’t need tucking in, so why should I? Family time?” she repeated. “Once dinner was over he wanted to read or watch his TV, have his Scotch, and again, I was supposed to be seen and not heard—that was my family time.”

  “He wouldn’t have known whether I needed to be tucked in or not,” Quinn said, as if there was nothing else he could think to say to all that.

  But it was a weak answer and he seemed to know that. He was silent for a moment, his expression showing some guilt. Then he said, “I didn’t know that was how he was with you. He was your dad—I was jealous of that. I figured that when I wasn’t around he was being your dad, the way I imagined a dad would be.”