“Nope, I’m an only child. My parents died in a car accident when I was eight. My grandma raised me.”
“Oh, I’m sorry for your loss. But I’ll have to compliment your grandma some day.” As soon as the words leave my mouth, I see it might have been too much. There’s a flicker in her eyes. I remember that she’s not in my head, where I’ve already been taking her to India, showing her Cape Cod…as far as she knows, I’m just Maeve’s dad that isn’t around much. I add, quickly, "She clearly raised you with care since you became a good teacher and a good nanny."
Vanessa’s smile is warm, if I freaked her out, I think it passed. I hope. She says, “She did. It’s hard to be so far away from her, but we talk a lot. She used to babysit, run a daycare, kind of, when my mom was a baby.” She has chosen her words carefully. I wonder what she almost said.
I’d asked her about her accent when she first started caring for Maeve, so I knew the grandmother is in Atlanta. “What does she think of you taking this job, then?” I ask.
Vanessa shrugs. “She’s okay with it, I think. Now.” She gives me a mischievous smile. “She doesn’t really trust you, though.”
“Oh? Why is that?”
“Because you hired a girl to take care of your baby after only seeing her wait tables. Badly.” She takes a big sip of the wine. "Why did you hire me? Just because you thought I was good with Maeve? Or is there something else?"
She’s looking at me so directly. I feel like I have to tell her some of the truth at least. I smile. "It might have been an impulse decision partly spurred by attraction. BUT," I add, cutting her off, "I maintain that it was a good impulse because you have been very good at your job. How’s the wine?" I throw that last bit in there to steer the conversation another way. I’m pretty smooth.
“It’s fine. Good, in fact, probably goes down too easily for my own good. So, you really never even taste it?”
My smooth steering just yanking the conversation in another direction I don’t really want to go.
“No, I don’t. I have a guy for that. Let’s just say that I liked booze a little too much for a little too long and I felt it was best to make a clean break. It hasn’t been very long, so it’s best if I stay cold turkey for now.”
The usual awkward silence follows that pronouncement. Then Vanessa says, “So. How ’bout them…Mets? Is that a team here?”
Silence broken, we laugh pretty hard. “No,” I say finally, “That’s New York. If you want to support Oakland, it’s the Athletics, and god help you. But if you support San Francisco, it’s the Giants.”
“And that would be…baseball, right?”
Surely she’s playing it up for comic effect, but I’ll take it over the alcoholism discussion. “Yes. Football is the Raiders and the 49ers. Basketball, locally, is the Warriors or, if you prefer an underdog, the Kings, And hockey, if you are so inclined, and I cannot imagine that you are, is the San Jose Sharks.”
“Into sports, then are you?”
“Not in the least. But if you’re a man in the business world, you’re expected to have a team and a working knowledge of most sports. When I lived in Boston, I decided to be a Red Sox and Pats fan and I paid an assistant to keep track of them and tell me all the game highlights so that I could say ‘Whoa, what about that 3rd quarter call last night?’ I’m like a parrot, though, only the barest idea what I’m actually saying.”
This strikes Vanessa as hilarious and she has to set down her wine glass to keep from spilling it as she laughs. I feel like I just made a huge sale, or–I guess–scored the winning run.
“So,” she says, wiping her eyes and picking up her glass again, “if you got to pick the topic, what would you talk about?”
“Travel. Kayaking.”
“Hey, I like to kayak! I’d love to travel some day, too. This wine has made me a little lightheaded, can we walk?”
“Sure,” I say, rising and then offering her a hand. Her skin is so soft in mine and I realize I’ve never touched her. I let it go reluctantly. “Where would you like to travel?”
“I’d love to go to Vietnam and Cambodia,” she says, as we stroll. “India sounds exciting.”
“It is, I’ve spent quite a bit of time there. I really love it.”
Vanessa’s hand brushes mine, probably by accident, but I take it. She doesn’t pull away.
“You were in India for the textile mills?” she asks.
"Yes. I went over expecting to move our operation back to the US. A lot of companies were riding the Made in America wave, moving their factories to South Carolina. But after working with the people a while, I realized that to move the mill would devastate their village. So I stayed and tried to improve conditions there. I figured we’d be better off trying to educate consumers on our end, explain why we were staying in India."
We’ve stopped walking, and I’m still holding her hand.
“You sound really passionate about it. I bet you’d make a great guide.” She’s looking up at me, the moon in her dark brown eyes.
“I’d love to show you,” I say, and can no longer wait. I lean down, taking her head in my hand as I kiss her.
Her lips soften into mine, returning the kiss, urgent. I pull her to me, my other hand in the small of her back, her body soft against mine.
As I try to part her lips with the tip of my tongue, however, she pulls away. Puts her hand on my chest. “Corbin, no,” she says softly, not meeting my gaze. “I…I’m going to my room. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
She turns and hurries up the path as fast as she can without breaking into a run.
Crap.
Chapter Six
It’s midnight in Atlanta, but this can’t wait. The phone rings five times before Grandma picks up. Obviously I woke her, her voice is still creaky with sleep.
“What’s happened, Vanessa, are you okay?”
You know how you’re holding it all together and then someone who loves you says “Are you okay?” and you totally lose it? That.
“Baby girl, what is going on, what is it?”
I feel terrible for scaring her and that just makes me feel worse, but I manage to choke out “It’s…not an emergency…I’ll be fine…” before dissolving in sobs again, because I’m not sure I’ll be fine.
“Are you hurt?”
“No.” Yes, but not physically. “I’m…sorry to scare you.” I manage to get the sobs under control. I don’t think of myself as much of a crier, but when I do, it’s not a dainty sniffle. “I guess I just wanted advice. I’m freaked out.”
“Okay, honey, what happened.”
“Corbin kissed me.”
I hear her sigh, like she’d been holding her breath. “Honey, wouldn’t this be a better conversation with Asia? I’m not good at this stuff.” I’d never known Grandma to have a gentleman caller even though she’s still beautiful at 75, with that tiny dancer’s body that my mother inherited.
“I tried,” I say, sounding like a whiny teen even to myself, "but I got her I’m driving auto text response."
“Good for her.” Grandma reminds me not to text and drive at least once a week.
"I really needed to talk now," I whine.
“Okay, okay, I’m up now anyway. So. This boy kissed you. Isn’t that what you wanted? You’ve sounded pretty sweet on him since, well, since you first told me about him.”
"Well, yes. No. I don’t know, that’s why I called!"
She sighs again. "Vanessa. I don’t know this boy at all. I don’t know his family. But I do know about rich men that think they can just have their way with the help, take advantage of women that work for them. Can you swear to me that he’s not like that?"
“Yes, I mean, I’ve seen no evidence of it. The other women that work here have never said a bad word or even rolled an eye behind his back. He’s only been here a little longer than I have, but I get the sense that they’ve known him longer than that. It’s one of his family’s houses, so maybe he visited as a kid.” The image of Corbin as a little boy com
es to mind, all floppy black curls and big blue eyes. Also, I realize I’m babbling. “Yeah, I mean, no. He’s not like that.”
“Okay. Did he just walk up and kiss you out of nowhere or did it happen…in a more usual way?” Poor Grandma, I can tell she’s well outside of her comfort zone. She’s always been very no nonsense with me where boys are concerned, just the facts and a healthy dose of skepticism about their motives. I went to college still a virgin, having been assured that to begin sleeping with boys too young would ruin my focus on grades. Once in college, of course, I realized that it was a risk worth taking. Grades aren’t everything. And you can always pull them up again. She used to warn me, though, against “getting too serious” if she thought I sounded too smitten with some boy or another. “You can find you another one once you get where you’re going,” she’d say. Needless to say, I didn’t get my love of romance novels from her.
"No, it was fine, the right way. We were holding hands and walking and talking. And I wanted him to kiss me, I did. I kissed him back. At first."
“Then what happened?”
“I’m not even sure. It’s like, all at once, I thought ‘I don’t know him, I don’t know if this is really what I want or if it’s just what I’d decided I wanted,’ you know?”
She paused, then said, “No, I’m afraid I don’t, not really. You say you don’t know him. That is true. How well have you known other boys the first time you kissed them?”