He turned his head and looked at her though runny, bloodshot eyes. "Did you get Rob his flax-seed?"
"Yes." She stopped by the nightstand and pressed a hand to her beating heart. "You scared me to death. How are you feeling?"
"Pretty good, now. Grace stopped by."
"I know, she said she would." She noticed the Nyquil and aspirin on the stand next to the pussycat alarm clock. Its cute little pussycat eyes winked on the half minute. "Have you eaten dinner?"
"Grace made me soup." He looked back up at the ceiling. "It was pretty good. Homemade chicken noodle. You can tell a good woman by her soup."
Kate thought it probably took a little bit more than soup. "Do you need anything?" she asked as she shrugged out of her coat.
"Yes, I need you to do something for me."
"What?"
"I've got some empty boxes out for you to put some of your grandmother's things in." A horrible cough racked his chest, then he added, "I thought you should take anything you might want."
This was news. Big news. Kate wondered what had happened to bring it about, but she didn't ask, in case he changed his mind. "Okay. Anything else?"
"Turn out the light."
She flipped the switch and moved back into the kitchen. She took the bowl and spoon from the sink and placed them in the dishwasher. As she added soap, she wondered how a nice woman like Grace could have raised a man like Rob. How a "good woman" who made a sick old man soup could raise a man who just grabbed unsuspecting women and kissed the breath right out of them. A man who could kiss like that, get that turned on, and not try and take things further. That wasn't natural.
She started the dishwasher and glanced about the kitchen. She didn't know where to start. What was she going to do with a house full of Tom Jones stuff? Rent a shed and store it the rest of her life?
Her gaze fell on the set of Tom decorative plates held in a rack by the table, and her thoughts returned to the kiss Rob had planted on her. What kind of man grabbed a woman's hand and shoved it on his erection? She got a stack of newspapers by the back door and set them on the table. Unfortunately she knew the answer to her last question. The kind of man who wanted to prove he didn't have a problem getting it up. In the calmer part of her brain, she could even kind of, sort of, understand why he'd done it. But what she didn't understand was what kind of man got that hard and pushed a woman away? She'd never known a man that sexually turned-on who didn't think she should drop to her knees and do something about it.
Whatever his reason, it didn't matter. She should have been the one to stop things before they'd gotten to that point. She should have been the one to step back. The one in control. He should have been the one left dazed and mortified.
She told herself that at some point she would have stopped him. That before their clothes hit the ground, she would have grabbed her bag and gone home. That's what she told herself. Problem was, she wasn't all that convincing. Not even to herself.
Kate wrapped a plate in paper and set it in the box. Rob
Sutter was a cheater and a bad emotional risk. He was rarely nice, and most often a jerk, which explained her inexplicable attraction to him.
He'd humiliated her twice now. Two times he'd left her embarrassed by her own behavior and stunned by his rejection. That was two times too many.
There couldn't and wouldn't be a third.
Ten
Stanley read over his poem one last time. It had taken him three days to write it, crossing out one word, substituting another, and he still wasn't sure he'd expressed himself right. The poem ended with the word reimburse, which was, admittedly, stupid.
He knew Grace liked poetry, and he wanted to tell her how much he appreciated her looking in on him. He wanted to tell her he thought she was a good nurse, but he hadn't been able to think up a good word to rhyme with nurse-hearse and purse just didn't do it.
He folded the poem and placed it in an envelope. He'd been out of commission with the bad chest cold for four days, and Grace had stopped by every morning before work and every night after just to check up on him. She'd taken his pulse and listened to his lungs. She talked about Rob and he talked about Katie. She always left him soup. She was a good woman.
He placed a stamp in the corner, then glanced out of the office. Katie was in front with the Frito-Lay salesman, probably getting suckered into stocking the "Natural and Organic" products, which was a bunch of hokum as far as Stanley was concerned.
He hurriedly wrote Grace's address and stuck the envelope under a stack of outgoing mail. A pile of pamphlets sat on his desk, and he opened a drawer and dumped them inside. He knew his granddaughter wanted him to think about upgrading his cash register and bookkeeping system. He wasn't interested. He was seventy-one and too old to change the way he'd been doing business for more than forty years. If his wife hadn't died, he'd be retired by now, spending his retirement fund on travel or some other type of recreation, not on some integrated accounting system.
Stanley placed a hand on top of his desk and rose to his feet. He'd come back to work to discover that Katie had rearranged a few things. Nothing big, just rearranged some of the merchandise. He wasn't quite sure why the over-the-counter medications had to be kept down below the prophylactics on aisle five. And she'd removed the live bait he'd kept by the milk in the reach-in cooler. For some reason, she'd put it next to the discounted meats. He knew she'd ordered some gourmet jelly and olives. He supposed he didn't mind, since it meant she was getting more involved in the store, but he didn't think gourmet items would sell in Gospel.
He placed a rubber band around the outgoing mail, and when Orville Tucker came in his mail truck, Stanley handed it over before he could change his mind. He wondered what Grace would think of his poem. He popped a few Turns and told himself it didn't matter. He'd tried his best, but Grace was a really good poet, and he was just an amateur. He cut meat for a living. What made him think he could write a poem?
He spent the rest of the day worrying about what Grace would think. By that night, he was in such agony that he wished like hell he could break into the post office on Blaine Street and steal the poem back. But the post office was one of the few businesses in town that had an alarm system. He wished he'd never sent it. He knew that if he didn't hear from Grace, it meant she probably hated it.
The next day Grace called him and told him she loved it. She said she was flattered and that the poem had spoken to her heart. Her praise spoke to Stanley's heart in a way he'd never expected. It reminded him that his heart was good for something more than pumping blood, and when she invited him and Katie to dinner at her house the next night, he accepted for both of them. Katie was always nagging him about getting out of the house more. He was sure she wouldn't mind.