Travis sat back down. “Joe fixed it so I’m going to spend the weekend with Kim. I’ll be in a connecting room, and she might be with her boyfriend. But still . . . I’ll be near her.”
“He told me,” she said as she smiled at her son. She’d never seen him this way, and it did her heart good.
“Did he? What other of my secrets did that nosy old man blab to you?”
Lucy smiled. Since the two of them had met, all she’d heard from Joe was “Travis.” What Travis said, did, his worries, his deep love for Kim, Travis’s suggestions about the hardware store. Every word of it, Joe repeated to Lucy.
“You should have seen him with Kim,” Joe’d said when he’d called her after their lunch at Al’s. “The poor guy can’t take his eyes off her.”
“What about her?” Lucy’d asked. “What does Kim think of my . . . of Travis?” If Joe heard her slip, he didn’t seem to register it.
“She acts like she pays no attention to him, that he’s just another guy, but if he moves, she sees it. When I suggested that she take young Travis with her to Maryland, her face lit up like a New Year’s spotlight.”
Lucy looked at her son. “Joe likes you a lot.”
“You’d never know it from what he says,” Travis said, but he was smiling. “According to Joe Layton, any man who can’t use a handsaw properly isn’t worth much. I told him I was a lawyer and you know what he said?”
Lucy had heard the story from Joe but she wanted to hear it again from Travis. “I can’t imagine.”
“He said . . .”
Now, with the newspaper in front of him, Travis couldn’t help smiling. Last night had been the way he remembered with his mother, her kindness, her humor, her sweetness. He was glad he hadn’t had to endure another session where she bawled him out.
On the other hand, that woman might be able to handle Randall Maxwell in a courtroom.
That evening when Travis had returned home—as he’d begun to think of wherever Kim was—she’d been about to throw a couple of frozen dinners into the microwave. When Travis was going through school he’d spent more than one summer crewing on private yachts. One year, to his horror, he was assigned the position of “chef.” He didn’t know how to boil water.
He put the dinners back in the freezer and looked to see what else was in there as he told Kim the story. “So there I was, not knowing an egg from a watermelon, and I was supposed to spend six weeks cooking three meals a day for the rich old man and his young wife.”
Kim crunched on the carrot stick he’d cut for her. “So what did you do?”
“I put on my most helpless look”—he demonstrated—
“and asked the wife to help out.”
“Did she?”
“Oh yes,” Travis said as he put chicken breasts in the microwave to thaw. He was glad his back was to Kim as he thought about that trip. He didn’t want her to see his face.
But she’d understood. “What else did she teach you?”
Travis started laughing. “A little bit here and there.” Moonlight, stars, the old man snoring below. He’d been nineteen years old and innocent. Not so innocent when they got back to the U.S.
He and Kim had a dinner that he’d never wanted to end. She told him more about her jewelry and what she hoped to do. “I have a big commission coming up and I need some new inspiration.”
“This trip to Maryland will be good for you.”
“That was my idea when I let Joce talk me into going.”
“You didn’t originally plan to go with this guy, did you?”
“Dave? No, I didn’t.”
“He invited himself?” Travis asked.
“More or less,” Kim said, “but I do think he has something important to say to me. Between him and Carla I’ve been given enough hints.”
A lot of things came into Travis’s mind that he wanted to say, but he thought he’d better keep his opinions to himself. Penny’s son, Russell, was on a date with Carla and the plan was for him to meet Travis in the morning and report on what he found out.