“No,” I answered the question the delivery boy had never asked before in the two years I’d been getting the same order.
“Oh, my mom said she saw you down on the dock having ice cream with someone. Said she was real pretty.” Linc leaned to the side, craning his neck.
I shut the door.
With two large pizzas in hand I headed back to the kitchen. My shoulders tightened with tension as I faced the very real possibility that my excursion with Skylar would, in fact, end up on the front page. People were talking. Obviously. And it wasn’t just Linc’s mom. Billy knew about the ice cream and the trolley ride and I sure as hell hadn’t told him. I doubted Mrs. Byers had been the one to fill him in considering he’d been at the bar and she considered liquor “the devil’s elixir” and wouldn’t step foot in Southern Comfort for fear of being struck by lightning.
Maybe I should tell Skylar that people were talking,I thought as I found myself once again looking out the back window toward Old Man Thompson’s place.
This time, I didn’t find Skylar and Luna dancing and laughing. When I looked out, I saw Skyler fanning smoke out of the kitchen window.
Alarm gripped me. I had no idea what the electrical was like in that house. It was an old house and hadn’t been lived in for years. I rushed out onto the back porch and I saw her open her back door carrying what looked like the charred remains of a roast or maybe a meatloaf. It was hard to tell from this distance.
Whatever it was, it wasn’t edible. Their dinner was obviously ruined. And as luck would have it, I’d ordered enough for a bottomless pit of a brother.
Without giving it a second thought, I went inside and grabbed the two large boxes off the kitchen table. As I walked through the field between our houses, a little voice in the back of my head asked if this was really the smartest thing to do.
I’d spent my entire adult life keeping people at arm’s length. Part of that was because it was safer that way. After losing Mama, and then Melody, I hadn’t wanted to let anyone in. But another part was because I didn’t want anyone to count on me. To need me. I didn’t want to be responsible for or accountable to another human being.
So why was I inserting myself into the lives of not just one person, but two?
I still didn’t have the answer to that question when I knocked on the door.
“Coming!” Skyler called out seconds before she opened the door and took my breath away.
She’d changed out of the jeans and tank-top that she’d been wearing earlier and was now in leggings and an oversized sweatshirt. Her auburn locks were flowing over her shoulder, framing her sweetheart face. And she was wearing her black-framed glasses that I’d grown so fond of over the past twenty-four hours.
Her sweatshirt hid all of her pinup-worthy curves, but she could wear a burlap sack and still be the sexiest thing I’d ever seen.
“What are you doing here?” she asked breathlessly.
“I have an extra pizza and I thought you guys might be interested.”
“Pizza!” I heard the high-pitched squeal a second before I saw a bouncing blur of blonde hair rushing toward me. “Mr. Hank!”
“Hey, Luna Luna.” I bent down and intercepted her bear hug.
“Oh no, we were just about to have our dinner.”
“But, Momma, we were only gonna have rice and vegetables because you burned the chicken, remember?” Luna looked up at her mom and I noticed that she had a red stain of something around her lips. It reminded me of when my brothers would drink juice and then pretend they were the Joker.
Skylar looked down at her daughter then back up to me and shook her head. “You already paid for the trolley ride, ice cream, and now this.” She motioned to the boxes. “It’s too much.”
“It’s pizza, not a four-course meal. And if you don’t eat it, it’ll just go to waste,” I lied.
I wasn’t in the habit of lying, in fact, I hated liars. But technically, Jimmy would just inhale it without even enjoying it which would be a waste. And anything that would keep me from spending an evening with Skylar and Luna would definitely be a waste.