Leave it to Max (Lori's Classic Love Stories Volume 1) Page 7

  How could he still have the power to hurt her? She’d gotten over him years ago, become adjusted to the fact that she’d never see him again—except in the eyes of their son. So why did she want to sit down on the crumbling front steps of the nearest old house and sob?

  The prince had not taken the princess to his castle and gifted her with her every heart’s desire. The knight had not rescued the damsel in severe distress. The lover had never loved her.

  She rubbed at her eyes. One look at the man and she was nineteen again. Her heart brimming with first love, her mind full of him, her body on the edge of womanhood, waiting for J.J. to make every dream come true.

  And he had. For a little while.

  Livy blocked out the lingering hum of awareness. He was handsome. He was tall, dark and strong. He was also the father of her child. She couldn’t be indifferent. But she could be an adult. Adults controlled themselves. They did not leap into bed with every person who aroused them.

  She and Garrett had been kids. Then she’d had to grow up. Garrett still hadn’t. To him, Max was a bright, shiny new toy, and he wanted one. But what happened when he grew bored with Max, as he’d grown bored with Livy?

  Livy knew all too well, and she’d do whatever she had to do to make certain her son wasn’t left devastated when Garrett Stark blew town.

  She glanced at her watch. Rosie had a meeting at ghost walk headquarters and would not be home to meet Max after school. If Livy hustled, she could be. She stepped up her pace, so that when the whirlwind of legs and big feet came around the corner and plowed into her stomach she had to windmill her arms to keep from falling.

  Max landed on his butt in someone’s front yard.

  “Oh, baby, I’m sorry.” She leaned down to help just as Max threw his arm up for balance. He caught her in the nose with his cast so hard Livy saw tiny floating black spots. At least she had an excuse for her eyes to be bright with tears.

  “Mom! What are you doin’ here?”

  Holding her nose, waiting for the blood to begin flowing, Livy could still give Max The Look. She’d had so much practice. “What are you doing here, young man?”

  He ignored the question he didn’t want to answer, just as guilty parties always did. “I’m sorry I hit you in the nose again. I never try to. Stuff like that just happens around me.”

  “I know.” She ruffled his hair. “But that doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

  He squinted, sheepish. “It’s not gushin’ this time.”

  “Well, that’s something.” She pinched the bridge, pleased to find it still straight though sore, then she gazed down at Max and sighed.

  He didn’t need to answer her question. She knew what Max was doing here. The same thing she’d been doing, and she would put a stop to it immediately. Before Max decided Garrett Stark would make a pretty good best friend.

  Livy traced a finger along the bumpy surface of his cast. “We have to talk.”

  “Sure.” He grinned. “See how crowded my cast is? I got all the doctors and nurses to sign, then at school everyone wanted to. It was so cool. No one else has a cast.”

  Livy shrugged off the guilt. She wasn’t the worst mother in town just because her child wore the only cast in school. Intellectually, she knew that. But in her heart? Not so much.

  Oblivious to Livy’s angst, Max started to walk toward the big white house down the street. Livy caught at his arm and got nothing but cast. Touching that thing was like stroking a gravestone. “Let’s go home.”

  His face scrunched. “But I wanna visit Mr. Stark.”

  “I figured that out, since you’re once again where you’re not supposed to be when you’re not supposed to be there. Didn’t I ground you?”

  He hung his head and kicked a stone off the sidewalk. “I wasn’t gonna be long.”

  “Oh, that makes all the difference.”

  In the way of children, he stuck a knife right in her weak spot.

  “Usually I’m home a while before you get there on Wednesdays, anyway.” Then he twisted it a bit. “It’s not like you’re there waiting for me.”

  Guilt, guilt, guilt, pulsed in Livy’s head. She did her best, but she always seemed to come up a few hours short. ‘‘If no one’s home, you’re supposed to go to Mrs. Hammond’s. How many times have we discussed this?”

  “But Jenny always wants to play house.” He gave an exaggerated shudder. “And I have to be the husband. She’s always saying she loves me, and when she does that I just want to run away as fast as I can.”

  Like father, like son.

  She really had to stop thinking that way or she’d let something slip. Taking hold of Max’s unfettered hand, she tugged him in the direction of home. He held back, and Livy halted. Max stared at her from eyes so like his father’s she had to force herself not to look away.

  “He’s a writer,” Max said, as if that explained everything. “For a job.”

  As fascinating as a dead bird is to most boys, being a writer must be to Max. Ever since he’d been old enough to hold a crayon, he’d drawn anything that came into his head, and once he could write words, he wrote stories that were far too advanced for a boy his age, causing both pride and concern to war within Livy whenever she read one.

  “He’s a writer, but he’s also a stranger. What have I told you about strangers?”

  “But—”

  “What have I told you?”

  He recited the creed. “They might look nice and talk nice, but that’s their job. They could grab you and take you and you’ll be gone forever-more.”

  “And?”

  “Then I’ll wish I’d listened to my mom.”

  Livy hated scaring him, but truth was truth. The world was screwed up. “I want you to stay away from Garrett Stark.”

  “But—”

  “No buts. That’s final.” She took his hand, expecting the grudging acquiescence she always got when she put her foot down.

  Instead, Max yanked away and backed out of Livy’s reach. “He’s not a stranger. If he was gonna take me away, he’d have done it when I snuck in his house.”

  “You what?” Livy shouted.

  A soft gasp made her look up, to find the two little old ladies Garrett had frightened earlier strolling toward them. Max scuttled behind her as Livy stifled a groan.

  The Kendall twins—Miss Violet and Miss Viola— had been her granny’s best friends. Savannah pure-breds and southern gentlewomen, they often tried to get Livy to cease her unladylike lawyering and settle down.

  “Olivia Frasier, your grandmama would be horrified to hear you shouting like a fishwife in public.”

  Miss Violet’s genteel voice matched her peach afternoon dress as well as her winter-white shoes matched her hat and her gloves. The summer-white accouterments had been neatly packed away after the Georgia-Florida football game, no doubt; just as any lady in southern Georgia knew it was inappropriate to wear panty hose until that age-old rivalry had been played out for the season.

  “Or shouting anywhere at all, for that matter,” Miss Viola continued.

  Her dress was autumn orange, the accents a perfect taupe. The sisters were identical in face, body and voice. The only way to tell them apart was by the shade of their hair. Miss Violet’s was black streaked with gray, while Miss Viola’s was gray streaked with black.

  “I’m sorry,” Livy said. “But there are times when shouting is needed.”

  “Oh, no, dear, a lady knows how to make folks listen by the tone and not the volume of her voice. It’s the courtroom that’s ruining you. Our father, the judge, always shouted.”

  Their father, the judge, had been as deaf as a sixty-year-old rock star. The courtroom had nothing to do with it.

  Violet raised her perfectly powdered, white-as-a-daisy-petal, never-been-in-the-sunshine nose. “We just refused to listen when he did. Right, Sister?”

  “Hmm?” Viola frowned in the direction of Garrett’s house.

  Livy glanced that way, too, and discovered he watched the
m from the porch. She cursed beneath her breath.

  “Olivia! Such language.”

  The sisters might be old, but they had ears like Irish setters.

  Max snickered. He’d come out of hiding and now stood at Livy’s side. Max loved it when the sisters took her to task, because that meant they weren’t picking on him. Two elderly ladies who’d never been married had no idea what to do with a rambunctious little boy, except tell him to sit still—which for Max was a behavior straight from the realm of impossibility.

  Violet glanced at Max and he sobered instantly. She patted him on the head and went back to ignoring him. Max nearly crumpled in relief.

  “There’s something about that man…” Viola murmured, still staring at Garrett.

  “Really?” Violet removed her Coke-bottle glasses, which she never wore unless she absolutely had to, from her winter-white purse, and peered down the street. “He needs a haircut.”

  “No…”

  “He most certainly does, Sister. A disgrace. He looks like one of those guitar players on MTV.”

  Livy and Max glanced at each other. MTV?

  “I’ve seen him before.”

  Livy almost cursed again but managed to contain herself. Though her granny had been senile at the end and unable to remember J.J. from one day to the next, the sisters remembered the name of their first-grade teacher—and pretty much everything that had ever happened in their considerable lifetimes. Livy didn’t think they’d ever seen her and J.J. together, but she couldn’t be sure.

  “He’s a horror writer,” Max put in helpfully.

  The sisters eyed him as if he were a bug, and Max began to fidget. “A what?”

  “He writes books about vampires. But don’t worry.” Max motioned for them to come closer, then whispered, “He isn’t one.”

  The sisters straightened, glanced at each other, then back at the old white house.

  “Hmm.” Viola pushed up the brim of her hat a tad. “A writer. Must be why he looks familiar.”

  Livy let out a silent sigh of relief.

  “And that would explain why he’s living in the Alexander place.”

  “Why?” Max asked.

  “It’s haunted, child.”

  “It is not!” Livy exclaimed.

  “Don’t contradict me, Olivia. Of course it’s haunted. All the best houses in Savannah are.”

  “Is yours?” Max piped up.

  “Certainly. The judge stops by every afternoon at three for tea.”

  Livy bit back her disbelief. The sisters could still box her ears if they were of a mind. But if they were holding regular conversations with their dead daddy, maybe she didn’t need to worry that one of them would connect Garrett to J.J. anytime soon. Maybe.

  As Miss Violet had said, all the good houses were haunted, and all the true Savannahians believed in ghosts. Perhaps that was why Livy had never truly fit in here, even though she’d wanted to.

  “Since Daddy started drifting about, have you noticed the former owner doesn’t?” Miss Viola asked.

  “Of course not, Sister. The judge loathed that man. Said he was no better than a common horse thief. Why, when Daddy bought the house he was never even told about the ghosts it already had, or that the building had been built right on top of a former cemetery.”

  “Well, it’s hard not to hit a burial place around here. The way they used to just bury people willy-nilly wherever they pleased. Look at that Jewish cemetery right in the middle of the road.”

  “Ahem.” Livy cleared her throat, hesitated, then couldn’t help herself. “They built the road through the cemetery. Not the other way around.”

  “Whatever, dear. The point is, Mama got no sleep at all some nights, what with the slamming and scratching and whispering. She finally buried a Bible in the backyard. Oh, Daddy had a fit about that, I’ll tell you. Putting a perfectly good King James into the ground. But when the commotion stopped, Mama just smiled and Daddy shut up.”

  Miss Violet nodded. “Which proves our point, Olivia. There’s no need for a woman to shout or curse. If you’re right, you’re right, and we so often are. Everything comes out in the end.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Livy muttered. “We’d better get going.”

  She’d like to retreat before the sisters got on a roll again. It was so hard to extricate oneself when they were. Unfortunately Max had other ideas.

  “Whose ghost lives at Mr. Stark’s?”

  Max stared at Garrett’s house with as much awe as he’d said Garrett’s name. Strangely enough, Max had never been frightened of ghosts, probably because Rosie spoke of them at breakfast, lunch and dinner as though they were just another friend or relative—a habit most folks who lived in Savannah for very long got into.

  Miss Violet squinted at the house once more. “I’m not certain who haunts the Alexander place.”

  “Maybe an Alexander,” Livy said dryly.

  Miss Violet gave her a sharp look. Livy tried to appear innocent, but that was more difficult than it seemed when you were guilty. How come so many of her clients had no trouble with it?

  Miss Violet tilted her head so she could focus her entire attention on Max. Her huge hat wobbled but didn’t fall down. “Hasn’t your grandmother told you all the ghost stories? If Rosie insists on being in trade, you’d at least think she’d be good at it.”

  For the sisters, being a guide was a trade. Of course, being a lawyer was a sin. Unless you were a judge. Somehow that was okay.

  “Rosie’s the best ghost-walk guide in town.” Max defended his favorite person in the world.

  “I wouldn’t know, but I have heard she does her business well.”

  Miss Violet said “business” with a little tilt to her mouth and twist to her voice that made Livy remember the way the judge had always said “lady of the night.” The sisters had never much cared for Rosie. In their eyes, she’d married beneath her—a Yankee carpetbagger, no less.

  No matter how many times the two had been told that Rosie’s husband was a carpenter, not a carpetbagger, they didn’t get it, or perhaps they chose not to. Just as no matter how many times folks reminded them the war was over—a war they hadn’t even been alive to see fought—they could still sneer Yankee better than Vivien Leigh. To make matters worse, Rosie had also committed the unpardonable sin of leaving her mother to live alone in her old age.

  “Rosie would have done better to stay home with her mama than traipse across the country like a hippie.”

  To Miss Violet, any woman who wore her hair long and didn’t do heels was a hippie.

  “But then, Rosie was always different.”

  Miss Viola could put more connotations on the word different than Miss Violet could to the word business.

  Max’s eyes narrowed and his mouth tightened. Sometimes he was a little too astute for his own good.

  “How’s your pet goose?” he asked.

  Livy resisted the urge to groan. There’d be no getting away now. The sisters’ goose had been a bone of contention between them and Rosie since the day they’d brought it home. According to Rosie, a wild animal should not be a pet, and the twins were exploiting the goose for their own nefarious purposes.

  “It’s not a pet,” Miss Viola snapped.

  “More of a decoration, maybe a tourist attraction,” Miss Violet clarified. “When Daddy started dropping in for tea, the former owner wasn’t the only one who stopped coming around. Our ghost goose went away.”

  ‘‘Daddy never liked that goose, even when he was alive.” Miss Viola wrinkled her nose. ‘‘Daddy, not the goose.”

  “That’s probably why the goose went away. The judge can be difficult, even though he’s dead. So we got a very special, very live goose to make up for the loss of the ghostly one.”

  “I don’t remember hearing about a ghost goose at your house,” Livy said.

  “The goose was one of the ghosts that horse thief who sold Daddy the house never even mentioned. And it didn’t leave when Mama buried t
he King James.” Miss Viola frowned in concentration. “Maybe because geese aren’t familiar with the Bible.”

  “What does this goose do that makes it so special?” Livy had often wondered.

  “Stays in the yard and doesn’t fly away.”

  “Well now, Sister,” Viola pointed out, “our goose can’t fly.”

  “Did you have its wings clipped?” Livy couldn’t keep the censure out of her voice. Perhaps Rosie was right about the goose, after all.

  ‘‘Of course not!” Viola looked insulted. ‘‘The poor thing had an accident as a gosling. That’s how it ended up being trained in the first place. Our goose would have died in the wild. It’s better off here, regardless of what Rosie says about exploitation for monetary gain.”

  That sounded like Rosie.

  “Rosie says you made the whole thing up to get on the ghost-walk tour,” Max offered.

  The sisters’ mouths pruned. Together they turned toward Max.

  Livy grabbed his hand. “Gotta go. Nice chatting with y’all.”

  This time she didn’t have to drag Max. He came willingly. Around the corner. There he stopped dead.

  “Old hens.”

  “Keep a respectful tongue for your elders.”

  “Why? They don’t have a respectful tongue for Rosie.”

  Livy wasn’t sure what to say to that. It always seemed as if she was telling him to behave in one way while the rest of the world behaved in another.

  Do unto others.

  Everyone did—though not in the way the Golden Rule intended.

  If you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything.

  The sisters had just ruined that one.

  Don’t get arrested.

  Max’s grandma visited jail every other week.

  Don’t cheat, don’t lie, don’t swear.

  Livy wasn’t even going to think about how many times each day he saw those rules broken.

  Did all parents have the same problem? Was anyone else trying to raise decent human beings in an indecent world? Or were they all scrambling to get along the best they could and hoping things would work out fine in the end? Some days Livy did that, too.