Someone to Watch Over Me (5 page)

Jax changed into a pair of running shorts and shoes and a ratty T-shirt, and ran until his legs absolutely burned and even Romeo looked exhausted. He stopped, dripping with sweat and dying for about a gallon of water, near the edge of the park not far from the flower shop, frowning. He hadn’t planned to run quite that far or to be this much of a mess when he got done. Did he have to go home to shower and change, or would Gwen take pity on him and let him into the shop this way? He thought she probably would.

“All right, Romeo. Time to turn on the charm, and we can probably get in the door. What do you say?”

Romeo had plopped down beside him, sprawled on the grass, panting heavily. He gave Jax a look that said,
You expect me to move? Now?

“She’s a nice lady. Look sad and she’ll fuss over you, like she did yesterday.”

He took off toward the shop, urging the dog to follow. The flower shop was in a row of old, brick buildings, renovated completely about fifteen years ago and now prime town real estate. A few doors down, the café had built a tree-shaded patio overlooking the park, and people had taken to eating outside on nice days. The sidewalks were wide and prettily landscaped, the shop owners often setting up merchandise outside, too, on nice days. People lingered here and chatted with neighbors and enjoyed the view. His mother had loved coming here, when she wasn’t sick.

Petal Pushers was an eccentric little place, its windows decorated with cartoon girls and boys playing with flowers, something new every couple of weeks drawn by its owner, Joanie Graham. Today, there was a tiny, stick-figured girl
holding a bouquet behind her back, shyly ready to present it to a stick-figured boy on the windows.

Jax should own stock in the place, with as much money as he’d dropped at Joanie’s over the years, but he’d never come to pick out flowers for a funeral before.

He tried the door but found it was locked. When he knocked on the glass, Gwen appeared out of the back room and came to let him in.

“Romeo, too? Is that okay?” Jax asked, halting in the open doorway. “He won’t bother anything.”

“Of course.” They came inside, and Gwen knelt down to talk to Romeo. “Hi, baby. Did you have a good run?”

Romeo made sad-puppy eyes at her and touched his nose to her cheeks, first the left then the right. Gwen grinned at him.

“His version of a kiss.” Jax rolled his eyes. “My sister Kim taught him that trick.”

“What a sweet thing.” Gwen fussed over him some more, petting him and kissing his snout. “He looks tired. Is he thirsty, too?”

“Oh, yeah. We’re both kind of a mess. Sorry about that.”

Gwen glanced up at Jax. He’d wiped himself off as best he could.

“It’s okay. Come on into the back. We’ll see what we can do.”

Romeo trotted after her, taking only a moment to sniff at a few of the more outlandishly bright sprays of flowers in big, bright pink containers spread around the room. Joanie often mixed her bouquets right out here in front of her customers, letting them point and choose what they wanted and her filling in with whatever it took to finish an arrangement.

The shop was done in a wildly bright palette of colors—teal, lime green, pinks and purples. It positively shouted
cheerfulness and made the woman who stood before him stand out all the more in contrast to the attitude and color of the shop.

He wondered why Joanie had hired her, because she definitely didn’t seem to fit in. Gwen was a study in browns. Brown hair, brown eyes, khaki slacks and a plain, loose, chocolate-colored T-shirt beneath a trademark green Petal Pushers apron with more stick kids and flowers on it, a very plain, tentative woman in a shop that was anything but plain or tentative. She stood in the back room looking serious and uneasy, as if Jax might do just about anything in the next few moments. He stopped where he was, a quick glance telling him they were alone among the refrigerated compartments and industrial-size sinks.

He didn’t want to spook her, as he had last night.

She found a bowl that was probably meant to hold flowers and filled it up with water and sat it on the floor, for the dog, then handed Jax a small, white towel and a bottle of water from one of the big refrigerators in back.

“Thanks,” he said.

“You’re welcome.”

“And thanks for meeting here today.”

“It’s no problem. I didn’t have anything to do and…” She frowned, looking away. “It’s fine.”

Scared and at loose ends, in a town where she probably didn’t know a lot of people, Jax figured. And kindhearted, just as he’d suspected.

He took a long drink of water and then started dabbing at the sweat on his arms and face with the towel.

She glanced at him, and then just as quickly looked away.

Shy, scared and lonely, he corrected himself. Not at all his type. “I’ll hurry,” he promised.

“Okay. I’ll be uh…I’ll be out front. Whenever you’re ready.”

Jax wiped off the worst of the sweat. When he came back to the front of the shop, with Romeo trotting after him, Gwen had her head stuck in a cooler full of flowers by the front window.

“Gwen, is it okay for me to be here with you?” He hesitated five feet away once again. “Last night…I didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable.”

She whirled around to face him. He saw heat blooming in her cheeks. She closed her eyes for a moment, then managed to give him the barest of smiles. “It’s all right. And it’s not you. Not your fault.”

Yeah, but it was some man’s.

“So…” She put a determined smile on her sad face. “Did your mother have a favorite flower? Do you have any idea what she would have wanted?”

Which meant she didn’t want to talk about this with him, which was fine too. Her right. He was just curious, thinking there might be something he could do to help. But he’d leave that for another day.

Not one when he was planning his mother’s funeral.

“She liked anything bright and cheery,” he said, frowning at the flower case, full to overflowing. “You know, I just thought of something. She made her own funeral arrangements, and she might have specified something in her instructions. Which I just left on the refrigerator at home.” He frowned yet again. “Sorry.”

“It’s all right. I know how difficult this is. I mean, I don’t really know. My mother’s…She’s fine. But we do a lot of flowers for funerals, so I’ve seen a lot of people trying to handle this and…I understand. You’re welcome to use the phone by the cash register, if you think anyone’s home.”

“Sure. I’ll try that.” He found the phone, made the call. Kim was there, and he frowned as she read the arrangements his mother had made.

“Couldn’t find it?” Gwen asked once he hung up.

“No. We did. She didn’t want any flowers. She said people had already spent a fortune on flowers for her, while she was sick—”

“They had. She had a lot of people who cared about her.”

“Yeah. And she was really into her cancer support group, said the group needed money for their programs a lot more than she needed more flowers, so she asked everyone to make a donation instead.”

“Lots of people make requests like that. If you’ll leave a name and address for the support group, we’ll keep it here, in case people call to order flowers.”

“Okay. Thanks.” He rubbed his hands against his forehead, which absolutely ached, and then remembered. “I’m sorry. I took up your Sunday afternoon for nothing.”

“No,” she said. “It’s fine. I didn’t have anything planned, and honestly, it’s…Well, sometimes the days are so long, you know?”

“Oh, yeah. I know. Cancer time, we called it, like the regular rules of time didn’t even apply.” Days could creep along so that every minute was agony.

“You miss her terribly, don’t you?”

He nodded. “And it’s selfish of me, that I’d wish one more day like that on her, but…I guess everybody thinks they’re going to have time to say everything they wanted to say, and now I wonder if anyone ever gets enough time to say it all or to do everything they always thought they’d do.”

Jax looked up self-consciously, realizing he’d said a lot more than he intended. Judging from the look on
Gwen’s face, he’d either said way too much or something terribly wrong.

“I’m sorry. Did you lose someone recently?”

“No.” She hesitated. “Not really. I just…I almost lost myself.”

S
he said it with a sad, apologetic smile, as if that wouldn’t really count, losing herself. And he wondered if she meant it literally—if she’d nearly died—or if she was talking figuratively.

How out of line would he be to ask that question? Not that they seemed to be observing any of the boundaries of what ordinarily constituted polite conversation. He supposed having someone die did that to people.

“Gwen, just so you know, I’m going to be staying at my mother’s for a while. The lease on my apartment was up two months ago, and she really didn’t need to be alone then, so I moved back in. I haven’t even started to think about finding my own place again. So if you need someone to talk to or if anything happens, anytime at all, just give me a call or come knock on the door. Or you can always call the police department and ask for me. I’m off this week and maybe next week, but I’ll be back there soon.”

“Thank you,” she said. “It’s good to know there’s someone I can call. Especially someone around the corner.”

“Anything I should know about this situation?” he tried. “I mean, if I were keeping an eye on the place, watching out for trouble, it would help to know what to look for.”

“You don’t have to do that,” she offered.

“Sure I do. It’s my job.”

“Oh. Okay. It’s…It’s a man….” She turned pale and hugged her arms around her own waist. “But then, you probably guessed that much.”

Jax nodded. “What does the guy look like?”

“White. Five-ten, a hundred and eighty pounds, short brown hair, brown eyes, nineteen years old. I could get you a picture.”

“Okay.” Sounded like she’d given out that description more than once. “Is this guy on the loose or locked up?”

“Locked up. In Virginia.”

“Good. Is he going to stay that way?”

She looked truly frightened then. Her eyes got so big, and she looked like he’d just knocked the breath out of her. “He’s supposed to.”

“I mean, has he been convicted and sentenced already?”

She nodded.

“Okay. No reason to think he wouldn’t stay locked up. I know that’s easy for me to say, when I’m not the one he hurt or whatever it was that he did to you.” Jax really didn’t want to know exactly what the guy had done. “He’ll stay there, Gwen. Trust that. And I’ll keep an eye out for you.”

“Thank you,” she said.

Romeo came up to her and nudged her hand until it was resting against his head. He looked up at her with something that bore a remarkable resemblance to a smile and made silly dog noises at her that Romeo probably thought were both soothing and charming, and she just ate it up.

His mother swore Jax could do the same thing in a heartbeat with a skittish female crime victim and that his father could, too. Jax was highly skeptical of that notion, and offended, too. He didn’t flirt with women who’d just been traumatized by crime. That would be crass, and he tried never to be that. And he wasn’t nearly as shameless as Romeo.

Gwen rubbed the dog’s ears and hugged him to her side for a moment. Romeo gave her his poor-misunderstood-hound-dog look. He got a lot of affection out of that expression, too.

Shameless. The dog was absolutely shameless.

And women were never skittish around Romeo.

Not that Jax was jealous of a dog.

“Give it a break, Romeo,” he said finally.

Romeo made a face at him, then turned back to Gwen and most likely laid his poor-misunderstood-hound-dog look on her again.

“He really is the sweetest thing,” Gwen said.

“Oh, yeah. He’s a prince. He’ll help watch your house, too.”

“Thank you, sweet boy,” she said, fussing over him some more.

“I’ll get you the name and address of my mother’s cancer support group. And you bring me the photograph, Gwen.”

“I will.”

“Thanks for today.”

“You’re welcome.”

He took a long, slow breath and escaped, one more thing taken care of.

Fighting off an odd, restless energy, Gwen watched Jax and the dog leave. Hearing him talk about how he
wished so much for just one more day with his mother made Gwen think she’d squandered the past year, like a woman who had all the time in the world to pull her life back together. Or a woman waiting for things to magically get better on their own.

How often did that happen?

Impatient with herself and her fears, she locked up the shop, marched off through the park, across Falls Creek and to her aunt’s house, suddenly impatient with everything.

It was an absolutely beautiful spring day, with plenty of sunshine and a perfect temperature, birds chirping, flowers blooming, the whole world seeming welcoming. And she was going to lock herself away inside her aunt’s dreary house again? Surely not.

Although her aunt had assured Gwen that she was free to make any changes she liked, Gwen hadn’t done anything, and the house was truly dark and dreary. No wonder Aunt Charlotte had wanted to get away.

In the meantime, she was happy to have Gwen here, so her house wouldn’t be empty.

That was how Gwen had come to run away to Magnolia Falls.

It had seemed like a smart move, an easy move, a furnished house just waiting for her, in a little town where she’d always felt safe, a chance to start over. Except she hadn’t started over. She hadn’t really done anything.

What if things weren’t going to get better unless she did something to make them better? What if she couldn’t afford to wallow in her own misery anymore?

Gwen went to the picture window at the back of the living room and pulled open the curtains she’d always left shut tight to keep anyone from seeing inside. Afternoon
sunshine poured in, and bits of dust flew off the curtains and a nearby table, floating freely on a ray of light.

She went and found a feather duster and got rid of all the dust she could find in every room in the house. Then she pulled open all the curtains and shades, then the windows themselves. The spring breeze was strong and felt as if it was capable of stirring up all sorts of things, which surely wouldn’t be a bad thing.

She pulled open the big, solid wooden back door, leaving only the screen door, just to see if she could stand having nothing but a thin wire mesh between her and the outside world.

Her aunt’s house and every one else’s on the block backed up to the alley, including Jax’s mother’s. So she had at least eight little old ladies that she knew of and one really cute cop who could see her backyard and back door. It wasn’t exactly a prime spot for crime, and this did happen to be a bright, sunny, spring day.

Surely she could risk airing out the house.

The light changed the house so much, made it feel so much more alive. There were blinds hung at most of the windows, she saw now that she’d pulled the curtains aside, which meant she could put up pretty, light-colored sheers instead of the curtains and just close the blinds at night. That sounded like a good change and certainly not a dangerous one.

She could pack up some of her aunt’s things and unpack some of her own, but that could wait for another day. She wanted to be in the sunshine today.

Gwen ended up pulling weeds in her mess of a yard. She pulled until her hands ached, uncovering what must have once been a well-planned yard, with neat, tidy bushes and a multitude of flowers. Some of them had survived being
smothered, and she decided she wanted more. Some color here and there. Something bright and decidedly cheery. A quick trip to the market down the street, and she had three flats of bedding plants, all of which she managed to install before dinnertime.

By then, she was pleasantly tired, even a little achy, but it felt good. The house looked so much better.

She’d brought some daffodils and crocuses inside with her. They were in a pretty, green vase in the kitchen. She liked them so much, she went out and picked a few more and set them on the mantel next to her angel.

Maybe she’d stumbled upon an answer to feeling better. Maybe she just had to plow ahead, back into life, stay as busy as possible. The yard could certainly use the work.

Some of the ladies on this street had beautiful gardens and so many flowers were in bloom now. Which made her think of Jax when he’d told her his mother didn’t want any flowers at her funeral. It seemed to make him so sad, and Gwen really didn’t want him to be. There were too many sad people in the world already, and he should not be one of them.

Then she had an idea, one little thing she could do to help. He’d made her feel better today, and she wanted to return the favor.

The first thing Jax and his sisters noticed when they walked into the visitation room was the huge spray of flowers draped across their mother’s casket. A bright, cheery, full-of-life bouquet of colors.

Jax was glad someone had ignored her wishes.

Sorry, Mother,
he said to himself.

He’d developed a habit of talking to her in his head, and why shouldn’t he? He’d talked to her nearly every day of
his life, and he feared it was going to be a hard habit to break. So he’d just keep doing it.

“She said no flowers!” Katie hovered in the doorway with the other two. None of them had wanted to walk into this room.

“But they’re so lively,” said Kim, who was hanging on to Jax’s arm, Kathie on his other one.

“It doesn’t matter. She said no flowers,” said Katie, who’d probably never broken a rule in her life.

“Let’s see who dared flout the no-flower rule.” Jax disentangled himself from his sisters and went just far enough into the room to grab the small card tucked into the arrangement. He pulled it out and read,
Hope you don’t mind. They came from the gardens of her neighbors, who were very happy to give them up for her. Gwen.

Jax actually grinned.

How ’bout that, Mom? Nice, huh?
He’d wanted her to have them. He didn’t care what she’d asked everyone to do. They hadn’t cost anything, and they’d distracted him in that first awful moment when he’d had to walk into the visitation room, something he’d been dreading all day.

Thank you, Gwen.

“Well?” Katie demanded, from her spot in the doorway.

“It’s all right.” Jax went back to where he’d left his sisters. “They’re from Gwen.”

“Who’s Gwen?”

“One of Mom’s neighbors,” Jax said. “Mrs. Moss’s niece. She moved in a few months ago, when Mrs. Moss left for Florida. She works at Joanie Graham’s flower shop.”

“The woman who came by the house with a quiche the day Mom died?” Katie frowned. “Do you know this woman?”

“Not really. I just met her that night. Well, no…Romeo
and I met her earlier that day. We went running, and she was having lunch in the park.”

“You picked up a woman the day Mom died?” Katie asked.

“No,” he insisted. “It wasn’t like that.”

“Honestly, Jax. What is wrong with you?”

“I didn’t pick her up. I didn’t do anything with her. She’s a nice woman.”

“Oh.”

“What does that mean?” Jax asked.

“That you’re not interested? That she’s not your type? A
nice
woman?”

“Hey, that was mean,” Jax said. “And I never said I wasn’t interested because she’s nice. I’ve dated lots of nice women. I just mean, she’s a nice person. You’d like her if you got to know her.”

Katie looked chagrined, and then she looked like she might cry.

“Whoa,” he said. “Sorry. Bad day.”

“I know. I’m sorry. I just thought…”

“That I’d hit on somebody at my own mother’s funeral?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

Okay. If he was honest with himself, he’d admit that he might. It would beat crying in front of half the town or feeling so lousy he wished he could die, too, which seemed like his main options at the moment.

“I just don’t want to walk into that room,” Katie said. “That’s all.”

“That’s no reason to pick on Jax,” Kim said, leaning in closer to his side and taking his arm once again.

“I know,” Katie admitted.

“Okay,” he said. “If we needed to, we could critique my relationships with women, all the way from grade school
to the present, if we really needed to. That would take some time.”

“All day,” Kim said.

“All week,” Kathie claimed.

“No,” Katie said. “At least a month.”

Jax glared at them, more than happy for a good sibling brawl to take his mind off everything else.

“I just don’t want to do this,” Kathie said, turning her face into his shoulder. She was the most tenderhearted one of them all. And one least likely to give him a hard time about anything.

He wrapped his arm around her and pulled her close. “I know.”

“And I feel like such a baby.”

“Yeah,” he teased. “Almost twenty-four, and all grown up. You and Kim probably think you know everything.”

“I don’t think I know anything anymore,” Kim cried.

“Me neither,” Kathie said, snuggling closer to him.

Katie just stood there, stubbornly on her own and fighting back tears, looking worriedly at him and her sisters.

We’ll figure this out, all of us together, won’t we? her look said.

He nodded and hoped he wouldn’t make a liar of himself one day soon.

Gwen dropped the flowers off at the funeral home well before the service began. She arranged them herself, then put her palm flat against the polished surface of the casket. She thought about her squandering time and Mrs. Cassidy watching it crawl by in what had to have been agony, wondered if she’d ever understand life and death and everything that fell in between.

Your son seems very nice,
she told Mrs. Cassidy just in case the woman could hear her.

And Romeo is absolutely adorable.

Now what?

I hope you like the flowers. I hope it was okay to bring them.

She wondered if Mrs. Cassidy had been afraid, if she’d gotten mad at God, too. If she’d felt betrayed by her illness and all the pain and being separated from everyone she loved. She wondered if the woman had any answers now.

When Gwen got home, she made a tray of vegetables, which she took to the Cassidy house. Gwen suspected it was one of Jax’s sisters who answered the door, giving Gwen a look that she couldn’t quite decipher, but it hadn’t exactly been welcoming. Gwen left as quickly as she’d come, then went outside to her still untidy front yard.