He eyed Hilroy, wondering if he felt the same or was just taking fun where he could find it.
“I’m so glad Mercedes finally called you,” Mrs. Garvey was saying as she took out three cups, pausing when her beau spoke up.
“Thank you, Edith, but I won’t stay.”
“Oh, please do, Edward. He’s so perceptive,” she said, finally meeting L.C.’s gaze, showing him the anxiety shadowing her own. “Mercedes keeps refusing our help. Edward thinks it’s a sort of self-flagellation on her part. But if she has called you—”
“She didn’t. S’cuse me for interrupting.” He moved inside. “I came because I thought she might want me here, but I just talked to Porsha and was told to stay away from her kids, so maybe me being here is the last thing Mercedes needs.”
He followed Edward into the lounge only to watch Edward take his armchair. That was where he sat, damn it.
“I can’t imagine all that Mercedes needs right now,” Mrs. Garvey was saying, making soft clinking noises as she set out cream and sugar and spoons. “Sleep, no doubt. Money for lawyers, although we took up a collection and she wouldn’t accept it. She said it wasn’t fair to her sister. And temper? She snapped at Lindy Bellacerra the other day. Told her to quit repeating everyone’s private business.” Mrs. Garvey’s ‘hmph’ had a smug quality to it, not nearly so disapproving of Mercedes’s lost temper as she might have been if it had been someone else.
L.C. lowered himself to the snow-white sofa, checking his clothes for oil and dust first, noting a photo on the side table as he came eye-level with it.
“Hey, that’s me.” He didn’t remember Mercedes taking the photo, but he did remember sitting at her kitchen table with Dayton that day. The boy had been discouraged by a math lesson he hadn’t understood and adamant no one needed to know how to use a ruler anyway. L.C. had shown him his tape measure and explained how often he measured things and why. Then they’d broken out the paper and pencils and drafted a birdhouse.
Inside Mrs. Garvey’s ‘Number One Teacher’ frame, he and Dayton had their heads bent in concentration while L.C. covered Dayton’s hands, helping to brace the ruler and guide the boy in drawing his carefully measured lines.
“Mercedes sent out that snapshot to be printed,” Mrs. Garvey said, coming to pick up the photo and admire it. “It was very clever of you to design such a practical lesson.”
He still owed Dayton a buck-fifty in lumber and a day of cutting and hammering. God, he missed those two. “How are the kids doing?”
“Dayton is distracted. A little sullen. Ayjia isn’t her usual chipper self. I’m so anxious to have this settled, yet...” She set down the photo and sighed.
Yet ‘settled’ might mean the kids left with Porsha.
The kettle whistled and Hilroy stood. “I’ll do it. You sit with L.C.”
Man, that guy was really making himself at home.
Mrs. Garvey smiled at Hilroy’s back in a little My Hero moment, something that both bemused L.C. and prickled his instinct to protect. Really, how well did she know the guy?
She took the far end of the sofa and her expression became deeply grave. “What will we do if she loses those children?”
“She won’t,” he said firmly, thinking of every way he’d fought for his share of Zack’s custody. He would help her find a way. “Even if they go back to Porsha, Mercedes will still be in their life.”
“Will she? I would not put it past that woman to take those children God knows where just to spite Mercedes. Mercedes knows it, too. She won’t leave them alone with their mother at all.”
L.C. wanted to believe Mrs. Garvey was overreacting, but what if she wasn’t? He had a momentary fantasy of packing up M and the kids and taking them back to Liebe Falls. To Canada. Anywhere they could all be together. If it made sense to him, sober and not even connected by blood to those kids, who knew what Porsha was thinking?
Mrs. Garvey’s fine china rattled and trembled as Mr. Hilroy brought the tray in and set it on the coffee table.
“L.C. likes his sweet,” Mrs. G said, leaning forward to prepare his cup herself, dumping three generous scoops of sugar into it.
“I wish I could call her,” L.C. started to say, but if the kids answered or figured out he was on the phone... “You think any little thing could set Porsha off? I wish I knew what to do. Just get a hotel for the night and leave, do you think? Wait for Mercedes to call me?”
“You will not spend money on a hotel when there’s a perfectly good bed here,” Mrs. Garvey said.
“Won’t Mr. Hilroy have some objection to your entertaining other men? Or do you mean you’re not using yours because you’ll be upstairs?”
“L.C.!” She let the spoon fall onto a saucer with a clatter. Her face flushed to near purple. “I meant the guest house.”
“Oh. ‘Course. Sorry.” He stared at the tea service for a long, awkward moment.
“Truly, your sense of humor escapes me sometimes. Edward, would you pour, please?”
L.C. had been dead serious, but he wasn’t about to say so. Nevertheless, when he looked up at Edward, the older man said, “I would object.”
“So might I,” L.C. threw back, watching the old guy stiffen a bit as he considered L.C.’s younger, strappier body. Edward set his chin with determination.
“Gentlemen,” Mrs. Garvey protested in a scold that warned they were going straight to the Principal’s office.
Not before they came to a little understanding, however. L.C. let Hilroy know with a steady stare that he’d be watching. Hilroy held his gaze, silently warning L.C. he intended to go after what he wanted anyway, which was reassuring. Apparently Hilroy wasn’t looking for the first easy target. L.C. didn’t back down, however. It’d make Mrs. Garvey feel good if her lover had to fight for her a bit.
“Edward, please pour the tea,” she said in an insistent, school-marmy tone.
He did.
As L.C. accepted his cup, he said, “I didn’t think about the guesthouse. I thought it was just for owners and their families.”
“Given the way you’re acting, one can only imagine you regard yourself as such. Of course you may use the guesthouse. You’ll have to fetch the key from Mercedes’s desk, of course.” She sighed. “The office is locked for the evening, however. May I just give you my keys and have you lock everything behind you? I’m not up to all that walking this late in the evening.”
“Sure. Thanks,” he said, touched by the family remark and her willingness to give up the keys to the castle.
“You can return them in the morning, on your way to the courthouse. Now, I wrote down the details at one point.” She glanced toward her little computer desk. “Then Mercedes said she didn’t want any of us there, but you’ll go, won’t you, L.C.?”
He wanted to, but, “I don’t know, Mrs. G. I’m more liability than asset, don’t you think?”
“Dressed as you are, yes,” she agreed, giving his work boots and frayed jeans and faded T-shirt a dismayed appraisal. “However, you’re not attending to help her win or lose. Regardless how this pans out, she needs you there. I haven’t seen her laugh once since you left.”
Holly collected the kids from the duplex first thing and took them to her house.
Mercedes pretended paranoia hadn’t driven that decision, but she needed to know the kids were somewhere Porsha couldn’t find them, in case she took it into her head to do something stupid.
Even though Mercedes trusted Holly wholeheartedly, even though Holly was saying through the phone against her ear, “They’re fine. They’re playing in the backyard with the puppy,” Mercedes kept having visions of Holly being followed by a gold convertible. She kept imagining rash, passionate, violent acts because she and Porsha were both wound as tight as two people could get, neither sleeping, both short-tempered, barely able to look at each other.
And this courthouse was so frickin’ serious. People walking around with sober expressions, their Sunday shoes making clip-clop noises on the polished floor while they met and made life and death decisions in ten-minute meetings. Shonda kept appearing and disappearing, offering coffee, water, a kind word for Porsha, a reassuring word for Mercedes.
Mercedes needed to pee, but not really. Her stomach churned, but it was empty. She shook and her fingers were icy, but she was sweating too.
She should have let some of the people from the complex come. Mrs. Yamamoto had practically begged to come along. Mercedes had refused every offer. It had seemed cruel to back herself with a dozen people when Porsha had no one. Then their mother, Delores Kimball, had arrived at the duplex in a borrowed car this morning. They had all come in Mercedes car to the courthouse, but the alliance was plainly drawn. Delores sat beside her eldest on a bench, in no better shape than Porsha, trembling and stinking of last night’s excess.
Porsha intended to go straight from the duplex to their mother’s with the kids if this ended in her favor. Mercedes hadn’t known how she would be able to stand driving them all to her mother’s little apartment in Holbrook, but the thought of watching the kids climb into a car with Delores Kimball behind the wheel was even worse.