Almost An Angel Page 2

  So yeah. He was still a crappy father.

  As they neared their house, he let Amy push the remote-control button to open the garage door, a task she considered thrilling. Once the car had rolled to a halt inside the garage, they gathered her backpack and his laptop bag and entered the house. The next half hour was consumed with the business of settling in for the evening and heating one of the dinners Vera, his part-time housekeeper, had left for them. Vera came to the house once a week, cleaned, ran the laundry and prepared a few entrees, which she would then pack in plastic containers, label and stack in the freezer.

  Conor knew how to cook, but after working all day, he lacked the energy to fix a healthy, satisfying meal. For the first few months after Sheila had died, neighbors had kept him and Amy supplied in casseroles. They’d eaten an awful lot of lasagna and mac-and-cheese that first month. But eventually they’d both grown sick of noodles. And he couldn’t justify spending time dusting, vacuuming, scrubbing the sinks and fixing elaborate dinners when he ought to be devoting himself to comforting his distraught daughter. So he’d hired Vera. She was a godsend, worth twice what he paid her. Every time he discussed giving her a raise, she shook her head and argued that she worked only one day a week for him. Whether or not she wanted it, she was going to get a huge Christmas bonus from the Malones this year.

  Thinking of his holiday gift to Vera reminded him of the holiday gift Amy was hoping for. While the chicken stir-fry and rice heated in the microwave, he threw together a salad and contemplated how he might raise the subject of unrealistic expectations with Amy. Eliza Powell was right: Conor couldn’t allow Amy to believe Santa was going to bring her mother back to life for Christmas.

  First things first. The microwave dinged and he shouted up the stairs for Amy to wash her hands and come to the table.

  She bounded into the kitchen, a cheerful sprite in her blue jeans and a purple sweater—purple was her favorite color this week. Her hands were still shiny with water from their washing, and her hair bounced around her face in fat brown curls. He poured her a glass of milk, popped open a bottle of beer for himself and took his seat facing her at the cozy oak table.

  Except for her hair, she looked like him. Gazing at her, he could see pathetically little of Sheila in his daughter’s face. Her pale blue eyes were his. So were her dimples and her pugnacious chin. He and Sheila used to joke that, given how strongly Amy favored him, he could never deny his paternity.

  Not that he’d want to. In fact, he’d used Amy’s resemblance to him as a strategy for persuading Sheila that they should have another child. “Don’t you want to try for one who looks like you?” he’d tease.

  After years of effort, he’d finally convinced her. They’d been trying. And then she’d died.

  “So, Amy,” he said, deciding there was no point in stalling. “You punched a boy in school today.”

  Amy scrunched her face, looking not the tiniest bit contrite. “Brendan Selchuk. He’s such a creep.”

  “Whether or not he’s a creep, you shouldn’t have hit him. Hitting isn’t good.”

  “He called me stupid,” she defended herself.

  “You could have called him stupid right back. Calling people names isn’t nice, but it’s not as bad as hitting.”

  “I told him to stop and he wouldn’t,” she said, then dug into her dinner. “Some people, the only way you can get them to stop doing something is to hit them.”

  Conor caught himself before disputing the point. A couple of years ago, he’d given her a few simple lectures on self-defense. If a stranger tries to grab you, scream as loudly as you can. Stomp on his foot. Punch him between his legs. Thank God Amy hadn’t punched her classmate there.

  “That’s true,” he allowed, “but you can’t hit your classmates. It’s not like Brendan is a criminal. He was just being obnoxious.”

  “And I got him to stop,” Amy said with a satisfied smile.

  “As I understand it, he was telling you Santa doesn’t exist.”

  “Which is stupid,” Amy said logically. “He said I was stupid. But I know Santa exists. Grandma told me Mommy is Santa’s special angel. How can she be the angel of somebody who doesn’t exist?”

  Conor wasn’t sure he wanted to detour into a theological debate. If Amy chose to believe her mother was an angel, he had no problem with that. The issue at hand was whether Sheila was Santa’s angel.

  “Amy,” he began, then fumbled. What to say? The child had lost her mother. He couldn’t bear to deprive her of Santa Claus, too. “The thing is, you can’t hit your classmates. Bottom line. It’s a bad thing to do.”

  Her lower lip trembled slightly and her eyes became glossy with tears. “If I’m bad, Santa won’t come.”

  “I didn’t say you were bad. I said hitting is bad.”

  “I did a bad thing. Now Santa won’t bring me Mommy.” She shoved back from the table, eyes overflowing, and ran out of the kitchen and up the stairs. A minute later, he heard the thump of her bedroom door slamming.

  Conor stared at her barely touched meal, and then at his own. He had no appetite. Even his beer tasted foul.

  Amazing that he could decipher the most complicated programing code without blinking. He could start a company, secure venture-capital funding, navigate the company over the threshold and into self-sufficiency, give his investors a generous return on their money, oversee a staff of fifty and bid on both federal and commercial contracts. He could repair a leaking sink, ski down a double-black-diamond slope and assemble an entertainment-center wall unit.

  But he couldn’t teach his daughter how to survive a tragedy.

  I am the worst father in the world, he thought.

  *

  WHAT ELIZA NEEDED was a new best friend.

  After the betrayal she’d endured at the hands of her former best friend, Eliza had landed a job with the Arlington public school system, packed up and moved to Connecticut. Good thing the lease of her apartment in Albany had been in Matt’s name. She’d been able to move quickly. All she’d wanted at that point was to get the hell away.

  She’d found a townhouse condo for rent two days after arriving in Arlington. If she’d taken her time—if she’d had more time to take—she might have chosen something different. A small house with a garden would have been nice. A sensible cape or colonial, not an architectural wonder like this place, with its sharp angles and modern flourishes. The floating stairway rising from the entry to the second floor made a dramatic statement, but Eliza had never believed residences should make statements. The loft above the great room was wasted space, and as she was learning with the advent of winter, rooms with vaulted ceilings were hard to heat. The kitchen’s laminate white cabinets gave the room a sterile feel, and magnets didn’t stick to the stainless steel refrigerator. The condo’s owners were an older couple who’d bought the place thinking to move nearer their grandchildren living in western Connecticut, but then their son-in-law had accepted a job in Washington, D.C., and the doting grandparents had decided to follow their offspring to the nation’s capital. They hadn’t yet decided whether to sell their condo, so they were renting it for the time being.

  Eliza was stuck living with their decorating choices, but that was okay. She’d signed a one-year lease. By this time next year, she hoped to be in a house better suited to her tastes. One without any vaulted ceilings, she thought as she donned a cardigan. Even with the thermostat set at sixty-five and the furnace cranking heat into the radiators, she was cold.

  Or maybe what chilled her was her lack of friends in her new community. Not that people in Arlington weren’t friendly. The divorcee in the adjacent condo often schmoozed with Eliza when they met outside in their driveways or at the Dumpster behind the fence at the end of their row. Everyone on the staff at the Adams School had welcomed Eliza warmly. In time, she knew, she’d make some genuine friends.

  But she needed a friend right now. Someone she could invite over for a bottle of wine and some intimate talk. Someone she could co
nfide in about the ridiculous crush she had on the father of an Adams student.

  She tried to imagine what such a friend would say. “Don’t even think about it, Eliza. You can’t mess with the father of a student, especially when the student needs counseling.”

  Or: “Go for it! He’s single, you’re single, why not?”

  Or: “Urge him to send his daughter to Rosalyn Hoffman for counseling. Then go for it.”

  A truly good friend would lay the first option on Eliza. She knew she shouldn’t be thinking about Conor Malone, about the piercing power of his gaze and the span of his shoulders beneath his leather jacket, about the surge of awareness she’d felt in his presence. She shouldn’t be thinking about him as anything other than the concerned parent of a troubled child.

  She poured herself a glass of chardonnay and wandered from her chilly kitchen into her chilly great room. Her overstuffed sofa didn’t match the stark architecture, but it was comfortable, and she kept a colorful crocheted afghan draped over the back so she could wrap herself up in the cozy wool if her sweater failed to keep her warm.

  She’d just sunk into the cushions and reached for the TV remote when her cell phone rang. Setting her wine glass on the coffee table, she hurried back to the kitchen, where she’d left her tote, and swiped the phone. “Hello?”

  A brief pause and then a man’s voice: “Dr. Powell?”

  “Who’s calling?”

  “This is Conor Malone. I shouldn’t have called.”

  “No, you should have,” she said automatically, then laughed. And then stopped laughing, because she shouldn’t be so pleased that the man she’d been thinking about—the man she shouldn’t be thinking about—had phoned her.

  The only reason he would have contacted her was that his daughter was having a problem. “Is Amy okay?”

  “Yeah, she’s…well, maybe not okay. I don’t know…” He sighed. “I blew it. I don’t know what to tell her. She thinks Santa isn’t going to bring her mother for Christmas because she hit that boy today and Santa doesn’t bring presents to bad children. That wasn’t what I was trying to communicate to her, but that’s what she heard.” Another sigh. “I really screwed up.”

  Her impulse was to assure him that he hadn’t screwed up. But maybe he had. She needed to consider his situation from the perspective of a child psychologist, not a woman who felt a totally inappropriate pang of lust when she thought about him.

  “I didn’t tell her she was bad,” he went on. “I know that stuff about how you criticize the behavior, not the child, and I told her that hitting people was a bad thing to do, and she started crying, stormed away from the dinner table and shut herself up inside her room.” He hesitated for a moment. “She’s too young for PMS, right?”

  Eliza permitted herself another brief laugh. “I’ve worked with some girls who I think were born with PMS. But I don’t think that’s Amy’s problem. I’ve only met her once, but I’ve gone through her file and reviewed Rosalyn Hoffman’s notes. Amy seems like a healthy, normal child, so let’s assume her reaction to the loss of her mother is a healthy, normal reaction. She’s built up a fantasy in her head of a way to get her mother back, and she’ll fight anyone who threatens that fantasy. Can you blame her? I’m sure you sometimes dream of getting your wife back, too.” Too personal? Too adult? Eliza had mentioned that last part to remind herself that thinking about Conor Malone’s gorgeous blue eyes and lanky build was inappropriate. He was a grieving widower. She’d be wise to remember that.

  “I don’t play make-believe very often,” he said. “The only thing I fantasize about these days is Amy having an easier time of it.”

  “She’s doing really well, considering.” Eliza offered him encouragement by adding, “You’re doing really well, too, Dr. Malone.”

  She heard a sound through the phone, half a cough, half a chuckle. “Nobody calls me Dr. Malone.”

  She’d used his formal title to establish some distance between him and herself. If his only fantasy was about his daughter healing, then she sure as hell shouldn’t entertain any fantasies about him. “As I said, I read Amy’s file,” she explained. “It says you have a Ph.D. in computer science from Carnegie-Mellon and you’re the founder and CEO of a firm that develops…what was it? Some kind of security system?”

  “Network security,” he told her. “Defenses against hacking, malware, that kind of thing. But nobody calls me doctor.”

  “Mister, then.”

  “Most people call me Conor,” he said. “Except for a few who call me Butthead.”

  She smiled, then bit her lip. Was he getting personal, inviting her to call him by his first name? Or just joking around with her? Did joking imply that he wanted to get personal?

  Don’t overthink it, she cautioned herself. As the father of a student, he was firmly situated on the other side of a line she couldn’t cross.

  “So what should I do?” he asked, his voice still warm even though he’d reverted back to the serious subject of his call. “Should I try to coax Amy out of her room or should I just leave her in there?”

  “She’ll probably come out when she gets hungry,” Eliza advised. “If not, give her a little while and then tap on her door and crack it open. Tell her you want to make sure she’s all right. Don’t step inside unless she invites you. Forgive the cliché, but she needs her space right now.”

  “Okay.”

  “You are entitled to open that door, Mr. Malone.” She used his last name deliberately, for her own benefit. “You’re her father. You need to make sure she’s safe.”

  “Okay.” Yet another pause. “Can I get Dr. Hoffman’s contact information from you?”

  “Sure.” That Amy would receive counseling from Rosalyn Hoffman instead of Eliza was a wise choice, given Eliza’s unwelcome attraction to Amy’s father. Amy would probably be more comfortable with Rosalyn, anyway. Rosalyn had helped her through the worst of her trauma last year. Frankly, Eliza would just as soon Rosalyn be the one to break the news to Amy that Santa Claus didn’t exist.

  After providing Conor Malone with the phone number of the private practice where Rosalyn was currently working, Eliza said good-bye and returned to the sofa. She wrapped the afghan around her, snuggled deep into its woolen folds and took a sip of wine. She clicked the remote control, and across the room her TV came to life, filling the echoing room with the sparkling dialogue and colorful images of a romantic comedy, one of those movies about a single professional woman who doesn’t want to think about how lonely she is until a funny, handsome, utterly inappropriate guy enters her life.

  Bad choice. She flipped through the channels until she landed on a basketball game. She wasn’t much of a basketball fan, but she didn’t want to watch a movie that even remotely reflected her own life.

  Basketball was safer, she decided. Basketball and a glass of wine and the afghan her mother had given her for Christmas a few years ago. Actually, anything was safer than thinking about Conor Malone. “Butthead,” she muttered aloud, then chuckled. It didn’t seem fair that a man still undoubtedly in the throes of grief and anxious about his daughter could make her laugh.

  Sometimes nothing in life seemed fair. That was what wine was for, she thought with a sigh.

  Chapter Three

  “THE DADDY SCHOOL,” Dennis Murphy said.

  Conor stood with Dennis in the kitchen of Dennis’s sprawling house. Erin, the female half of Dennis’s nine-year-old twins, was Amy’s best friend, and today, because Dennis’s wife had had to take a day off from work while a new hot-water heater was installed in their basement, she’d allowed each of the twins to invite a friend over after school instead of attending the after-school program at the Y. According to Dennis’s wife, Amy and Erin had shut themselves up inside Erin’s bedroom for most of the afternoon while Erin’s brother Sean and his friend wreaked havoc in the family room. They were at an age when boys believed girls had cooties and girls believed boys were gross. Conor doubted Amy would have any cause to punch Sean Murphy
or his buddy, but he was relieved to hear that the children had segregated themselves onto separate floors.

  While Dennis’s wife was upstairs, alerting Amy that her father had come to take her home, Dennis and Conor loitered in the kitchen, inhaling the aroma of chicken roasting in the oven. Dennis had offered Conor a beer. Conor had declined. Dennis had asked how things were going, and for some reason Conor had told him, “I’m worried about Amy. She’s got some crazy ideas about Christmas this year, and I don’t know how to set her straight.”

  He’d always gotten along well with Dennis Murphy. Dennis had unexpectedly received full custody of the twins after his ex-wife had decided to move away from Arlington. Until his remarriage, he’d had a taste of what Conor was going through as a single father. Conor wasn’t a sexist, but honestly, parenting seemed to come more naturally to women than to men. No woman could love her child more than he loved Amy, but women had certain instincts that he seemed to be lacking.

  Maybe it wasn’t a male-female thing, or an instinctive thing. Maybe it was a Conor thing. Maybe he just plain sucked as a father.

  He’d made an appointment for Amy to start seeing Rosalyn Hoffman again starting Monday afternoon. Unfortunately, transporting Amy from school to Dr. Hoffman’s office meant Conor would have to leave work early. Not a great idea when GateKeepers was trying to nail down a major contract with the West Coast firm before the end of the year, but his daughter’s mental health took precedence.

  Life would have been easier if he’d arranged for her to meet with Eliza Powell instead. Dr. Powell worked at Amy’s school. Conor wouldn’t have had to cut out of work to chauffeur Amy to Dr. Powell’s office.

  But Dr. Hoffman had been so good with Amy. And Conor wanted Eliza Powell for himself.

  Stupid thought. Stupid and selfish. He couldn’t have Eliza Powell, even if he did want her—which, honestly, he didn’t. Shouldn’t. Mustn’t. She might be married or otherwise attached. And he was still attached to Sheila. She might be dead, but… God, just thinking about another woman felt like a betrayal.