Comfort and Joy Read online

  At six o’clock, he had stood by while Robin locked the shop’s front door, reminded her sales clerks to double-check the pre-Christmas schedule of store hours posted in the staff room, removed her brown apron and shut off the lights. Her car was parked in an employee lot behind the store, and he had waited until she’d driven around to the front parking lot and flashed her station wagon’s lights at him before he started his engine.

  Now he was going to meet Philip.

  He wanted to meet the kid. He wanted to see for himself this boy who’d been raised to give his imagination free rein, to invent a make-believe universe—Jesse had overheard Robin and Eileen discussing the alien planet from which Philip’s turkey had allegedly descended. He wanted to observe a child who was allowed to believe whatever he wanted and to create whatever he wanted. Although Jesse didn’t know much about children, he wanted to get to know the son Robin Greer had produced.

  That was the other reason he was trailing those beacon-like red taillights through the darkness: Robin herself. There was something so alive about her, something so vibrant, so warm. From a distance, he’d observed her conversations with her clerks at the store, her competence in solving the mystery of the missing votive candles, her calm control over her domain. Jesse didn’t particularly care for the items Woodleigh’s sold, but he liked the way Robin ran the store. She seemed capable and strong, and...

  At peace. Again it occurred to him—she was at peace with herself.

  They entered a quiet neighborhood of modest but lovingly tended single-family houses which backed on a dense forest. The front lawns were neatly mowed and the front walks were lit. Many of the houses were trimmed with Christmas lights. The driveway up which Robin turned led to a blue house with a willow wreath hanging on the front door.

  Jesse’s car trailed hers onto the long driveway, and he killed the engine and climbed out. Robin had parked inside the garage and was sliding down the garage door when Jesse reached her. “Let me give you a hand,” he said as she heaved the massive door down. She seemed much too petite to be able to yank the door into place.

  She waved off his assistance with a simple, “I’ve got it,” and sure enough, the door slid into position. Then she accompanied Jesse up the walk to the door. “You’re welcome to stay for dinner if you’d like,” she invited him matter-of-factly. “Philip is always starving by the time I get home, and the roast is probably ready. It’s too big for two people, anyway.”

  “Roast? Your son cooked a roast?”

  She laughed and jiggled her key ring to select the right key for the front door. “No. Kate O’Leary put it in the oven. She’s Philip’s babysitter.” The door swung open, and Robin hollered, “Phil? I’m home!”

  A wiry tow-haired youngster bounded into the living room from a hallway behind the staircase. “Hey, Mommy!” he shouted, springing into her arms and giving her an exuberant hug. “I did all my homework and I played Wii and I fed all my cookies to Cookie Monster at school so that means I can have more cookies for dessert tonight, okay? Hey, who’s this?” he asked, releasing his mother and fixing his gaze on Jesse.

  Jesse was only subliminally aware of the aroma of cooking meat that filled the air, the homey furnishings in the living room, the broad brick fireplace on the far wall and the sturdy maple occasional tables scattered about the room. The bulk of his attention was focused on the boy.

  Philip looked exactly like Robin—or at least, like a seven-year-old male version of Robin. His hair was the same flaxen shade, the same flyaway texture. His eyes were as bright and multicolored as hers, his cheeks as cleanly defined, his jaw as pointy. His build, like hers, was slim yet strong, exuding energy. And his greeting was just as down-to-earth and accepting as Robin’s “Hello, Jesse” had been when he’d entered her store.

  “This is Jesse Lawson,” Robin said. Jesse had wondered how she would explain his presence to her son, whether she would introduce him as a friend or an acquaintance, or, perhaps, as a cheapskate who didn’t give a damn about one-of-a-kind silkscreened notecards. But she had avoided labels and simply provided his name. Jesse liked that. “Jesse, my son Philip, on vacation from the planet Gleek. Hi, Kate,” she greeted the plump silver-haired woman who had entered the room behind Philip. “How did it go today?”

  “No problems,” Kate O’Leary reported, eyeing Jesse curiously as she moved past Robin to the hall closet for her coat. “Philip just gave you the whole story—except he pestered me for cookies. I thought it best to leave that up to you.”

  “Thanks,” Robin said with a laugh. “Phil knows I’m more of a pushover than you are when it comes to cookies. By the way, Kate, I’m going to have to work late a couple of nights this week—”

  “No problem,” Kate assured her, slinging on her coat and reaching for the front door’s knob. “Just let me know your schedule when you’ve got it.”

  “’Tis the season,” Robin reminded her with an apologetic smile. “Our hours are going to be crazy for the next few weeks.”

  “I don’t mind, I really don’t,” Kate insisted. “I could use the extra money—lots of presents to buy.”

  “You gonna buy me a present?” Philip asked, climbing up to the second step of the staircase and then jumping down dramatically. “I ask only on account of, I’m gonna buy you one.”

  “You are?” Kate feigned utter astonishment. “In that case, I’d better revise my shopping list. I’d be mortified if you gave me a present and I didn’t have one to give you.” She winked at Robin, gave Jesse another interested glance, and said, “So long, everybody. See you tomorrow.”

  “Thanks, Kate.” Robin left the porch light on for Kate, then locked the door and removed her jacket. “Give me five minutes to change my clothes, and then we’ll have some dinner.”

  “You staying for dinner, Jesse?” Philip asked, climbing up the stairs again and leaping down with death-defying courage. “I think maybe we’ll have cookies for dessert. What’s your favorite kind of cookie?”

  “Chocolate chip,” Jesse answered, though his gaze remained on Robin, watching the playful bounce of her shiny blond hair, the graceful motion of her hips, the slender curves of her calves and her small, dainty feet carrying her up the stairs and out of sight.

  ***

  BY THE TIME Robin returned to the living room, Jesse and Philip were gone.

  She had taken longer than the promised five minutes to change her clothes. Ordinarily, when she got home from work, she threw on her old jeans and a sweatshirt, washed off what little make-up she was wearing, and bounded down the stairs to spend the evening with her son. But tonight, she had taken a longer-than-usual amount of time combing through the closet in her bedroom, searching for an outfit that would look both casual and becoming. Jeans and a sweatshirt met the first of those conditions, but definitely not the second.

  After donning a pair of wool slacks and a patterned blouse, Robin headed for the bathroom, not to scrub off her make-up but to freshen it up. She pulled the barrette from her hair, brushed it out, and then decided to leave it loose. Hurrying down to the living room, she hoped that Philip wouldn’t be a big-mouth and comment on her uncharacteristically well groomed dinnertime appearance.

  She gazed about the empty living room for a moment, spotting Jesse’s blazer draped over the back of a chair and wondering where Philip had dragged him off to. Then she heard her son’s piping voice floating out of the den.

  She strode to the doorway and found Jesse seated on the sofa and Philip kneeling on the coffee table facing him, holding the poor man captive as he displayed for him various stamps, papers and envelopes which he pulled from an old shoe box. “This one, it’s from Mexico,” Philip announced. “See? It’s got Spanish words on it. That’s what they speak in Mexico,” he explained with great self-assurance. “This one’s from Brazil. And you know what, Jesse? It looks like Spanish, but it’s not. Guess what it is.”

  Jesse labored to appear ignorant. “I don’t know, Philip. What is it?”

  “
Portuguese!” Philip crowed, obviously thrilled to have shown up an adult with his superior knowledge. “They speak Portuguese there. Did you know that? My dad doesn’t really understand Portuguese, but he speaks Spanish real good. I’ll show you—he wrote me this message in Spanish...” Philip rummaged through the shoe box and withdrew a sheet of white note paper. “Here, he wrote, ‘Hasta la vista, Filipo.’ Do you know what that means?”

  “What does it mean?” Jesse asked politely.

  “It means, Goodbye, Philip. Mostly my dad goes to Spanish places, like in South America and the West Indies and stuff, so he can talk to the people. Sometimes he gets stuck going to Brazil or something, though. Then he needs a translator.”

  Clearly, Philip and Robin were novices at this business of entertaining a strange man in their home. If she had been more savvy about such situations, she would have trained her son not to besiege a male guest—a potential dating companion, at that—with the collection of letters and exotic postage stamps Philip had received from his father. Robin was glad that Ray corresponded regularly with Philip, but she didn’t think that having the boy chatter non-stop about his father was the best way to make Jesse feel welcome.

  “Philip?” she said, trying not to sound disapproving as she entered the den. Not only had Philip been sharing his father’s letters with Jesse, but he’d brought Jesse into the messiest room in the house—not counting Philip’s bedroom, of course. With Kate O’Leary’s help, Robin managed to keep the living room and kitchen relatively tidy, and the dining room was practically immaculate since it was used so rarely. The den, however, was a place for unwinding, kicking back, overlooking the rubble of scattered toys and games, half-read books and magazines, two-month-old retail catalogs and piles of sewing projects yet to be completed.

  At the moment, the den seemed even more cluttered than usual because Robin and Philip had recently lugged the cartons of Christmas decorations down from the attic. Robin had insisted that it was too early to start decking the house with holiday adornments, but Philip was so eager for Christmas to arrive that he’d begged his mother to bring the cartons downstairs. He had also begun badgering her about buying a tree, but she’d argued that if they bought one too early in December, it would be all dried out by Christmas morning.

  “Please put the letters away,” she said, gently but firmly. “And what’s the rule about climbing on the tables?”

  At the sound of her voice, Philip jumped off the table and spun around. Collecting a few scattered postage stamps into his box, he grinned. “Did you know that on Gleek kids are allowed to climb on tables all the time?”

  “Then I’m glad I don’t live there. Speaking of tables, Phil, perhaps you could give me a hand setting the table in the dining room. We’re going to eat there tonight.”

  “Yeah? How come?”

  “Because Jesse is here, and we use the dining room when we’ve got company.”

  “We don’t use it when Mrs. O’Leary stays for supper,” Philip reminded Robin as he set the lid on the box and returned it to a shelf.

  Were all children of divorced mothers this difficult the first time a new man entered their home? “Mrs. O’Leary,” Robin said as evenly as she could, “spends more time in this house than I do. She’s practically one of the family.”

  Philip shrugged. “Okay. The dining room, huh. I guess I gotta wash my hands, then.” He darted out of the den and vanished into the bathroom.

  Robin risked a glance at Jesse, who was rising from the sofa. If Philip had made him uncomfortable by discussing Ray, Jesse didn’t show it. He’d shoved up the sleeves of his sweater and rolled up his shirt sleeves beneath it, exposing his slender, sinewy forearms. He had bony wrists and long, tapered fingers, and his skin was a gold-tinged color just a shade lighter than the skin of his face. Robin wondered what he would look like in the summer, his entire body shimmering with a rich, toasty tan, and then she swallowed a shocked laugh. That she should be thinking of Jesse’s undressed startled her, and she swiftly chased away the image by concentrating on the subject he and Philip had just been discussing—her ex-husband. Surely, fifteen minutes listening to Philip regale him about Robin’s ex-husband was enough to smother any romantic inclinations on Jesse’s part.

  He smiled and crossed the room to join her at the doorway. “Gleek—that’s Philip’s make-believe planet, right?”

  She nodded. “Among other things, Gleek is a place where seven-year-old boys do everything they aren’t supposed to do on earth, and don’t do anything they are supposed to do on earth. Ten’ll get you twenty that during dinner, Philip’s going to announce that on Gleek kids don’t have to eat their vegetables.” With that, she marched down the hall to the kitchen, removed the bag of already washed green beans from the refrigerator, and dumped them into her steamer to cook.

  In spite of the fact that they ate in the dining room instead of the kitchen, Philip was as rambunctious as usual. He monopolized the mealtime conversation with a long-winded description of his day in school. “Cookie Monster is such a pig,” he informed Jesse. “He eats grapes, lettuce leaves, bugs and cookies. He gobbled up all my cookies and all of Adam Worblin’s. Did you know that Adam Worblin is the worst speller in class? We’re having a spelling test on Friday. Spelling is dumb, don’t you think, Jesse? When I grow up, I’m gonna have a secretary and she’ll check my spelling for me.”

  “When you grow up,” Robin asserted, “maybe you’ll be a secretary.”

  “Uh-uh.” Philip soberly shook his head. “Then I’d have to know how to spell. I wanna be a scientist. I wanna have lots and lots of snakes.”

  Robin didn’t bother to hide her grimace. Jesse chuckled. “What you want to be is a herpetologist,” he told Philip. “That’s the name for a scientist who specializes in snakes.”

  “Yeah?” Philip’s eyes grew round. Clearly, he considered Jesse a genius for knowing such an arcane fact, even if the man had to be instructed by a mere second-grader that people in Brazil spoke Portuguese. “That’s what I want to be, then. What’s the word again?”

  “Herpetologist.”

  “Herpetologist,” Philip murmured, cementing the term in his memory. “I think Jeff Calloway wants to be one, too. We could have a snake farm together, and then we could spend all day catching bugs to feed our snakes. And buying cookies for them, too. Can I have some cookies now, Mom?”

  Robin eyed her son’s plate. He had distributed his uneaten green beans around the dish, as if she might not notice his vegetable avoidance if the beans were spread thin across the porcelain. She considered nagging him to eat a few more beans before he requested dessert, then decided not to. It was a special night; they had a guest. She didn’t want to have a face-off with her son about something as trivial as green beans.

  “I tell you what,” she said. “Why don’t you help me clear the table, and then you can have some cookies and milk in the den.”

  Philip let out a hoot. This was a double treat—not just cookies, but cookies in the den. Robin rarely permitted him to bring food into the den. He gathered his plate and silverware, bolted from the table and raced into the kitchen.

  Robin smiled at Jesse. “We can have some coffee in the living room, if you’d like,” she offered. Then she remembered that he had asked to come to her house specifically to meet her son, and she added, “Or you can have cookies and milk with Philip.”

  “Coffee sounds great,” he said, standing and collecting a few more dishes.

  It didn’t take long to stack the dishes into the dishwasher and cram the leftover food into the refrigerator. After preparing a pot of coffee to brew, Robin arranged a few cookies on a plate, filled a glass with milk, and carried the snack into the den. “Can I watch TV, too?” Philip asked hopefully.

  There were limits to indulging one’s child, but Robin didn’t care to impose them this evening. “All right,” she said. “You can watch the Celtics game. No news, though.” Turning to Jesse, she explained, “Whenever he watches the news, he wants to ask
me a thousand questions about each story. Not that I mind—I’m glad he has an interest in the world—but it would be nice to have our coffee without interruptions.”

  Philip switched on the television, then flopped onto the couch and balanced the plate of cookies on his knees. Pivoting to leave the room, Robin noticed that Jesse was gazing at the shoe box in which Philip stored his mail from his father. She cringed, then forced a faint smile and left the room. Jesse followed.

  A vision of his intense stare focused on the shoe box remained with her while she filled two cups with coffee, asked him whether he took cream or sugar, and carried the cups to the living room. Although Jesse didn’t mention the letters Philip had shown him, Robin couldn’t keep herself from wondering about his reaction to them. Had he felt uncomfortable listening to Philip go on and on about his father? In Jesse’s place, she would have felt uncomfortable.

  Her smile felt forced as she sat on the sofa and gestured for Jesse to take a seat beside her. She watched him as he lifted his cup, sipped, and lowered it. “I’m sorry about that stuff with my ex-husband’s letters,” she said finally, to alleviate her own awkwardness if not Jesse’s.

  Jesse smiled. “Don’t be.” He took another sip of coffee, then leaned back against the cushions, stretching his long legs out under the table. “I take it your son and your ex-husband are close.”

  “As close as they can be, given that Ray travels so much.”

  “I think that’s terrific,” he said. He sounded as if he meant it, and Robin felt her tension abate. “It’s probably one reason Philip is such a well-adjusted child. So many kids of divorce aren’t.”