“Oh no.” I scrubbed it off with my fingers. “Every time you see me.” All that time I had spent getting ready, and then I had to mess with the water heater!
“What?”
I started blushing. “Every time you see me, there’s something wrong with me. You must think…I don’t know what you think. I was trying to fix the water heater,” I tried to explain.
“It broke?”
“Well, if that’s what it means when you don’t have any hot water anymore, then yes, it broke. Do you know anything about fixing them?” There went one thing from my list offorbidden conversation topics: home repairs. What other boring, unromantic subjects I could bring up?
“Sorry, I don’t know anything about water heaters.”
“Me neither.” I sighed. “I just don’t want Charlie and Cassie to have to take cold baths. I can warm up water on the stove, I guess. Like Laura Ingalls.” I could if they didn’t cut our electricity and gas anytime soon.
Luke was looking straight ahead. “Isn’t Cassie married? Where is her husband during all this?” He sounded angry.
I checked to make sure that Charlie was really asleep. “Mike left,” I whispered. “About a month after her diagnosis.” They had always been up and down. Maybe this was just a down time and he really would come back again, just like Cassie kept hoping.
He shook his head. “He walked out on his kid and his wife a month after her cancer diagnosis. He sounds like a winner. I hope you don’t mind me asking, but is he up to date on his alimony and child support?”
I snorted. “First, they’re not divorced. And no, he hasn’t sent a dime.”
“So you’re supporting them both.”
I toyed with the elastic on the cuff of my jacket. “Well, yeah, I guess.”
“By working two jobs.”
“It’s ok.”
“And this is the asshole she broke up with me for?”
My mouth dropped open. “Um, uh…”
He looked at me and cracked a smile. “I’m just kidding. When we broke up it was a mutual thing. But I knew that she had met somebody.”
I was having a hard time coming to terms with this. Cassie had broken up with Luke, forMike? This smart, conscientious, educated, beautiful, punctual man with a dimple and a car with satellite radio, forMike? Mike with the bad temper, and the girls on the side, and (at one point) an extra fun case of chlamydia? Well, Mike did have a motorcycle back when they met, and Cassie had always been a freak for a bike.
Lost in my shock, I didn’t respond and we rode in silence for a few miles.
“Right at your feet there’s a bag with some breakfast stuff and two coffees,” Luke told me. “I wasn’t sure how you take it, so there’s a container of milk and some packets of sugar and the fake stuff.”
“You brought me coffee?”
“Sure. There are croissants, muffins, I don’t know what else. Can you grab me something too?”
No joke, tears had come to my eyes. He brought me coffee? And breakfast?
I busied myself passing a coffee (he took it black) and a muffin to him, and poured milk in my own coffee and loaded up the sugar. He kept glancing at me while I fixed my cup. “Now I’ll know for next time how you take it,” he commented.
Next time, as in, he might bring me coffee again? My heart almost burst out of my chest. “Thank you so much. Really.”
He smiled. “It’s just coffee and a muffin.”
“No, it’s that you thought about bringing it for me, and even cream and sugar too…never mind. Just thanks.”
“You’re welcome,” he said. “It’s my pleasure.”
Getting up at the crack of dawn to drive to a swim meet was no one’s pleasure, except for me today, drinking coffee and riding with Luke.
