Lucy
Was it a date? Lucy asked herself, not for the first time, as she headed to Alex’s house the following Saturday. Had Alex Kincaid really asked her out on a date? And did she want it to be a date? She was here for only three more months, and he had two damaged daughters,andhe was her boss, which might even make dating him illegal. Maybe there was some school policy against fraternizing with staff. She couldn’t exactly ask.
After several days of deliberation she decided to play it the way Alex had pitched it: as a favor to Poppy. Stay safe. Not what she’d advised Juliet, but after witnessing her sister’s heart-wrenching near breakdown, she could see the merits in emotional cowardice.
In the few days since then, Juliet had gone back to her brittle self. And Lucy had let her, because she understood about needing to claw back some composure after you’d been rubbed so emotionally raw.
She stopped in front of Alex’s house, took a deep breath, and ran a hand over her frizzing hair. Before she could knock, thedoor flew open, and Poppy stood there, already dressed with a coat and backpack, grinning widely.
“You look like a sausage!” Poppy exclaimed.
“Umm . . . thanks?” It wasn’t the look she’d been going for, but Poppy seemed pleased.
“She means,” Alex said, coming behind Poppy and resting his hands on her shoulders, “that you’re wearing red and yellow.” At Lucy’s blank look he clarified, “Mustard and ketchup. Poppy puts loads of both on her sausages.”
“Ah.” Lucy glanced down at her yellow top visible under her unbuttoned coat and her red corduroy skirt. A sausage it was. She glanced up again, taking in Alex’s weekend wear of faded jeans, a T-shirt, and a crew-neck sweater. He definitely could rock the casual look, and deliberately she moved her gaze back up to his face.
Bella slouched downstairs, dressed all in baggy black, her arms folded ominously. Lucy braced herself. She was not going to spend the day trying to win Bella over. Been there, done that, and no desire for a repeat trip.
“Hello, Bella.” Her voice rang out, manically cheerful. Seemed she couldn’t keep from trying.
Bella muttered a hello back, which was better than silence, if only just.
“So I looked up this Crab Fair on the Internet,” she said, “and it looks wicked cool.”
Poppy frowned. “Wicked?”
“Sorry, that’s American slang for completely amazing.” She ruffled the girl’s hair gently, grateful that at least one of the Kincaid girls liked her. “Did you know about the gurning competition?”
“The what?” Alex asked, and reached for his coat.
“Gurning. I’d never heard of it before, but apparently there’s a competition to make the strangest face. How cool is that?”
“Oh, Daddy, you should enter,” Poppy cried, and Alex made a face that Lucy thought wouldn’t remotely win, but it was still kind of cute.
“Me? I don’t think so.”
“You should, Dad,” Bella said suddenly, and this surprising contribution to the conversation had them all turning to her.
“You think I should?”
“Do you remember how you used to make faces at us when we were little? To get us to take our medicine.”
Alex blinked, and Lucy felt her heart give a dangerous little twist at the sight of the bittersweet memory on his face. “I’d forgotten that.” He turned to her to explain, “Both Bella and Poppy were prone to ear infections, and they hated the rounds of antibiotics they were put on—”
“Daddy used to pull funny faces to make us open our mouths, and when we did, Mummy would spoon the medicine in.” Now Poppy made a face. “It tastedawful.”
Lucy smiled in sympathy, even as she felt a dozen different conflicting emotions collide inside her in a kaleidoscope of feeling. Sadness, for the mother they’d lost. A little shameful jealousy, because Alex and Anna sounded like such a loving team. And hope, because clearly there was more to Alex than the stern taskmaster he was at school.
“I think we should all enter the competition,” Lucy said. “Apparently you have to make the face through a horse collar, which just adds to the craziness. They call it ‘gurning through a braffin.’”
“What’s a braffin?” Poppy asked, wrinkling her nose.
“A horse collar, I guess,” Lucy answered. “Are we all ready?”
Charlie gave them all a morose look before Alex shepherded him into the kitchen and appeased him with a full water bowl and a dog treat. A few minutes later they piled into Alex’s car;Lucy noticed the papers littering the front passenger seat, along with a browning banana peel.
“Sorry,” he muttered, sweeping it all into a pile and tossing it into the back.
