Yours to Keep: A Loveswept Contemporary Romance Page 7

  “No time. Two jobs.”

  He swallowed and licked his lips. “The tutoring and the ESL teaching?”

  She nodded.

  “Do you work for a particular school with the ESL teaching?”

  “The school of Ana. I put flyers up in the library. You wouldn’t believe how many people want to learn English, and I think it helps that it’s my second language, so I’m ‘one of them.’ ”

  “You’re an entrepreneur,” he said, impressed.

  She laughed. “Never thought of it that way, but I guess I am.”

  He was beginning to suspect that each revelation she made hid more mysteries. Why, for example, didn’t she teach in a public school, or at least for an established company? Getting her own students couldn’t be easy. He guessed that she didn’t have a teaching degree. Maybe she didn’t even have a bachelor’s degree. Her family sounded painfully poor; it probably hadn’t been in the cards. But if she wasn’t going to volunteer that information, he wasn’t going to pry. “You must be really good at it, if what I’ve seen is any indication.”

  She smiled. “Thank you. I love teaching.” She handed him a dripping spatula. His fingertips touched hers. He almost grabbed her hand. He’d draw her close and—

  He could. He could do it. He knew how much he liked her now. And Theo obviously adored her.

  That was part of the problem, of course. Things had been good since she came into their lives, and now he owed it to Theo not to mess everything up. Not to rock the boat. What if he made a move on Ana and she reacted the way she’d reacted to Ed Branch, and refused to tutor Theo anymore?

  He pulled his hand back and took a deep breath that did nothing to cool the burn he was feeling. He dried the spatula and slid it into the drawer.

  “What about you?” She submerged her hands again, seeking another dish. “What do you do?”

  “I’m a pediatrician.” He watched her closely. Women usually reacted, one way or the other, to that piece of information. Some of them had been raised to think that marrying a doctor was a legitimate personal goal. Others believed that doctors were snobby. Or too busy for families. They were rarely neutral on the subject.

  All she said was, “I bet that never gets boring.”

  “Never.”

  “Sometime I’ll make you tell me stories. When I’m not up to my elbows.”

  “I will. You’ll have to shut me up. I could talk all night.”

  That left a hollow moment of silence in the kitchen, while Ethan contemplated the idea of a conversation with Ana that went on all night.

  “Any hobbies?” she asked.

  “I watch football. Does that count?”

  She laughed, a flash of white teeth and dark eyes. “You like football? Marco and Angel, my nephews, both play. My brother was hoping they’d play baseball—it’s more Dominican, and he’s a crazy baseball buff—but no such luck.”

  “It’s probably a good thing Theo doesn’t play,” Ethan said. “I played in high school, but now that I’m a pediatrician it would scare the heck out of me. I’ve seen too many head traumas.” He’d tried never to show any outward disappointment at Theo’s lack of interest in the game, but he’d always secretly wished for a son who played.

  “Scares me a little,” Ana admitted. “Every time I go to one of Marco’s games. All those helmets cracking.” She’d finished washing the last of the dishes and had let the water out of the sink. She swiped at the sides with her sponge and bent over to empty the drain stopper into the trash. An enticing crescent of bare skin slipped into view between her shirt and her jeans, and his groin tightened painfully.

  What the hell had they been talking about? He shook his head to clear it. Football. “There shouldn’t be helmets cracking in high-school football. There shouldn’t be helmets cracking in the NFL, for God’s sake.”

  He saw her eyes flicker to the clock behind him, and turned to look. It was seven-fifteen. “We’d better get going,” he said.

  “The thing is, I don’t mind questions if the person asking them is honestly, genuinely interested in who I am,” Ana told Ethan.

  They were in his car, barreling along Route 50 toward Hawthorne, and she’d been thinking about their conversation in the kitchen.

  “I don’t like it when I feel like people are asking me questions because they’re hoping to catch some juicy gossip or because they’ve convinced themselves that showing concern is the right thing to do,” she said.

  He was as beautiful in profile, driving, as he was face-to-face. His features appeared to have been chiseled by a sculptor from the darkness. His hair, despite the chaos that the waves suggested, was neatly trimmed around his ear. She had the urge to trace a finger across his skin from his jaw to behind the sensitive curve of that ear and down the nape of his neck.

  “I know exactly what you mean,” he said quietly. “When my wife—her name was Trish—died, there were three categories of people. There were people who didn’t ask me anything about how I felt, because they were scared of hearing the answer. And there were people who asked me how I felt because they felt they should ask, or because they wanted to be able to report to other people about the condition of the bereaved widower. Then there were the people who asked because they really, truly wanted to know. I didn’t mind talking to them, but the other two sets of people filled me with rage, really boundless rage.”

  “Yeah.” Her heart was choked with emotion, and she couldn’t say more.

  He seemed to understand, though. “That’s why I said I was sorry about Theo’s questions. He sort of forced you to tell us about your mom.”

  “But I didn’t mind. Because he really wanted to know.”

  “Your experience must have been a lot like Theo’s. You were both so young.”

  “I understood enough to know she wasn’t coming back, but not enough to have any perspective on how I would ever, ever be able to deal with it.” She was shocked, for the millionth time, by how much she still felt like that motherless child when she thought of those days.

  And—she didn’t say it aloud—when she had surfaced from the worst of the initial pain there was the misery of discovering how screwed up their immigration situation was. This country, which had promised to be hers, slipping away quickly and irretrievably.

  “I think even when you’re older you feel—I felt, at least—like you can’t imagine ever being happy again,” he said. “And it does take awhile, and it has a way of creeping in when you’re not planning it and least expect it. Surprising you. I still feel surprised sometimes when I feel outright happy.” He turned slightly, then, to look at her, and there was a question in his eyes that felt, to her, like an answer.

  Happiness surprised her then, big and bright and almost like the thickness of tears in her chest.

  They were in Hawthorne now, and Ana was aware of the bleakness of the landscape in a way she never had been before. She rarely thought much about the city’s history, about how vibrant it must have been as a mill city, and how desolate it was now—boarded-up factories, some of which had briefly been turned into office buildings or apartment complexes during the nineties boom, only to fall back into disuse. They were on St. Avignon Boulevard now, coming into the center of the city, and it was distressing to see through his eyes how many broken windows there were, how many vacant lots, how many places where trees had grown up to reclaim the city. It was so, so different from Beacon.

  “Ana.” His tone was serious.

  Oh, she wanted this, and she didn’t! How was it possible to crave and dread exactly the same thing?

  He took a long breath; she heard and felt it. “Ana, I—”

  “Left here,” she interrupted as they came to the light, and she felt a twist of panic. They were close to her neighborhood now; he was going to see for himself where she lived, how she lived. “You’re going to go right in three blocks.”

  She’d stopped him, somehow. Whatever he’d been about to say, he’d thought better of it, or the necessity of navigati
ng in the city had made it too difficult. He took the right onto Salem then made a series of quick turns.

  They went by her street, but she didn’t point it out, didn’t say, “My building is down there.” She directed him down streets narrow enough that he had to give his full concentration to maneuvering around parked cars and not hitting pedestrians in the growing dusk. She got him to Duarte Elementary, to the circle in front of the cafeteria entrance. He pulled up at the curb.

  She could tell that he hadn’t completely given up on what he’d been about to say earlier. He was trying to catch her eye, trying to get them back to where they’d been five minutes ago.

  Back to happiness. And sudden and dangerous intimacy.

  It was very possible that he was about to kiss her. The possibility was so real that her lips tingled. All she’d have to do was turn toward him.

  She reached for the door handle instead, an impulse rather than a decision, lifting, pressing, bursting out of the car and into the relief of the fresh air. Not looking back at him.

  “Thank you!” she called. “Thank you so much for dinner, and for the ride!”

  She knew, without looking back, that he was staring at her. Puzzled.

  “I need a helper,” Ana announced, her voice echoing in the cafeteria.

  Her beginning students looked back at her blankly from where they sat behind cracked and carved-up tables. Their chairs were sticky with gum, their seats covered with graffiti, many of the corners jaggedly broken off.

  Ana pointed at a tiny Chinese woman with streaks of white in her chin-length black hair, sitting at the nearest table. “Ling, come here.”

  Ling glared. Unwillingly, slowly, she extricated herself from her seat and inched toward the podium.

  “Angry,” Ana said. “You are angry.” She made an angry face. “Make an angry face,” she instructed Ling. She’d chosen Ling because even though she was shy, she was an overachiever. There was no way she’d refuse to do what Ana said.

  Ling gave a slight laugh, then made an angry face at her classmates. There were a few chuckles.

  “Ling, what makes you angry?” Ana asked.

  “Stupid teacher,” said Ling, quite loudly and with nearly impeccable pronunciation.

  Now the class roared. Ana laughed, too. She taught them the words “angry,” “stupid,” “teacher,” and then, for good measure, “smart.” Then she let Ling sit down.

  She had no problem getting volunteers for the rest of the emotions. Everyone wanted a chance to make faces and report to the class what got their emotions going. A young Somalian mother, her hair hidden under a gold headscarf, told her classmates that it made her happy when her kids said they loved her. A rapid-fire Spanish speaker named Emilio—she thought he was probably Mexican, but she wasn’t sure—said that he was embarrassed that he couldn’t speak English to his son’s friends.

  Then Nati, who was Salvadoran, stood up.

  “Sad,” Nati told them.

  Ana felt a twinge of apprehension. She’d played this game with her students before, but something in Nati’s face made her realize that Nati wasn’t playing.

  “My daughter,” Nati said. “They deport her. Now I have to—” She hesitated. “I have to be the mother of my grandchildren.”

  Ana’s hands got hot, her feet cold.

  Nati started to cry.

  With a superhuman effort, Ana got a grip on herself and put her arm around Nati, who shuddered under the touch, her face a terrible mask of unhappiness, a parody of the emotion she’d chosen to represent. Ana looked around the room. Nati’s expression—grief, fear, and not a little anger—was already echoed on all the other faces. Ana made them repeat “daughter,” “deported,” and “grandchildren,” but she knew the game was over.

  “Conversation practice,” she told them, and counted them off by twos. They broke off into pairs and began their halting, painful conversations. She gathered up her papers. She was sweating hard. She pulled her T-shirt away from her chest to let in some air.

  After class, she stopped Nati. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asked in Spanish.

  Nati shrugged. “What is there to talk about?” There were huge circles under her eyes, and the flesh hung on her face, an unhealthy yellow. Her hair, pulled back in a makeshift bun, frizzed out in escaped strands around her face.

  “Do you want to tell me what happened?”

  “She got pulled over. She was driving without a license. No papers. Not much she could do.” Nati shrugged again, as if to say that it had only been a matter of time until such a thing happened. “Now she’s banned.”

  “How long?” Ana whispered.

  “Ten years.”

  Ten years was the time bar—the length of time before she could reapply for entry—that Ana, too, would face if she was discovered. Ten years of exile from her family, her friends, her job, her homeland. The same penalty she’d pay if she were to come forward and admit that her visa had expired—a ten-year stay in D.R. before she could return here and seek a green card.

  “She doesn’t know anyone there. She came here when she was three years old. She doesn’t have friends there. All our family is here. There are people there who will take her in, but she has to start over there. It’s not a good place for her. Very poor, very unstable. We can’t see her, because we can’t travel. My grandchildren can see her, but how often? Once, twice a year? Their mother.”

  Tears pricked Ana’s eyes. Her chest felt tight. She had to get a grip. She was not the one being deported. And the Dominican Republic was not El Salvador. The island was a beautiful place, with thriving cities and a healthy tourist trade. Her aunt was there, a woman Ana barely remembered and spoke to on the phone, briefly, awkwardly, only every few years. And yet the idea of being sent away there, away from everything that mattered, away from everything she’d built here, made her light-headed with panic.

  She barely remembered D.R. Sometimes, in high summer, a certain trick of sunshine would bring memories back to her. She remembered that the lights went out, and sometimes there was no water. She remembered the rice shortages, her parents arguing about whether to leave or stay. She remembered that the hills were like no color she’d seen since—a vivid damp green.

  She’d heard that it was a different country now, that technology had arrived there, had made the urban areas more like the cities she knew, although the rural areas had changed less. If she ever got sent back, she’d live in a city. She’d teach English. She’d be wealthy and successful there, capitalizing on tourism. But, still, it was practically impossible to imagine being exiled there for ten years. To imagine spending ten years away from the people she cared about. To know that the businesses she’d built wouldn’t even exist in her absence. To have to start from scratch. She didn’t even really still have family there. Except her father, and he didn’t count.

  “Todo es suerte, ¿sí?” Nati asked. “It’s all a matter of luck, right? I’ve been here nearly thirty years, and I’ve managed to fly under the radar. You, too, right?”

  They’d never discussed Ana’s status explicitly, but someone who knew what to look for would see the clues. The jar of cash her students paid her with. The fact that she didn’t drive. Ana gave a tight nod of confirmation. Yes, lucky.

  “My daughter, she wasn’t so lucky.”

  Driving without a license was more bad judgment than bad luck, Ana thought, but she didn’t say so. She knew that Nati’s daughter had had her own good reasons.

  “Do you have a lawyer?”

  Nati shook her head. “There’s nothing we can do now. If we had hired a lawyer when she was still in the country, maybe—but it’s too late now.”

  Ana knew it was true. “I’m very sorry.” She put her hand on Nati’s arm.

  Tears spilled down Nati’s cheeks. “She was my little girl,” the older woman whispered.

  The past tense broke Ana’s heart.

  Chapter 8

  With an extreme effort of will—and an ample serving of luck—Et
han kept his Monday more or less on the rails so that he could leave in time to see Ana. Even so, by the time he got back to his office to gather up his things it was nearly six.

  She’d run away from him on Thursday night.

  He had watched her walk toward the cinder-block building. Aside from his headlights, there were two streetlights in evidence, but one flickered on only periodically. In the dim yellowish light, the school looked old but well cared for, the metal double doors where Ana stood, fumbling with a lock, newly painted dark green.

  She hadn’t looked back at him. He’d waited until she slipped inside before he pulled out of the circle and turned back toward home.

  He hadn’t planned any of it. Her name had slipped past his self-control. It was the feel of her beside him in the descending dusk. The comfort of her presence. The way she listened, considered, replied. Her buoyancy in the kitchen, her gravity in the car. He could feel the heat of her body, smell strawberries and soap and the sweet tanginess of her, could hear the swish of her hair as she moved in her seat beside him and the tightness in her throat when she talked about things that hurt her.

  She could run away from what was between them, but he knew: For him, at least, it would not go away.

  He’d have to figure out what had made her flee from him on Thursday, whether it was related to the incident with Ed Branch or something else entirely. He wanted to understand where her wariness came from, and he wanted to soothe her through it. To draw her toward him even if it took weeks of deliberation and care. He was a patient man. He had waited a long time to feel this sense of hope and longing. And he knew—knew in some deep and fundamental part of him—that she was experiencing it, too. He’d seen it flicker over her face at dinner. He’d felt it in the suspended moments in the car.

  He piled up the charts he needed to take home with him. That was the price he often paid for leaving on time. The practice was in the process of switching to electronic records, and soon everything would be on his laptop, which would make things a little easier, but the workload wouldn’t change. At the end of the day, all the bits and pieces that he hadn’t had time to deal with would be waiting for him.