A Mother's Homecoming(45)
He followed her gaze to the clock above the stove. “Whoa, I didn’t realize it was so late.” He bounced off his seat, grabbing his empty plate and bowl as he went.
She slid down off her own stool and carried her dishes around the counter to deposit in the sink. “Thanks for lunch. Your culinary skills have improved a lot since you took me on that picnic where you made peanut butter sandwiches.”
He laughed. “You mean that time when I was in such a hurry to get you alone that I forgot the jelly and the drinks? Not my finest hour.” Peanut butter on plain bread, with nothing to wash it down. “Tell you what, maybe I can make it up to you sometime. Cook you dinner?”
She blinked, dozens of questions fizzing to the top of her head like a carbonated soda someone had dropped before opening. Before she had a chance to articulate any of them—he didn’t mean as a date, did he? With Faith or just the two of them? Did his willingness to spend time with her mean he’d forgiven her? She heard the front door open and shut.
“Hello? Dad? I saw the truck outside.”
Nick and Pam exchanged glances. Showtime. As of this moment, they were a parental team, not to be taken lightly or easily divided and conquered.
“We’re in here,” Nick called. Would Faith notice the subtle way he’d stressed we? Would she have recognized Pam’s car in the driveway?
Faith clacked into the kitchen in a pair of stylishly heeled boots. She looked startled but excited when she spotted Pam. “Hi! What are you doing here?”
“I invited her,” Nick said in his Grim Father voice. Pam knew instinctively that Faith would be hearing that tone again the first time she ever broke curfew or got a ding in the family car. “Because I think the three of us need to talk.”
“I agree,” Pam added quickly, not wanting Nick to come out of this looking like the bad guy.
“Oookay. Can I, like, get a soda first and sit down, or do we have to all stand here being weird about it?”
Nick jerked his thumb toward the living room. “In there. Now.”
By unspoken consent, Nick and Pam took the larger sofa, leaving Faith the matching love seat on the facing wall. As she studied them, Faith raised a hand next to her face—looked confused for a second—then dropped it. The longer Pam watched her, the more she agreed with Nick’s assessment from last night: she does look more like me now. The biggest differences between them were age and Pam’s hair being far lighter.
Nick steepled his fingers under his chin, affecting a look that suggested his ancestors might have been Inquisitors. Pam bit the inside of her cheek to suppress a highly inappropriate giggle. This stern disciplinarian was a guy who’d once been in on the plot to “borrow” a rival team’s mascot.
“When I came home early yesterday,” Nick began, “and found you here alone with a boy, which you know is completely against the rules—”
“He’s nineteen,” Faith interrupted. “More man than boy. And I told you, he’s a teacher. It’s not like I’m dating him, Dad.”
From the way Nick’s jaw clenched, it was easy to tell Faith wasn’t helping her case. “We’ll get back to the advisability of you being alone in the house with a nineteen-year-old later,” he promised. “But the part where you hired him, without talking to me about it first, as a teacher? Whose idea did you say that was again?”
Faith squirmed but glared at Pam, not ready to back down just yet. “I told you at the salon that my friend knew a guy, and you said it was a great idea. You said I should go for it.”
“Ah,” Nick said. “So it was your idea initially, not Pam’s. And how about the way you made it sound as if the two of you had been regularly corresponding? How many times have you actually seen or talked to her?”
“Three.”
“Not counting today or that day you met for milk shakes,” Nick added.
The girl’s gaze dropped. “Once.” Her mumble was barely audible.
“And that’s when you ambushed her at work?” he persisted.
In lieu of an actual answer, Faith crossed her arms over her chest and huffed out an aggrieved sigh.
Pam decided it was time for her to wade into the conversation. “Faith, you’ve made it seem like you want us to be … friends. But friends don’t screw each other over. Why did you try to get your dad angry with me?”
“It wouldn’t have happened if you’d taught me to play guitar like I asked,” Faith accused her. “But you told me to get a regular teacher, one who wouldn’t ditch me at the first opportunity.”