Anything for Her(46)

“Don’t tell me that. Oh, ew.” A momentary silence. “I am so glad my bedroom was at the end of the hall.”

“Yeah, it mostly embarrassed me until after the uproar. Then I’d hear them in there, and I’d feel so much rage I could have lit a fire with it. Why would he want her, after? Why, if they were doing it regularly, did she screw other men?”

“She won’t talk about it, even now. I, um, think there was someone else recently. I’ve gotten so I can tell. She gets more animated, and Dad watches her with so much pain in his eyes.”

Nolan bent his head and pinched the bridge of his nose. “Sometimes I hate her.”

Anna grunted.

“You ever think of moving out here?”

The silence suggested he’d startled her. “Is that an invitation?”

He relaxed back in his chair. “Sure, why not? You, me and Sean. Oh, and Cassie.” And Allie. Please, and Allie.

“Who?”

He told her about the adoption, and even about the signs he thought might suggest a lessening of Sean’s insecurity.

“Who was it you told about Mom and Dad?” Anna asked suddenly. “Not Sean.”

“I’m...seeing a woman.”

“How long?”

He thought back. “A month, maybe.”

“And you’re actually talking to her.”

“Yep,” he said, smiling at the pure suspicion and disbelief in her voice.

“How’d you meet her?”

He told his sister about Sean’s quilt top and Allie’s exquisite work. About how every time he went to Allie’s he saw that top becoming a quilt, and wished he had better words to describe the process, or how much of herself he sensed Allie poured into her work. Even though most often the quilts were made for someone else, she had to be doing what she did for herself. As much, he supposed, as he worked for his own satisfaction, not minding too much the letting-go part.

“I’ve never heard you sound like this about a woman before,” Anna said. “She’d better not hurt you.”

“I can’t be sure yet.” That was hard to say; hard to admit to himself. “I think she feels something for me. Maybe a whole lot of something, but she’s holding part of herself back, too.”

“Then why take a chance on her?”

Wasn’t she quick to say that, thought Nolan. “I think Allie needs time to work through some things. And I don’t have any reason to believe I can’t trust her. She has wounds that don’t seem to have healed. What’s going on between us is rubbing at them, I suspect.” He made a huffing sound, half chuckle. “Come to think of it, she reminds me a little of you. You wouldn’t be so eager to turn yourself inside out for a guy, either, no matter how much you liked him.”

“I have no intention...” she began hotly, then stopped. “Maybe I shouldn’t say never.”

“No.” He smiled, envisioning her face, not as soft and pretty as their mother’s, though she had the same blue eyes and blond hair. No, Anna’s face had some of the same bony structure as his did, which nobody could call pretty. She was striking, though, and her looks showed character. He bet there were always men around. He had no idea what it would take for her to open up to one. She was hotter-tempered than he was, less content inside herself.

What he’d told Allie about his sister wasn’t quite right, he thought now. Anna saw more of their parents, true. But was she close to them? No. What she did, it seemed to him, was a little like willfully scraping her bare skin against a rough-textured wall until she bled, and then going back and doing it again. And again.

“Anna, you should move away.” He hadn’t known he was going to say that until it came out, but he knew it was right. “You need to put distance between you and Mom.”

This silence stretched until it quivered with the stress, but he refused to break it.

“This Allie,” she said, surprising him, “has stirred you up. Or maybe it’s Sean. Usually we don’t talk about much of anything and we both go away happy.”

“We both go away,” he agreed.

His sister gave a bark of laughter. “Okay, maybe not happy.”

“I used to think contentment was the most I could hope for,” he tried to explain. “I’ve changed my mind.”

Another silence was less easy to read.

“Maybe,” his sister said, “I should come out for a visit. Check out your rainy corner of the world. I suppose potters can make a living in Washington State as well as Chicago.”