The Chance (Thunder Point #4)(69)

“I can do that,” Laine said. “Yeah, I can do that. Maybe. But he has to go to a motel.”

Pax laughed at her. “You can’t do that. You’re too much like him. You like being right and you have to point it out to him when he insults you, which only causes him to talk down to you again. I mean, you are right, but you like it too much. You can’t not hear him, you can’t let it go when he offends you, you can’t go to a Zen place....”

“All right, all right...but I’m good at long baths.... I’d better get downstairs. I left him with Eric....”

“I can’t wait to meet this guy.”

“You might be meeting him soon, when you come out here to get your father!”

“Call me when he leaves tonight. If you let him live.”

When she got to the bottom of the stairs she heard laughter. Her father was laughing and talking. Eric was laughing with him.

“I guess you two found something to talk about?” she ventured.

“This fella here has worked on Packards. We had a ’41 Packard station wagon. You know the kind, with the wood paneling. We had one when I was a kid—it was red. My parents would load us into it and take us to the lake in New York in summer. That car was a beauty. Business was so good my dad got himself a Packard coupe convertible, a ’49—it was a slick shiny brown. A little cold inside in Boston winters but he didn’t care. He gave my mom the station wagon for the kids and he owned that convertible. What a car. What a car. I loved that convertible.”

Eric gave her a reassuring smile. Why can’t I do that? she asked herself. Why can’t I just let his snide comments go and talk about classic Packards? “How old were you?” she asked her dad. Trying. She was trying.

“Oh, nine or ten or something. It was a big deal in my neighborhood, let me tell you. All the kids wanted a ride in it. My oldest brother borrowed it for a dance and dinged it up.” He laughed, shaking his head. “I never heard a bigger uproar in my house. Back then it took weeks to fix something like that.”

“Now we can do it in an afternoon if we have the right parts. Sometimes we need a second afternoon for paint unless it’s chrome,” Eric said. “You hungry, Paxton?” he asked.

Senior leaned back and rubbed his belly. “I could eat. Sorry, son, I missed the name....”

“Eric, sir. Why don’t I take you and Laine to dinner. There’s a nice little seafood place at the marina.”

“Son, I’m from Boston. I hope you don’t intend to try to impress me with seafood.”

“No, sir. I’m going to wow you with the company.”

Paxton laughed pleasantly. “Good for you! Good for you!”

“Give me a few minutes to change clothes and then we’ll go.”

“Sure. Absolutely. Don’t want to go out to dinner in your mechanic’s clothes....”

Laine frowned but Eric touched her arm gently and she relaxed.

“Janice, where did you find that delightful young man who knows all about classic cars?”

“Laine, Dad,” she corrected.

“Hmm?”

“You called me Janice.”

“Hmm? Did I? You do look so much like your mother sometimes. So where are we going to dinner?”

She hesitated for a moment, then said, “A seafood restaurant at the marina. It’s not real fancy but the nicest one in town and the food is wonderful.”

“Perfect,” he said. “That young man, he’s a friend of yours?”

Again she was speechless. “I live with him,” she said patiently. “Eric is my boyfriend. We’ve lived together for almost three months.”

“He seems a perfectly nice young man. Does he remind you of Pax at all?”

She shook her head. “Not at all,” she said. But she thought Eric was like Pax. Patient. Definitely not touchy. Loving and kind, yet very strong. And it seemed Eric, like Pax, could accept Senior as he was and find a way to get along with him. Maybe she’d leave Eric in charge and she could go to the motel!

* * *

Laine would long remember this particular dinner at Cliffhanger’s as one of the most pivotal evenings of her life. And not in a good way.

Senior kept talking about old cars, ones he idolized as a child and status cars like his first Mercedes. While he and Eric had a beer, Senior talked on and on about the route to the lake in New York, the price of milk and eggs, war rationing and gas coupons.

“My dad was a surgeon,” Senior said, “and he got more coupons so he could get back and forth to the hospitals whenever necessary, but between him and my mother, there was always a way to get to the lake. He didn’t serve in the Army because he was slightly disabled—one leg just a little shorter than the other from a childhood accident. He had a slight limp but it never slowed him down. He had more energy than ten men put together. I don’t remember him ever having a sick day in his life.”

Eric asked questions about rationing, Senior explained about “need certificates.” Everyone had to demonstrate a need for major items before they could be purchased. Even typewriters were rationed because the Army needed them for communication. And then he began telling the same story again.

All of this would have happened before Senior was ten years old, but Laine had heard it all before. Except she had heard it from her grandmother, roughly twenty years ago.