Just then they drew into the driveway of a very run-of-the mill L-shaped rambler on a tree-lined street where the houses were enough alike as to be almost indistinguishable from one another.
“Looks like mom and dad haven’t gotten home yet,” Theresa noted. A fresh film of snow dusted the driveway. Only one set of tire tracks led from the garage, but a single pair of footprints led up to the back door. “But Amy must be here.”
The doors of the station wagon swung open, and Jeff Brubaker stood motionless beside the car for a moment, scanning the house in the way of a man seeking reassurance that none of the familiar things had altered. “God, it’s good to be home,” he breathed, sucking in a great gulp of the cold, pure Minnesota air. Then he became suddenly effervescent, almost jogging around to the tailgate of the wagon. “Come on you two, let’s get this junk unloaded.”
Thinking ahead to the next five minutes, Theresa appropriated a guitar case to carry inside. She didn’t know how she’d manage it, but if worse came to worst, she might be able to hide behind it.
At the sound of the tailgate slamming, a gangly fourteen-year-old girl came flying out the back door. “Jeffy, you’re home!” Smiling with a flash of tooth braces, Amy Brubaker threw her arms wide with an open gesture Theresa envied. Not a day went by that Theresa didn’t pray her sister be granted the blessing of growing normally.
“Hey, dumpling, how are ya?”
“I’m too big for you to call me dumpling anymore.”
They embraced with sibling exuberance before Jeff plopped a direct kiss on Amy’s mouth.
“Ouch!” She jerked back and made a face, then bared her teeth for inspection. “Look out when you do that. It hurts!”
“Oh, I forgot about the new hardware. Let’s see.” He tipped her chin up while she continued curling her lips back as if not in the least daunted by her unattractive braces. Looking on, Theresa wondered how it was her little sister had managed to remain so uninhibited and charmingly self-assured.
“I tell everybody I got ’em decorated just in time for Christmas,” Amy declared. “After all, they do look a little like tinsel.”
Jeff leaned back from the waist and laughed, then quirked a smile at his friend. “Brian, it’s time you met the rambunctious part of the Brubaker family. This is Amy. Amy, here he is at last—Brian Scanlon. And as you can see, I’ve talked him into bringing his guitar so we can play a couple hot ones for you and your friends, just as ordered.”
For the first time, Amy lost her loquaciousness. She jammed her hands as far as they’d go into the tight front pockets of her blue jeans and carefully kept her lips covering the new braces as she smiled and said almost shyly, “Hi.”
“Hi, Amy. Whaddya say?” He extended his hand and smiled at Amy with as charming a grin as any of the rock stars beaming from the postered walls of her bedroom. Amy glanced at Brian’s hand, made an embarrassed half shrug and finally dragged one hand from the blue denim and let Brian shake it. When he released it, the hand hung in the air between them for a full fifteen seconds while her smile grew and grew, until a reflection flashed from the bars of metal spanning her teeth.
Watching, Theresa thought, oh, to be fourteen again, with a shape like Amy’s, and the total lack of guile that allows her to gaze point-blank in unconcealed admiration, just as she’s doing now.
“Hey, it’s cold out here!” Jeff gave an exaggerated shiver. “Let’s go in and dig into mom’s cake.”
They carried duffel bags and guitar cases into the cheery front-facing kitchen of the simple house. The room was papered in an orange- and gold-flowered pattern that was repeated in the fabric inserts of the shutters on the windows flanking the eating area, which looked out on the front yard. An ordinary house on a street with others just like it, the Brubaker home had nothing exceptional to set it apart, except a sense of familial love that Brian Scanlon sensed even before the mother and father arrived to complete the circle.
On the kitchen table was a crocheted doily of white, and in the center sat a pedestal plate bearing a mouth-watering German chocolate cake under a domed lid. When Jeff lifted the lid, the gaping hole came into view. In the hollow wedge was a slip of folded paper. He took it out to reveal a recipe card from which he read aloud: “Jeff, it looked too good for me to resist. See you soon. Dad.”
The four of them shared a laugh, but all the while Theresa stood with the broad end of Jeff’s guitar case resting on the floor at her toes, and the narrow end shielding the front of her coat. She was the delegate hostess. She should ask for Brian’s jacket and hat and make a move toward the hall closet.
“Come on, Brian,” Jeff invited, “see the rest of the place.” They moved to the living room and immediately four raucous, jarring chords sounded from the piano. Theresa grimaced and glanced at Amy who rolled her eyeballs. It was “Jeff’s Outer Space Concerto.”
They drew deep breaths in unison, signaled with nods and bellowed simultaneously, “Je-e-e-eff, knock it off!” While the sisters giggled, Jeff explained to Brian, “I composed that when I was thirteen ... before I became an impresario.”
Theresa quickly hung up her coat in the front-hall closet and hustled down the hall to her bedroom. She found a pale blue cardigan sweater and whisked it across her shoulders without slipping her arms into the sleeves, then buttoned the top button at her throat. She glanced critically in the mirror, realigned the button-and-buttonhole panels so the sweater covered as much of her as possible, but found to her dismay it did little to disguise her problem. Oh God, will lever learn to live with it?
Her usual, end-of-the day backache plagued again, and she sighed, straightening her shoulders, but to no avail.
The house tour had stopped in the living room where Jeff had found his Stella. He was twanging out some metallic chords and singing an offbeat melody while Theresa tried to bolster her courage and walk out there. Undoubtedly it would be the same as it always was when she met a man. Brian Scanlon would scarcely glance at her face before his eyes would drop to her breasts and he would become transfixed by them. Since puberty she had relived those awful moments too many times to count, but Theresa had never become inured. That horrifying instant when a man’s eyebrows twitched up in surprise, and his lips dropped open while he stared at the outsized mammary glands that had, through some unfortunate freak of nature, grown to proportions resembling volleyballs. They rode out before Theresa like a flagship before a fleet, their double-D circumference made the more pronounced by her delicately boned size-nine frame.
The last time she’d been introduced to a strange man he was the father of one of her second-grade pupils. Even as a parent, the poor man hadn’t been able to remember protocol in his shock at glimpsing her enormous breasts. His eyes had riveted on them even while he was shaking Theresa’s hand, and after that there’d been such awful tension between them the conference had been a disaster.
If she had carved a notch on her bedroom dresser every time that had happened down through the years, there’d be nothing before her now but a pile of wood chips. Now meeting the apprehensive eyes of the woman reflected in the mirror, Theresa quailed with all the familiar misgivings. Red hair and freckles! As if it wasn’t enough that she’d been cursed with these mountainous breasts, she’d landed hair the color of paprika and skin that refused to tan. Instead it broke out in brilliant orange heat spots, as if she had an incurable rash, each time the sun grazed her skin. And this hair—oh, how she hated it! Coarse, springy ringlets that clung to her scalp like a Brillo pad if cut short, or if allowed to grow long, developed untamable waves reminiscent of those disastrous messes fried onto women’s heads in the early days of the century before hot permanents had been perfected. Detesting it either way, she’d chosen a middle-of-the road length and as innocuous a style as she could manage, brushing it straight back from her face and clasping it at her nape with a wide barrette, below which the “tail” erupted like a ball of fire from a volcano.
And what about eyelashes? Didn’t every woman deserv
e to have eyelashes that could at least be seen? Theresa’s were the same hue as her hair—pale threads that made the rims of her eyelids look pink and sickly while framing eyes that were almost the identical color of her freckles, a pale tea-brown. She thought of the dark spiky lashes and the stunning green of Brian Scanlon’s eyes, and her own dropped to check her sweater once again, and tug it close together, as Theresa realized she could no longer avoid confronting him. She must return to the living room. And if he stared at her breasts with lascivious speculation she’d think of the strains of her favorite Chopin Nocturne, which always had a calming effect upon her.
Amy and Jeff were sitting on the davenport while Brian faced them from the seat of the piano bench. When Jeff caught sight of her, he thwacked the guitar strings dramatically, and let the chord reverberate in fanfare. “There she is!”
So much for slipping quietly into their midst.
Brian was no more than five feet away, still wearing his formal garrison cap. She was conscious of a wink of silver on the large eagle medallion centered above the black leather visor as his eyes swerved her way, directly on a level with the objects of Theresa’s despair. Her pale brown eyes met his of sea green. The certainty of what would happen next seemed to lodge in her throat like a pill taken without water. Now! she thought. Now it will happen! She steeled herself for the sickening embarrassment that was certain to follow.
But Brian Scanlon relaxedly stretched six feet of blue-clad anatomy to its feet and smiled into Theresa’s eyes, his own never wavering downward for even a fraction of a second or giving the impression that it even crossed his mind.
“Jeff’s been demonstrating the old Stella. She doesn’t sound too bad.”
Aren’t you going to gawk like everybody else? She felt the blush begin to tint her face because he hadn’t looked, and to cover her fluster grabbed onto the first words that entered her mind.
“As usual, my brother thinks of nothing but music.” Theresa strove to keep her voice steady, for her heart was knocking crazily. “And here you sit with your hat and jacket still on. I’ll show you where you’ll sleep, since neither one of these two had the courtesy to do it.”
“I hope I’m not putting anybody out of their bed.”
“Not at all. We’re putting you on a hideaway bed in the family room downstairs. I just hope nobody puts you out of yours, because it’ll be in front of the TV and fireplace, and dad likes to stay up at least until after the ten o’clock news.”
He didn’t look! He didn’t look! The exaltation pounded through her brain as Theresa led the way back through the kitchen to the basement door that opened into the room just behind the stove wall. Oddly enough, she seemed more aware of Brian Scanlon because of the fact that he’d assiduously remained polite and refrained from dropping his eyes. She took his guitar and he his duffel bag, and she led him downstairs into a large basement area with a set of sliding glass doors facing the rear yard. The room was paneled in warm pecan and carpeted in burnt orange that burst into a glow as Theresa switched on a table lap.
Brian watched her hair light up as she paused above the lamp, then scanned the room, which contained a country pine coffee table, a cushioned davenport and pillowed rockers in the Colonial style. A fireplace was flanked by a television set, and at the end of the room where Brian stood, a thick-legged kitchen set of glossy pine was centered before the sliding glass door.
“Mmm ... I like this room. Very homey.” His eyes came back to settle upon Theresa as he spoke.
He seemed the type who’d prefer art deco or chrome and glass, but an appreciative reaction riffled through Theresa, for her mother had largely let her choose the colors and textures of the furnishings when they’d redecorated two years ago. It wasn’t her own house, but it gave Theresa a taste of home planning, making her eager for the day when she could exercise her own tastes throughout an entire house.
Brian noted her tightly crossed arms beneath the baby blue sweater and the nervousness that was absent only while her sister and brother were close by.
“I’m sorry it has no closet, but you can hang your things up here.” She opened a door leading to an unfinished portion of the basement where the laundry facilities were housed.
He crossed toward her, and she stepped well back as he popped his head around the laundry-room doorway, one foot off the floor behind him. There was a rolling laundry rack with empty hangers tinging in the air currents from the opening of the door. “There’s no bath down here, but feel free to use the upstairs tub or shower any time you want.”
When he turned to her, his eyes again rested directly on hers as he noted, “It sures beats the BOQ on base, especially at Christmas time.” She was conscious of how crisp and correctly knotted his formal navy blue tie was, how smoothly the dark blue military “blouse” contoured his chest and shoulders over the paler blue of his shirt, of how flattering the square-set cap was to the equally square-cut lines of his jaw.
“BOQ?” she questioned.
“Bachelor’s Officers’ Quarters.”
“Oh.” She waited for his eyes to rove downward, but they didn’t. Instead, he began freeing the four silver buttons bearing the eagle-and-shield U.S. Air Force insignia, turning his back on her and taking a stroll around the room while freeing the “blouse” and shrugging out of it. He slipped his hat off the back of his head with a slow, relaxed movement, and she saw his hair for the first time. It was a rich chestnut color, trimmed—according to military regulations—far too short for her taste, and bearing a ridge across the back from the band of his cap. He turned toward Theresa again, and she noted that around his face the chestnut hair held the suggestion of waves, but was cut too short to allow them free rein. It would be much more attractive an inch and a half longer, she decided.
“It feels good to get out of these things.’’
“Oh, here! Let me hang them up.”
“Just the blouse—I mean the jacket. We get in trouble if we hang up our caps.”
As she came forward to take his jacket, he extended his cap, too, and its inner band was still warm from his head. As she scuttled away around the laundry-room doorway again, that warmth seemed to singe her palm. When she tipped the cap upside down to lay it on the rack above the clothes bar, a spicy scent of some hair preparation found its way to her nostrils. It seemed to cling to the jacket, too, as she threaded its shoulders over a hanger and hooked it on the rack.
When she returned to the family room, Brian was standing in front of the sliding glass doors with his hands in his trousers pockets, feet widespread, gazing out at the snowy yard where twilight was falling. For a long moment Theresa studied the back of his sky blue shirt where three crisp laundry creases gave him that clean-cut appearance of a model on a recruiting poster. The creases rose up out of the belted waistline of his trousers but disappeared across his shoulders where the blue fabric stretched taut as the head of a drum.
She crossed the room silently and flipped on an outside spotlight that flooded her father’s bird feeder. Brian started at the snap of the light, glancing aside at her as she crossed her arms beneath the sweater and joined him at the wide window, studying the scene beyond.
“Every winter dad tries to entice cardinals, but so far this year we haven’t had any. This is his favorite spot in the house. He brings his coffee down here in the mornings and sits at the table with his binoculars close at hand. He spends hours here.”
“I can see why.” Scanlon’s eyes moved once more to the view outside where sparrows, caught in the beam of light that lit the snow to glimmering crystals, twittered and searched for fallen seed at the base of the feeder pole. The far edge of the property was delineated by a line of evergreens that appeared almost black in the waning light. Their limbs were laden with white. Suddenly a blue jay darted from them, squawking in the crass, impertinent note of superiority only a blue jay can muster, scattering the sparrows as he landed among them, then cocking his head and disdaining the seeds he jealously guarded.
&nb
sp; “I wasn’t sure if I should come with Jeff. I felt a little like I was horning in, you know?”
His hands were still buried in his trousers pockets, but she felt his eyes turn her way and hoped she wouldn’t blush while attempting to lie convincingly. “Don’t be silly, you’re not horning in.”
“Any stranger in the house at this time of the year is like a fifth wheel. I know that, but I couldn’t resist Jeff’s invitation when I thought about spending two weeks with nothing to do but stare at the bare walls of the quarters and talk to myself.”
“I’m glad you didn’t. Why, mother didn’t hesitate a minute when Jeff called and suggested bringing you home. Besides, we’ve all heard so much about you in Jeff’s letters, you hardly seem like a stranger. As a matter of fact, I believe one of us had a tiny bit of a crush on you even before you stepped out of the car in the driveway.”
He laughed good-naturedly and shook his head at the floor as if slightly embarrassed, then rocked back on his heels. “It’s a good thing she isn’t six years older. She’s going to be a real knockout at twenty.”
“Yes, I know. Everybody says so.”
Brian heard no note of rancor in Theresa’s words, only a warm, sisterly pride. And he need not lower his eyes to her chest to see that as she spoke, her forearms unconsciously guarded her breasts more closely.
Thanks for warning me, Brubaker, he thought, recalling all that Jeff had told him about his sister. But apparently Jeff told his family as much about my background as he told me about them, he thought, as Theresa went on in a sympathetic note.
“Jeff told us about your mother. I’m sorry. It must have been terrible to get the news about the plane crash.”
He studied the snow again and shrugged. “In a way it was, in a way it wasn’t. We were never close after my dad died, and once she’d remarried, we didn’t get along at all. Her second husband thought I was a drug addict because I played rock music, and he didn’t waste any more time on me than was absolutely necessary.”