The Rocky Road to Romance

more closely at Daisy. “You look like the devil.”

“I was up late last night. Then things got kind of rushed this morning because I had to squeeze grocery shopping in between my other jobs.” She gave an enormous yawn and sighed. “I’ll be okay once I get on the road. I’m used to being tired.”

“Maybe Elsie should drive today,” Steve said. He gave Elsie a twenty-dollar bill. “Take the portable scanner and go somewhere for breakfast.”

“She’s overcommitted,” Elsie said. “She’s headed for burnout. If she don’t watch her step, she’s gonna end up someplace where they feed you strained peas and make you sleep in a rubber room.”

Steve scrutinized Daisy. She looked tired, but she didn’t look ready for the rubber room. He wasn’t so sure about himself and Elsie.

He could see blue sky lurking beyond the open garage door. Inside the dark garage it was cool, but the air was already heating up outside. In another hour the cement pavement would be shimmering. In another hour he’d be on the air-conditioned broadcast floor and Daisy would be cruising south on the beltway through Maryland. He didn’t like the arrangements. He wanted to be with Daisy.

He reached out, touched a silky curl, and let it wrap around his finger. “I think I’ll carve an hour out of my schedule today so we can have lunch together. I’ll get some potato salad and fried chicken and we can have a picnic.”

He arrived at Belle Haven at twelve-fifteen with a packing crate filled with food and the quilt from his bed draped over his arm. Bob bounced around beside him, following close on his heels, never taking his eyes off the food box. They spread the quilt under a tree not far from the car, took the portable scanner, and set out the lunch.

Elsie looked at the quilt and shook her head. “Once I get down on that thing it’s gonna take a forklift to get me up. I can do most anything with this hip except picnic. If it’s all the same to you, I’ll take my food back to the car.”

Steve gave Bob a bag full of burgers and a vanilla milk shake. “Don’t eat the carton,” he told the dog. “Last time you ate the carton, and it made you sick.”

Daisy took some fried chicken and fruit salad. “This is lovely. You’re a good person.”

“I was hoping you’d notice.”

She smiled at him. He had ulterior motives. How nice.

“I have some big news,” he said. “I bought a house last night.” He took a napkin and wiped milk shake off Bob’s face fur. “It’s a terrific house. It has a fenced-in backyard for Bob and little print wallpaper in the dining room. Actually, I don’t know if I like the wallpaper, but the Realtor said it was Williamsburg and very classy. Maybe you could take a look at it and let me know what you think. I’m not much of a judge when it comes to wallpaper.” And while she was there she could also look at the bedrooms-especially the one with his big king-size bed.

Bob had finished his burgers and was inching his way over to the chicken.

“You can’t have chicken,” Steve told him. “It has bones in it, and you’re not supposed to have bones raw or cooked.” Steve dumped a glob of potato salad on a paper plate, added a deviled egg and a biscuit, and fed it to Bob. “Save some room for dessert,” he told him. “I bought a cheesecake.”

Daisy slanted a look at Bob. “He always eats like this? What did he eat for breakfast?”

“We didn’t have much time this morning. We were up late last night packing. We stopped on the way in to work and got coffee and doughnuts.”

“You fed him coffee and doughnuts for breakfast?”

“I made sure the coffee was cool. Yesterday was better. Yesterday we had orange juice and eggs and whole wheat toast.”

“Doesn’t he ever eat dog food?”

“I bought some for him, but he didn’t like it.”

Daisy ate half of a melon ball. “You ever have a dog when you were a kid?”

He shook his head. “Nope. I never had a pet of any kind until Bob. We lived in a high-rise in Houston for most of my childhood. Very posh. My dad and my mom do lots of traveling. They were never very interested in the hearth- and-home stuff. Home was a place to entertain business associates.”

“You probably had servants.”

“Mmmm.” He gnawed on a chicken leg and tossed it into the cardboard bucket. He glanced at Daisy and thought she looked a little wistful.

“Must have been nice.”

He shrugged. “It was right for my mom and dad. They both came from very poor beginnings. When the oil money started coming in they went uptown. My grandfather Crow was the only member of the family who stayed on the land. I spent a summer with him once and hated it. I must have been nine or ten. I look back on it now and think it might have been the best summer I ever had.”

Daisy curled her legs under her and picked at a biscuit. “What made you change your mind after all those years?”

“I don’t know. Gut feeling. My grandfather Crow lived on a flat piece of cracked red dirt. The house was a small wooden thing patched together with pieces of jerry can and chinked with sun-dried mud. He swept the inside with a broom. He didn’t have a vacuum cleaner. He had electricity but only used it in the winter to run the heater. No electric lights. He said they made the life cycle unnatural. He said when the sun went down a body was supposed to look at the stars for a while and go to sleep. And if you couldn’t fall asleep right off, you hadn’t worked hard enough that day.”

His grin was lopsided, self-deprecating. “This philosophy went over big with a ten-year-old who’d never known a day without servants. I didn’t know how to pour my own milk on my cereal. And I thought watching television was an essential body function- eating, sleeping, watching television. Grandpa Crow had a garden behind his house that he worked on every day. He had to keep whacking at the red dirt to keep it from baking hard and dry around his plants. He had a goat and a flock of scrawny chickens. He had an old Ford pickup that was in worse shape than your klunker, and every Saturday we’d go into town for some canned food and mail and Grandpa’d get a bottle of whiskey. When he was alone I think he might have been drunk a lot of the time, but when I was there he’d just sip at the whiskey and get more talkative.”

The grin broadened. “By normal standards more talkative wasn’t exactly chatty. Grandpa Crow was a man of few words.”

“Is he still living on his land?”

“Yeah. I went to see him two years ago. He’d moved into a trailer. Very spiffy, but he still wasn’t using lights. At least that’s what he said, but I think when no one’s around he pulls out a television and makes microwave popcorn.”

“How about you? Do you have servants now?”

“Someone comes in to clean.” He polished off another chicken leg. “I learned how to pour my own milk when I was in college, so I was able to do away with the butler and the cook and the manservant.”

“Do you miss them?”

“Sometimes the cook.Once in a while the manservant.Never the butler.”

Daisy gave him a long look. “Are you at all like your grandfather?”

“Not much. I’m also not much like my parents. Lately I’m not even like myself.”

“Are you having an identity crisis?”

“I think I’m in a period of transition.”

“Ah-hah.”

Steve sighed. She was so incredibly pretty, sitting there with her feet tucked up like a cat and her blond hair dappled in sunlight. Very feminine. He reconsidered the word. Feminine didn’t feel exactly right. Womanly was better. There was a ripeness to her, a lushness of personality. She didn’t whine or flirt or make excuses. She went about the business of living with open exuberance. In an odd way she reminded him of his grandfather. His grandfather Crow was much more taciturn, but there was depth to him, and there was depth to Daisy.

In the beginning Steve had felt the pull of her blue eyes and soft curves, and instantly falling in love with her had been half-serious, halffolly-a private joke on himself that held an element of truth. This morning he woke up and realized that he wasn’t just enamored-he liked her. Really liked her. She was brave and bright and honest. And there was a lot of passion bubbling below the surface. He suspected she hadn’t fully tapped into it yet. There was a