“Why?”
“It’s a long story.” She didn’t elaborate. “Anyway…I’m really sorry, but my mother doesn’t want to join us. She’s having a bad day. This is very embarrassing.”
“There’s no reason to be embarrassed about things that aren’t your fault.” It hit me that this entire invitation was likely bullshit. “She didn’t really want to meet me, did she? You said that was the reason you invited me over.”
Once again, it didn’t take much to get her to tell the truth.
“No,” she admitted. “I just wanted to have dinner with you.”
I sighed. I couldn’t even be mad at her. “So, let’s have dinner, then.”
A look of panic flashed over her face. “Dinner…shit!”
She raced to the kitchen and opened the oven to remove a burned lasagna.
“I meant to take this out before Eric came by. He totally screwed me up, and until you said the word dinner, I didn’t even remember I was baking it.” She threw the potholder down in frustration. “I don’t do the cooking thing all that often, but I normally know how to make lasagna.” She muttered, “Shit.”
“It’s okay. It’s just lasagna.”
“No. It was supposed be a nice dinner. And I messed it up. Eric showing up really fucked with me.”
She almost looked ready to cry. Suddenly, all I cared about was making it better.
“Hey…fuck the lasagna, okay? It’s a beautiful night. And we have bread. We can eat it outside.”
She managed a smile. “And salad. At least I couldn’t burn the salad.”
Stepping into action, I headed for her cabinets.
Heather followed. “What are you doing?”
“I’m seeing what else you have that we can make real quick.” I turned to her. “Do you have canned tomatoes and pasta?”
“Um…yeah…in the pantry.”
“Perfect. I’ll make pasta and a quick sauce to go with the bread.”
“You don’t have to do that.”
“It’s fine. I actually like to cook. It’s therapeutic after a long day.”
“You should do it more often then, because you’re kind of wound up half the time.”
As nervous as she claimed I made her, that didn’t stop her from being a little ball buster.
“Well, that’s why I came to the lake, isn’t it? To unwind? I can’t help it if a certain someone keeps intercepting.”
She fetched me a large can of tomatoes. “Do you really think I’m a pain in the ass?”
I looked back at her as I filled a pot with water. “You want to know the truth?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
I shut off the water and placed the pot on the stove. She leaned against the wall, smiling and waiting for my answer.
“I’m tough on you, but I don’t think you’re a pain in the ass. I actually admire you.”
Her eyes widened. “Really?”
“You’ve made some pretty big sacrifices for your mother. Not just that—I see how hard you work, even saw you getting groceries for the old lady down the road, too. You’re a good person, and you find time for others even though you have a lot on your plate.”
“You’ve been stalking me?” she teased.
“No. I was driving by when you were unloading your car and helping Mrs. Benson bring the stuff in. You didn’t notice me.”
“I still think you were stalking me.” She winked and popped open a can of seltzer for herself. “Hey, how did you know her name? You’ve met Mrs. Benson?”
“Oh, I’ve met Mrs. Benson.”
“Uh-oh. What did she do?”
“I was driving by her house one day and noticed some wind had taken her mailbox down. I knocked on her door to give her the mail that had fallen out and let her know I’d fixed it.”
“And?”
“Before I had the chance to tell her why I’d knocked, she informed me that I was much better looking than the guys they normally sent her.”
Heather laughed out some of her seltzer. “Oh no.”
“You know where I’m going with this, then.”
“Yes. I accidentally found out one day when I went to check on her. Definitely not something I’ll ever forget—learning first hand that Mrs. B spends her Social Security check on male escorts.”
“How old is she?” I asked.
“Ninety.”
“Damn. Well, she knows what she wants, I guess.”
“She must have been pissed when she realized you weren’t on the menu.”
As I stirred the pasta into the pot, I changed the subject. “So, what did Eric want? He told you to think about what he said…”
Heather crossed her arms and blew a breath up into her hair. “He wants me to agree to go out with him one night while he’s home. He says he wants to talk about what happened between us. I don’t know if that’s a good idea. Hurt me once, shame on you. Hurt me twice…you know that saying.”
“He hurt you pretty badly, huh?”
“Well, we were together for a long time, throughout high school. I always knew there was a risk in him going away to college without me. I just didn’t think he’d call me drunk and in tears, confessing that he’d messed up and slept with some girl at a campus party.”
“Shit. I’m sorry.”
She shook her head as if to dismiss my sympathy. “You know what, though? He did me a favor. At least I didn’t waste more time with him.”
“You should never settle for someone like that. I don’t care what he has to say to convince you otherwise.”
She continued to watch me cook until I plated two dishes of angel hair pasta and poured the red sauce over them.
“You okay with eating outside?” I asked.
“Yeah, it’s a nice night.”
We took the food out to the back patio. The sun was halfway down.
Scooting her chair in, she said, “This is a real treat. I should be ashamed at the way this dinner turned out, but I have to say, it’s kind of nice being served by you. It might even be worth burning the lasagna.”
She grinned, and it took everything in me not to smile back.
I pointed to her plate. “Stop smiling and eat.”
Heather twirled her noodles around her fork. “Can’t stop smiling, but okay.”
I needed a lock for my jaw, because I was smiling now, too. It was contagious.
We ate in silence for a while.
Wiping my mouth with a napkin, I said, “What would you want to be doing if this situation weren’t holding you back?”
Heather put her fork down and pondered my question. “Well, I would be in college, probably halfway through. I think later I’d want to get my masters to become a psychiatric nurse. But then I’d also want to find some other things I’m passionate about—like you have with your photography. Your photos are amazing, Noah. Truly. I’ve been meaning to tell you that.”
I’d never shown her my work. “You Googled me, I take it.”
“Yeah. Hope you don’t mind. Your photos from Havana were breathtaking. I’ve visited that page on your site several times. How did those pictures come about? What made you choose Cuba?”
It impressed me that out of everything on the site, she’d taken notice of that piece. The photos weren’t easy to look at, but they were real with a powerful message. Those particular shots were all in black and white.
“It was an assignment for a newspaper five years ago. You could say it chose me. I was working freelance at the time and traveled there with a reporter for a feature on the current state of Cuba and its people. It was one of my longest times away from home, actually. Only the photos are on my site, not the accompanying story.”
“Well, that’s the beauty of it. The photos tell the story even without the full explanation, which proves your talent. I’m not just saying that. Believe me, I’m a terrible liar. Your work is really amazing.”
I was never good at accepting compliments, especially about my work. But I tried.
“Thank you.”
“Will you tell me more about it?”
“The Cuba trip specifically?”
She leaned in, her eyes full of wonder. “Yeah.”
For some reason, I felt like obliging.
“I don’t know if you noticed the shots of the teenagers with tattoos. There’s this underground punk culture of young people there. Many of them were high on amphetamines when we were taking those photos.”
“Have you ever heard of Los Frikis?” she asked.