place before her mother had taken it over. He’d throw a couple of cameras around. There'd be lenses and photos and magazines. He'd have half a dozen coffee cups on the nightstand. She bet he read in bed every night. Maybe he wore glasses, not nerdy guy glasses but the sexy smart ones. Bare-chested and be-speckled. Yow. Also not going there.
And she'd have to read in bed if he did. The light would be on, so there'd be no sleeping until they were both ready. She'd leaf through a magazine, something with recipes. She'd keep a pair of scissors in the nightstand drawer to cut out anything she wanted to try.
She shook herself, concentrated on the street, and what would happen back at Belmar with no place of her own, or money of her own for that matter. What would become of her? What had become of her? If she attended a high school reunion no one there would have predicted this failure. She'd been on track back then.
The derailment, the true derailment, had occurred when she'd fallen in love with Max. It wasn't his leaving that had done it. It was the falling for him she should have stopped. The leaving was inevitable, and she wouldn't make that mistake again. She'd managed to go on the first time, but she didn't have the time or the energy and optimism of youth on her side anymore.
She just had to avoid him. She pulled up to the curb, looked out at Max’s front door. Avoid him. Live with him, of course, because she was homeless and penniless and, oh yeah, her mother lived there. Maybe she wasn’t going to Max’s house so much as going home to mother’s. Her mother just happened to live with the man who had derailed her whole life. Steve had only put the finishing touches on it.
When she walked in, the crowd in the living room surprised her. She set her bag down and saw the boys on the couch that was her bed. Annie sat on the arm next to Guy. Her mom sat on the smaller couch beside Missy, and Max stood in the kitchen doorway with his hands palm out, indicating his complete innocence in the intervention.
She glared at him anyway. "Do you furnish crab puffs for all gatherings or just Bunco night?"
Max hooked a thumb toward the back of the house. "I could grill something."
"You are hilarious. Why didn’t you just tell them everything and then they’d all be off my bed?" She waved the length of the couch.
"I don’t kiss and tell."
Gwen looked at her mother. "There was no kissing."
"Well, that’s a shame." Ellen sounded so disappointed Gwen rolled her eyes at her.
Max straightened in the doorway. "You were the one with the rules. Now you’re saying there weren’t any?"
Ellen sighed. "Where there’s a will…"
"Alright." Gwen sat heavily in the nearest chair. "Max brought me ice cream and pastries. And I showed him around the house, and we drove separately back here."
Jason turned to Max. "You lookin’ to make her one of those big gals?"
Bryan seemed to consider that image. "Some guys like the extra poundage on a woman."
"A little," Jason curved his hands like an hour glass shape in front of him.
Guy laughed and mimicked Jason’s hour glass. "Curvy kvinne." His sly, if guttural addition made Annie blush and drove Jason to give him a fist bump.
Bryan offered a fist to Max. "You old guys got some mad skill. I never thought about just finding a skinny one and then giving her ice cream until she got the right size."
Max bypassed the fist bump. "I am a fountain of wisdom." He took Bryan’s hat off. "I just stop feeding them when they reach harvest weight." He whacked him with the hat and pointed at the women in the room, and Bryan mouthed a sorry.
"What happened when you saw Dad?" Missy looked so stressed, Gwen wanted to reach over and smooth the lines on her drawn face. She certainly didn’t want to add any.
"You know, there were some things about the house I didn’t know. I just did not know. So, it’s not going to work out quite like I thought. But it'll be fine."
"What’s not? What’s not going to work out?"
"Nothing. It’s just that there are some legal complications, that’s all. Some I didn’t foresee."
"He doesn’t want to sign the papers. That’s it, isn’t it, Mom? He won’t give you a divorce because he wants to take you back."