Leaving Normal, Stef Holm [ebook reader screen .TXT] 📗

"Let me know the exact day and I'll mark it on my calendar."

Ever since they'd lost their mother to breast cancer, the sisters religiously went for their yearly mammograms together.

"I will. I think it was the seventh."

Their food arrived and they ate while continuing to discuss family matters, then returned to the flower shop to discover the plumber had to be called once more to take another look at the leaky pipe in the restroom. This was the third time he'd come out to work on the pipes.

And Jonathon had rescheduled three times.

For some reason, Natalie felt as if it was a bad omen.

Later that night, after closing Hat and Garden, Natalie walked to the Stonehouse to meet Jonathon. She wore boots and, by the end of the sixth block, she wished she'd driven over. But the winter sunset was pretty and the outside temperature hadn't felt that cold when she'd started out. Now her cheeks were numb.

So much for her worries about keeping Jonathon waiting—he'd called to say he was running late. His eldest son had to be fitted with a new mouth guard and there was a holdup at the dentist's office.

Jonathon had two sons—a sixteen-year-old who attended Centennial High and a fourteen-year-old who went to Lowell Scott Middle School. The two boys played any game imaginable depending on the season.

They'd been on the football team, the soccer team, baseball and hockey. Right now they were thick into basketball and wrestling. Jonathon's schedule revolved around his sons' games.

Natalie had never been really big into sports, perhaps going to a Boise State football game or two in the fall to get into the college-town spirit. Aside from that, she bypassed ESPN.

She questioned whether or not she and Jonathon had some common ground, then quickly discounted that thought. She was here just to have fun, to enjoy a man's company, to not put undue pressure on herself to make anything more out of it.

Natalie had freshened her makeup at the flower shop before leaving and now wondered if she should have changed into something less businesslike for an evening date.

Date.

The word had become almost foreign to her. It had been months and months since she'd been out. After those last few encounters, and doing the speed-dating session, she'd sworn off of dating.

What in the world was she doing here now? She'd barely talked to Jonathon on the telephone for more than five minutes at a time; she didn't know him. So she'd done the floral arrangements for his wife's funeral; that was years ago. He could have hang-ups, but she had no way of knowing about them until it was too late.

The back of her throat tightened, her palms grew damp.

This is insane.

She proceeded to the bar, trying to keep a modicum of composure. Glancing at the time on her watch, she took a seat at the end of the bar, hating every second of sitting alone, looking as if she were trying to be picked up.

"What can I get you?" the twentysomething bartender asked her.

"I'm waiting for someone. I'll order when he gets here."

He moved down to the end of the bar, took another order, then came back by her to fill a glass with beer on tap.

Licking her lips, Natalie contemplated asking him something. Then she just went ahead. "Have you ever been asked to order a cab for a woman if she needed one?"

"Sure."

"How do you know she needs one?"

"She just tells me," he replied, shrugging.

"But what if she couldn't tell you—what if the guy she didn't want to be spending the evening with was right next to her?"

"Never happened before."

Making a quick decision in what was perhaps a moment of lunacy, she replied, "If I ask you to make me a screwdriver, that means call me a cab."

"Excuse me?"

"I'm meeting a man and I didn't drive over here and I'm thinking I might need a backup plan." Although why she might need such a plan, she had no clue. But Sarah had put the germ of the idea in her head. "Where is your ladies' room?"

"In the back."

"Is there a back door?"

"Yes." His blond hair, shaved in a precise crewcut, picked up the backlights from the mirrored bar.

"Good. So if I ask you to make me a screwdriver, call me a cab and have the driver pick me up in back."

"Uh, okay."

She reached into her purse, collected a bill and slid it toward him.

He raised his hands. "That's okay. I've done worse for nothing."

Almost twenty minutes later when Jonathon hadn't shown up, Natalie's nerves were stretched taut. Her bad feeling returned tenfold and she was borderline calling for a cab herself and going home.

But then a tall man approached the bar.

Jonathon.

Although looking stressed and tired, he was very handsome. He had on a dress shirt, suit coat and slacks.

"So sorry I'm late," he apologized. His eyes appeared as kind as she'd remembered. He didn't look awful, didn't come across as self-absorbed or as if he had planned on letting her wait so long.

"My days are crazy." He laughed, a show of white teeth beneath his mustache. "Sometimes I wonder if I can keep this up."

His cell phone rang and he cut himself short, glancing at the caller ID. "Excuse me. It's my son's coach." He answered the phone, and the earlier optimism Natalie had felt just faded.

She waited, gazing pointedly at the bartender and smiling, trying not to convey the tangle of indecision flitting through her. She thought about the mound of laundry she'd yet to complete, and the data she could be inputting into Quicken tonight for Hat and Garden's books.

It was a sad commentary that she considered such mundane events more important than a drink and dinner with a nice-looking man.

Jonathon disconnected the call. "Sorry. My boy's been benched for the last several games because he has a hairline fracture on his big toe. I told the coach he's not shooting a ball with his damn toe but with his arms and hands.