Not This Guy!
Автор
Glenda Sanders
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1
MIKE CALDER WAS not a man prone to drinking alone, but he made an exception on his wedding day. Technically, he supposed, as he opened a second bottle of champagne, it was not his wedding day. Technically, it was the day his wedding was supposed to have been.
“To the bride!” he said, lifting the delicate wine flute in a mock salute before draining the champagne that had been purchased to toast the future of the happy couple. Growling in frustration, he hurled the empty glass against the brick fireplace and took smug satisfaction in the crash and tinkle of glass shattering against brick.
May she enjoy the same happiness she’s always enjoyed with her ex-husband!
She’d slept with him, for God’s sake! Her ex-husband. The ex-husband who’d gone into a rage and broken the windshield on Mike’s car with a baseball bat the first time Mike had parked it in her driveway. The ex-husband against whom—on the advice of an attorney Mike had paid for—she’d filed a restraining order because he’d harassed her to the point of putting her job in jeopardy.
She was supposed to marry me within the week, and she gets lonely and sleeps with her ex-husband! The ex-husband who’d forgotten the kids’ birthdays, not shown up for scheduled visits and moved across the country without a backward glance. The ex-husband who’d been so erratic with child support payments that Mike had to loan Beth Ann money to pay her electric bill.
The sound of the breaking glass aroused Dodger, Mike’s aging chow-shepherd-setter, who rose stiffly and ambled over to investigate the carnage.
“Sit!” Mike ordered, before the dog could reach the broken glass. “I may be a veterinarian, but I’m in no mood to sew up mutt noses or tongues tonight.”
No condition, either, he admitted as he pulled himself out of the recliner and stalked to the kitchen for the broom and dustpan. He went back into the living room, swept up the shards and dropped the demolished flute into the wastebasket. Then he took a liter beer stein, a souvenir from Oktoberfest, from the cabinet.
Much better, he decided, when he’d fit the better half of a bottle of champagne into the tankard. Now he could get down to some serious drinking without having to waste energy pouring and sipping and pouring and sipping. Damned sissy champagne flutes weren’t made for a man’s hands, anyway.
The mantel clock chimed the hour, taunting him with the realization that if things had worked out differently, he would have been leaving for a brief honeymoon right around this time.
“Prosit!” he toasted in the direction of the clock before taking a hearty gulp of wine.
If things were different! Yeah. Right. He chortled bitterly. If.
If he hadn’t left Beth Ann on the other side of the country. If her son hadn’t run away in the first place. If he’d gone to California to bring back the kid himself instead of buying a ticket for Beth Ann so she could do it.
If Beth Ann hadn’t slept with her ex-husband. It always came down to that. The bottle of champagne he’d already downed did nothing to dim the memory of their conversation—the one they’d had when he’d surprised her at her ex-husband’s apartment. It hadn’t taken him long to leap to the obvious conclusion. Beth Ann wasn’t able to look him in the eye and she spoke only in single-word sentences. It hadn’t been much of a leap.
To her credit, Beth Ann hadn’t tried to deny it when he’d confronted her.
She’d tried to explain, which was far worse.
“It just...it just happened,” she’d said. “I was so upset—”
Of course she’d been upset! Most mothers would be upset when their ten-year-old son got angry over losing electronic-game privileges and hitchhiked across the country to live with his father. She’d been frantic with worry and her seven-year-old daughter had been hysterical.
“I was...I got here, and I was so...relieved to see Danny safe, and Steve was so understanding—”
Understanding? Her ex-husband? The jerk? Mike had been too shocked to point out that he had been understanding, too—understanding enough to drop over a thousand dollars for plane tickets so Beth Ann and her daughter could fly from Florida to California to bring the runaway home.
It would have been kinder if Beth Ann had just shut up at that point, but she’d kept explaining. Or trying to.
“He misses us,” she’d said. “He says he’s learned his lesson. When he had to give us up, he realized—”
Mike had to clench his jaw to keep from wailing at her gullibility. “He didn’t have to give you and the kids up, Beth Ann. He gave you up voluntarily. He’s the one who decided to skip his scheduled visits and default on his support payments. He’s the one who decided he had to live on the opposite side of the continent.”
“He’s made mistakes—”
“How astute of you to notice.”
Beth Ann frowned. “He says he’s sorry.”
“How touching.”
“He and I were married twelve years, Mike.”
“You and I are getting married Saturday, Beth Ann,” Mike said sarcastically. “Doesn’t that mean anything?”
Her face turned tragic. “Oh, Mike, I’m so confused.”
“About us?”
“About—” She swallowed a threatening sob. “He wants us to stay here and try to make a go of it.”
“You’re not considering it?” Mike asked, amazed that he even had to ask. But as he gave voice to the question, he realized that she really was considering it.
“The kids are glad to see him. He is their father.”
“The father of the year!” Mike muttered bitterly. He saw the anguish in Beth Ann’s eyes. “You are considering it,” he accused.
Beth Ann exhaled a dismal sigh. “He’s been part of my life for as long as I can remember. We have a history.”
“You and Steven have a history. You...and I...and the children,” he said stiffly, measuring his words, “are supposed to have a future—beginning Saturday at two o’clock.”
Beth Ann pressed her palms to her temples as if suffering from an excruciating headache. An odd, high-pitched sound came from her throat. “Oh, Mike!”
“I’m leaving for the airport in half an hour,” Mike said crisply. “You and the kids can come with me, or you can stay here with the father of the year.”
“Mike, please. Be fair.”
Fair? he thought. He’d neutered her cat, spayed her dog, changed the brakes in her car, pruned her trees and cleaned her gutters. He’d held her hand through a visit to the emergency room with her daughter’s broken arm and given her son the birds-and-bees-and-safe-sex talk. Hell, he’d even spoken to her daughter’s class on Career Day. While her ex-husband was forgetting to write support checks and skipping scheduled visits with the kids.
“I’ve never been anything but fair to you.”
“But you can’t expect me to—”
“I didn’t expect you to sleep with your ex-husband.”
“I told you. That just...happened.”
“Yeah. Well, the thing is, it happened—and less than a week before our wedding.” Circling her wrists, he guided her hands away from her face and searched her eyes.
“Why?” he asked. “Why did you stay here? Why didn’t you come back to Florida and tell me about it so we could work through it?”
“I was embarrassed,” she said. “And confused.”
“About whether you’d rather be on the West Coast with him or on the East Coast with me?”
“About...everything,” she said with a sob. “Oh, Mike, I have to think—”
“If you have to think about it for more than five seconds, then you’ve already made your decision,” Mike said.
Within hours, he was on a plane headed for home. Alone.
Now, abysmally alone, he was drinking champagne on what would have been his wedding day, and the numbness accompanying the shock of their abrupt breakup was slowly giving way to a miasmic blend of unpleasant emotions: anger over Beth Ann’s infidelity; sadness over the loss of the closeness they’d shared; disappointment over his failure to make it work; self-loathing over having made the same old mistake again.
“This one’s for you, Calder,” he said, lifting the beer stein high. “To another outstanding job of proving that nice guys finish last.”
He chugalugged the champagne and reached for another bottle, thinking, with tipsy logic, that it was a good thing the wedding was to have been a small, intimate celebration. Otherwise, he might end up drinking himself to death, instead of just into a stupor.
The phone rang while Mike was in the process of uncorking the bottle. Mike decided to let the answering machine pick up the call. If it was anything less than a plague threatening to wipe out the entire house cat population of America, it would have to wait until he was over the hangover he was working on.
“I don’t know if I have the right person, but since your name is Mike—” The voice coming through the speaker was unfamiliar. An awkward pause ensued before the woman continued.
“I’m calling from California. My phone number is the same as yours except for the area code. I wasn’t sure I should call, but I was so upset that my husband said I should try.”
“Are you talking to one of those machines?” a male voice interjected from the background, only to be shushed by the frantic woman.
“We’ve been getting phone calls from a little girl named Shelly who keeps asking for Mike,” the woman continued. “She insists this is his number.”
The corkscrew was fully engaged, but instead of extracting the cork from the bottle, Mike froze, listening intently to the stranger’s voice. Beth Ann’s daughter’s name was Shelly.
“I finally asked her where Mike lived and she said Orlando, so I looked up the area code. If you know this child, please call her. She sounds desperate to talk to you. And if you are the right Mike, I wish you’d let me know so I can quit worrying. I mean...this could be a crank caller, but it sounds—”
Uttering a blistering curse, Mike set the bottle aside, lunged for the phone, thanked the woman for calling and assured her he would get in touch with Shelly.
He cursed again as he hung up the receiver. Why the hell couldn’t it have been something simple—like a plague threatening America’s house cats? If he had to list the things he didn’t want to do on this of all nights, talking to Beth Ann’s daughter would go at the very top.
With a forlorn sigh, he reflected that the only thing more pathetic than a seven-year-old girl without a daddy was a thirty-eight-year-old veterinarian without a family. He and Shelly had been buddies from the moment they met. Mike had filled in for the father who’d disappeared from her life, and Shelly had occupied the space in Mike’s heart that only a child could claim.
Up to the moment his taxi had arrived at Beth Ann’s ex-husband’s apartment, Mike had been hoping Beth Ann would come to her senses and agree to return to Florida with him. But it was Shelly who’d run to him, crying, for an urgent goodbye hug. The image of her pretty little face, contorted with grief over being abandoned once again, haunted him.
She’d been trying to call him.
Wearily, he looked up the number and dialed.
* * *
BETH ANN’S EX-HUSBAND answered the phone and summoned Beth Ann with a gruff growl. Mike was sure he meant for him to hear as he told Beth Ann in a scathingly sarcastic tone, “It’s your boyfriend.”
“Mike?”
“Hello, Beth Ann.”
“If you called hoping I’d be all nostalgic because of what day it is—after walking out on me the way you did—”
“I didn’t call hoping anything,” Mike said. If she’d had a change of heart, a sudden realization that she’d made a mistake by staying with her ex-husband, she’d have called him by now.
“Then why did you call?”
“To talk to Shelly.”
“No way! We’ve just got her calmed down. I don’t want her upset again.”
“Calmed down?”
“It hasn’t been a great day,” she said caustically.
“She’s been trying to call me,” he said.
“What? No way. She hasn’t even asked.”
“She’s been getting a woman with my number in your area code,” he said patiently. “Please, Beth Ann. Maybe I can explain—”
Beth Ann’s laugh was ugly. “Maybe you could explain to me.”
“We’d have to explain to each other,” Mike replied sadly, wishing it were possible. Wishing she could make him understand how she could have crawled into bed with her ex-husband after everything the jerk had done to her.
“Let me talk to Shelly,” he said softly. “Please.”
Her sigh of acquiescence slid through the phone lines. “I guess it can’t hurt anything. Just...don’t upset her, okay?”
“When did I ever upset her, Beth Ann?” He hadn’t created the confusion that had plagued the child’s life. He’d been prepared to step in and be the father she needed.
“I’ll get her,” Beth Ann said, leaving Mike holding the receiver to his ear, wondering how he was going to get through the upcoming conversation as he listened to vague noises of confusion and shuffling in the background.
“Hello.” The little-girl voice was squeakier than usual.
“Hey, Silly, is that you?”
“It’s Shelly,” she corrected. She didn’t giggle the way she usually did, but her voice gained strength as she fell into their old pattern of teasing.
“This is Mike.”
“I know.”
“I hear you wanted to talk to me.”
“Uh-huh.”
“What’s on your mind, Silly?” As if he didn’t know.
“Shelly!” she said with a weary sigh, as if the effort to keep up the game had overwhelmed her. But as she spoke again, it was outrage he heard in her voice. “Mommy forgot about the wedding. I tried to tell her it was today, but she wouldn’t listen.”
Mike searched frantically for a suitable response. Before he could come up with one, she continued. “I even showed her the calendar, and she still wouldn’t listen. She made me go to my room. Only it’s not my room. It’s a silly old storage room with a sleeping roll on the floor. And she said there isn’t going to be any wedding.”
“She’s right, honey.”
“But—I was supposed to be flower girl, remember? I had a special dress and everything.”
“I know. But sometimes—”
“Aren’t you going to be my new daddy?”
“No, Shelly. I can’t do that.”
“But I wanted you to be my daddy,” she said, her voice breaking.
“Oh, honey, I wanted that, too. But things between your mother and I just didn’t work out.”
“She said bad things about you after you left. I told her she wasn’t being very nice, and she told me I was being disrespectful.”
“You have to respect your mommy, Shelly. It’s not easy being a grown-up. She was probably a little sad. Maybe you could be extra nice to her right now.”
“But you were going to be my daddy.”
“You already have a daddy.”
“He’s not nice like you are.”
Mike closed his eyes and clenched the receiver in a death grip. Why didn’t she just take a dull knife and dig out his heart with it? “Give him a chance. You haven’t been around him in a long time.... Maybe he just needs to remember how to be a daddy.”
He could hear her breathing on the other end of the line.
“I still love you, Shelly. We can be buddies, even if I can’t be your daddy.”
“Can I call you?”
“Why don’t you write me letters? That way, you could send me pictures. And I’ll write you letters back.”
A sniff. “What about Lady and Tramp?” The stuffed animals he’d bought her on a trip to Walt Disney World had been “living” at his house for Shelly to visit when Beth Ann was visiting Mike.
“What if I sent them to you?” he suggested.
“In the mail?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Wouldn’t they be scared?”
“Naw! They’d have each other. It would be an adventure.”
“Okay.”
“When you get them, you can write me a note and tell me they got there safe and sound.”
There was a commotion at the other end of the line. “I’ve got to go now,” Shelly said, sounding vexed.
“All right. I’ll be looking for a letter from you.”
“Mike?” Beth Ann’s voice.
“I’m going to send her Lady and Tramp.”
“Thank you.”
“I assume you’ll still be there when they arrive.” He wasn’t even sure why he’d asked, especially in such a snide way. He was past hoping she might come to her senses and hurry back to him, begging for forgiveness and understanding and a fresh start. Somewhere between the Grand Canyon and the Mississippi River, he’d realized that she’d never really worked through her feelings for her ex-husband, and that he’d rushed into their relationship out of a yearning for roots and family instead of out of love for her. And Beth Ann...well, Beth Ann had been looking for a man she could count on.
“Why not?” she asked sharply. “Look, Mike, I told you I was considering staying in California.” There was a strained silence. “Actually,” she said finally, “I’ve been job hunting. You wouldn’t believe how much higher salaries are here.”
“I hope you find what you’re looking for,” Mike said. “I mean that.”
“Thank you.” She paused, then added hesitantly, “Mike—”
“Yeah,” he said, relieved to hear the note of finality in the way she addressed him. “Me, too. Take care of the kids, huh? They’re great kids.”
“You’re going to be a great father someday.”
“Yeah. Right.” Nice shot, Beth Ann, he thought as he replaced the receiver. She must have seen from the very beginning how much he wanted—needed—a family. And how vulnerable he was because of it. She’d played on that vulnerability as surely as he’d leapt at the opportunity to play the role of hero charging in to rescue the women and children from the bad guy.
The only problem was, the good guy didn’t end up with the girl.
Mike went back to the champagne, gave the corkscrew a savage yank and scrambled to get the stein under the mouth of the bottle as the liquid spewed forth. This was one night he didn’t want to waste a drop.
For a while he relished the sweetness of self-pity. He felt like hell, and no one could blame him. His fiancée had slept with her ex-husband and the child he’d grown to love like a daughter had been taken from him. Instead of becoming a family man, he’d become the cuckolded husband-to-be.
Husband-never-to-be was more like it! Husband-never-to-be, father-never-to-be, happy-never-to-be—
At some point during his consumption of the third bottle of champagne, Mike suddenly began to see his situation more clearly. It was as though a huge bank of lights had been turned on, illuminating truths that should have been obvious to him all along: he was a nice guy, and nice guys were fools. Clowns. Jesters in the court of courtship. Comic relief in the war of the sexes.
He was an anachronism, a fossil; the last dinosaur in the valley; the last cowboy wearing a white hat in a sea of black Stetsons; the last knight to don armor and go out to deliver maidens from peril.
Well, no more! he thought with drunken resolve. No one could be exploited unless he allowed himself to be. He was going to wise up and get tough. Get rid of his white hat. Put away his armor and quit rescuing damsels in distress.
He was going to join the rest of the hardened cynics in the real world. He was going to quit getting attached to fatherless waifs and desperate women. He was going to just swear off women altogether—
Swear off women?
Whoa! Stop the presses. Put on the brakes. What was he thinking? He didn’t want to swear off women! He wasn’t a monk. He was a healthy man in his prime and healthy men in their primes had needs, after all. He liked women. He liked the way they smelled, he liked the sound of their laughter and he liked the way they felt. Why should he give them up?
With the lucidity of logic that came from four bottles of champagne, he realized that he shouldn’t have to give up women at all. He just needed to find a different type of woman. A woman who would like him without needing him so much, who could do as much for him as he could do for her. Someone who could appreciate him without exploiting him. A woman unencumbered by the past and anxious to embrace the future, who was not only his intellectual equal, but his financial and emotional equal, as well.
A new kind of woman. That was it. The answer. He would be more selective. Particular. Discriminating. He would set certain standards and abide by them. No more blundering into relationships based on chemistry. No more being seduced by a woman’s needing him. No more getting attached to children who were no concern of his.
The longer he pondered the idea, the better he liked it. He hadn’t rushed into setting up a clinic or buying a house without preparing a list of requirements and shopping around. Why would he be less careful in selecting a woman?
The plan was too profound to be committed entirely to memory, he concluded. He needed something tangible to remind him of his resolve. With Dodger padding after him, Mike walked to the kitchen and dug through his catchall drawer for a notepad. Under the letterhead imprinted with the name Smith’s Worm Capsules, he wrote:
Mike Calder’s Minimum Requirements for a Woman
1. She will have a good job that pays well.
2. No children.
3. Doesn’t believe men are a scourge upon the earth—no abusive ex-husbands, stalking ex-lovers, harassing bosses or any other troublesome man in her past.
4. Drives a relatively new car still under warranty and has an established rapport with a professional mechanic.
5. Lives in apartment or condo, or has a lawn service under contract.
Pleased with his efforts, Mike read the list drunkenly to Dodger, who responded with a canine cock of his head and a soft whine.
“I know,” Mike replied. “I am a genius. Nice of you to say so.” He skimmed the list again. “Just one last thing—”
6. Sexy.
“There,” he said, adding a final period with the dot of his pen before returning his gaze to the dog. “A man has to have some fun, doesn’t he?”
* * *
MONDAY MORNING, Mike posted the list above the utility room sink at the clinic, where he would see it each time he washed his hands.
Suzie, his office manager, discovered it right away, as he’d known she would. Suzie always noticed everything. And Suzie always had an opinion. She responded to Mike Calder’s Minimum Requirements for a Woman with a derisive snort. “Did a little soul-searching this weekend, did we?”
Mike responded with a frown.
Undaunted, Suzie perused him with the sharp gaze developed during the raising of three sons. “You must have also done a little drinking. You don’t look as pretty as you usually do.”
“There was all that champagne,” Mike said, unfazed by her upbraiding. “I couldn’t let it go to waste.”
Suzie’s “harrumph” was like that of an impatient parent. “I knew it was a mistake for you to hole up by yourself. You should have been with people, gone out and had some fun.” She lifted the glasses hanging from a chain around her neck and put them on. Her forehead wrinkled with concentration as she gave the list a careful reading.
“I wasn’t in a partying mood,” Mike said dryly.
Suzie parked her glasses on the very tip of her nose and looked at Mike across the rim. “So you’re looking for a ‘rich bitch’ now.”
“I’m looking for an economic and emotional equal,” he corrected.
Suzie removed her glasses and let them fall to the end of the chain on her ample chest. “Seems a bit...extreme to me.”
“From now on,” Mike said firmly, “when I go out with a woman, I’m going to be more to her than a hunk of muscle and a checkbook.”
“Uh-huh.”
“I mean it, Suzie. I’ve been too easy too long. I’m tired of doing women’s yard work and fixing their cars and fending off their ex-husbands, then having them run off with the first jerk who comes along.”
“You’ve had some bad breaks,” Suzie conceded.
“Some? They should stamp Sucker across my forehead, the way they used to brand thieves.”
Suzie shrugged. “Whatever. It’s your love life. But you still seem like a yard-work-and-car-repair kind of guy to me.”
“That was the old Mike Calder.”
“Well, if you’re serious about this, you ought to be real interested in seeing the letter that came when you were in California. It’s from Samantha Curry.”
“Samantha Curry? Should I know the name?”
Suzie rolled her eyes. “Men! Don’t you read anything but the front page and the sports section? Just Samantha Curry of the Orlando Currys. She’s a socialite and a sort of professional volunteer do-gooder. She’s organizing one of those community rabies vaccination days and she wants you to man a clinic at one of the neighborhood shopping centers.”
“You think she meets my requirements?”
“She’s beautiful, single and rich.”
“No kids? No ex-husbands?”
“Just all that money and all those degrees from all the right schools.”
“Then maybe I ought to man a clinic. Send the form back to her and write the times on my calendar.”
“I’ll put you down for supplying a carton of vaccine, too.”
“That’s very civic-minded of me.”
“You want to make a good impression, don’t you?”
“Yes. And this time it’s tax deductible—unlike the tennis shoes I bought for Beth Ann’s son, and the lawyer’s fees I paid for Beth Ann, and the down payment I made on the braces for what’s-her-name’s daughter year before last, and...I could go on, but I won’t.”
Suzie placed her hand gently on Mike’s shoulder. “Let go of it, Mike. You’re a nice guy. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I don’t mind being nice, but I’m through being easy,” Mike said. “Women with sob stories can just find some other poor sucker to tell them to. Sob stories aren’t going to cut it anymore. Not with this guy!”
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