Heart-strong Read online

  HEART-STRONG

  by Bonnie McCune

  Copyright 2013 Bonnie McCune

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  Cover art by Joan Alley

  This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are the product of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. No part of this book may be scanned, uploaded or distributed via the Internet or any other means without the permission of Prism Book Group. Please purchase only authorized editions and do not participate in the electronic piracy of copyrighted material. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Published by Prism Book Group

  ISBN- 978-0-9858941-7-7 First Edition 2013

  Published in the United States of America

  Contact info: [email protected]

  http://www.prismbookgroup.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  PLEASE ENJOY THIS SAMPLE FROM A SAINT COMES STUMBLING IN BY BONNIE MCCUNE.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  CHAPTER ONE

  Rachel Kinsey always met men. Frequently unsuitable ones. Buskers whistling on pan pipes or thrumming drums. Winos old and young. Patched-up homeless with shopping carts, asking for a handout. But also construction workers, computer techs, teachers. She related to all sorts, inherently able to identify the human element in each.

  Her universal appeal to them was a sympathetic outlook and an open, trusting demeanor, the result of her big hazel eyes fringed with curly lashes and her teddy bear rounded cheeks. She may not have been the most gorgeous female in town, but she oozed empathy, compassion for their problems, understanding about their clashes with friends and family.

  Their universal appeal to her was a human connection with the male of the species. Men of all shapes, sizes, and colors fascinated her. She considered them as nearly a separate class of creatures. Lacking brothers, cousins, uncles and assorted other men in her family, and robbed of the weak connection she’d had with an emotionally distant father when he divorced her mother, she made males the subject of informal but intense scrutiny. She knew this weakness for fellow mortals, even unreliable or penniless fellows, caused many of her personal problems. But the failing, which had culminated in a defunct marriage with an infrequently employed handyman, also had brought her son Scott, now ten, so she loosed her curiosity unfettered.

  Late one afternoon in August she announced to her sister, “I met a man today.”

  “You’re always meeting men. Usually unsuitable ones,” her sister snapped back.

  “I don’t know if he’s unsuitable, but he was tall and had the brownest eyes. I’d know him if I saw him again.” In her musings, she tilted the water pitcher somewhere in the vicinity of the glasses.

  Sharon turned from the stove where she was wafting spoons of spaghetti sauce through clouds of steam and tomato splatterings. “Rachel,” she whooped and jumped across the kitchen to rescue the pitcher before the water spilled. “Was he another one of your weirdoes?” Sharon asked as she put the pitcher on the counter.

  “Oh, no. None of those. He was just a regular man. Had a decent haircut. Even wore a sports jacket. Although he did look...a bit ragged around the cuffs. And his tie was off-center.”

  “So a touch of vulnerability. Where did you meet him?”

  “Outside Super Shop “

  “What does he do?” asked Sharon.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s his name?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. All I know is I want to see him again.”

  “Well, you realize the chances of that.” Sharon moved the spaghetti pan to the sink and began draining it.

  “Yes, slim and none,” Rachel recited Sharon’s standard philosophy.

  * * *

  He could remember what she looked like. Just like the sketch he was attempting from memory. She’d made such an impression, he could almost see her sitting over there in the corner, her honey-colored hair matching the rays of the setting sun that filled the room, picking up the color of the potted mums and the warm tones of the oak dining table. Yes, not only was Jim a weekend artist, albeit a serious one, but also he was a romantic who’d absorbed his values in great gulps of popular culture—love songs, sentimental films, novels several decades past their initial popularity.

  Jim hadn’t noticed her at first outside the grocery store. They both had been looking at the ad taped to the window listing weekly specials. Outrageous, he’d been thinking, apples for two ninety-nine a pound. “Criminal,” she’d said and turned toward him. “Criminal. Apples at two ninety-nine a pound!”

  Then she’d looked up and up, and he’d looked down and down. She’d blushed. He’d flushed, never having felt such an instantaneous camaraderie with a woman before. He couldn’t, wouldn’t analyze the response, but figured her candor as well as her rounded figure and her understated attractiveness had something to do with it. He wished he’d thought fast enough to introduce himself, or ask her a question, anything to extend their time together. But he’d been too flustered.

  He usually went for blondes, but this little lady had an indefinable spark, as if she enjoyed every moment of life and shared that delight with those around her. Probably she loved to cook—her appearance at Super Shop and her familiarity with prices of produce indicated as much. Jim was so bored with the frozen, canned, and dried selections he juggled for meals, he could puke. And eating out, even with friends, was costly and, he admitted to himself, sometimes boring with their constant conversations about sports or excessive drinking.

  The woman he’d run into probably could discuss current events and art and had educated opinions on both. She certainly had decided judgments about costs of food. He wished he could get to know her better.

  Jim thrummed the eraser end of the pencil on the counter. Maybe she was his dream woman. Too bad he couldn’t translate his feelings into an adequate work of art. He sighed, laid the pencil down, shoved the drawing in a stack of miscellaneous papers, picked up the can opener and went to work on the two cans of spaghetti destined for his dinner.

  * * *

  The next night it rained. At precisely the same time she’d gone the evening before, Rachel ran to Super Shop, dodging umbrellas and puddles. She paused to take off her scarf and fluff her hair outside the window with the ads. No one else stopped in the rain except a plump old woman having trouble folding her portable shopping cart. Rachel went inside, picked up half a gallon of milk, and waited in the longest checkout line she could find. Busy surveying the other customers, she didn’t leaf through the celebrity and gossip rags, nor did she didn’t swear under her breath at the idiot paying for his purchases with loose pennies who grinned in her direction. There was no sign of the tall dark stranger, so she left the store.

  As she walked home, she daydreamed. If his attire meant anything, he probably had a decent job, one in management or a profession. And his demeanor was so welcoming; his eyes, so friendly. She’d felt immediately that they’d be compatible. She wished she’d see him again.

  * * *

  Jim leapt off the bus. A late client at the Center for Dispute Resolution made him miss his regular ride. He ran down the street to Super Shop, dodging umbrellas and puddles. No one stood by the window with the ads. He dashed inside, grabbed a loaf of bread and some bologna, and waited in th
e longest checkout line he could find. Was her hair dark blonde or light brown? He couldn’t recall. But he’d know her if he saw her again, with her direct yet trusting gaze and her whimsical air, like a beloved rag doll. He didn’t see her. At home he made himself a bologna sandwich smothered with ketchup and mayonnaise and stared now and then at the sketch he’d pulled from the pile of papers by the telephone.

  * * *

  The next night Jim was on time, and Rachel was late. Jim didn’t need a thing from the store—he bought a package of crinkle potato chips. He exited out the east door just as Rachel entered the west door. Her boss, a lawyer with high expectations of success but no money for overtime, had begged her to stay late to finish the legal research for a Monday court appearance. Rachel didn’t need a thing from the store, so she bought some oven cleaner.

  Chalking their first exchange up to chance, neither bothered loitering by or in the grocery store again. Once in a while, Rachel mentally kicked herself for not asking the man his name. Once in a while, Jim yearned over the sketch of the young woman with the short, straight nose and pouting lips.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Fall arrived, leaves dropped from trees, days shortened, nights grew colder, people became snippier. Rachel and Sharon shivered in their shared apartment in a vain attempt to control their heating bills by setting the thermostat at sixty-three. Scott spent all his spare time in the park playing soccer. When his obsession lasted longer than three weeks, Rachel withdrew fifty dollars from her tiny savings account to sign him up with the ten-year-olds’ team. Each weekend she dutifully went to a game. Even though she hadn’t yet learned all the rules, she cheered when the other parents cheered and picked up the empty soft drink cans dropped by careless young players.

  Scott’s team always lost. He blamed the coach. “If Jim were our coach, we’d win,” he said one day as he and his mother walked home. He alternately bounced and kicked the soccer ball.

  “Jim who?” Rachel asked.

  “Jim! The one who showed me how to block a punt.” Scott turned his foot sideways in a near-impossible position.

  “I thought Jim was a kid.”

  “Oh, Mom. I’ve told you a thousand times. I see him sometimes on Sundays when I go to the park with Owen to fool around. He played soccer in college. He was nearly a semi-pro.”

  “Nearly a semi-pro!” Rachel was suitably impressed. A sudden thought occurred to her. Like his mother, Scott had a positive genius for picking up eccentric men. She stopped in the middle of the sidewalk.

  “What does this Jim do? Does he hang out at the park all the time? Is he ever with anyone?”

  “He’s just a guy.”

  Rachel was not reassured. “Just a guy” could range from a drug pusher to a grandfather. “Don’t tell him where you live. And don’t go anywhere with him,” she cautioned.

  Despite the warning, Scott brought Jim home the very next day. Rather, Jim brought Scott. The impossible foot position had met the soccer ball with a predictable result—a strained ankle. Scott hobbled several blocks leaning on Jim. He finished the distance up the front steps and elevator in Jim’s arms.

  Just when she’d decided to use the oven cleaner purchased weeks before, the doorbell interrupted Rachel. She knocked her head soundly on the stove’s interior wall and moaned. She walked to the door rubbing her noggin and peered through the peephole. All she could see was Scott clutched in someone’s arms.

  “What are you doing?” Rachel shrieked as she threw the door open. She snatched her son from the stranger without looking at the man. “What on earth has happened? Are you hurt?”

  “Not much. I twisted my foot is all. Don’t have a cow.” Scott shot an uneasy look in the man’s direction.

  “You drive me crazy,” she continued, huffing and puffing her way to the couch where she lowered Scott gently to the cushions and began feeling the leg with careful fingers. “Does that hurt? That? That?” With each question she moved her hand to a different area of her son’s limb, eliciting a squeak of alarm from the boy. “We should get you to the hospital. Why wasn’t an ambulance called?”

  “It’s not that bad. It’s not even swelling.”

  “It’s bruised. A little.” She took a breath and straightened. “I guess you just need some ice and rest. But honestly, what else can happen? What a run of bad luck. It’s not enough that you broke your arm last year. Then you got your bike stolen. Then you lost those textbooks, and we had to replace them. Now this, whatever this is. All those things cost money.”

  Jim froze in the doorway. The woman from the supermarket! She certainly wasn’t his dream seductress. Her hair, what he could see of it under the raggedy scarf, was mousey brown. As he watched her bend over the boy, jean-clad bottom toward him, he realized she was far plumper than he remembered. And she seemed obsessed with money.

  Scott groaned. “The bike wasn’t my fault. Neither was losing the books. The principal told you that the driver went too far cleaning the bus.”

  “I know. But since my boss couldn’t give raises this year, any emergency is a financial crisis.”

  “I told you, you don’t have to pay for a doctor.”

  Mother’s and son’s voices rose higher, ear-piercing as two opera singers. Jim thought of one of the rules he’d learned at work—the power of mediation is not to force the involved parties into resolution, but to allow them to convince themselves. “Just a minute,” he broke in. “Scott’s injury is insignificant and the result of inexperience, not deliberation. And you are more worried than angry.”

  Rachel swiveled toward the door, a maternal snarl distorting her features. “No one asked for your opinion, so butt—” She dropped her words mid-sentence. Her jaw plummeted, her hand flew to her hair, in vain hoping it looked better than she feared, then she pulled off the scarf.

  “Haven’t I seen you at the Super Shop?” they asked at the same time.

  Jim crossed his arms over his chest and eyed Rachel. Now she looked a little more the way he recalled, although her nose was definitely pug, not straight. She was wearing a black t-shirt with gold lettering. A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle. Rachel saw him read the slogan on her shirt. She flushed.

  “A present from the women at my office after my divorce,” she explained. Aaah, the blush, the feminine delicacy. She definitely might be his dream woman, thought Jim.

  “I must look and sound like a witch,” Rachel said, her snarled locks standing straight out monster-style. “My sister says I’m headstrong.”

  “Nope. Worried, busy, frantic maybe. And caring,” answered Jim.

  Scott groaned from the sofa to draw attention to himself once more. An obedient mother, Rachel bustled around with aspirin, juice and ice pack until he was comfortable. As she worked, she snuck little glances at Jim, who had propped a shoulder against the wall and watched her, arms crossed. He wasn’t as tall as she’d remembered, nor as good looking. But definitely attractive and competent, with a hint of vulnerability in the way his eyelids shuttered his eyes when she looked in his direction.

  She invited him to have coffee, ruthlessly forcing down in her mind Sharon’s constant prediction—“Someday you’ll be sorry. You’ll bring home one of your weirdoes, and he’ll rob you. Or worse.”

  The Sunday shadows crept high up the walls before the two stopped talking at the kitchen counter. Little by little, coincidence by coincidence, in the manner of couples similar in age and outlook, newly met but fated to attract one another, they discovered things they had in common. Jim was a struggling lawyer, Rachel was a paralegal. Jim was an amateur artist, Rachel dabbled in pottery and weaving. Both loved classic rock but hated disco, punk and metal. Rachel danced Jim to the door to a rousing rendition of “I can’t get no satisfaction.” She stuck her hand out.

  “Thanks for your help with Scott,” she said.

  “Jim Landers,” he filled in as he grasped her hand.

  “Oh, you’re Jim. I should have guessed. I’m Scott’s mother, Rachel.”
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  “I know,” answered Jim. He continued to hold her hand. “Would you and Scott like to go for ice cream some afternoon?”

  “That would be fun.”

  They dropped hands simultaneously as if each had become too hot to hold. Rachel opened the door. Spotting some smudges on the woodwork, she wet her finger with her tongue and rubbed the dirt away. Jim stepped into the hall.

  “Thanks again. You’ve been super,” she said.

  “I hope so,” he replied.

  * * *

  Rachel slid into her relationship with Jim like she slid into a warm bubble bath. He made her feel protected, cozy, feminine. In fact she was in a bubble bath when she tried to sort out her sentiments in a conversation with her sister. “This relationship is quite different from the way I felt right after the divorce,” she told Sharon, who was plucking her eyebrows in the communal bathroom. “I’m not in a hurry for anything permanent, but it may come in time.” Rachel blew a cloud of suds up in the air.

  “I have to admit he’s the most normal man you’ve ever liked,” Sharon said as she yanked a recalcitrant hair. “He has a full-time job, opens the door for women, seems to brush his teeth. I keep holding my breath waiting for some fatal flaw.”

  “If he has one, I’d say he’s a perfectionist,” Rachel answered. “When he talks about work, he beats himself up if he handled a client wrong. And he wasn’t happy when I forgot to add a dab of mustard to the potato salad last week.”

  “They say women go for men who resemble their fathers or are the exact opposite. Any truth in this case?”

  “I certainly hope there’s no resemblance,” Rachel said. “Dad walked out on his family. I don’t need an undependable guy in my life.”

  * * *

  At Jim’s house, in between quarters of a televised football game and pulls on long-necked beer, he was reviewing his relationship with Rachel in a desultory relaxed stream of consciousness. The liaison was comfortable, he mused, like changing into an old shirt from a business suit. He didn’t worry about some other man stealing her away. Although she was attractive, she wasn’t a femme fatale. She was the wife and mother type.