Chapter 4
When Leo marched into the kitchen, her mother did a double take. “Oh my God, Leontyne! You are soaked to the bone!”
Water dripped from Leo’s hair and clothes onto the kitchen floor, but she didn’t care. “Why didn’t you tell me Dad had a stroke last year?”
A wooden spoon slipped from her mother’s hand and clattered to the floor. “I…I… Please don’t be angry. It wasn’t anything like this one. They only kept him in the hospital for a few days. There was no need to upset you.”
“No need? I’m your daughter!”
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“It’s not like I can do much now either. I still would have liked to know.”
The phone started to ring, and her mother picked it up quickly, as if she was glad to escape the discussion. “Oh, hi, Julia.” She flicked her gaze toward Leo. “Um, yes, she’s here. Oh. That’s a wonderful idea, but you’ll have to ask her.” She held the phone out to Leo and whispered, “It’s Julia from the mayor’s office. They heard you’re home and would like you to sing at the county fair. Wouldn’t that be—?”
“Tell her no.” She was here to escape, not to give more concerts. “I’m going upstairs to take a shower.” Without waiting for her mother’s reply, she stalked out of the kitchen.
Everyone and their dog was calling her, yet her mother couldn’t manage to pick up the phone to let her know her father had suffered a stroke.
No wonder Holly had acted so judgmental. She had assumed Leo had known and not cared enough to come home.
It rankled her that Holly would think that, but at the same time, she couldn’t help being impressed with her. Back in New York—in any city anywhere in the world, really—people fawned over her and fell all over themselves to please her. Holly’s down-to-earth bluntness was refreshing. Maybe, just maybe, Holly really was who she appeared to be, someone who wanted to help without any ulterior motives. She certainly wasn’t a starstruck groupie; that much was for sure.
By the time Leo had showered and changed, she had calmed down a little, but she still wasn’t in the mood to go downstairs and face her mother or the callers who all wanted something from her—or rather, from Jenna.
She stepped up to the bookcase and ran her index finger over the top shelf. No dust. Her mother had gone out of her way to make her feel at home here, but Leo was too angry with her to focus on that right now, so she randomly picked books off the shelf to distract herself.
A hardcover copy of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Tattered paperbacks of Tipping the Velvet, Stoner McTavish, and other lesbian novels. She had bought them in a bookstore in St. Joe and displayed them proudly, knowing her parents wouldn’t recognize those titles as lesbian.
Next to her copy of Tina Turner’s biography, she came across her old high school yearbooks. She slid her senior yearbook off the shelf, sat cross-legged on the bed, and leafed through it.
Her senior picture made her cringe. Good thing she had a stylist and a hairdresser now.
The text beneath her headshot said she had been voted most likely to succeed. She traced the line of words with her fingertip. Guess they were right. Back then, she would have given anything to achieve fame as a singer, but now that she had it, she felt as if she had lost herself in the process.
Sighing, she thumbed through the rest of the yearbook, in search of Holly’s picture. She was only a few years younger than Leo, so she had to be in there somewhere.
The headshots of the underclassmen were smaller and arranged in alphabetical order within each grade. There she was, in the freshman section.
Holly’s hair had been longer and more reddish than auburn, pulled back into a ponytail, but the look in her startling blue eyes was the same. She was smiling into the camera, and the dimples framing her lips made her seem friendly, even a bit mischievous, as if she was about to crack a joke. At the same time, she somehow appeared to be above all the high school drama. In an X-Files T-shirt, she clearly hadn’t dressed up for photo day.
Leo leafed through the group photos of various sports teams, the drama club, and the school’s jazz band. Holly hadn’t been in any of those. Had she been an outsider, like Leo?
A knock on the door made her flinch. She quickly closed the yearbook and slid it beneath the blanket before taking a deep breath, preparing to face her mother and have a more civilized talk. “Come in.”
Holly opened the door a few inches and peeked in, wanting to make sure Leo was decent before she entered. No sense in repeating that little encounter in the bathroom, just in reverse.
Leo sat cross-legged on the bed. Her hair, still slightly damp, fell to her shoulders in untamed waves. With her long, elegant limbs and her golden tan, she resembled a lioness.
Shaking her head at the strangely poetic thought, Holly opened the door more fully. “I’m about to go home for the day, but first I wanted to…um… Can I come in for a minute?” This was something that she didn’t want to talk about in passing.
Leo unfolded her legs and put both feet on the floor. “Sure. Come in and have a seat.”
Her wet clothes were draped over the only chair in the room, so Holly had to perch on the foot of the bed. A hard corner dug into her butt. Frowning, she reached beneath the blanket—and pulled out a thin hardcover. It was a high school yearbook.
“Um, I was just…uh, looking at some old pictures.” A flush climbed up Leo’s throat and into her cheeks.
Holly couldn’t help grinning. Leontyne Blake, stammering and blushing like a teenager. It was almost cute. The thought gave her pause. Oh no. You know better than this. Thinking people are cute usually leads to wanting to date them, and that leads to them wanting sex. She wouldn’t go down that road again—and certainly not with Leo. But somehow, it had been easier to ignore Leo’s good looks when she’d been angry with her.
Not that she wasn’t still angry. She was, but now she was beginning to realize that maybe things weren’t quite as black-and-white as she had believed. Maybe she had misjudged her.
Leo sat at the other end of the bed and watched her curiously. Her blush slowly faded away. “So? You wanted to talk or something?”
“Um, yeah. I…” Holly glanced down at the golden numbers embossed on the cover of the yearbook. “I wanted to apologize.” She looked up. “I thought you knew about your father’s first stroke. I shouldn’t have jumped to conclusions.” Leo opened her mouth to say something, but Holly held up her hand. “To be completely honest, I still think you could have called or visited a little more often. But I’m your father’s nurse, so it’s not my place to tell you off the way I did. That was completely unprofessional.”
Now Leo just stared at her without saying anything.
“You know, this is the place where you either say ‘I accept your apology’ or ‘Go to hell.’”
A smile tugged on the corners of Leo’s lips. She shook her head, a pensive expression on her face. “I just don’t get you.”
“Is that the ‘I accept your apology’ or the ‘Go to hell’?” Holly asked.
Leo’s smile blossomed into a full-out laugh. “I accept your apology.”
The tension fled from Holly’s body. She blew out a breath, only now noticing how much it meant to her. “Thank you.” She put down the yearbook and stood.
The rich voice with the smoky edge Leo was famous for stopped her before she reached the door. “I really didn’t know. About my father’s first stroke. And I only found out about the most recent one a couple of days ago.”
Holly believed her. She turned around and studied her. “Would you have come if you’d known?”
Leo glanced down to where her fingers traced figure eights on the covers. “I…I don’t know.”
Well, at least she was honest. Holly could appreciate that.
“I think so,” Leo said after a while. “My father and I… Things between us are…” She waved her hand in an unsteady line.
“Complicated?” Holly supplied.
Leo barked out a laugh, but the sound held no humor. “You could say that, yeah. We haven’t had even one civilized conversation since I left home. Strike that. Even before, we never talked much, and whenever we tried, we usually got into an argument. And now…now we can’t talk, even if we wanted to—and my father made it clear as day that he doesn’t. So I don’t know why I should stick around.”
“You could still talk to him, you know?” Holly said softly. “He understands what you’re saying, even if he has trouble answering.”
“I don’t know what I would say.”
“And maybe that’s why you should stick around—to find out.” When Leo didn’t answer, she opened the door. Maybe she had said too much. She was Gil’s nurse, not Leo’s friend who was free to comment on her personal life. Forgetting that had gotten her into trouble, and she vowed not to make the same mistake again.
Just before she could pull the door shut behind her, Leo called, “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Holly looked back and met her gaze. “See you.”