A Promise to Cherish Read online

  “Don’t tell me you ran all the way over here,” Lee said.

  He nodded, still trying to catch his breath.

  “But it must be eight miles!”

  “Eight mi . . . hiles is nothing. I’m in goo . . . hood shape.”

  “I can see that.” And she could, in spite of his breathlessness. He looked like poured copper, wet and smooth and sleek and sculptured, the muscles of his legs as hard as an Olympian’s, his shoulders glossy and well developed.

  “Must’ve lost six pounds of sw . . . sweat on the way ov . . . over here though.”

  “I can see that, too.”

  He drew in a large gulp of air, his breathing growing even while he continued to slump against the rail. “You wouldn’t turn a man away thirsty, would you?”

  “And risk a darn good job?” Lee returned impertinently. “Come on.”

  Sam boosted himself away from the railing and followed Lee inside, making her uncomfortably conscious of her bare feet and legs and the strip of exposed skin between her skimpy bandeau top of white stretch terry and the faded denim cutoffs with strings dangling down her legs. She resisted an urge to run a hand over the single coarse braid that fell down her back and was as frayed around the edges as her cutoffs. She led Sam along the short hall to the rear of the house, where the kitchen’s sliding glass door stood open to her small, shady patio. He stood before it, hands on hips, letting the draft cool his sweating body, as she opened the refrigerator.

  “Here.” She moved behind him with two clinking glasses.

  “Thanks.”

  “Let’s go out on the patio where it’s more comfortable.” She slid the screen open, and he followed. There was only a single webbed lounge chair, and before he could protest, Lee plopped down on the concrete, facing the lounge chair with her legs crossed Indian fashion. “Have a seat,” she said.

  “No, here, you take—”

  “Don’t be silly. You’re the one who just ran eight miles, not me. Anyway, the concrete is cool.”

  He shrugged, dropped into the lounge chair, took a sip of tea, and glanced around at her pots of bright red geraniums, asparagus fern, and vinca vine. It was cool and restful in the shade, but Lee felt warm and uncomfortable as Sam’s eyes returned to her. What should she say to this man who refused to accept her brush-off and appeared at her door the next day with incorrigible brashness . . . then made her laugh!

  “Do you run every day?”

  “I try to.”

  “I don’t think I’d care to on a day like today. It’s supposed to get up to ninety-five degrees.”

  “That’s why I run in the morning.”

  “Mmm.” She sipped her drink, aware of his eyes, which made a periodic sweep of the geraniums but always returned to her bare knees.

  “Did I interrupt something important?” He glanced toward the house, where the vacuum cleaner was sprawled across the living room floor.

  “Just the weekly house cleaning.” Lee grimaced, then added, “Ugh!”

  Sam laughed, then the corners of his lips remained in a teasing grin. “Heap big disgusting job, cleaning the teepee?”

  She couldn’t stop her smile. “Show some respect, would you, Brown?”

  “Well, you should see yourself ”—he gestured with his glass—“sitting there barefooted with your legs crossed and that braid dangling down your back and your skin the color of a too ripe peach. The name Cherokee fits better than ever.” He polished off the rest of his tea in one gulp and set the glass down, still grinning.

  “You know”—she tipped her head to one side—“it puzzles me why I let you get away with it. If anybody else said things like that to me, I’d give ’em a black eye.”

  “You tried that once on me too, remember?”

  “You deserved it.”

  He threw his head back, closed his eyes, and crossed his hands over his naked belly. “Yeah, I did.”

  How was a woman supposed to deal with a man like him? There he sat, as composed as a potentate, looking for all the world like he was going to take a nap on her patio.

  “If you just stopped by to catch forty winks, do you mind if I finish my cleaning?”

  He opened one eye. “Not at all.” The eye closed again, and a moment later Lee slid the screen door open. The vacuum cleaner wheezed on, and for some reason she found herself smiling. She heard nothing more from Sam Brown until about fifteen minutes later, when she was watering the living room plants. He stepped inside and stopped in the hall behind her. “Would you mind if I used your bathroom before I head back?”

  She turned to see him filling the living room doorway with his bare shoulders and chest. “It’s upstairs, to your right.”

  He sprinted up the steps as she turned back to watering the plants. But a moment later she remembered the open door to the extra bedroom and turned, ready to bolt up and close it before he emerged from the bathroom. But as she reached the bottom step, the door above clicked open and the muffled thud of his footsteps sounded across the hall, pausing momentarily while she backed up, listening, a hand pressed to her heart. Again his footseps neared, and she scurried out to the kitchen, where she was busily scouring the sink when he found her again.

  “Thanks for the iced tea. I’ve got an eight-mile run yet, so I guess I’d better go.”

  She ran her hands under the water, grabbed a towel, and followed him idly toward the front door, conscious of a great reluctance to see him leave. They stepped out onto the sunny front stoop, and he moved down two steps, then turned as she leaned against the railing with the towel slung over her shoulder. “I’ll see you Monday, Cherokee,” he finally said. The sun lit his hair to russet and his skin to copper as he gazed up at her without making a move. In another minute he would turn and jog off across the city. And all of a sudden she couldn’t let him go. “It’s eighty-five degrees already. There’s no need for you to run all the way home. I can give you a ride if you want.”

  “What about your house cleaning?”

  “It’s all done.”

  “In that case, I accept.”

  Her heart went light and happy. “Give me a minute to put on some decent clothes, okay?”

  She’d already stepped through the front door when his question stopped her. “Do you have to?”

  Over her shoulder she threw him a scolding expression, but he only raised his palms, shrugged, and grinned.

  She returned shortly, dressed in white pedal pushers and a red spaghetti-strap top that bloused at the waist and just above her breasts. As her bare feet slapped down the steps, a pair of red canvas sandals swung jauntily from two fingers, and white feathers bounced in her ears. Sam was leaning against the back fender of her dusty Pinto. He nudged himself upright and opened her door, waiting while she got in.

  When he was seated beside her, she put the car into reverse. “If I remember right,” she said, “you live on Ward Parkway . . . in the family rattrap.” She gave him a sidelong grin.

  “Everybody’s got to live somewhere.”

  He settled back for the ride, and fifteen minutes later Lee was following Sam’s finger as it pointed toward the cobbled drive of a majestic, well-preserved mansion.

  Cradling the wheel in her arms, she stared in undisguised awe. Realizing Sam hadn’t moved, she turned to give him a sheepish grin, then gazed up the ivy-covered chimney of the enormous stucco tudor home. “Nice little rattrap you live in,” she said wryly.

  “Would you like to see it?”

  “Are you kidding?”

  “Mother’s not home. She’s out golfing.” The mention of his mother made Lee quail momentarily, though she wanted very badly to go inside his home and see where he lived, how he lived.

  He seemed to sense her hesitation and turned, resting a knee on the seat between them, an arm along its back. “I’d like very much to spend the day with you, Cherokee. What do you say we do the town? Anything at all—think of the craziest, most illogical things you’ve ever thought of doing, and we’ll try every one of ’em
. And no more of what happened in the orchard yesterday. That’s a promise.”

  It was a promise she would not have extracted had the choice been left up to her. “I work for you! Doesn’t it sound just a little . . . well . . .”

  “Hell, is that all? You think that if we end up more than friends you’ll lose your job if and when the romance is over?”

  “Something like that. Or at least it’ll be a lot more strained when we bump into each other in the office every day.”

  Engaging creases crinkled the corners of his eyes. “Maybe I should fire you here and now so the problem doesn’t arise.”

  “Brown, you’re impossible.” But she couldn’t help smiling as she shook her head at his foolish reasoning. Yes, he was impossible. Impossible to resist, with his dark good looks and his engaging sense of humor. She thrust her worries aside and promised herself a day of carefree fun. She would laugh and return his bantering and teasing and accept the fact that she enjoyed his company immensely.

  “Say yes,” he coaxed.

  She gave him a wry corner-of-the-eye smirk. “You gonna fire me if I don’t?”

  “No.”

  “Then, yes, damn you.”

  The house was all cool class with an open stairway that dropped from the biggest fanlight window Lee had ever seen. Sam ran upstairs, leaving her to look around while he took a quick shower and changed. She wandered from room to room, hands clasped behind her back as if afraid to touch what she wasn’t supposed to. The living room had two enormous sets of fanlight doors opening onto a glass-walled sun-room that overlooked the side yard, where the Kansas City traditions had been sustained—lush flower beds curving around ancient magnolia trees; a small fountain spouting water from a cupid’s ewer; and wrought-iron benches enclosed on three sides by precision-trimmed boxwood hedges.

  “Ready?”

  Lee turned to find that Sam had come up silently behind her on the thick, white carpeting. He looked as inviting as his house and yard. She forced her eyes back to the luscious view outside. “I had no idea,” she murmured.

  “It gets kind of lonely sometimes,” he replied.

  Again she turned. He was standing nearer, smelling of fresh soap and that everlasting Rawhide scent. His car keys were in his hand.

  “Let’s go get crazy,” she said, giving him a devilish look meant to suggest just that.

  THEY took the city by storm, skittering across it like crazy bedbugs. Sam knew Kansas City well, both its fun spots and its history, and he introduced Lee to both. They rented roller skates and wheeled through Loose Park, where the famed artist Christo had once covered the sidewalks with shimmering gold cloth and entitled his work “Wrapped Walkways.” They bought bandages at the drugstore and entitled their works “Wrapped Knees.” They bought a rhinestone ring at the Country Club Plaza and put it on the finger of a fountain nymph in the Crown Center, declaring a bond forever between the two magnificent landmarks whose creators, Lee learned, had both had the initials J. C. They got separated in the midst of the colorful Festa Italiana in Crown Center Square and recovered each other from the arms of exuberant Italian dancers. They ate ice cream at Swenson’s and drank piña coladas at Kelly’s Saloon, then nearly lost both on the Zambezi Zinger at Worlds of Fun, and settled their stomachs by lying flat on their backs between rows of markers at Mount Washington Cemetery. They spit into the “Mighty Mo” off the middle of the Hannibal Bridge, with laughing apologies to Octave Chanute, who hadn’t taken two and a half years creating it just to have two zanies use it for this! They slipped into the Truman Library and left a note commemorating the date in the Encyclopedia Britannica—in Volume 7, page 754—promising to come back a year from then and see if it was still there.

  All day they walked along Kansas City streets named after the city’s founders—Meyer, Swope, Armour. Sam showed Lee Kessler Boulevard, named after the landscape architect who’d mapped out the entire beautification system of boulevards, gardens, and fountains that made the city a splendid kaleidoscope of beauty. He told her the history of William Rockhill Nelson, the founder of the Kansas City Star, who had fought for the city’s approval of the unique boulevard network for fourteen years, and of how Jesse Clyde Nichols’s visionary planning had brought sculpture, fountains, and art objects to the city’s intersections. They scampered, carefree, through the sun-splashed Kansas City day, and when night fell and the lights of the fountains lit their lilting waters to ruby, emerald, and sapphire, Lee and Sam sat on the edge of one eating Moo Goo Gai Pan and fried rice from little white cardboard containers.

  “How’s your knee?” Sam asked.

  Lee lifted it and checked the bandage and the dried blood on her white pedal pushers. “Still intact. Next time I won’t let you talk me into doing three hundred sixty degree turns when I haven’t been on skates in years.”

  He chuckled, but his eyes rested on her with a warm, appreciative glow.

  “You’re a helluva good sport, you know that, Cherokee?”

  “Thanks. You ain’t so bad yourself, Your Honor.”

  “You ready to call it a day?”

  “Am I ever.” She patted her stomach, sighed, then stacked the white cartons one inside the other. They meandered away from the fountain toward Sam’s car, dropping their trash on the way . . . and somehow when he returned to her side, his hand took hers . . . and somehow she didn’t mind a bit. A few minutes later, as their wide-swinging steps moved more lazily, Sam Brown looped an arm around Lee’s neck and drew her close to his side. It felt good to be there, so she lifted a hand and hung it from his wrist, watching their feet go slower and slower.

  Sam drove leisurely through the Kansas City night, listening to the night sounds of crickets and frogs through the open windows. The fountains along Ward Parkway shushed past, and Lee rested her head against the seat, wishing the evening needn’t end at all. Sam pulled up in his driveway and turned off the engine. Neither of them moved.

  “Thanks for a really fun day,” she said softly.

  “The pleasure was mine.”

  Still neither of them moved.

  “I see Mother’s home. Would you like to meet her?”

  “Not tonight. It’s late . . . and I’ve got bloody knees and Moo Goo Gai Pan on my shirt.” The very thought of meeting his mother threatened to flaw the perfect day.

  Lee felt Sam studying her across the car seat, and a moment later his voice came quietly. “Cherokee?”

  “Yes?”

  He hesitated before saying, “There’s no Moo Goo Gai Pan on your shirt.” Immediately she reached for her door handle, but his hand came out to detain her. “I’d really like you to meet my mother. Why are you running away?”

  She laughed nervously and said to her lap, “I’m really not very good with mothers.” She turned an entreating glance up at him and added softly, “I’d rather not.”

  His thumb moved softly, brushing the crook of her elbow. “Do you mind telling me why?”

  She considered doing just that, then answered without rancor, “Yes, I do mind.”

  Disregarding her answer, he went on, “Let me guess. It’s got something to do with your being part Indian.”

  She was stunned that he’d figured out that much of the truth and felt as if, for a moment, he’d looked into her very soul.

  “H . . . how did you know?”

  His eyes moved to the feathers at her ears and with a single finger he set one in motion, then explained, “You’re very defensive about it, you know.”

  “Everybody wears Indian jewelry these days. It’s very in.”

  “Don’t get mad, Cherokee. It’s been a great day, and I want to keep it that way. But I wish you’d level with me. So far you haven’t told me much of anything about your past.” A long pause followed before he encouraged softly, “Why don’t you tell me now?”

  She considered for a moment and realized she wanted very badly to tell him. But it was hard to explain. It had been so long.

  “I . . . I don’t know where to begin.�
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  “Begin with your husband. Was he white?”

  “Yes.” She dropped her eyes.

  “And?”

  “And . . .”

  When she didn’t go on, he urged softly, “Look at me, Cherokee. And what?”

  His eyes were pools of shadow as he leaned across the dark confines of the car, and at the concern in his voice she suddenly found herself wanting to tell him things she’d promised herself never to reveal. But she needed to put some distance between herself and Sam Brown while she told him, so she opened her door and got out, leaving him to follow. As they ambled slowly toward her car, she began haltingly.

  “Joel married me in one of those . . . those idiotic rebounds from the woman he should have married in the first place. A very white woman of whom his mother heartily approved. He’d . . . he’d had a fight with her, so when he met me it was . . .” She sighed and looked up at the stars. “Oh, I don’t know what it was. A chemical mix-up, maybe. A stupid impulse. But we didn’t think it out at all. We just did it. Too fast, too . . .” She shrugged and hugged her arms as they moved across damp grass. “Nothing about it was right, not from the very first, except maybe the sex.

  But that’s not enough to sustain a marriage. After a while his mother’s disapproval of me began to wear on Joel, and he began blaming me for alienating him from his family. Within a year after our divorce, he married the girl his mother had been telling him all along he should have married.” They stopped at her car. “So now you know why I’m not too good with mothers.”

  The lights from the house spilled in long white splashes across the dark lawn behind them. Sam stood with a hand in his trouser pocket. Lee waited for his response. When it came, she was pleasantly surprised. The hand came out of his pocket and captured her elbow and he spoke in a soft, cajoling voice.

  “Now that that’s out of the way, come here.” His gentle grip swung her around to face him, then he looped his arms around her waist till their hips rested lightly against each other. And suddenly she forgot about mothers and personal histories, for Sam Brown’s face was smiling down at her through the warm, flower-scented night. It seemed as if the beguiling fountains of Kansas City itself danced within Lee’s heart as she waited for one thing she needed to make this day end in total perfection. Then he lowered soft, warm open lips over hers, and she lifted her own, slightly parted, readily accepting the brush of his tongue upon hers . . . but softly, gently.