Knight In Black Leather by Gail Dayton (ebook reader ink .txt) 📕

he...liked you. You weren't so bad as Granma said. And--um--lots of stuff."

Probably things Marilyn had tried to say to her, but she refused to hear.

"So, since you got me on the phone, instead of your mom, anything you want to know?"

"Have you ever been in prison?"

"Prison? No. Never. Not even when I was a juvenile. I've been to jail a time or three, but the law says juvie stuff doesn't count."

"I guess not."

Eli told Julie about growing up in Scranton. He told her about his new business. He even told her about getting kicked out by his stepfather and having to survive on his own. He refused to tell her anything else about those years. He didn't talk about that. Not even with Marilyn.

Julie listened. She got mad at the places Marilyn got mad, laughed at the places Marilyn laughed. She was her mother's daughter, all right. Eli was beginning to feel pretty good about the conversation, feel like maybe he'd managed to fix at least some of the problem, when Julie dropped her little bombshell.

"So are you going to marry my mom?"

Twenty

***

It exploded smack in the middle of Eli's brain, blowing all coherent thought to hell and gone, just as Marilyn walked in the back door with dinner.

"I..." He couldn't get anything else out.

"What's the matter? Don't you want to marry my mom?"

"I..." He managed again. Marilyn walked up and kissed his cheek, setting the containers of food on the countertop. "...don't know," he finished. "I--we just met six weeks ago."

"Who is it?" Marilyn mouthed.

"It's Julie." Eli handed the phone to her, desperate for escape.

"Hi, sweetie, how are you?" Marilyn's eyes sparkled with sudden tears as she listened. Then a wicked grin spread across her face and she put her hand over her mouth as she laughed. "Oh, no, you didn't! Oh, you are so mean."

She looked up at Eli. "She was just teasing--giving you a hard time. She wasn't serious."

"Yeah, well, she about gave me a heart attack," Eli grumbled. He wasn't so sure about that teasing bit. She sounded fucking serious to him. He should have realized that by staying here with Marilyn, by bringing Pete into the picture, the question of marriage would inevitably come up, and he didn't do marriage.

Hell, he didn't even do love. How could anybody possibly think he could do marriage? There were damn few things that scared Eli, that even made him nervous. He'd seen it all, done most of it.

But just the idea, the very vaguest thought of marrying somebody, especially somebody like Marilyn, had him so terrified he was practically pissing his boots.

And yet, when you got right down to it, what was marriage but a bunch of promises written down? Promises to stick no matter what, to look after each other. Okay, yeah, to love each other--that was in there too and everybody knew Eli wasn't any good at that. But the other promises he'd already made. Maybe they weren't written down, but he made them, and he never broke a promise. Ever. So really, was it a bad idea?

Fuckin' A, it was.

The aroma from the burrito boxes finally penetrated his brain. He went to the stairs and called up. "Hey, Pete, wash your hands. Food's here."

Seconds later, Pete appeared, hands dripping water everywhere until he got around to wiping them on his pants. He took the plates Eli handed him and set them around the dining table they'd moved from the apartment.

"Okay, I'll look for you then," Marilyn was saying as she came into the room. "I'm really glad you called. Yes. Me, too. Love you."

Marilyn hung up the phone. Then she threw her arms around Eli and hugged the stuffings out of him as she planted a smacking kiss on his mouth. "I don't know what you said to her," she said, hugging him even tighter. "But thank you. She's coming home for spring break."

They had a week to get used to living in a three-person household before it became four people at spring break. Eli was spending six days a week at the shop, but he split the time with Frank, so some days he went in late and some days he left in time to pick Pete up at school. Pete chafed under the restrictions imposed on him, but until Flash was behind bars again, the kid wasn't going anywhere without an adult along.

Marilyn came into the shop for the grand tour one day and wound up handling a customer with a complaint about a bill. Frank had added it wrong--but apparently neither one of them could add, because it was added in the customer's favor. By the time Marilyn was through soothing tempers and making the Harley-riding biker happy with his discounted repair, she'd been drafted to handle the office work.

Spring break changed all that. Pete went down to the shop with them, where he was bored to tears after an hour or so of tinkering. Julie came home from college to stay out most of every night catching up with old friends and then sleep most of every day. She did occasionally come get Pete in the afternoons and take him home where he could play video games or watch rented movies, but Marilyn could feel Julie's resentment every time Eli walked into a room where she was.

She tolerated his presence, not much more. Still, she was trying, which was more than Marilyn's sisters and mother were willing to do. Marilyn was careful to make time for "just us girls" activities and they seemed to help. So did the board games at the dinner table Julie's last night home. They played "cutthroat Monopoly" with everyone cheating for all they were worth. Julie commented as they went upstairs for bed that she didn't remember laughing like that in a long time.

On Sunday, before Julie got back in the old car to drive back to school, she hugged Marilyn goodbye. Pete tackled her for his own style of bear hug. Then, to everyone's