For the first time since the afternoon of her wedding, some of the darkness inside him lifted. He walked from one window to the next, envisioning their meeting. She would cry, of course, but he mustn't give into any emotional manipulation on her part. After everything she had put him through, he wouldn't make it easy for her. He would be tough, but he wouldn't be unreasonable. Eventually, Susannah would thank him for treating her so compassionately. Years from now they might even be able to smile about what had happened.
Feeling much more like himself, Joel returned to his bed. As he sank back into his pillow, a sigh of satisfaction slipped from his lips. He had been too emotional about all of this.
By this time tomorrow night, he would have his daughter back. And then everything would be all right.
The afternoon was unusually hot for Northern California. Susannah had propped the garage door open, but only an occasional breeze managed to make its way inside. Even though she had pulled her shorter hair into a ponytail with a red rubber band from the morning newspaper, her neck was damp. She looked up from the board she was stuffing to study Sam. He had a bandanna wrapped around his forehead so he didn't drip sweat onto the boards. For a moment she let her gaze linger on the muscles bunched beneath his T-shirt.
"I sure as hell hope Pinky doesn't decide to renege on the deal," he said abruptly. "I've met guys like him before. They're hardware freaks-seduced by the last piece of equipment they set eyes on. Half the guys in Homebrew must have discovered his place by now, and I'll bet some of them are trying to sell him their boards. If we don't get ours to him fast, he might strike a deal with someone else and then back out on us."
Susannah rubbed the small of her back where it was aching from having been bent over the assembly table for so long. "It seems to me that we have enough real problems without inventing unlikely ones." She stretched, trying to work out the kinks. "Remember that we have a contract and the others don't."
The muscles she had been admiring beneath his T-shirt grew unnaturally still. Slowly, she laid down her soldering iron. "Sam?"
He didn't say anything.
A warning bell went off in the corners of her mind, and she pushed herself up from the table. "Sam, you do have a written contract with the man, don't you?"
He became unbelievably busy with the board he was putting into the burn-in box.
"Sam?"
He turned on her belligerently. "I didn't think about it, all right? I was excited. I just didn't think about it."
She pulled off her reading glasses and rubbed her temples.
Suddenly she felt very tired. Her love for him kept blinding her to the fact that he was only a kid. A wild kid with a silver tongue. And she was an uptight socialite, and Yank was a hopeless nerd, and none of them knew what they were doing. They were goofing around, playing at being grownups. Why was she even surprised that he hadn't thought to draw up a contract? At that moment, she realized how insurmountable their problems really were. They were deeply in debt. It was only a matter of time before this house of cards they were building came crashing down around them.
"Look, don't worry, okay?" he said. "I told you the guy's a hardware freak, and we've got the best piece of hardware in the whole Valley."
She wanted to yell at him and tell him that it was time to grow up. Instead, she said wearily, "No more oral agreements, Sam. From now on everything has to be in writing. We can't ever let this happen again."
"Since when did you start giving orders?" he retorted. "You're sounding like a real bitch, you know that?"
Perhaps it was the effect of the heat, or the ache in her muscles, but her customary patience deserted her. A surge of righteous anger swept through her, and she slapped the flat of her hand down on the table. The sound reverberated through the garage, startling her as much as it did Sam. For a few seconds she stared down at her hand as if it belonged to someone else, and then, incredibly, she found herself slapping it down again.
"You're the one who made the mistake, Sam. Don't you dare attack me. You're the one who messed up! Not me."
He looked at her for a moment and then wiped the back of his forearm over his sweat band. "Yeah, you're right. Okay."
She stared at him. Was that all there was to it? Had she actually won an argument with him?
He grinned at the expression of surprise on her face and began to amble toward her, running deliberately lecherous eyes over her body. Susannah experienced a moment of deep pleasure, a sense of the strength of her own womanhood that was new and wonderful. Without thinking about what she was doing, she hooked her index finger over the snap on his jeans and tugged. When he came up against her, she gave him a trashy kiss, open-mouthed and deep.
"Would you be a doll baby and do a shampoo for me? I hate to interrupt, but I'm really backed up."
Susannah pulled abruptly away as Angela came through the beauty shop door. Sam whirled around. "She's not your shampoo girl, for chrissake!"
Susannah interceded. "My back hurts and I need to stretch for a few minutes. I don't mind. Yank will be here before long, and Roberta's coming over this evening to help."
Sam's lips tightened at the mention of Roberta, but since he was the one who had called her and told her she had to help assemble the boards, he couldn't really protest. Susannah suspected he would have made the elderly women in Angela's beauty shop stuff boards if they had better eyesight.
A blast of cool air from the window air conditioner hit her as she stepped through the door of the beauty parlor. One elderly woman was under a hair dryer, and Angela was giving another a perm. Susannah ushered the third to the shampoo bowl and supported her as she leaned back. She didn't mind helping Angela. Sam's mother was so good-natured it was impossible not to like her. Besides, when Susannah was helping out, she felt less guilty about the fact that she wasn't contributing anything toward her room and board.
As she gently worked the lather through the elderly woman's thin hair, she thought about how badly she needed money. All her life she had been dependent on her father, and now she was dependent on Sam and Angela. She had even been forced to ask Sam for money to buy a box of Tampax. He had given it to her without comment, but she still found the experience demeaning.
"Well, h-e-l-l-o there." Angela's voice, flirtatious and sassy, rose over the sound of the water running in the shampoo basin. Susannah glanced up, then sucked in her breath as the walls of the small shop seemed to tilt in crazy directions.
Joel Faulconer stood in the doorway, aloof and out of place in a hunter-green polo shirt and crisply creased khaki slacks. He had put on some unneeded weight since she had last seen him, and his golfer's tan had faded. It was probably only her imagination, but he seemed older than she remembered.
He gazed around him without saying anything. In the past few weeks, Susannah had grown accustomed to her surroundings, but now she saw it all again through his eyes-the garish mirrored tiles, the plastic plants and ugly photographs of overly elaborate hairstyles. She saw herself-cheap and common in a man's T-shirt and a pair of threadbare slacks she had once worn for gardening. She could almost read his mind as he watched her shampoo the hair of a woman who was wearing blue bedroom slippers with slits cut in the sides to accommodate her bunions.
Susannah heard a cry of pain and realized she had dug her fingers into the poor woman's scalp. "I'm sorry," she apologized, releasing her. Her hands shaking, she finished rinsing out the woman and wrapped her head in a towel. Then she went over to her father. Angela looked on, making no attempt to hide her curiosity.