Evenings at the Argentine Club Page 15

  Eric made it pretty clear that he was offering her a room as he might offer a business partner a spare office. Was he interested in sleeping with her? She’d have to say yes. And she’d lie if she said she wasn’t just as interested. Sex had always been a complex thing for her. The female part of her craved the touch of a man. But then came the overthinking. Not wanting to undress unless it was completely dark, not wanting a man to run his hands up and down her body and feel all the flab. When you were over-weight and hated your body, that kind of intimacy held a painful amount of anxiety.

  But with Eric, that wasn’t the reason she might hesitate entering into a sexual relationship. She looked better today than she had in years. No, it was more that their families had been friends and would probably continue to be friends forever. Would sex mess things up if they didn’t get emotionally involved? Probably, Victoria reluctantly admitted to herself.

  She dragged her bags to the living room. Then she went in search of her mother and found her in her bedroom, surrounded by boxes and boxes of stuff. “What in the world are you doing?”

  “I’m doing some packing and cleaning up, too. Maybe it’s time for all of us to leave.”

  Victoria opened her mouth to respond, but didn’t know what to say. Leave? This was where both her parents belonged. “What are you packing?”

  “Things I plan to give away and things I’d like to keep.”

  She walked in. “Like?”

  Jaqueline had piles of old clothes. Cardboard boxes full of pictures; other pictures sat in albums. Plastic bins full of crafts and trinkets she and Carmen had made through the years. Victoria picked up a picture frame she’d made out of popsicle sticks and soft drying clay back in third grade. A picture of herself smiling with overgrown front teeth stared back at her.

  “Would you like some of those?” Jaqueline asked.

  “No.”

  “Would it hurt your feelings if I chose just the most special to keep?”

  “Of course not.” Victoria found a spot on the bed to sit. She picked up old cameras. “I remember when you used to use these huge things.”

  Jaqueline nodded. “That’s when it took skill to take a good picture. Not like now that everyone uses those digital things with automatic settings.”

  Victoria put the camera down and peeked into a box of pictures. “Wow, Mom, I never saw any of these.” There were tons of pictures of Jaqueline with Victor when they were young. They wore heavy coats and hats, and the scenic backgrounds of mountains and ice made it look as if they were in Antarctica.

  “Most of those we took when we went to Bariloche for our high school graduation trip. Back then, as soon as you started high school your parents started to make monthly payments to a travel agency. By the end of the fifth year, they had paid for a one-week trip to the Patagonia. Your father met me there, since he wasn’t at the same school as I was. My parents never knew that he’d done that.” Jaqueline blushed.

  Victoria smiled. “You had a whole week alone in an exotic, isolated Patagonian town?” She raised an eyebrow. “What did you do?”

  Jaqueline’s fair skin turned even more red, and she looked away. “Nothing. Explored.”

  “Each other?”

  Now Jaqueline looked directly at Victoria and frowned. “Victoria!”

  “Sorry.” She looked back at the pictures. “These look like postcards, Mom.”

  “Mmm,” she said, and stacked old books in boxes.

  “Did you take all these?”

  “All the ones I’m not in, yes.”

  “They’re great.”

  “Thanks.” She got a faraway look in her eyes. “I loved to take pictures. I used to imagine that I would sell some to a magazine like National Geographic. We didn’t have Internet back in the mid-seventies when I took those, and the magazine was available at the newsstands, but it was so expensive. I would buy one every few months and wonder how those photographers managed to get their pictures in there.”

  Victoria gazed at her mother. “Really?” she said gently. “Why didn’t you pursue photography once you moved to America?”

  Jaqueline shrugged and brushed aside the idea with a huff. “Who had time to do that? I had to take care of you girls and help your father at the restaurant. I didn’t have time to play like when I was a teenager in Argentina.”

  “But you could have made money selling your photos.”

  “Victoria, don’t be silly.”

  That was her answer to everything. It annoyed her. “Mom, dreams aren’t silly.”

  “It wasn’t my dream. It was just for fun.”

  Fine. She stood. “Save some of those pictures for me.”

  “Some day, when I have time, I’ll have to organize them.”

  “Good idea.” She bent down and kissed her mother. “I’ve gotta go. Love you.”

  Jaqueline looked at her like she was moving to another continent. “Good-bye.”

  “I’ll see you soon. Okay?” Victoria ignored the guilt that she told herself she shouldn’t feel. She was twenty-eight, for goodness sake. Most American kids left home the second they hit eighteen. She had to go. It was now or never.

  Jaqueline watched Victoria leave and didn’t move until she heard the front door close. Then she let out the gush of air she’d been holding in her lungs to keep from calling her back. Her last child was gone, and she felt the last bit of life drain from the house. How could she stay here alone? Tears clouded her vision. She reached for a pillow and let out a shaky sob that had been building for hours. She cried into the soft feathers covered by warm cotton. Hot tears flowed from her eyes, and grief and fear from her soul. Her whole life, everything she worked for and lived for, was gone. It all came down to this. Boxes full of pictures and an empty house. Once she released much of the pain she’d been holding in check, she felt better. Drained, but better. She straightened, setting the pillow aside. “Estupida,” she scolded herself.

  She wiped her eyes, glad she had nowhere to go today. No one to see. She reached across to the box of pictures Victoria took so much interest in. One day when she had time, she would organize them, she’d told her. An ironic laugh escaped her lips. Time was all she had these days. She decided to put the rest of these pictures into albums. Then she’d offer some to Victoria, some to Carmen, and some to Victor. The rest she’d keep for herself.

  She stared at a picture she took of a group of penguins. She and Victor had enjoyed Bariloche so much that a couple of years later, she’d traveled back to the Patagonia to Peninsula Vales. She’d photographed penguins and glaciers and places most people would never see because of its remoteness. Gorgeous sceneries. Her country had magnificent sites that nature had sculpted and humans had not had a chance to destroy. And Victor had wanted to leave all that behind. Granted that even in Argentina, they had lived in a city where they weren’t lucky enough to enjoy the stark beauty of the south very often. But they would have been so much closer. They would have been home.

  Jaqueline let the photograph drop back into the box. This was getting her nowhere. Those days, those times, were over. And she had to face life as it was now. And maybe it wasn’t too late to reclaim the girl and the woman who took those pictures. Maybe the lie she’d told Victoria about not having dreams could be remedied. Why not? She wasn’t dead yet.

  Victoria carried one suitcase at a time into Eric’s home. He wasn’t there. She could tell men had been working in the kitchen today. The cabinets had arrived and been placed like a jigsaw puzzle where they would sit, but they hadn’t been screwed together or attached to the wall.

  In the bedroom that Eric had offered her, everything had been completed. The carpet was new, the walls and ceiling had been painted, the lighting she’d chosen had been installed. The awesome closet organizer made the previous plain closet with a wooden pole look like a hole in the wall. She unzipped her suitcases and began emptying her clothes, finding places in the closet to fill up.

  But as she worked she became increasingly more depressed
. Her clothes might fill the closet, but a coldness filled her spirit. She felt truly alone. So she sat in the center of the empty bedroom and wondered where her father was, what Carmen was up to, and if her mother was cooking for herself tonight. Jaqueline would.

  “Hey, what are you doing?” Eric stood at her door.

  Victoria hadn’t even heard him walk in. “Moving in.”

  He took a seat on the middle of the floor next to her. “Is this like a meditation-moving-in thing?”

  She smiled. “Maybe. I was trying to make this room feel like mine, which is kind of stupid. I’m only going to be here for a few weeks.”

  “You asked me a few weeks ago where I went when I left home. Remember?”

  “Yes.”

  “The first place I stayed in was a dump. Well, the first place was my car, actually. But then I found this run-down shack. It had one bedroom, a tiny bathroom, and a kitchen covered in roaches.”

  “Ugh,” Victoria said. “And you stayed there?”

  “I started cleaning it up, then called an exterminator. We took out all the drywall and found roaches even inside the walls and in the insulation.”

  “Eric!” She shuddered, imagining crawling things running up and down her back. “You’re creeping me out.”

  “It was gross.” He smiled like a little boy. “I’d sit in my car at night, sometimes shivering and close to tears. I wondered what the hell I’d gotten myself into. I missed my mom’s great meals, and my bed, and I started to think I should have stayed where I was and figured out how to finish school, and like it.”

  Victoria listened.

  “But I stuck it out. Within a couple of weeks we had the entire house clean. I laid the flooring, got the drywall back up and painted, and finally moved into the place. I made a whole ten grand off the place in the end. It wasn’t much, but it was like gold to me. I was so proud of the way it turned out. I’d taken a dump and made it a nice place to live.”

  She smiled.

  “Being on your own is sort of scary. Even without the cockroaches.”

  “I’m not scared. Just sort of sad that my life as I knew it is over.”

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Yes and no.”

  Eric leaned forward. “Let me help you finish unpacking. Then let’s meditate over the roasted chicken and salad I brought. Hungry?”

  “A little.”

  He got on his feet opened one of her suitcases, and began gathering shorts, T-shirts, socks, bras, and underwear.

  Victoria pulled the items out of his hands. “I’ll do it.”

  He shrugged. “Sure you don’t want my help?”

  “I’m sure. Actually, let’s go eat. I’ll do more of this later.”

  “Good.” He put everything down and headed to the living room. On a card table was a bag from the grocery store. He pulled out the delicious-smelling chicken and prepared salad. Then he dug some paper plates out of another paper bag.

  “Is this the way you’re used to living?”

  He nodded and pulled out a French bread.

  She smiled. His mother apparently had some influence over him, Argentines ate bread with every meal. She loved it but would have to control herself and limit her portion to one slice.

  “The kitchen will be finished this week, and we’ll be able to cook then. But I’m used to making do without a kitchen or furniture. The second a house gets livable I sell it and start over.” He tore a piece of bread off and handed it to her, then took a chunk for himself and bit into it.

  “I tell you, Eric, I don’t think I could get used to this.” She took a napkin and placed her bread on it.

  He cut the chicken and served a leg and breast on each plate, then spooned the salad beside the chicken. “It gets tiring. I’m ready for something more permanent, but the problem is that you have to work wherever you find a house.”

  “You found this one. Why can’t you find more and establish a home base?”

  He took his plastic fork and knife and began eating, but he watched her with sort of a crooked smile. “Has my mom hired you? She makes the same argument.”

  Victoria took a bite of chicken. It was tender and garlicky with a hint of rosemary. Delicious. “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.”

  “No problem. I would like to find a great house, fix it up, and actually keep it someday.” He held up his fork. “Have real silverware and a real dining table.”

  “How about real mortgage payments? Those are the ones that worry me.”

  “I don’t plan on having those. I’ll pay cash for my house.”

  She lifted an eyebrow. “Really? I’m impressed.”

  He chuckled. “Not having anything allows me to save a lot.” He finished his food and put his plate and utensils in a plastic bag he was using for trash. Victoria gave him her plate. She’d had enough.

  He stood and took the bag outside, where they had a large can to toss construction debris. Then he returned. “Okay, now we can go back to your room and unpack your undies?”

  She shook her head. “I wondered when you were going to mention those.”

  “I’ll let you see mine, if you’d like.”

  She stood, still feeling completely inadequate with Eric. She looked… well, the way she did. And he looked like he had just walked out of a workingman’s calendar. “I don’t play that game,” she joked.

  “Ah.” He looked amused. “Too bad for me.” He turned away, then paused. “Although, you do play some games. You forget that I know some of the guys you dated in high school, which was why you surprised me with that comment about being shy. I know you weren’t such an angel.”

  What did he mean by that? “I wasn’t?” she asked with surprise.

  “Evan Greene and Saul Anaya.”

  Victoria frowned and followed Eric into her bedroom. “What about them?”

  “Spin the bottle?” Eric said, raising an eyebrow.

  Victoria laughed. She and Evan had dated a couple of months until her father had put his foot down. She could see him at school but no dating. At sixteen, she wasn’t about to listen to that nonsense. So when she spent the night at her best friend’s house, the guys came over and they played spin the bottle. “That was an innocent kid game.”

  Eric reached back into her suitcase, but instead of pulling out panties he took some of her tops and placed them in a drawer in the closet. “Not what Evan said.”

  She rolled her eyes. “He never got past… second base.” She laughed.

  He laughed too. “And Saul?”

  “No comment.” She dated him for a year and a half, until they graduated and he joined the navy. He was her first real boyfriend.

  “Hmm,” Eric said, and handed her a pile of shorts.

  She put away her shorts. “My dad hated him.”

  Finally he pulled out her bras and panties, and handed them to her. “And if you and I started dating. Seriously. Would he hate me, too?”

  “You’re Argentine.”

  He stepped closer. “That makes a difference?”

  “To him.”

  “And to you?”

  “No difference at all.”

  Eric leaned closer, and he placed a hand on her waist. “Being with you makes me happy, Vicki. Do you think it’s because you remind me of when I was a kid and still innocent?”

  She couldn’t answer that. “It’s because I let you touch my underwear,” she whispered.

  He smiled. “That must be it.” He kissed her cheek. “You going to be okay sleeping in here all by yourself?”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “Too bad.” He eased back. “Good night, then.”

  Victoria’s heart was beating a little too fast. Whatever she was doing, it gave her a rush she found irresistible. Out of all the risks she was taking lately, spending time with Eric was probably the most dangerous, but also the most enjoyable.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Victoria officially enrolled in the Institute of Design the following week.
She planned to attend twice a week during the fall quarter. That gave her plenty of time to complete work on Eric’s property, put in some hours at the boutique, and look for more design work. Eric wouldn’t be paying her until he sold the house—that was their agreement. And that was fine. She didn’t need the money. Her expenses had been so minimal while living with her parents that she had enough money saved to last her a long time. So that didn’t worry her, but she was excited to begin building her business.

  As part of her registration process, she had a counseling session. Victoria spent a couple of hours discussing her goals and planning her courses.

  The counselor tapped his notepad. “I pointed out your reference, Douglas Glen, to one of our instructors, Mrs. Hendrickson. They used to teach together at Burbank High.”

  Victoria smiled. “Douglas is the one who recommended I get my degree. He’s my cheerleader and my friend. He’s right about absolutely everything.”

  “Mrs. Hendrickson would like to speak with you when we finish here—and we are actually done. Unless you have any questions.”

  She had a plan for next year, and it all looked doable and exciting. So she didn’t have any questions. She closed her notebook and slipped it into her canvas bag. “I’m all set.”

  He wrote on a sticky pad. “This is Mrs. Hendrickson’s office number.”

  Victoria took it. “Thank you.”

  She stopped by the woman’s office next. Mrs. Hendrickson was one of the few older people she’d met here—even the professors seemed young and stylish—although she looked amazing. She invited Victoria into her office.

  “I don’t remember you from Burbank High,” Victoria said.

  “I worked there ages ago. Douglas was suited for that environment. I’m afraid I didn’t enjoy dealing with teen hormones half as much.”

  Victoria smiled. “I don’t think I would, either.”

  “Victoria, I spoke with Douglas earlier and he thinks a lot of you.”