Up Close and Personal. Fern Michaels

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СКАЧАТЬ the food that wasn’t good for them, but she’d justify it by saying they would double up on vegetables the rest of the week. The brownies that she made every Saturday morning were the best.

      But she knew. How could she not have known? Everyone in town knew that Rifkin Forrest had a thing going on with Sarabess Windsor. However, no one in town, and that included his mother, knew if that thing had ever been acted upon. Jake thought it had, but he couldn’t prove it. Once, during his sophomore year, he’d gotten the courage to actually discuss with his mother what he considered his father’s indiscretion. She hadn’t put him off. Instead, she’d said rumors should never be repeated. Her eyes had been so sad when she said it. Oh, yes, she knew.

      When she’d gotten sick, she’d changed her will, leaving the entire Granger fortune, except the mansion, to him, in a trust that he couldn’t tap until he was thirty-five years of age. The mansion had come to him when he turned thirty. The remainder of the robust trust would be available to him in ten months. His father had been stunned and actually started proceedings to contest the will, but he hadn’t followed through once he read a letter his mother’s attorney handed him hours after the reading of the will. His father had never divulged the contents of the letter, nor had Jake asked. Things had changed after that, though. There was less spending money, his first car had been secondhand. He’d gone to a second-tier college, and his allowance had been meager. He’d worked to have extra spending money.

      To say he and his father had a close, warm relationship would be a lie. They worked in the same office, had dinner occasionally, but they didn’t really socialize. They never called one another just to chat—there was nothing to chat about. As far as Jake knew, his father never went to the cemetery to visit or leave flowers on his mother’s grave.

      His father still lived in the stately historical mansion that had once belonged to the Grangers of Crestwood. He himself had never gone back to the mansion after he graduated from law school. Instead, after his time in Albany, he found a three-bedroom apartment on the outskirts of Crestwood that suited him just fine because the owner of the complex said they accepted dogs. Not that he had a dog, but he was going to get one. Plus, he liked the window boxes and the colorful striped awnings over the windows. The window boxes and the flowers reminded him of his mother. Each renter was responsible for the flowers, something he took seriously. His window boxes were the prettiest, he thought smugly. When he was finally settled, he was going to go to the SPCA and adopt a dog.

      He’d furnished the entire apartment with secondhand furniture and a few antiques he’d picked up at garage sales. If he had anything to say about it, he would never set foot in his mother’s old home even though it now belonged to him.

      Jake jammed the napkins and the leftovers from the Whoppers into the bag his food had come in. He slipped his car into gear, drove over to the trash can, and dumped the bag. “You can just kiss my ass, Sarabess Windsor,” he muttered as he waited for a break in traffic before swinging out onto South Main Street.

      So much for Sarabess Windsor. Short and succinct. On to Amanda Pettijohn. No doubt she was ticked off big-time. He had to decide if ticking off the lovely beauty was important or not. In two seconds flat he decided that in the scheme of things it wasn’t important.

      Jake buzzed on down the road, stopped for the light at Five Points, continuing on until he came to Tea Farm Road, where he made a left. He made several more turns before he brought his Mustang to a complete stop. He climbed out, briefcase in one hand, the fish fillet and milk shake in the other. He whistled for Elway, the resident cat that he and the others fed and took care of. Elway was disdainful and had no loyalty to any of the tenants. He went where the food was, the main reason he was so fat. No amount of enticing or cajoling could tempt the cat to come indoors. He would follow the tenants up the steps to their individual decks, where he would wait patiently for his food to be put onto a plate and his milk or water into a bowl. Battle-scarred Elway, one part of his ear missing, his tail limp and bedraggled, had six such arrangements.

      Again, Jake whistled for the cat, who came on the run and followed Jake up the steps to his second-floor apartment. Jake opened the door and waited like he always did to see if Elway would follow him. He always left the door open in the hope the fat cat would venture indoors, but he never did. Today, however, Elway trotted indoors, looked around, then leaped up onto the tweedy-looking sofa that held a thousand different smells. Stunned, Jake made no move to close the door but reached for a dish and a little bowl in the cabinet. He crumbled up the fish filet and poured the milk shake into the bowl. He set them on the floor and waited to see what the cat would do. What a coup this was! He could hardly wait to tell his neighbors.

      Elway hopped off the sofa and marched to the kitchen. He gobbled down his food, licked his whiskers, then inhaled the milk shake. Jake felt pleased with himself. When the fat cat finished his dinner, he meandered back to the sofa where he hopped back on, stretched out, and went to sleep.

      “Son of a gun! Looks like I got myself a cat!” Jake walked outside to bring in the box he had placed on his deck, hoping this day would come, and filled it with litter from the plastic container he kept in his pantry. He closed and locked the door.

      Jake was so pleased seeing the cat sleeping on his couch, he forgot the anger he felt toward his father. He didn’t care about Amanda, either. How weird that a mangy cat could take the place of the luscious Amanda Pettijohn.

      As Jake started to get changed he had one leg in his jeans when he thought about Trinity Henderson. He’d promised himself to think about little Trinny. In his bare feet, he walked out to the kitchen, popped a beer, and carried it back to the couch of a thousand smells. He was extra careful not to wake Elway. He made a mental note to take Elway’s picture so he could prove to the other tenants that Elway had indeed come indoors and actually climbed onto the couch and gone to sleep. He propped his feet on the scarred coffee table, fired up a cigarette—his one bad vice, which he had no intention of giving up—and puffed contentedly. He told himself two cigarettes a day weren’t going to harm him. Settled on the couch, he leaned back, closed his eyes, and traveled back in time to the last time he’d seen Trinity Henderson….

      The back tire of the bike he was riding skidded on the shale road. A heartbeat later he was flat on his back staring up at Trinity Henderson, who was laughing her head off. Girls are so stupid, was his first thought. Then he decided to cut the girl a little slack because she was great fun. “Anyone else make it out here today?” he grumbled as he got to his feet. He picked up his bike and straddled it.

      Trinity brushed at her curly blonde hair that was always full of straw. She was picking at it. She shrugged.

      Jake immediately knew what the shrug meant. Sarabess Windsor had corralled the others and invited them to the house to spend time with Emily, which meant there would be no ball game today. “I told them to come in the back way. Miz Windsor can’t see us on the back road,” Jake said.

      “Then how do you explain the fact that she was waiting for them on the back road? They didn’t want to go, but you know how Miz Windsor is. She would have called their parents and told them about their bad manners. They’re probably playing Parcheesi, drinking lemonade, and eating those sticky little cakes Emily likes so much. It’s pretty hard to say no to Miz Windsor,” Trinny said sourly.

      “That means the guys will be up there for two hours, and I have to get home to mow the lawn. I hate that woman, and I hate Emily even more,” Jake grumbled.

      “Yeah, I know. It could be worse, Jake. She could have corralled you, too.”

      “Nah. I told my father how much I don’t like her and Emily. I told him I wasn’t going up to the big house anymore. I told my mother, too. My mother told my father I didn’t have to go there if I didn’t want to go. My father tried to tell me it was a charitable thing СКАЧАТЬ