All a Man Is. Janice Kay Johnson

smells from the kitchen, fresh flowers from her garden on the table, an Italian tenor bellowing from the stereo.” He grimaced. “Of course, the music went off when Dad walked in the door, and if Mama was lucky, he’d grunt his appreciation for amazing food. The change in her was gradual. She’d listen to music less and less often, smile less. By the time Josh and I were in high school, she’d lost any gift for happiness. I don’t know if she’d recover it even if he dropped dead of a heart attack tomorrow.”

      Julia couldn’t help herself. She touched him, only fleetingly, her fingertips to the back of his hand, but it was enough to draw a startled, somehow riveted stare from him.

      “Were their feelings hurt that we moved away?” she asked, as much to distract him as anything. His parents hadn’t said much to her, but she’d never been sure how they felt about her anyway.

      As a distraction, her question worked. Alec gave a grunt of his own. “Couldn’t tell with Mama. Dad thought me quitting my job was asinine. I’d be a captain before I knew it, maybe rise to chief of the LAPD. He knew how to bring Matt into line, and it didn’t involve pampering the kid or uprooting the whole damn family. ‘My belt’s still good for something,’ he said.”

      Julia shuddered. They were both silent for a moment.

      “I always thought I might be more like him than Josh was,” Alec said unexpectedly. “Josh was more...happy-go-lucky, for lack of a better term. I internalize everything.”

      Yes. She’d seen that.

      “I was thinking something like that,” she admitted. “The only thing is, Josh was only happy when he was in motion. Eventually I started wondering if he had an attention deficit disorder, but surely he’d have had to be patient, I don’t know, crouched somewhere waiting for the bad guys to make a move. I know he was smart, but he almost never picked up a book. Even TV bored him. He could sit down for about the length of a meal, then he’d get twitchy and leap up and need to do something.”

      “Yeah, he had some trouble in school. Far as I know, he was never diagnosed, but—” He put down his fork and seemed to mull that over. “Actually, I don’t know if that’s true or not. Dad would probably have given hell to any teacher or school administrator who tried to lay the blame for Josh’s issues on some problem in his brain when obviously they were lacking. He limped through graduation, but he enlisted the minute he graduated. Never crossed any of our minds that he might go on to college.”

      Somehow the conversation drifted after that. First Alec and she exchanged their own experiences in higher education. She shook her head over her idiocy in dropping out before getting her degree, Alec telling her his father had belittled his own determination to get his.

      “‘Why waste your time?’ he’d say. ‘You should have gone straight to the police academy. Think of the street experience you’d have by now.’ He’d shake his head. ‘You’ve been to school for thirteen years already. Why would you want to write a paper about Robert E. Lee’s military mistakes or the fact that some damn philosopher tried to prove himself wrong?’”

      “Some damn philosopher?” she queried.

      “Descartes. He was determined not to be smug in his beliefs.”

      “So he tried to prove he was wrong.”

      “Right.” Alec shook his head. “Funny Dad should have chosen that paper to disparage, because I take Descartes’s theories about self-doubt seriously. Whenever I go too far out on a limb, I think, hold on, remember Descartes, and take the other side. Sometimes I actually do convince myself I was wrong.”

      “I’m impressed,” she said, smiling. “You actually demonstrate the value of those college classes on a day-to-day basis.”

      He smiled, too. “I told you, I internalize everything.”

      She had been so wrong about him, Julia thought as they finished dinner and returned to the Tahoe. Why hadn’t she ever noticed how different he was from her husband?

      Of course, she knew the answer in part. While she was married, she hadn’t let herself dwell on any feelings in particular for Josh’s brother. And later—it had taken her a long time to emerge from the grief and the guilt, and by then she was consumed by her children’s needs. For all the time she and Alec had spent together, most of their conversations had to do with the kids, Matt in particular. It alarmed her a little to realize that this evening, she and Alec had been, for possibly the first time, only a man and woman. She couldn’t help wondering if he’d made any discoveries about her.

      She was more self-conscious than usual when they got back to the duplex. The kids weren’t due back for another half an hour. I could invite him in, she thought, but had the unsettling thought that doing so might be dangerous. She didn’t dare betray her feelings to him, not if she was going to continue to depend on him the way she had been. She’d be foolish to misinterpret the expression in his eyes when he’d said, When you need something from me, tell me.

      So she thanked him for dinner, made her excuses and shut the door firmly on the man standing on her doorstep. The one whose voice had become husky when he implied he would give her anything at all.

      Inside, heart thumping, she knew her greatest fear having to do with him was that he’d give what she asked, but for all the wrong reasons. Even the idea of that was unbearable.