"It sucks to be you."
Ben Anderson opened his mouth to protest and then closed it
again. He contemplated how those few words summed up his
life and decided the assessment was not without accuracy. Of
course, the truth of those words was closely linked to the
fact he had become guardian to the boy who had spoken them,
his eleven-year-old nephew, Kyle.
It was a position Ben had held for precisely ten days, the
most miserable of his life, which was saying quite a bit
since he had spent several years in the Marine Corps,
including an eight-month tour of duty in the land of sand
and blood and heartbreak.
At least over there, Ben thought, there had been guidelines
and rules, a rigid set of operating standards. Becoming
Kyle's guardian was like being dropped in the middle of
a foreign country with no backup, no map, and only a
rudimentary command of the language.
For instance, did he tell Kyle he was sick of the expression
It sucks to be you or did he let it pass?
While contemplating his options, Ben studied the envelope in
front of him. It was addressed to Mr. Ben Anderson and in
careful brackets Kyle's Guardian just so that where was
no wriggling out of it. The handwriting was tidy and uptight
and told Ben quite a bit about the writer, though Kyle had
been filling him in for the past ten days.
Miss Maple, Kyle's new teacher at his new school was
old. And mean. Not to mention supremely ugly.
"Mugly," Kyle had said, which apparently meant more
than ugly.
She was also unfair, shrill-voiced and the female
reincarnation of Genghis Khan.
Kyle was a surprising expert on Genghis Khan. He'd
informed Ben, in a rare chatty moment, that a quarter of the
world's population had Khan blood in them. He'd said
it hopefully, but Ben doubted with Kyle's red hair and
freckles that his nephew was one of them.
Ben flipped over the envelope, looking for clues. "What
does Miss Maple want?" he asked Kyle, not opening the
letter.
"She wants to see you," Kyle said, and then
repeated, "It sucks to be you."
Then he marched out of his uncle's kitchen as if the
fact that his old, mean and ugly teacher wanted to see his
uncle had not a single thing to do with him.
Ben thought the responsible thing to do would be to call his
nephew back and discuss the whole "it sucks" thing.
But fresh to the concept of being responsible for anyone
other than himself, Ben wasn't quite sure what the
right thing to do was with Kyle. His nephew had the
slouch and street-hardened eyes of a seasoned con, but just
below that was a fragility that made Ben debate whether the
Marine Corps approach was going to be helpful or damaging.
And God knew he didn't want to do anymore damage.
Because the hard truth was if it sucked to be someone in
this world, that someone was Kyle O. Anderson.
Ben's parents had been killed in a car accident when he
was seventeen. He'd been too old to go into the
"system" and too young to look after his sister, who
had been fourteen at the time. Ben went to the marines,
Carly went to foster care. Ben was well aware that he had
gotten the better deal.
By the time she'd been fifteen, Carly had been a boiling
cauldron of pain, sixteen she was wild, seventeen she was
pregnant, not that that had cured either the pain or the
wildness.
She had dragged Kyle through broken relationships and
down-and-out neighborhoods. When Ben had been overseas and
helpless to do a damn thing about it, she and Kyle had gone
through a homeless phase. But even after he'd come back
stateside, Ben's efforts to try and help her and his
nephew had been rebuffed. Carly saw her brother's
joining up as leaving her, and she never forgave him.
But now, only twenty-eight, Carly was dying of too much
heartbreak and hard living.
And Ben found himself faced with a tough choice. Except for
Carly, his life was in as close to perfect a place as it had
ever been. Ben owned his own business, the Garden of
Weedin'. He'd found a niche market, building outdoor
rooms in the yards of the upscale satellite communities that
circled the older, grittier city of Morehaven, New York.
A year ago he'd invested in his own house, which
he'd bought brand-new in the well-to-do town of
Cranberry Corners, a community that supported his business
and was a thirty-minute drive and a whole world away from
the mean streets of the inner city that Kyle and Carly had
called home.
Ben's personal specialty was in "hardscaping,"
which was planning and putting in the permanent structures
like decks, patios, fireplaces and outdoor kitchens that
made the backyards of Cranberry Corners residents superposh.
It was devilishly hard work, which suited him to a T because
he was high energy and liked being in good shape. The
business had taken off beyond his wildest dreams.
Ben also enjoyed a tight network of buddies, some of whom
he'd gone to high school with and who enjoyed success
and the single lifestyle as much as he did.
Did he disrupt all that and take sucks-to-be-him Kyle O.
Anderson, with his elephant-size chip on his shoulder, or
surrender him to the same system that had wrecked Carly?
Since Ben considered himself to be a typical male animal,
self-centered, insensitive, superficial—and darned proud of
it—he astonished himself by not feeling as if it was a
choice at all. He felt as if sometimes a man had to do what
a man had to do, and for him that meant taking his nephew.
Not that either his nephew or his sister seemed very
appreciative.
Not that that was why he had done it.
Ben opened the tidy envelope from Miss Maple. He read that
Kyle's behavior was disrupting her class, and that she
needed to meet with him urgently.
Ben decided if Miss Maple had a plan for dealing with
Kyle's behavior, he was all for it. Having decided
against the drill-sergeant method, since it was untested on
eleven-year-olds who were facing personal tragedy, Ben was
at a loss about how to deal with the mouthi-ness, the
surliness, the belligerence of his eleven-year-old nephew.
There always seemed to be an undertow of hostility from Kyle.
Unfortunately, the note said he was supposed to meet with
the much maligned Miss Maple fifteen minutes ago.
"Kyle?" he called down the hallway. There was no
answer, and Ben went down the hall to Kyle's room.
He stood in the doorway for a moment. The room used to be
Ben's home gym, complete with a wall-mounted TV and a
stereo system with surround-sound speakers. Now all his
workout stuff was in the basement, though he'd left the
TV and stereo for Kyle.
Kyle was sprawled on the unmade bed. Highly visible were the
cowboy sheets Ben had bought for him, along with the new
twin-size bed, when he'd confirmed his nephew was coming
to stay for good.
Kyle, naturally, had glared at the sheets and proclaimed
them "for babies." Ben could see his point, as at
the moment he was listening to ominous-sounding music in a
foreign language and flipping the pages on a book with a
title that looked like it might be Greek.
"When did your teacher give you this note for me?"
Kyle shrugged with colossal indifference.
"Not today?" Ben guessed dryly.
"Not today," Kyle agreed.
Ben glanced at his watch and sighed. "Let's go see
Miss Maple," he said. "We're late."
"Miss Maple hates tardiness," Kyle said,
obviously mimicking his teacher's screechy voice. He
sounded quite pleased with himself that he had managed to
get Ben in trouble with the teacher before they had even met.
Ben felt uneasily like a warrior going into the unexpected
as he held open the door of Cranberry Corners Elementary
School, and then followed Kyle down the highly polished
floor of a long hallway. Was he going into battle, or
negotiations? Strange thoughts for a man traveling down
hallways lined with cheerful drawings of smiling suns and
stick people walking dogs.
He stopped, just outside the doorway of the class Kyle
pointed to, and frowned at what he saw inside. A woman sat
at a lonely desk at the front of the class, mellow September
sunshine cascading over her slender shoulders.
"That can't be Miss Maple."
Kyle peered past him. "That's her, all right."
It was because he'd been expecting something so
radically different that the first sight of Miss Maple made
Ben feel as if he had laid down his weapons somewhere. He
felt completely disarmed by the fact that it was more than
evident that not one thing Kyle had said about her was true.
Or at least not the "mugly" or "old" part.
He'd have to wait and see about the "mean." And
the screechy voice.
There was something disarming about the classroom, too. A
huge papier-mâché tree sprouted in one corner, the branches
spreading across the ceiling, dripping with brightly colored
fall leaves with kids' names on them. The wall contained
charts full of shining stars, artwork, reprints of good
paintings. This was the space of someone who loved what she
did. From Kyle's attitude, Ben had pictured something
grimmer and more prisonlike for Miss Maple's lair.
But then, Miss Maple was not the Miss Maple he had imagined,
either, and Ben struggled to readjust to the picture in
front of him. In fact, the teacher was young, not more than
twenty-five. She was concentrating on something on her desk,
and her features were fine and flawless, her skin was
beautiful, faintly sun-kissed, totally unlined. Her hair,
pulled back in a ponytail, was the exact dark golden color
of the wildflower honey that Ben kept in a glass jar on his
countertop.
Of course, she could still be mean. Ben had known plenty of
gorgeous women who were mean straight through. You could
tell by their eyes, diamond flint and ice.
But then she lifted her eyes, and he was momentarily lost in
their softness and their color, an astounding mix of jade
and aqua and copper.
Nothing mean in those eyes, he decided, and tried out his
best easygoing boy-next-door grin on her.
An unexpected thing happened. She frowned. It didn't
make her look mean precisely, but he understood
perfectly how an eleven-year-old boy could be intimidated by
her.
"Hello," she said, "I think you must be
lost." Her voice wasn't screechy at all. It was
quite amazing, with the belllike tone of a church bell
ringing on a cold, pure morning. She leaned back in her
chair and folded her arms over her chest, as if she had
suddenly reached the alarming conclusion she was alone in
this end of the building.
Women weren't generally alarmed by him, but the fact she
was here at five in the evening probably meant she was
sheltered in some way. The atmosphere in the classroom
really was a testament to no life. How long did it take to
make a tree like that? She'd probably been in here all
summer, cloistered away, working on it!
More's the pity, since Ben could clearly see her chest
was delicately and deliciously curved, though it occurred to
him it was probably some kind of sin to notice that about
the grade-five teacher, and the fact that he had noticed
probably justified the alarm in her eyes.
Or maybe that was nuns a man was not supposed to think
manlike thoughts about.
Which she was dressed like, not that he was an expert on how
nuns dressed, but he suspected just like that: high-buttoned
blouse in pristine white, frumpy sweater in forgettable beige.
He would have liked a glimpse of her legs, since he was
unfortunately curious about whether she was wearing a skirt
or slacks, but the desk totally blocked his view.
He moved forward, leaned over the desk and extended his
hand. He couldn't think of a way to lean over far enough
to see her legs without alarming her more than she already
was, so he didn't.
"I'm Ben Anderson, Kyle's uncle." He
deliberately turned up the wattage of his smile, found
himself wishing he had changed out of his work clothes—torn
jeans with the knee out, his company T-shirt with Garden of
Weedin' emblazoned across the front of it.
Miss Maple took his hand but did not return his smile. Any
idea he had about holding her hand a little too long was
dismissed instantly. Her handshake was chilly and brief.
"You are very late," she said. "I was about to
leave."
Ben was astounded to find he felt, not like six foot one of
hard-muscled fighting machine, but like a chastened
schoolboy. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Kyle slide
in the door, and roll his shoulders inward, as if he was
expecting a blow. Ben found he didn't have the heart to
blame his nephew for not giving him the note.
"Uh, well," he said charmingly, "you know. Life
gets in the way."
She was not charmed, and apparently she did not know.
"Kyle, will you go down to the library? I had Mrs.
Miller order a copy of The History of Khan for you.
She said she'd leave it on her desk."
"For me?" Kyle squeaked, and Ben, astonished by the
squeak glanced at him. The hard mask was gone from his eyes,
and his nephew looked like a little boy who was going to
cry. A little boy, Ben thought grimly, who had seen far too
few kindnesses in his life.
He was aware the teacher watched Kyle go, too, something
both troubled and tender in her eyes, though when she looked
back at him, her gaze was carefully cool.
"Have a seat, Mr. Anderson."
Miss Maple seemed to realize at about the same time as Ben
there really was no place in that entire room where he could
possibly sit. The desks were too small, and she had the one
adult-size chair.
He watched a faint blush rise up her cheeks and was
reluctantly enchanted. He decided to smile at her again.
Maybe she was one of those women who liked the
real-man look, dirt and muscles. He flexed his forearm just
a tiny bit to see if she was paying attention.
She was, because her blush deepened and she took a sudden
interest in shuffling some papers on her desk. She
apparently forgot she'd invited him to sit down.
"Your nephew is a bit of dilemma, Mr. Anderson," she
said in a rush, shuffling frantically to avoid further eye
contact with his muscles.
"Ben," he offered smoothly, hoping she might give up
her first name in return.
But she didn't. In fact, she stopped shuffling papers
and pressed her lips together in a firm line, gazed at him
solemnly and sternly, the effect of the sternness somewhat
tempered by the fact she picked that moment to tuck a
wayward strand of that honey-colored hair behind her ear.
Ben had the unexpected and electrifying thought that he
would like to kiss her. He wasn't sure why. Maybe as a
shortcut to the woman underneath that uptight outfit and the
stern expression.