Winning Dixie Read online

  Okay, he’d been gone two minutes. It did not please her to realize that she could actually feel when he was near and when he wasn’t. What did that mean?

  The bell over the door dinged. She didn’t need to hear his voice to know it was him. Her internal radar—her Wade detector, as Pops put it—told her it was him. A moment later he more or less exploded into the kitchen with a young Hispanic man in tow.

  “Dixie McCormick, meet your new dishwasher, Miguel Ortega. His father is the man who came in the other day, but he’s working for a construction company now. Miguel was looking for work, too, so, here he is.”

  “Miguel,” she said, extending her hand. “Welcome.” He shook her hand with a combination of shyness and eagerness. “I guess Wade told you what we need?”

  “He told me, yes.”

  “And you’re okay with that?”

  He nodded with his entire upper body. Almost a deferential bow. “Yes, ma’am. I have bussed tables and washed dishes before. I know what to do.”

  “Excellent,” she said, relieved, hoping he was telling the truth.

  “And now,” Wade said, taking Miguel by the arm, “I’m going to show him around.”

  Dixie started to ask if Wade had told the boy the work was only temporary, but he must have. He knew he himself would go back to washing dishes when Pops came back.

  It was too late to ask, anyway, as Wade had already ushered Miguel out the door and had him bussing tables.

  She shrugged and used the edge of her spatula to scrape the gunk off the griddle. If a little voice in the back of her mind recalled that her first thought when she met Wade was that he hadn’t looked as if he’d needed a job—especially not manual labor for minimum wage, and that if she hired him he wouldn’t stay a week—she ignored it.

  She’d been wrong. He’d stayed two weeks and counting. It could be time was running out for her.

  Oh, now, wasn’t that a telling thought? Time was running out for her? For her to what? She doubted that hiring a new dishwasher to replace Wade was what her unconscious mind was concerned about. No, her unconscious mind was concerned mainly with her family and, in this case, her personal happiness. Which meant that her tiny little pea brain had quite possibly decided that her personal happiness rested on whether Wade stayed or left.

  And that was just bull hockey. She scrubbed harder on the griddle. Since when did her happiness, personal, superficial or otherwise, have anything to do with any man?

  Since Wade Harrison.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  “Okay, but I didn’t say anything.”

  The voice—Wade’s voice—startled her so much she shrieked and whirled, flinging the greasy crud of more than a dozen hamburgers from the end of her spatula. The gunk sailed through the air, arcing gracefully yet with serious force, straight into Wade’s face.

  “Oh!” She covered her mouth with her hands, but she couldn’t quite squelch the bark of laughter at the look of shock on his face. “I…am so…” She tried to swallow, but another laugh escaped. “…sorry.”

  Wade wiped a hand down his face, then stared at the greasy mess that came off.

  “Really,” Dixie said. “I am…truly…sorry.” Snicker.

  He looked at her sadly. “So am I.”

  “You are?”

  “I am.”

  “For what?”

  “For this.” He stepped forward and rubbed his gooey hand across her face.

  “Wade!”

  He smiled benignly. “Yes?”

  “I can’t believe you did that!”

  “Actually, neither can I.” He frowned and shook his head. “I guess you bring out the teenager in me.” In more ways than one, he thought, feeling the heated stirring in his blood at simply being near her. “It wasn’t very gentlemanly of me.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” she said. “But I can’t blame you. I would have done the same.”

  “You must have really been concentrating when I came in,” he said.

  “I was cleaning the griddle. How’s Miguel doing?”

  “Great. In fact, here he is now.”

  It took no more than a couple of minutes for Wade to show Miguel how to run the dishwasher. It turned out that he’d worked one similar to it at a previous job.

  Oh, yeah, Wade thought, Dixie was going to want to keep this kid. All Wade had to do was break it to her that she needed to.

  “Dix?” He moved toward her so they could have at least the appearance of privacy.

  “What?”

  “You know I take a lot of walks around town, right?”

  “So I’ve heard.”

  “If I came by your house tonight, would you walk with me? Just the two of us?”

  Dixie’s mouth went dry while her palms grew damp. It was just a walk, she told herself. He wasn’t asking her on a date. That her heart should suddenly race was just plain crazy. But she wanted to go. She wanted to take a walk with Wade.

  “Okay,” she managed. “About seven?”

  “Great.” His smile turned her knees weak. “I’ll see you then.”

  She gave him a look from the corner of her eye. “How far are you going to make me walk?”

  “Don’t worry. Not too far. Just far enough to give us time to talk.”

  Chapter Eight

  That evening Dixie looked around her dinner table and felt her heart swell. She was so lucky to have her family gathered around her every night. Pops’s accident last night served to remind her never to take her life and the people she loved for granted.

  “So, Pops, how was Miz Ima and her casserole?” she asked.

  A deep red flush stole slowly up his cheeks. He scowled at her.

  Dixie hooted with laughter. “Boys, I think Miz Trotter is sweet on Pops.”

  “You mean, like, boy-girl sweet on?” Ben asked, alarmed at the idea.

  “Exactly.”

  “Eww, yuck,” Tate said.

  “My sentiments exactly,” Pops muttered.

  “Shame,” Dixie said, laughing. “You’ve had a thing for her for twenty years.”

  The boys spent the next few minutes making gagging sounds.

  They had yet to learn the value of girls.

  “Have not,” Pops protested. “Why, she’s a good six months older than me.”

  “You know what they say about older women,” Dixie teased.

  “Oh, hush, you.” The red blush now reached the tops of his ears.

  “All right, all right,” she conceded. “How’s your ankle feeling?”

  “Sore and swollen,” he admitted tersely.

  “You’re still bent out of shape that I hired another dishwasher,” she accused.

  “What are you going to do with him when I come back to work? That’s what I’d like to know.”

  So would Dixie, but she was afraid she would have her answer to that when Wade got there. “We’ll see. But one thing to keep in mind, we both knew Wade wouldn’t stay long.”

  Pops shot a look toward the boys, but they were still making gagging noises and hadn’t heard Dixie’s comment. She was grateful for that. Both boys worshiped Wade.

  Dammit, she’d been doing fine keeping him out of her mind until now. She feared she knew what he was going to say to her when they took their walk. He was going to say he was quitting. Leaving town. And she dreaded it. Her stomach tried to tie itself in a knot at the idea. The thought of never seeing him again created a yawning, empty hole inside her.

  That stunned her. She knew she was attracted to him, that she liked him, even cared for him. Wanted him. But she hadn’t realized that she was falling in love.

  Oh, God, please, no. She could not, would not fall in love with a drifter. She would not fall in love with a man she had to support. Not again.

  Yet hadn’t she always thought that Wade came from money? Maybe he did. Maybe he was going back to it.

  All this speculation was pointless. She glanced at the clock on the wall and noted that he would be there in forty-five minutes. She stil
l had to clean the kitchen and get the boys and Pops to go to Pops’s apartment.

  How odd was it that she’d never asked to have the house to herself before?

  She didn’t care for what that said about the state of her love life. What it said was that she didn’t have one.

  Before Wade came clean to Dixie there was something he had to do. Something vitally important that he’d been putting off.

  With directions from a man at the gas station, Wade drove beyond the south edge of town and up a small wooded hill. At the top the woods gave way to the ultimate tribute: the town cemetery.

  It wasn’t a very large cemetery, but when he climbed from the car he found the area quiet. A peaceful stillness lay over it. If a man’s remains had to be planted in the ground for eternity, this was a good spot.

  Having no idea where McCormick might be, he started walking the rows, reading the headstones. Some dated back to 1850 and earlier. Now and then a shrub hugged a marker. There was a scattering of flowers here, small American flags there. One grave was as recent as last week, the seams of the sod still visible where the grass had yet to knit together. A huge bouquet of tiny pink rosebuds rested beneath the headstone. He noted that it was for a two-year-old child. He couldn’t imagine the pain of the parents, or the loss to the world of a young life cut short. Who knew what that child might have become if she’d had the chance?

  Before the wave of sadness rolled completely over him, he moved away and walked faster.

  It took him ten minutes to find what he was looking for. Several McCormick family members from the past eighty years occupied a section near the center of the cemetery by a gnarled cedar tree. On the outer edge of that section he found him. James Donald McCormick. Beloved father, son and grandson.

  Gooseflesh rose across Wade’s neck and down his arms. His heart paused, then raced.

  “Hel—” Wade’s voice caught. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Hello. I guess you know who I am. I got your heart.”

  He stopped, looked up at the deepening blue sky. Not a cloud in sight. “It seems odd to come here and talk to you. I feel like I’ve been carrying you around inside me for the past two years. And I have been, haven’t I? I’m sorry you died, but by signing that organ donation card, well, you saved my life. I wouldn’t have made it another day, and that’s the truth.”

  He paused and looked around. It occurred to him that if someone heard him talking, they might think he was off his rocker. But then, people often talked to departed loved ones at gravesides, so who cared?

  “You probably know I came here to check on your sons. It seemed as if that’s what you wanted me to do. God, they’re so alive, so…I don’t know, perfect? I can’t find the words. But I know why you loved them so much. They just reach right inside a man and fill his heart. Your heart.”

  He looked around again, because he had a confession to make that he’d just as soon no one overheard. He was still alone.

  “I’ve already set up a college fund for each of the boys. I haven’t figured out what else to do to make sure they never want for anything, but you can rest now, because I’ll see to their future for you. I came here out of gratitude to you. I’m still here two weeks later out of love for them.

  “I swear, I did not come here to hit on your ex-wife. I came for Ben and Tate. But she is quite a woman, your Dixie.

  “Pops misses you, but he’s doing all right…except for that fall he took at the game. But the damage is temporary. I’m still trying to find a way to make sure not only your sons, but everybody in town, knows what you did for not only me but the other people whose lives you saved or made livable again. I want people to be proud, to say, ‘I knew him. He was the best.’ I’ll figure it out. But right now I’ve got to go explain to your ex-wife who I really am and why I’m here. If I don’t find the right words, I might end up right next to you.” He smiled. “I’d be proud to sleep next to you for eternity. Thank you, Jimmy Don. Thank you for my life.”

  It was a new concept for the McCormick men, that Mom should want the house to herself at a time of her own choosing.

  Pops thought it was a fine, fine idea, except he feared Wade was going to tell her he was moving on.

  Ben and Tate didn’t get it. What could their mother possibly want to do that she couldn’t do with them there? They frowned and scratched their heads, but Pops mentioned popcorn and a baseball movie on DVD. That was the end of their thoughts about Mom.

  Dixie didn’t know whether to be hurt or glad that they could forget about her so easily. She shook her head and watched them race across the yard toward the apartment ahead of Pops, who had to go slowly because of his crutches.

  At last. Silence!

  Except for the TV, which the boys had left on. Local news was over and one of those entertainment magazines was on. Nothing but gossip, Dixie thought with a shake of her head. She started across the living room to turn it off, but the picture on the screen, and then the accompanying audio, nailed her feet to the floor.

  “One of the country’s richest, most eligible bachelors seems to be missing in action. Media and entertainment mogul Wade Harrison hasn’t been seen at any of his usual haunts for a couple of weeks now. No one at Harrison Corporation, where he served as CEO until his heart surgery two years ago and where he still sits on the board of directors, will comment on his whereabouts, but he was not at the Broadway opening last night starring his good friend Tom Cruise, and friends say it would take something major for him to miss Tom’s Broadway debut. Hmm. Has anyone seen Wade Harrison lately? If you have, send us an e-mail here at the show.”

  The picture on the screen was of the dishwasher at Dixie’s Diner in Tribute, Texas, but instead of jeans and a T-shirt, he was wearing a tux and a thousand-watt smile.

  Dixie trembled with warring emotions. Fury, that Wade had failed to tell her who he really was. Humiliation at being duped. A gaping sense of loss for the man she’d thought she was falling for. A man who obviously didn’t exist.

  How could he? Damn him. “Wait until I get my hands on you, you rotten, no-good, lying son of a—” No one was allowed to swear in her house. She figured since she made the rule, she should abide by it.

  But, oh, she could think of quite a few four-letter words to call him.

  Outside, a shadow crossed her front window. She slapped the Off button on the TV just as a knock rattled the door.

  It was Wade.

  Oh, God. What was she going to say to him? She gnawed on her lip and paced the floor. Should she play dumb and see if he confessed? Maybe this was what he wanted to talk to her about.

  Should she confront him with what she knew rather than give him a chance to tell her first?

  Should she simply open the door and punch him in the mouth?

  Yes. She liked that last one the best. Too bad she wouldn’t do it.

  He knocked again.

  With a deep breath, she opened the door.

  “Hi,” he said, stepping inside with a smile.

  “I’m glad you came,” she said curtly. “If you’ll wait here a minute, I’ll get my checkbook and give you your final pay. Then you can be on your way.”

  Wade shook his head as if trying to clear water from his ear. “On my way?” He gave a brief laugh. “Are you firing me?”

  She gave a jerky toss of her head. “You’re here to tell me you’re quitting, aren’t you?”

  Wade eyed her carefully. Something was going on here, something he didn’t think he liked. She was really ticked off. At him, apparently.

  “What’s going on?” he asked carefully.

  “What’s going on, Mr. Bigshot Media Mogul, is that you’ve been playing me for a fool from the minute you walked into the diner that first day.”

  Wade hung his head and stared at the toes of his sneakers. She’d found out. Maybe not everything, but enough to make her angry.

  “You can’t even bother to deny it, can you?”

  At the disgust in her voice, he snapped his head up. �
�What, that I came here to make a fool out of you? I do deny it. I flatly deny it. Yes, I wanted you to walk with me tonight because I had something to tell you. Obviously you’ve already heard at least part of it. Or someone else’s version of it. Are you interested in hearing what I have to say?”

  She turned her shoulder to him. “Not particularly.”

  “Well, that’s too bad. What I have to say doesn’t concern only you. It concerns other people, too, so you don’t get to make the decision to jump to conclusions and refuse to hear the truth.”

  “Me?” She cried in mock surprise. “Have a say in what goes on around here? Heaven forbid. Apparently, you’re the one running this little farce. So, what was it, Wade, did you get bored in New York and decide to come down here to Texas for a little amusement?”

  He leaned in close to her and kept his voice quiet. “If I was looking for amusement, I damn sure wouldn’t be washing your dishes.”

  She folded her arms across her chest and glared at him. “Well, you’ve got me there. Why are you washing my dishes?”

  Wade let out a long breath and rubbed the back of his neck. “It’s a long story, and you have to let me tell it my way. Can we sit down, please? If you don’t believe anything else tonight, Dixie, please believe that I never meant to deceive you or cause you trouble.”

  “Yeah. Right. Sit. I’m having iced tea. You want some?”

  “Yes, please. But you don’t have to wait on me.”

  “I’m not waiting on you. I’m keeping you out of my kitchen. Now, sit. Please.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  She rolled her eyes and stomped off to the kitchen.

  If she was offering him tea, Wade figured that meant she was willing to listen. He took a seat on the sofa and wondered what she’d heard about him and where she’d heard it.

  In the kitchen, ice cubes crashed into glasses. Liquid splashed. Then she was back, handing him a glass of iced tea.

  “Here,” she snapped.

  “Thank you.”

  “Skip the pleasantries,” she said. “Why are you here? Wait. Let me rephrase that. Why are you in Tribute, why are you working for me and why are you in my house right now?”