His Fire Inside

Her laughter is really starting to get on my nerves. She wipes her eyes as she laughs so hard she can’t catch her breath. I’m eying the fence and considering jumping it to escape. “Oh goodness, I’m sorry for laughing.” Well stop, I want to plead but bite my lip so hard it’s bleeding. She shakes her head as she wipes her eyes again. “It was the expression on your face. You would have thought I was asking you if you were willing to run nude down the street. I’m well aware Rourke is a catch, he’s made those stupid most eligible bachelors lists a few times. Most women would be pleading with me to set them up with him, but you look as though it would be torture.”

I’m so agitated I pull my ponytail out then put it back in, disbelieving it’s not as tangled and knotted as I’m feeling. “Your son will be my employer. I’m expressly not allowed to get involved with the people I’m a companion for or their loved ones. Things could get very m—complicated. I don’t do complicated. I’m not saying your son isn’t attractive, a blind person would find him attractive. I just, I’m not looking for a relationship, any kind of relationship, and there’s the fact your son doesn’t really do relationships so...no, Mrs. Vega. No.”

Her sigh is deep and heavy. She is a crappy actress. “You are right about Rourke and his non-relationships. I’m sure, though, once he’s found that special person he’ll be as loyal and true as his father. I never once doubted Emilio kept our vows, and if you think Rourke is handsome, my dear, you should have seen his father. Emilio was so very handsome he often stole my breath clean away.”

“How did you meet Emilio?” I make sure to use his name.

“I was Rourke’s kindergarten teacher. Rourke blew me away by all he already knew. His father worked with him to make sure he wasn’t seen as some worthless immigrant—his words, never mine. Emilio had only been in the country for seven years, from Guadalajara, Mexico. He was adamant Rourke shouldn’t feel like an outcast; he didn’t even want him to learn Spanish, but of course Rourke learned it along with several different languages on his own.

“Emilio met and married Rourke’s mother, a debutante sowing her wild oats who wasn’t expecting any of those oats to bear fruit. Her family was so angry he was a Mexican immigrant that they disowned her. She married Emilio, thinking her family would come around to accepting her husband and child, but they didn’t so when Rourke was three she went crawling back to her family.

“Rourke was speaking full sentences when he was only two years old and reading by the time he was three. It was mainly due to the babysitter his mother left him with—the babysitter was working on her teaching degree and using Rourke to practice on. By the time Rourke made it into my class he was grades ahead of the kids in the same room. He was reading at a fifth-grade level and doing sixth-grade math. I met with Emilio to urge him to move Rourke to a gifted school.

“And...well, the moment I met Emilio I fell hard for the man. Emilio told me that Rourke already said he hated the limits of the school system and would rather work from home alone. He asked me if I had any ideas, and invited me to discuss them over dinner.” She blushes as she shrugs. “Emilio offered to cook me dinner. I went and never left. We got married two weeks later. I quit teaching to homeschool Rourke.”

I can’t imagine throwing my whole life away on the strength of one night with one man. Even before my fucked-up, failed marriage. “That must have been some dinner.”

Her smile is deep; she’s glowing. “It was. Once he knew he was going to marry me he quit the construction job and got on at the post office, from sheer will I think. I did warn him we would want to make sure we put plenty of money away for Rourke to go to college, and he listened. They are very alike that way, they both listened, were considerate, the way they took care of me and each other. Emilio was a proud husband and father. He worked very hard to give us the life he believed we should have.”

“How long ago did he die?”

“Almost fifteen years now. It was stress, we had just gotten word about Rourke being injured. Although he was hurt badly, he would survive. Even though it was good news, it was Emilio’s second heart attack. His heart didn’t know the difference and gave out on him.”

“I’m so sorry. I read previously Rourke went to school at Stanford. It was only the other day I found out he served in the Army. What made him go into the Service?”

“That Atlas complex of his. I’m proud of him and he makes me crazy at the same time. He won a full ride scholarship to Stanford and left at only sixteen, except it didn’t cover room and board which was a huge amount of money. While we had been saving money for years for college, I’ll admit when we found out about the full ride we never took room and board into consideration. We thought full ride meant full ride, since it even covered his books.

“So we gave a part of the money we’d saved to Rourke so he could travel around Europe and see the world after he graduated high school. For half the summer I went, and for the other half his father went. We weren’t extravagant, we knew we would still want to set money aside for Rourke to have spending money and to come back to Austin for summer and the holidays. But it wasn’t nearly enough when room and board were factored in.

“By Rourke’s junior year we had to take a loan out on the house. But only months later Emilio’s diabetes got bad, and he couldn’t work. I had gone back to teaching but my teacher’s salary wasn’t making a dent. Then Emilio had a heart attack, and it scared the living daylights out of us. Rourke came back and found out everything. He made the decision not to finish his last year at Stanford. Rourke broke both our hearts and signed up for the Army. He sat us down and explained it was the way he had to go. A forty thousand signing bonus would give him more than the last year of Stanford.

“He gave us the first ten thousand to settle things, bills for the house, then he was gone. Neither Emilio nor I was surprised to find out within a year Rourke moved beyond infantry and into Ranger school. We didn’t see him again for two years. He sent money home for us to invest on his behalf in things we never would have picked, and of course it made him a fortune by the time he was out. Then he invested with his former Army buddy, who was flipping houses and hiring former vets to do the work.

“When his father died the payout was substantial, and I still had to argue for him to take back the fifteen thousand he had given us over the years. It was the first time Rourke and I ever raised our voices with each other.”

“Are you going to tell me about how he’s nice to puppies and kittens too?”

Cheryl laughs. “I don’t need to hard sell Rourke, it’s a mother’s prerogative to brag about her son. I’m quite confused how you can be attracted to my son yet seem to not like him as a person. It’s so rare to find I admit I’m not handling it well.”

“I will admit I resented him, before I knew more about him.” Her head tilts. “It seems like all these changes in Austin that make it harder to afford to live here, that turned it into this mecca for people intent on changing it from the quirky, weird place it is, were kind of his fault. There was all the expanding he did, building, and helping fund the festivals and car racing here. Then some people reminded me, he’s just one guy and he couldn’t have done all of this by himself. I don’t know it was more about what he represented. And then I met him and he’s really bossy and arrogant.”

Nodding, she chuckles. “Bossy is the tip of his iceberg. Tell me about yourself. How did you come to do this sort of thing?”

I shrug. “After a bad divorce I had no money and not a whole lot of options. I had my CNA license and a friend knew of someone who needed a live-in CNA. It solved my problems in one go: decent money and allowed me to move out from my brother’s place and give him his bed back.”

“What does your family think of you moving about?”

“My parents are dead, my dad was in the Army and didn’t make it back from deployment, my mother died in a car accident when I was eighteen. My brother and sister don’t think much of anything.”

Her eyes widen. “Oh my. That must have been difficult to be eighteen and supposedly an adult, but without the benefit of a guiding hand. Or were your brother and sister there for you?”

Another shrug, after so many years it’s gotten easier to talk about. “My brother was in the Army, stationed overseas, and my little sister was only fourteen. I raised her. I somehow ended up married, and we became a family unit for her.”

“Somehow?” Her confusion is genuine, same as mine was all those years ago.

Shaking my head, I shrug. “I’ve thought about it often. One day he was there checking up on us the way he had been since my mom died, the next after a night of too much wine, I woke up with an engagement ring on my finger and him in my bed. He never left. I liked him but I never loved him. At the time I thought I needed him, needed the way he wanted to take care of me and my sister. It’s embarrassing to admit I thought he was the white knight, when instead he robbed and pillaged my life.”

Her eyes are kind as she pats my hand. “There’s no shame in doing what hundreds of women have done before. I was married at sixteen for the very same reason. My father had just died. My mother was adamant I needed a man to take care of