Gloria's Daughter Ch. 02

Gloria showed up a moment later in a shapeless grey sweatshirt and matching pants, and the look of unexpected wonder as she saw the big restaurant carton flooded me with happiness. Just the way her eyes widened banished the stress and jitters and anxiety and put a glow in me that I had done exactly the right thing. Looking up from the box, she stood tiptoe as high as she could, held my shoulders for balance, and leaned over the food to kiss me on the cheek.

Flush with pleasure and embarrassment, I said, "I just thought, you know, when you said you never cooked for Thanksgiving -"

"Of course," she said, settling back to her soles with a smile. "This is so you, Denny. You're lovely."

"Anyway," I shrugged the box upward, "I can hand this off or bring it in and set it down, and the two of you can -"

Gloria laughed and stepped aside, pushing the door wider as she got out of my way. "And that's so you too. Don't be ridiculous. You can't bring Thanksgiving dinner and not stay and share it."

From around a corner inside, not-Brandy said, "Mom!"

"Hush, honey." Something occurred to her then, and she looked back at me and said, "I mean, unless you've somewhere else to be - I don't mean to assume ..."

"No," I admitted, "my friends Bob and Leisha invited me to their place, but I went last year and it was awful. Kids hollering, Bob's father-in-law giving me a day-by-day breakdown of all his stock trades for the last month, vegan turkey substitute ... no can do."

"Good. The kitchen's through there and around to the left."

Moving past her, I heard her shut the door behind me and found myself inside Gloria's house.

Light flooded in from the right side of the entryway - the direction she'd pointed. A daisy-yellow living room opened up there, fireplace diagonally opposite me, couch with beaten-up upholstery facing the main wall to the right, where a mid-sized plasma TV sat atop an entertainment center. Gloria's daughter stood between the couch and coffee table with a book in her hand and a look of stymied frustration on her face. She stared at me as I took a couple of steps into the room, nearing the back of the couch.

"Denny, this is my daughter, Kaylee. Kaylee, this is Dennis."

"We've met," she said in a tone flatter than a frying pan.

"Yes, but that's not the same thing as being introduced," Gloria responded. "Don't be rude."

Not knowing what else to do, I said, "It's nice to meet you, Kaylee."

"Yeah. Sure." Her eyes went from my face to the boxed Thanksgiving feast, tracking it as I moved on toward the kitchen, which I now saw beyond a pass-through bar that separated it from the living room. An ambivalence in her face said that no matter how aggravated it made her to have her mother's customer invade their home, she really had been a long time without a proper Thanksgiving meal, and couldn't help being lured by it.

I made my way around the corner into the kitchen, done all in white cabinetry with a round four-seat table in the breakfast nook. The house appeared twenty or thirty years old - clean and well maintained, but hardly the most stylish place I'd been in. On one side of the room, the range and oven looked like original equipment, while the stainless-steel refrigerator two cabinets down was clearly new. On the other side, the sink and dishwasher had obviously not been replaced since the house was built. It looked like a kitchen where things were allowed to stay until they broke, though kept clean and polished in the meantime.

The microwave from "Brandy's" dorm room sat on one faux-granite counter, next to the fridge.

"So ... where do you want this?"

Gloria had followed me in, a little farther back than arm's reach. She looked around at the counters and tables. "I don't know - what do we have to do to it?"

I looked down at the printing on the box, despite having already read it five times in the car.

"It says an hour of reheating time. I guess the turkey will have to go in the oven or something."

From the living room, Kaylee made an ughh! noise. I couldn't tell if it signified impatience at having to wait that long to eat, or at having to tolerate my presence the whole time. But glancing through the bar, I noticed she'd sat back down on the couch with her book and her frown, when she could easily have dashed away to her room.

Gloria put a hand on my shoulder and pointed next to the sink. "Well, let's unpack it there and see what we're looking at."

The next hour may have been the happiest non-sex hour I'd had in fifteen years. I tried to offer to do the food prep myself so that she wouldn't have to cook, but she refused to hear of it, and from there we unloaded the carton and spread everything out and leaned side-by-side on the counter reading the instruction sheet together with her hand resting beautifully between my shoulder-blades. Once a game-plan came together of what to oven-heat and what to microwave and when, we got the turkey in the oven and found ourselves with nothing but time to wait. She pointed to a coffee-maker in one corner.

"Should I make a pot while we're waiting?"

"Sure, that sounds great."

Leaning to look through the bar, she asked her daughter, "You want to come have coffee with us, Kaylee?"

"No thanks." A dismissive hand waved the offer away with even a glance up from her book. "Awkward enough already."

Gloria laughed and rummaged in a cabinet for a tin of coffee, a couple of mugs, and a sugar jar. "Go on and sit down," she said, tilting her chin toward the table. "This will just take a second."

What I really wanted was to step nearer, take gentle hold of her by the waist, and move with her as she got the coffee going, so that I could smell her hair and the scent of ground coffee beans and feel close to her and caught up in her life. But I didn't, and to tell the truth, watching her move about the kitchen from my place at her table felt almost as good.

"Okay," she said, leaving the coffee to percolate and coming to join me in the breakfast nook. "Sorry I don't have one of those Kurgig-whatevers that zaps the coffee out in two seconds. We're cheap and old-fashioned around here."

"I'm sure it's better than the crap that comes out of the machines at my work," I said, watching her slide into the chair adjacent to mine. Beautiful Gloria, her freckled face bare of makeup, eyes the blue of oceans seen from space, red hair a little tousled, as if she'd brushed it lazily this morning and taken no special care with it since.

"So how's your week been?" she asked, looking as though the subject actually interested her.

"Pretty quiet. Half the office took the week off. Last week was a bear, though, everybody frantic to get enough ahead of schedule that a week off won't blow any deadlines."

The coffee-maker gurgled. With a mischievous grin, Gloria said, "That's the advantage of being in my line of work. When I take the week off, there's nothing to blow."

"MOM!"

Hearing Kaylee's squawk, the two of us broke up laughing. I tried to hold it in as best I could - I didn't want to give her any more reason to hate me, and I know teenagers can't stand to be snickered at by adults. But Gloria let loose without restraint, and hearing her, seeing the delight in her eyes, made it wickedly difficult to stifle my own laugh.

The coffee finished, was poured and stirred. We talked and sipped and caught up on the last week and a half. Holiday weeks were almost always skip weeks for me and Gloria, certainly if her daughter ... Kaylee, so strange that it wasn't Brandy ... was going to be at home. At some point, the surly teenager got up and went in to the refrigerator to get herself a soda, making the entire round-trip without ever casting her eyes our way, even though Gloria leaned in and whispered to me while she was walking toward the fridge.

"It's okay if you look at her ass. I won't be offended. She's got a hell of an ass, doesn't she?"

My face went bright red, or at least felt like it. I also just about choked on my coffee. I really thought I'd done a better job at hiding what my eyes wanted to do than that.

She sat back up as Kaylee returned around the corner of the bar, carrying her soda can to the couch. Then, when the book went back up in front of her daughter's face, she put her mouth back near my ear and asked, under her breath, "Do you wish I had an ass like that?"

No, I thought, because then I wouldn't get to see the ass you've got now, and I really like your ass. But ... partly yes, too, I guess. Kaylee's got a pretty awesome butt.

"Let's, uh, talk about that later," was all I said, keeping my voice quiet as I could. She grinned and tapped my foot with hers below the table. Then she looked over at the kitchen clock.

"Turkey's almost done. Time to start getting the sides heated up."

Everything came in its own microwavable or oven-safe container - gravy, mashed potatoes, corn on the cob, rolls. We got them into the appropriate cooking appliances, and then Gloria found the right serving dishes for everything. Soon we were loading it all piping hot onto the table.

"Lunch, Kaylee," Gloria said.

Her daughter got up and came into the breakfast nook, an uncomfortable, uncertain expression on her face. "Look, if it's okay, I'll just make myself a plate and take it to my room."

"No, it's not okay." Gloria's face and voice carried that firm, stern opposition parents can use with their children and nobody else can really match at all. "We have a guest, and he's gone out of our way to bring us this wonderful meal, and -"

"Yeah, because he ..." The reflexive teenage interruption trailed off. Her mouth clamped down frustratedly.

"Because he what, Kaylee? Because he wants to get into my pants? That's pretty obviously not the reason he came over, right?"

Silence. Gloria let her face soften.

"Kaylee ... please?"

With a grumbly expression but no further complaining, Kaylee moved over to the table and sat, taking the chair on the other side of Gloria from me. That put her as far as possible from my spot - but also meant we faced each other directly across the tabletop.

"Thank you, sweetheart," Gloria said, touching her daughter's hand.

"All right," I said. "I guess let's eat."

The meal went better than I would have expected, given Kaylee's starting attitude. I managed to ask her about her classes and get some grudging answers, and when I put a little effort into follow-up questions, she apparently decided to relent and let loose with actual details. She was taking some crazy stuff - advanced calculus and computer and engineering courses that I wouldn't have touched unless my major required it. But she hadn't even declared a major yet, and got a bit defensive about that when I asked.

Gloria had told me her daughter was smart. I'd assumed she was being truthful about that. Listening to Kaylee talk, though, and watching her vibrant blue eyes, made it clear to me that Gloria had exaggerated nothing. She had the passion and vivacious articulation that you only find in brilliant youths - people whose minds are so sharp they can capture and analyze the whole world, but whose experience is still too limited to understand that there are blind spots in every analysis and limits to the reach of the mind.

We kept talking a good half-hour after we'd all gotten full. I barely noticed the food as I ate, working so hard to keep Kaylee's sudden openness from snapping shut again - and also half-high on the glow of appreciation in Gloria's eyes as she watched me interact with her daughter. It helped a great deal, I'm sure, that Gloria had gotten a bottle of wine out along with all the serving platters, and the three of us had put away most of the alcohol over the course of the meal.

At some point, though, the conversation reached a lull, and the diversion of whatever subject Kaylee had been discussing wrapped up and left her, and she seemed to realize that she'd come perilously close to sitting comfortably at a table having lunch with her mother and one of her mother's johns.

Her mouth crimped a little, and she said, "Well, I'm bloated. I'm going to take my book and lie down in my room and -"

"Oh, no," Gloria interrupted. "Denny brought the food, he and I got it ready, and you're going to put everything away and do the cleaning up."

"Mo-omm ..." she whined. But the complaint only got her a commanding stare, so she rolled her eyes and stood up, sighing. "Oh all right."

"I'll help," I said, standing up as well.

"Nope," Gloria said. "You're going to go in the living room and strip down to your underwear, and I'm going to do something I've never done for you."

"AAH!" Kaylee shrieked, almost dropping the turkey platter she'd lifted off the table.

I'm certain I looked equally horrified. But Gloria just laughed at both of us.

"Get going, you two. I'll be back in a minute with my massage table."

Two people as different as Kaylee and I have probably never felt as identical an sense of relief as we did in that moment. When I looked at her, I saw her looking back, blue eyes full of oh-my-god-can-you-believe-she-just-did-that-to-us?

Then she straightened up and came around the table carrying the turkey, her composure returning enough to let her say, "I hate you, Mom."

I went into the living room and stood there awkwardly. Gloria had disappeared somewhere into the back of the house, where I presumed the bedrooms could be found. It looked like a folding massage table could be set up either just in front of the fireplace (No way - Kaylee will have full view of that the whole time she's working on dishes) or along the front wall, between the entryway and the hallway that led back where Gloria had gone. I moved to the second choice, and tried to get my courage up to pull off my sweater and start unbuttoning my shirt. But even from this angle, Kaylee would be able to see me stripping as she went back and forth from the table to the interior of the kitchen.

By the time Gloria returned, carrying her folding table by its handle, I'd managed to get out of my sweater and shoes but nothing else.

"Well this is the slowest I've ever seen you undress," she said, lifting an eyebrow.

"Oh, come on," I said, glancing toward the kitchen. Kaylee made another trip to the table, looked over at us.

"Ugh," she said, picking up a couple of dishes and hurrying away. From around the corner, she raised her voice to continue, "I'm almost done moving everything, and trust me, I don't want to look anyway."

Gloria pointed her eyes at my belt buckle and then down to the floor. "Let's go. I'll have this thing set up faster than you can say 'cranberry sauce.'"

"All right, all right." I worked at unbuttoning my shirt. True to her word, she flipped the table open, got its legs out and locked, and set it upright by the time I'd shucked the shirt and started on my pants. "T-shirt off too?"

"Up to you."

My eyes flicked toward the kitchen involuntarily. I couldn't see Kaylee. The table was bare. I left the t-shirt on anyway.

"Okay, so how do I ...?"

"Just get on and lie on your tummy with your face in here," she said, patting the middle of the cushioned surface and then running her hand up to indicate the padded oval face-rest at one end.

Gracelessly, and with another embarrassed glance at the kitchen, I sat on the table's edge, lifted one foot and then the other, and rolled over onto my stomach, scooting and shifting until I had my face lined up with the head-rest's opening.

"See? Easy. Now close your eyes and relax."

Closing my eyes was easy. Relaxing, not so much ... at first.

Gloria's hands came down and rested perpendicular to my waist, side-by-side at the small of my back. "Come on, Denny. You can do better than that."

I took a deep breath and willed my muscles to un-tense.

"There you go." I could hear the smile in her voice as she said it. Then her hands started to move.

Very quickly, the remaining tension went out of my body and I found myself floating in darkness, as if the firm, gliding pressure of Gloria's fingers were my only connection to reality. She hummed lightly as she worked, but I couldn't identify any particular tune. Stress-knots and kinks in my sinews yielded before the power of her hands, bringing groans that I should have worried would be misinterpreted by Kaylee. But what Gloria was doing had me beyond worry. From my back, she moved up to my neck, then out across one trapezius and then the other, then around the shoulders and down each of my arms, then each of my legs. At some point, I realized that the noise of dishes and water in the kitchen sink had stopped - that Kaylee must have already finished and walked past us to her room. I found it didn't really make any difference to me.

Eventually, when I felt I was about to melt and drain away, Gloria patted one hand between my shoulder blades. "Roll over."

I did, taking care not to get too close to the edge, in case I fell off or unbalanced the table. Once I'd gotten on my back, she leaned over me, took one shoulder in each hand, and hooked her thumbs into my deltoid muscles right where the ends of my pecs joined up to them.

"Oh god." I'd opened my eyes when I turned over; now they rolled up into my head and had trouble focusing when they came back down. "Ohh."

Gloria smiled and continued circling her thumbs deep into my aching flesh, driving away cricks and pangs that I hadn't even known were there.

"Listen," she said, moving down along my right arm, "When I've wrapped this up, we can make some more coffee and sit and chat for a while, or watch some of the football game if you like. But I can't invite you to stay."

I nodded, watching her work. "Sure. That's not why I came."

"I just wanted to make sure you understood."

"Of course I understand. Kaylee would -"

"No." Her fingers paused, thumb at the lower end of my bicep. "Kaylee lives every day knowing her mom is a whore."

"Gloria ..."

"I know you don't like it, but it's the word she would use. It's what she thinks about what I do, and compared to that, having a man I like sleep over would be nothing." Shaking her head, she returned her gaze and her attention to my arm. "No, the reason I can't ask you to stay is, this is as far as I can go and still keep you as a client. I can accept a sweet Thanksgiving dinner as a gift from a customer. I can turn around and give you a massage as my own Thanksgiving gift back. But I can't take you to bed - to my bed - and still keep screwing you for money. I just can't. And what sucks most about that is, I really, really need you as a client. Not for the money, I could make that up somehow. But whenever I start doubting what I do, whenever Kaylee tries to insult me into quitting, I can think of you and I know she's a hundred percent wrong. Anytime I'm thinking I have a shitty job and it makes me a shitty person, I can fix it. All I have to do is look at my Monday evening calendar."

I sat up and took hold of her forearm, putting my other hand on top of hers. "Gloria, you're the last person in the world who should think of herself as shitty."

With a smile, she extracted herself from my grasp and pushed gently at the center of my chest. "And that's exactly what I'm talking about. Lie down and take your massage."

I did, but I wasn't ready to let it go. "I thought you said you had lots of decent clients."

"I do," she said, pinching the meat between my thumb and palm with one hand, using the other to rub a thumb and forefinger slowly down each of my fingers in turn. "And lots of annoying ones to balance them out, and a couple of real buttholes to pull me down if I let them. But nobody can tip my balance the wrong way when you're on its happy side, Denny. And if I bring you over here past the boudoir door, I'm going to have a really, really hard time leaving this side of the house for that one every day."