The Heart of the Matter Read online

  There were women in sweats, in tights and T-shirts, and in coordinated outfits like the white-haired woman wore.

  Then one woman noticed him standing in the doorway and pointed in his direction, and conversation stopped as the women turned in a body to stare at him. As loud music his sons would probably recognize thrummed from the tape player on the stage, he began to wonder why he’d thought this was a good idea.

  Because it meant his health, he remembered, and renewed confidence in him from his boys.

  He took a step into the room, smiled at the ladies and was about to head for the other side of the room when a figure in black tights and a black-and-yellow leotard emerged from the curtains onstage. She dropped a stack of tapes and a towel near the tape player, then leapt off the stage and ran at an easy lope toward the back of the hall.

  Jason recognized Laura Price, looking like some very sophisticated and erotic little bumblebee. The body that had been concealed under a lab coat three days ago at the clinic was now as clearly revealed as though she were naked.

  Full breasts moved under the short-sleeved leotard, the jut of ribs was defined above a very narrow waist. A flat stomach between hipbones led his eye to long, slender thighs, lightly muscled calves and ankle socks in big-soled shoes. Her wild hair was tied back in a high ponytail. When she turned, the yellow stripes rounded over a tight derriere.

  He felt another spell of light-headedness coming on.

  She stopped halfway toward the doors when she spotted him and changed direction. “Mr. Warfield,” she said in obvious surprise. “Are you…joining us?”

  He looked up at the knot of ladies watching him with smiling interest. Then he saw the white-haired lady standing on one foot and bending her other leg behind her until her foot touched the back of her head, and he winced again.

  “If you don’t think I’ll slow you down too much,” he said.

  She followed the line of his gaze and laughed. “Don’t mind Martie. She was a dancer in her youth and comes to classes to stay limber. None of us tries to keep up with her.” She looked around. “Didn’t Barry come with you?”

  He shook his head. “His call night’s been changed and he had a broken hip coming in.”

  “Well, I’m glad you decided to come on your own. I know it’s probably a little uncomfortable for you with no other men in the class, but please don’t feel selfconscious. No one is here to impress anyone, just to get healthy. Start slowly, do what you can, and I always demonstrate the lighter side of our moves, so go with what works for you.” She caught his arm and pulled him toward a table set up near the doors. “Come on. Dixie will register you while I get us ready to start.”

  Jason was turned over to a bubbly young woman in gray tights and a black-and-white T-shirt that read Dixie’s Day Care on it. While he filled out a form and checked off whether he had or didn’t have a long list of illnesses, she told him she exercised to relieve stress. “Dealing with ten to fifteen kids every day can turn your mind to broth and your body to sausage,” she said.

  The food references made him salivate.

  When he’d finished the forms and paid the small fee, Dixie introduced him to Philly. She was a plump middle-aged woman in baggy sweat bottoms and a T-shirt. She announced that her claim to fame was that she always occupied the back row.

  “Everyone else moves too fast for me,” she said, indicating the three rows of women ahead of them, “so I stay in the back and do my own thing. The back’s a good place to start. I’ll keep you from getting hurt.”

  Jason nodded a thank-you as a slow, brassy tune began and Laura Price started to warm up her class.

  They did neck rotations, slow, easy stretches of arms and legs, easy bends and twists, then, as the music changed every seven or eight minutes to something just a little faster and a little more intense than the tune before, the warm-up gradually turned into the beginning stages of aerobic exercise.

  Jason was surprised to find himself enjoying it. Philly warned him of what was coming next, helped him when the steps became tricky and saved him from being trampled when a forward march he was just getting into made an abrupt turn and he was suddenly confronted with a dozen women just gaining their stride running toward him.

  With Philly pulling on him, he backpedaled dramatically, causing an outburst of smiles and laughter before the cheerful army made another turn and headed back toward the stage.

  When that number was finished, Laura, still running in place, ponytail bobbing, called for everyone to take their pulse.

  Jason put a thumb to his wrist.

  Laura leapt off the stage and came toward him while the other ladies toweled off, drank water or stood with their fingertips to their necks, watching the big clock over the stage.

  “Never take your pulse with your thumb.” Laura surprised and momentarily befuddled him by putting her fingertips to the side of his neck just under his chin. Her green eyes looked past him to the clock, her complete attention riveted on it.

  He stayed absolutely still, sure his pulse must sound like someone on amphetamines. He could feel every small pad of every fingertip touching the sensitive skin at his throat. He couldn’t take his eyes off her eyes.

  Then she dropped her hand abruptly and swung a diagnostic gaze to him. He felt it like a touch, as though it soothed all the hardworking processes in his body. “Your thumb has its own pulse, so it confuses your reading. You’re a little fast but not too bad. How do you feel?”

  “Great,” he said.

  “Good. Test yourself once in a while as we go through the heavy-duty stuff. Your heart rate shouldn’t exceed about one hundred and twenty beats per minute. So every once in a while, check the clock for fifteen seconds and make sure you’re not over thirty beats. Get it? A quarter of a minute, a quarter of your rate.”

  He nodded.

  “If you get higher than that, slow to a walk, or you can even stop if you get uncomfortable.” She turned to Philly. “You keeping an eye on him, Philly?”

  Philly grinned. “Already saved his life once. I think I might even take him home with me. Bob’s out fishing.” She turned a wicked grin on Jason. “Would you like that, Mr. Warfield?”

  “Jason,” he said. “Do you make brownies?”

  She patted the roundness under her baggy sweats. “How do you think I got this figure?”

  “Then, I’m yours.”

  Laura ran back to the stage, levered herself up with agile ease, then popped in another tape.

  Jason lost control of the situation at that point. For the next twenty minutes he felt as though he were on one of those iron-man weekends for executives who want to learn the limits of their endurance.

  He learned that he’d met his somewhere at the end of the warm-up. He even slowed down to a march step, walking his way through the moves with Philly while everyone else continued to jump, bounce, leap and run like some well-oiled set of pistons, beautifully synchronized, moving flawlessly in their appointed up-and-down rush to the unrelenting music.

  He was drained and renewing unwelcome memories of the first weeks of boot camp when the music stopped.

  He turned to Philly. “Is it…over?” he gasped hopefully.

  She patted his arm consolingly. “Now we’re going to the mat.”

  He raised an eyebrow in perplexity. He was sure it was the only part of him he’d be able to raise for the next few weeks. “But I was beaten to the mat twenty minutes ago.”

  She laughed and drew him toward the side of the room where all the other women had gone to retrieve exercise mats from a tall green stack.

  “Now we do floor exercises and cool-down,” Philly said. “You’ll like this part.”

  “You didn’t bring any of those brownies with you, did you?”

  She took a mat for herself and handed him one with a sunny smile. “You’re so funny. No wonder you get paid for it. Come on. You’ll want to drink a little water before we get going again.”

  Ten minutes later, in the middle of thirty cr
unches, he thought that no amount of water—or even brownies—would have seen him through the torture Laura inflicted upon her class now.

  Only, he seemed to be the only one in pain. There was lots of good-natured groaning, but when Laura called for thirty leg lifts, they gave them to her. And when she told them to turn over for thirty on the other side, they groaned again, but did it.

  And through it all, she lay on a mat on the stage, leading the routines with perfect form and seemingly limitless endurance. Her cheeks were pink with the glow of exertion, and she mopped her face occasionally with a hand towel on her mat, but her moves were tireless.

  While she executed perfect push-ups, he followed, determined to do as many as she could of this one exercise with which he was familiar and at which a man, with superior upper body strength, should excel.

  But she, her body perfectly aligned, pushed up and down as though she were motorized, while he did one to her two, his muscles burning and screaming with pain.

  He finally slumped to the mat while she continued to count. Then he watched in a haze of exhaustion as she pushed herself up, then eased herself down, and suddenly his mind skewed what he saw and he imagined her in the act of loving a man—him—with that same inexhaustible enthusiasm.

  He groaned and let his forehead fall to the mat.

  “You okay, Jason?” Philly asked anxiously in mid push-up. She was doing half push-ups from her knees, but she was doing them beautifully.

  He rolled onto his back and drew a deep breath. “I’m great, thanks. Nothing that oxygen and a pacemaker wouldn’t cure.”

  She laughed as the music stopped. “Glad to hear it. Worst is over. Now we’re cooling down.”

  Jason survived the next two cooling-down numbers, and put on a brave face when the class was over and many of the women, disheveled but somehow vibrant, came to introduce themselves and welcome him to the class.

  “Next time will be hell,” Martie warned with a sturdy thump to his back, “but after that you’ll get into it and it’ll feel so good you’ll never want to quit.” Then she shouldered her towel and her own personalized mat and left the hall.

  Dixie rolled her eyes at the retreating figure that looked more thirty than seventy.

  “We’re all chipping in to have her kidnapped and force-fed DoveBars.” She smiled at him philosophically. “You don’t have to do as well as she does, you just have to relax and feel good. See you Wednesday?”

  No. They were never going to see him again. But he smiled and let her think it was an affirmative, and thanked her for all her help. Then he fell onto one of the many folding chairs lined up on both sides of the room and pulled his bag toward him with his foot because he doubted seriously that he could bend. He was sure he’d pulled every muscle and stripped every gear in his body.

  He’d eased his crippled muscles out of his sweatsoaked shirt and was pulling on a fresh one from his bag when he surfaced from the neck to find Laura standing in front of him, a big brown envelope bag over her shoulder. She’d combed out the ponytail and red hair fell in tight ringlets past her shoulders. Damp little curls sprang along her hairline. He thought they seemed like visible signs of her energy.

  “You survived,” she observed with a cautious smile. “How do you feel?”

  He rotated a shoulder and stopped because it hurt. “Like I’ve been worked over by Torquemada,” he replied. “I can’t believe you aren’t even out of breath.”

  She tapped lightly over her heart. “Of course I get breathless, but I recover quickly because I have clear arteries. And I doubt seriously that the Spanish Inquisition was this much fun.”

  “Fun.” He considered the word. “You probably mountain-climb on weekends, don’t you?”

  She laughed. “No. But I do hike. You coming back Wednesday?”

  He tried the same smile on her that he’d used on Dixie. “I appreciate your interest in me, Ms. Price.”

  “You can call me Laura,” she said, and he could tell she’d read his mind, “if you come back on Wednesday. But if we’re just going to meet in my office, I’ll have to remain Ms. Price.”

  She was teasing him about that, but he guessed on some level the distinction was true. The woman who was up-tight and formal and serious about rubber food became someone else entirely when she put on tights and cranked up the music. She could let herself go here. He found himself wondering why she couldn’t always do that.

  Jason made a production of getting to his feet, then realized his bag was still on the floor and he would have to bend for it.

  “I imagine I’ll be paralyzed by Wednesday,” he said, bending for the bag and accepting immediately that it had been a terrible mistake. Strained muscles protested.

  He straightened with difficulty.

  “I told you to take it slowly,” she admonished, taking his arm and leading him toward the door as though he were ninety. But he was in too much pain to take offense. “Come on. I’ll walk you out to your car.”

  “I did take it slowly,” he insisted, hobbling along with her, “but even slowly took every reserve of endurance I had. Where did you train, anyway? With the Olympic men’s triathlon team?”

  “Honestly.” She scoffed lightly, taking more of his weight as they went down the few front steps. “A group of men play basketball once a week at the Y and think they’re commando material. Real fitness takes so much more than that. But you’ll feel it as you continue.” She stopped in the middle of the walk and looked up and down the street, which was empty except for a black Ford Explorer, and a station wagon that bore the church’s name on a magnetic sign on the side.

  “Where is your car?” she asked.

  “At home,” he said, aware that he was leaning on her. “I walked here to warm up.”

  “Where do you live?”

  “On Oak Hill overlooking the bay.”

  She frowned. “That’s a mile and a half away. You wore yourself out before you got here. How did you expect to get home after seventy-five minutes of exercise?”

  He smiled blandly. “Hearse?”

  She punched his shoulder.

  He screamed.

  She apologized and rubbed the spot. “Relax, Mr. Warfield. I’ll take you home.”

  “You can call me Jason,” he said, hanging on to her as she led him toward the Explorer. “If I don’t have to come back on Wednesday.”

  It was dusk when Laura pulled into the driveway behind a blue Mercedes wagon. She hurried around her vehicle to help her passenger out.

  “Never mind, I can’t do it,” he said when she pulled the door open. “I’ll have to bend my head and move my legs, and I think everything has fused into a solid bar of rust. Just close me in and call a priest.”

  “How you do exaggerate,” she said with a smile, crouching to look in at him. “And anyway, rust isn’t solid. It flakes, so I’m sure if you move just a little, you’ll find you can move a little more.”

  “No, I don’t think so.” He lay back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “Get my boys so I can tell them where the insurance policy and all that stuff is. And I want to be cremated.”

  Laura couldn’t hold back the laughter. “Well, if you don’t get out of the car, I’ll have to perform the cremation myself and it’ll be a little crude. Come on. Give me your right leg.”

  “Take it,” he said. “I’m sure it’ll come right off. It disconnected from the rest of my body somewhere during those leg lifts.”

  She was really starting to like him. “Come on. I’ll help you.”

  She took the fleece-covered calf of his left leg carefully in her hands and lifted until his foot was out of the car.

  “Ow, ow, ow, ow!” he cried.

  “Sorry,” she said, then moved the other leg in the same way. But this time she was aware of sturdy muscle. The rest of him might not be well-honed, but basketball had tightened his legs nicely.

  She looked up into his dark brown eyes and discovered that he was reading her thoughts. The humor was still there, a
long with genuine physical discomfort, but over that, bright and clear, was…interest.

  It collided with the interest she felt and made her want to withdraw. Nothing ever came of interest-for her, anyway. Interest always led one along a promising path then fizzled or died abruptly, leaving her with the conviction that there was something wrong with her.

  She stood and straightened, needing to put some physical distance between them.

  Then three boys came out of the house, a young teenager, a sturdy preteen and a little boy. She recognized them from one of the columns she’d read where Jason had taken his boys to a ball game.

  “Did he faint again?” the middle boy asked anxiously, running to him.

  “No,” Jason grumbled, then let the boy and his older brother team up to help him out of the car. “If you want the truth, I was murdered. This is Laura Price, guys. She leads the aerobics class. She did it. I’m sure you’ll want to avenge me.”

  “Don’t you have to be dead if she murdered you?” the little one asked.

  “Well, it’s a Zen kind of a thing,” Jason replied, “but you can be dead and still very much alive. Laura, that’s Matt. This big guy on my left is Eric, number two son. This one’s Adam.”

  In the glow of a floodlight over the garage, Laura saw three faces that bore strong resemblance to Jason’s, though the second boy’s coloring was fairer than that of the other two. They seemed concerned for their father, but a little amused, too, by his predicament.

  “We tried to tell you, Dad,” Adam said, guiding Jason’s arm around his shoulder as Eric did the same on the other side. “You’re getting a little…you know…antiquey for this kind of thing.”

  Jason fixed Laura with a pitiful expression as he beckoned her to follow them toward the house. “You love them, suffer for them, sacrifice and give them your good name, and what do they give you in return?”

  Adam smiled up at him. “Their paper route money when you’re between royalty checks. But I thought you didn’t want us to tell anybody that.”

  Jason laughed and lightly boxed his ear. “He’s going to take over the column when I get too old.”

  “Which looks like it could be tomorrow,” Eric said as he sidled sideways to get Jason through the door.