Okay, so apparently when I had to make a small change in the last chapter, I forgot this part. So here's the essence of what I wrote before: Basically, I assured she-loves-shoes that I've always been intrigued by the what-if-Kirsten-and-Jimmy-got-married idea, which is why I wrote this, and I do hate to break couples up. That being said, Sandy will show up because I like him too much to keep him away, and there's no telling what he'll do. As for Ryan, he'll probably show up, too, but we'll have to see (including me; I really don't have any idea where I'm going with this.) I am sorry that I had to eliminate Seth, but there's no way he could've fit in the timeline. All right, here I go.
"Here we are," she announced, more to herself than to her brother, as he'd already undone his seatbelt and barely waited for her to turn off the car before opening his door.
"Thanks again," he said with a smile. "I owe you one. You can get back home okay?" Grace nodded.
"Yeah, it's no trouble." She laughed. "Don't mention it—it was kind of fun. I've definitely never driven such a nice car before." Suddenly the Roberts' door opened, and Summer stepped onto the porch.
"Cooper, are you just going to stand there, knowing I'm waiting for you?" she asked, her tone just under a whine, but then she smiled. "Hi Grace," she called, waving. Grace noticed the nails: dark pink with jeweled decals on the tips. She waved back. "Thanks for driving him."
"No problem," she called back. "See you, Summer." With a glance behind her, Grace pulled out of the Roberts's driveway and began to head back home. Once she got there, she panicked for a moment, realizing she didn't have house keys, but then she noticed the other keys on the key ring Dad had given her. They must be for the house, she decided, relaxing. She'd have to ask Vicky or Cal to help her get the car back into the garage; Jim had handled it before, and she wasn't sure if she remembered what he'd done.
"Hey, can someone help me get Kirsten's car back into the garage?" she asked tentatively as she opened the front door. Nobody seemed to hear her over the sound of the television. Grace thought a minute and tried to remember where Kirsten had said the TV was. She made it to the rec room and found Cal watching syndicated reruns of Full House.
"Cal, do you know how to get the car in the garage?" He looked away from the screen and nodded.
"I'll show you," he said, and she followed him outside to the wide driveway in which she'd parked the Mercedes.
Meanwhile, Kirsten was sinking deeper and deeper into a quicksand of work. She was becoming overwhelmed, but there was no way she could cut back; Jimmy had made some bad investments and was working on getting his portfolio back to where it needed to be. Their dual-income family was now mostly subsiding on her job as No. 2 at the Newport Group, and while she made more than enough money for the Cooper family to keep up its lifestyle, Kirsten wasn't used to the pressure of the family's depending on her. She checked her watch. It was almost lunch time. Maybe I should check on the kids—well, Grace, and then go out to eat.
"Cooper residence," said Cara's voice as always.
"Hi, Cara, it's Mrs. Cooper. Is Grace home?"
"She and Mr. Caleb are outside getting the Mercedes back into the garage, ma'am."
"Oh. Where did they go?"
"I believe that Mr. James wanted a ride to Miss Roberts' house, and Miss Grace drove him there."
"She's okay, then?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Thanks so much, Cara. Oh, I meant to ask you—for dinner tonight, could you please make that Indian dish I like so much?"
"Of course, Mrs. Cooper."
"You're the best. See you tonight." Kirsten hung up the phone and twirled a pen absently in her long fingers. So Grace had taken Jim to Summer's house. Kirsten was becoming a little bit more comfortable with the idea of Jimmy's illegitimate daughter living with them, but she still didn't know anything about the girl, and, as Jimmy had made crystal-clear the night before, neither did he. She could only think of one person who knew anything about Grace: Sandy Cohen. Absently, Kirsten began to search through her purse for the slip of paper on which he'd written his phone number.
Sandy Cohen had been a friend of her roommate's boyfriend back in college, she recalled, and had flirted with her an awful lot before finally asking her out. He'd had impeccable manners, though she had known that, to her father, they wouldn't have come close to making up for his lack of family money. Though Caleb Nichol had had to work hard and get his hands dirty to build the Newport Group, he had come from one of the quintessential "old money" families that had run into financial ruin and looked down on the nouveau riche; he had married into one of the most blue-blooded families in the country without trouble, trading on the Nichol name. The fact that Sandy didn't even have new money was just water under the bridge. In retrospect, Kirsten thought that her father's obvious disapproval was part of Sandy's appeal. He had been a good guy, though, and very honest; she could trust him to tell her the truth about her stepdaughter.
"California PD," said a rather harried female voice when she telephoned.
"Hello, this is Kirsten Cooper," she said politely. "May I please speak with Mr. Sanford Cohen?"
"Sure—SANDY!" called the woman. "Line 2!"
"Sandy Cohen," he said a moment later. "May I ask who's calling?"
"This is Kirsten," she blurted. "Kirsten Cooper, Grace's stepmother?"
"Mrs. Cooper, sure, I remember you," Sandy said easily. "What can I do for you?"
"I was hoping we could talk about Grace: her schooling and such, you know?"
"No problem. What do you want to know?" She hesitated.
"I'd rather not talk about it on the phone...Can we meet for lunch or something?" Sandy glanced at his watch.
"Where are you?"
"The Newport Group; that's where I work. Why?"
"I don't think I have time. Tell you what, Mrs. Cooper, why don't we get together for drinks after work instead?" Kirsten considered for a moment.
"Sure, that sounds fine. Where?" He named a reasonably nice bar/restaurant not terribly far away.
"Okay," she agreed. "See you around five-thirty?"
"That's good for me," he told her cheerfully.
"Great. I'll see you then. Good-bye, Mr. Cohen." She still remembered him as "Sandy," but he had called her "Mrs. Cooper," so she reverted to the more formal name.
"Bye, Mrs. Cooper." She cradled the phone and thought a moment. This was actually happening: she, Kirsten Cooper, had a second teenage daughter.
The rest of the day trudged on, Kirsten working fervently even through lunch so as to ensure that she could leave to meet Sandy with an easy conscience. She didn't normally leave work before six-thirty, but she hadn't wanted to inconvenience him, so she'd suggested a more normal "after-work-drinks" time, but it meant she had less time to get through the massive amount of work that the new development the company was building created.
At five o'clock, Kirsten sighed and put her unfinished work in the sleek leather attaché Jim had given her as a Mothers' Day present just months before, smiling fondly as she thought of the little boy who had grown up so much recently; he was taller than she was now, and she had a suspicion that things were getting serious between him and Summer Roberts. Kirsten smiled and waved good-bye to the receptionist as she walked out of the building. She liked Summer, who had inherited her father's brains and her mother's sweet heart. She had also, reflected Kirsten with a slight smirk, managed to end up with soap-opera good looks, despite the fact that neither of her parents had been exceptionally attractive.
Kirsten got to the restaurant early, and she retreated to the bathroom to make sure she looked okay. She touched up her makeup and brushed her hair and then went to the bar to wait for Sandy Cohen. She ordered a scotch on the rocks and sat, sipping it slowly.
"Mrs. Cooper," called a voice that was touched with a New York accent; in southern California, though, the touch was enough to be extremely exotic. He took a seat next to her.
"Hi, Mr. Cohen." He grinned.
"Aw, you can call me Sandy. I'm not used to people being so formal," he joked. "I think your stepdaughter was the first kid I've met to call me 'Mr. Cohen.'" Kirsten smiled awkwardly.
"Then you should call me Kirsten," she told him as he asked the bartender for a Molsen. "Let's get a table, though, I don't really like sitting on bar stools anymore."
"Anything you like," agreed Sandy amiably. They moved to a table, and Sandy took off his jacket. Kirsten drank a little faster from nerves.
"So, um, I guess Grace is going to be living with us now," she started, "and we're going to need her school records so that we can enroll her properly." She downed her scotch, the ice cubes still mostly un-melted, and ordered another. "And...I mean, we don't know anything about her except that she's Jimmy's daughter with Julie...something. You know, I don't even remember her last name, that's how little I've thought about her for the past sixteen years. So...I mean, if you can, I'd like to know what you do about her."
"It's not a lot," warned Sandy. "Grace lives, or she did up until two days ago, with Lance and Julie Baldwin and two younger siblings: Helen, who is fourteen, and Gerald, who is nine. She got pretty good grades, good test scores—stronger in math than English, by the way. She was arrested for shoplifting two bottles of nail polish and some nail polish remover from a drug store, maybe eight dollars' worth of stuff. Normally she would've been let off by the police, but there's been a lot of crime recently in her area. Some officers deal with it by easing up on all but the murderers and bigger-time drug dealers; others deal with it by being much harsher on everyone. It was Grace's bad luck to meet up with a member of the latter group." He smiled ruefully. "She doesn't have a prior record at all. I only met her the one time, so really you and your husband ought to have a better knowledge of her personality than I do." It was Kirsten's turn to smile.
"Thanks. I was wondering what she'd done to need help with a 'legal trouble,' but that doesn't sound any worse than what the girls do at home. So, Sandy," she continued, in a different tone. "I have to ask why you never called me." His face registered a look of confusion.
"After we went out," she explained. "I gave you my number, but you never called. I remembered not long after you left yesterday." He considered.
"How come you never called me?" he countered teasingly. "I gave you my number." She gave a small shrug.
"Girls don't call; at least, we're not supposed to make the first call. That's the boy's job." Sandy laughed. He had a nice laugh, Kirsten noticed. Like Jimmy's, it filled his whole face and went all the way to his—very blue—eyes.
"Ah, I guess I was a little bit intimidated by you," Sandy admitted. "I mean look at you. Gorgeous, rich, smart, and even nice—who would've guessed," he kidded. "I figured you'd had a momentary lapse in judgment that wasn't likely to happen again, and I'd just be wasting my time. Why?" Kirsten demurred a little, looking a bit sheepish.
"Well, you know, you were the first boy I ever went out with who said he'd call but didn't," she explained. "It kind of hurt my feelings, now that I remember." Sandy gave her an apologetic chuckle.
"I'm sorry. If I'd known you wanted me to call, I would have. Believe me," he assured her. "But...ah, I had just gotten over my ex-girlfriend, and I wasn't quite ready to have the next girl I asked out dump me unceremoniously, as I'm sure you would have."
"Don't be so quick to judge me," said Kirsten with a knowing look on her face. "I might have fallen hopelessly in love with you, and we would've gotten married and driven off into the sunset together."
"I guess we'll never know," he said with mock sincerity, and she smiled again.
"The choices we make in life," she teased. "What if we were destined to be the parents of a great—artist, or a musician? Because you didn't have the nerve to call a girl, the world will never know the next Mozart."
"My deepest apologies to the artistic community for lack of guts." Sandy's cell phone rang just then, interrupting a slightly discomfited silence.
"What's that? Yeah, I can…he did what? Okay, Judy, I'll be there. I love you. Bye." Turning to Kirsten, he added, rather unnecessarily, "That was my wife. Apparently my son has just been found in a rather compromising situation with a girl." Kirsten didn't seem upset.
"Your son is seventeen, right?" she asked. "My son still isn't sixteen, but I'm pretty sure he and his girlfriend have at least gotten close." Sandy shook his head.
"This is my fourteen-year-old, and my boys know that the rule is no sex in the house—or the car, in Jake's case. I gotta go. It was nice seeing you, though." He reached for the jacket that he'd hung on his seat.
"Yeah," Kirsten agreed. "We should talk again sometime." She stood up and shook his hand. He eyed her with concern.
"You drank those scotches a bit fast. Are you gonna be okay to drive home?" Kirsten nodded distractedly.
"Sure, I'll just get something to eat and I'll be fine." She flashed him a grin. "If we had time and I didn't have to go home to my family, I'd prove I can drink you under the table."
"All right. If you'll be okay…"
"In all seriousness, Sandy, thanks, but I'll be fine."
"Okay. I'll just go pay the bill then, and—"
"Hold on. I asked you; I'll pay."
"But I'm the man. Proper etiquette demands—"
"But this isn't a date, so really, it's who-asked-whom." They considered each other for a moment. "I'm not going to let you," she told him, her firm tone offset by twinkling eyes.
"Fine. You win. You can pay," he said with mock anger. "I'll see you, then. Bye, Kirsten."
"Bye, Sandy."
It wasn't until she'd finished a salad and a small plate of onion rings and asked for the check that she found out he'd managed to take the bill himself, anyway.