Getting Lucky

As the school bus turned the corner onto Fourth Street, Ben Foster pulled to the curb fifteen feet before the stop sign and shut off the engine. There was something inherently wrong with what he was doing spying on a bunch of schoolkids in hopes of catching a glimpse of a twelve-year-old girl. It was creepy. Perverse. And the fact that the girl was his never-before-seen daughter didn't make it feel any less strange. But what was the alternative? Walk up to the house, knock on the door, and say, "Hey, darlin', say hello to your long-lost father"? Maybe sometime, but not today. All he wanted today was to see her. The bus came to a stop with a squeal of brakes, the doors opened, and a half-dozen kids tumbled out. The two he was interested in looked both ways, then ran across the street in front of the bus. They were both blonde-haired and fair-skinned, both pretty, but it was the older one who held Ben's attention. Her hair fell past her shoulders and was pulled back in a fancy braid. She carried her backpack as if it were too heavy, and she moved with the unconscious ease of a girl who wasn't yet fully aware of her body. She was beautiful. Delicate. Perfect. He'd learned quite a bit about her in the past few weeks that she lived here in Bethlehem, New York, in the blue house down the street, with her sister and brother, their aunt, uncle, and cousin. She was in the sixth grade, made A's and B's, and had a best friend named Susan. Her aunt Emilie worked at the local inn and had risked prison to keep the kids together when their mother, Berry, got locked up, and her uncle Nathan was a cop. Her name was Alanna Marie Dalton. And she was his daughter. Ben had had about thirteen years to get used to the idea of having a daughter, but truthfully he'd rarely spared her a thought. The day Berry had told him she was pregnant, he'd told her good-bye and he'd never seen her again. He'd never seen Alanna, either, and at odd times he suspected that might have been his loss. It had definitely been his grandmother's loss. She'd gone to her grave regretting that she'd never been able to meet her only great-grandchild. His throat tightened at the thought of her. Emmaline Bodine had been the most important woman in his life. She'd taken him in every time his mother had taken off, and she'd done her best to teach him things his parents hadn't. The fact that she'd failed was his fault, not hers. He'd been too wild, had had too many bad examples to counteract her good one. But she'd never stopped loving him, until the day she died two months ago. If he knew her, she was probably watching over him somewhere up in heaven, waiting, hoping for him to finally, just once in his life, do the right thing. Whatever that was. Refocusing his attention, he looked across the street just as the Victorian's front door closed behind the two girls. He thought about staying there a while longer, in case they came back out, then decided against it. The last thing he needed was some housewife calling the cops on him. Hell, with his luck, it would be Alanna's uncle who showed up to haul him off to jail. He started the engine and pulled away from the curb, driving slowly past the Victorian and the house where Alanna lived. He headed back to Main Street, then downtown, making an illegal turn to park in front of the diner he'd noticed earlier. It was late for lunch, early for dinner, which meant he had the place mostly to himself, and that suited him just fine. In small towns like Bethlehem, people tended to pay a lot of attention to strangers. At the moment, he'd just as soon do without that. He slid intoPappano, Marilyn is the author of 'Getting Lucky' with ISBN 9780553582321 and ISBN 0553582321.