One
Newport, Rhode Island

NHL Wizard Jason Pickering Goddard left the battered podium to a round of applause and sat beside his grandmother on the gym stage of St. Anthony's Home for Boys. "Dreams die," Jason whispered. "Life sucks. That's what they should learn. I didn't do them any favors with that 'dreams do come true' crap."

His grandmother bristled without ruffling a manicured feather. "Reality, they've got," she said. "Hope is what they need."

Jason winced. She might as well have said, "They're a hell of a lot worse off than you are, so stop feeling sorry for yourself," and she was right. But he sure as hell wished the boys heading for the gym exits would stop looking back at him with all that misplaced hero worship.

Damn it. He'd screwed up. It didn't make sense, him talking about dreams, not after he'd drunk himself senseless and lost his.

Wait a minute. . . .

Jason raised his chin and gave the woman who raised him a sidelong glance. What he saw should not have surprised him: a manipulating matriarch running a power play. Well, well, well. He relaxed in his chair, stretched his legs to ease the ache in his knee, and folded his arms across his chest. "Gram, why did you really drag me here today?"

"What? Well . . . you never get to see the good that the Pickering Foundation does."

"Good? This place is falling apart."

Every inch the society matron, his grandmother barely winced before she tilted her head in belated approval. "My point exactly."

She was angling for something, Jason knew, but what? "You want a bigger donation, just say so."

The benevolent old fraud cleared her throat, fidgeted with her Dior handbag, and looked everywhere but at him before she patted his hand. "Thank you, dear."

"I'd rather write a check any day than—"

"Raise a finger to help?" Sheer annoyance filled Gram's snapping hazel eyes. "You and every other member of the idle rich!" She rose, braced on her ancient umbrella, chin high, head at a regal angle, indignation in the set of her shoulders and the straight of her spine.

"Give me a break," Jason said. "I wouldn't be idle if—"

"Enough with the self-pity." She tapped his cane with her umbrella. "This is only a setback," she said, echoing his tired litany.

Jason squared his shoulders. "I will play hockey again. I'll be back on the ice in no time. You'll see."

"Not according to the majority of your doctors."

"The majority of them are wrong!"

"Of course they are, dear."

"Don't take that patronizing tone with me, young lady."

Bessie Pickering Hazard, seventy-seven-year-old chairman of the board of the Pickering Foundation, laughed like a schoolgirl.

Jason grinned. Glad the old twinkle was back in her eyes, he still wished to hell he knew what she was up to. He'd seen this act before, and it didn't bode well for the poor sucker she'd picked as her latest mark . . . him.

Gram had accomplished some great deeds in her day, and to pull them off, she'd played some steep angles. Just thinking of the ways she might try to play him made Jason's tie so tight, you'd think somebody pushed a choke switch.

Best rebound now, he thought, self-preservation riding him. "How the hell does a gimp jock fit into whatever scheme you're trying to hatch this time?" he asked.

"Jason, dear, whatever are you—Ah, here comes the director. You remember Sister Margaret?"

They were force-fed sugar cookies and watered-down cherry punch in the old art deco reception room, a showplace of mission furniture and teeming glass-faced trophy cabinets. Untouched by time, the room remained the sanctum where hopeful childless parents met with more-hopeful potential adoptees.

Gram had purchased the turn-of-the-century, brick-and-granite school building in the fifties specifically to house St. Anthony's, likely to keep herself busy while his grandfather pursued other "interests."

That she'd named it Saint Anthony's after her faithless husband, Anthony Bannister Hazard, was one of Gram's private jokes with God. Or perhaps she'd thought to redeem the philandering old buzzard. No one knew but Gramps himself whether she succeeded, because he had resided in the hereafter for more than twenty years now.

What Jason liked best, and feared most, about his grandmother was that in her entire life, she'd let nothing and no one stop her. She was the strongest person he knew, man or woman, and he loved her in the rare way she loved him, faults and all.

As Jason opened the outside door, the scent of pine-pitch wafted up from the sun-soft, cracked-tar schoolyard, reminding him of the afternoons he'd spent waiting for Gram to pick him up and sneak him off to hockey practice. She'd said these boys needed hope, and hope, by damn, he'd had aplenty back then.

Now, as then, Chilton, her octogenarian driver, saw them and came around to open the door of her pristine, sixty-three white Rolls, and stood waiting at attention.

The moment they exited the building, the boys at play hushed and stood like statues, making Jason's awkward cane-clicking trek across the yard seem endless.

"I wish you had let me drive my Hummer," he told his grandmother, as if that might have given him control over anything but the next brick wall that got in his way.

Copyright © 2006 by Annette Blair