Family Love

by Liz Crowe

  “You presume correctly.” She sipped and tried to ignore the gathering storm between them.

  “I told you before, I will not take charity from your family.”

  “I’m aware of that.”

  He leaned forward, holding the piece of paper that represented enough money to pay off their house loan to his uncle and fix every single thing that needed it, with a few thousand left over for an actual savings account. She’d been doing the math in her head all day. Her stomach rumbled. She hadn’t eaten anything of substance in hours, and her head ached from low blood sugar.

  “You don’t have to shove it in my face, Anton. I’m aware of it. It was given to me, after all.” She let herself have the subtle dig.

  His brow furrowed even more. “I don’t know what you think you’re playing at, hiding this kind of thing from me, but—”

  “Stop it right there. First of all, I wasn’t hiding anything from you. I had every intention of telling you about it. But there were other things to tend to today, in case you forgot.”

  “No, I didn’t forget that the mother you hated who was about to marry you off to that abusive asshole, Will Scott, and who has not laid eyes on our children since their birth, died this morning.”

  Lindsay swallowed her retort, since he spoke nothing but the truth. “Well, since you have such a fine memory you also know I was busy with the arrangements, regardless of what she did or didn’t do for me or you. It’s my obligation as a daughter.”

  “Bullshit,” he spit out.

  “What did you say?” She rose, fists on the table, fury ramping her headache up a hundredfold.

  “I said, bullshit, Lindsay. Until two days ago, your mother could have died and you would never have even known about it. She paid you to come to her, to give a damn about her funeral, to see my sons.”

  “I’ll remind you, Anton, that those boys did not spring from your dang forehead fully formed. I bore them and birthed them and take care of them pretty much all of the time. They are my sons, too.”

  “Don’t change the subject,” he said, flapping the check in the air between them.

  “Give it to me,” she said, forcing herself to stay calm, to not rise to meet his temper.

  “No. I don’t think so. I think you are I are going to take a ride together and return this to your father.”

  “The hell we will,” she said, forgetting her earlier resolve. “The hell you say, Anton Love. That is my damn inheritance, not a charity check for another of your projects.”

  He glanced at the paper in question again, then held it between his fingers and ripped it into two pieces, then four, then eight, then more. He tossed them into the air. Some landed on the table. Still more landed on his hair and, she assumed, hers.

  “I don’t take money from the Halloran family, Lindsay. End of discussion.” He turned, stomped into the house, up the steps and out the door, slamming it so hard she heard it all the way out where she still stood, in the baking heat, in the middle of a tiny paper snowstorm.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Her brothers kept her fully apprised of their father’s condition as he slipped even deeper into the bottle after his wife’s death. After a few attempts to get him to stop or at least slow down the boozing, and receiving near-violent rebukes, they’d stopped trying.

  He’d given up, they claimed. He wanted nothing more than to pass out drunk one night and never wake up. On December 23rd of that year, he got his wish.

  Arranging a funeral for a man with such far-reaching connections in the horse world, and at Christmas, and while nearly eight months pregnant, was a trial. Doing it without any help from Anton was even more so.

  But after his temper tantrum and the ripped up check, Lindsay had not let him in the house. It had taken about three days of yelling, pounding on doors, intervention from his mother and brothers for them to get her message: Anton was no longer welcome in her house, near her boys or in her life.

  The months between that dramatic weekend and what had once been her favorite holiday were full of long, sleepless nights, coupled with vast stretches of days she stumbled through in a haze of exhaustion.

  After about a week, both Antony and Kieran were asking for their dad. By the end of the third week without him, they were all thoroughly sick of one another.

  But Lindsay was resolute. No amount of begging, pleading, or even several visits from the new priest from their church would move her.

  She surrounded herself with friends. Young mothers she’d helped out, and her brothers—and in the case of JR, his fiancée—all provided support. But at the end of every day, she looked at her sons in their high chairs, and honestly believed she was doing the correct thing. Even if it meant, by then, missing Anton so much it was a physical pain in her chest.

  Various epiphanies during long, lonely nights forced her to admit to herself that she’d only married Anton out of pure spite. That she’d not had sex with him that first time out of any real emotion—merely a deep, unmet, selfish, physical need. It took her self-enforced separation to realize that she relied on him, she required him … that she did, now, in fact, love him.

  But it was too late for that revelation.

  She would not be spoken to or treated as he had done. She was a partner in this business of their marriage. She had a say in the overall health of it, and that included the financial side.

  All it took was for her to close her eyes and remember that scene on the lower patio—the tiny drifts of paper and the oppressive heat … the raw fury on his face when he told her she “had to” return it … and her memory of all the sacrifices she had willingly made in order to have a life as Mrs. Anton Love—and she would gird herself for the next twenty-four hour period of single motherhood.

  She had her checkbook from their account, and would visit the bank every other day or so to ensure there was money for the bills she had to pay, the groceries she needed, mainly to feed the boys. Her appetite had more or less disappeared the split second she made the decision to keep Anton at arm’s length, much to the dismay of her doctor, who reminded her every month that she had a responsibility to the child in her womb.

  The bank tellers were always polite, even when imparting the bad news that there were only a few dollars left until “Mister Love” could make another deposit. Many of them knew her from church.

  In the small town she now inhabited, pretty much every living soul knew about her, her wealthy, horsey background, her stable-hand husband, and their struggle to make a brewery profitable. She hated that. The stares in the grocery. The whispers on the street. She blamed Anton for every damn one of them.

  She felt nothing for the child. If anything, she resented the hell out of him—her—or “it” as she would say under her breath when “it” would make itself known via fluttery kicks, rolls and other annoyances. Her basketball-sized belly swelled out from her hips, stretching her skin so thin she could trace the pattern of veins under it when she sat and studied it late into yet another sleepless night.

  She’d taken to dragging the boys out to the rented stable where she kept a much more patient Zelda and the “new” Daisy her brothers had bought for her. They also paid for the boarding and upkeep of both animals, thank heaven. She’d never be able to manage it or enjoy what she considered the ultimate luxury—the company of her horses—otherwise.

  When she was still able to ride, she would put one or other of her sons in the saddle in front of her and wrap her hands around his small ones while he held the reins. Antony took to it like a duck to water, asking daily about another Zelda ride. Kieran was less inclined, but after a couple of calm sessions cantering about the small paddock, had at least stopped screaming in terror at the sight of the barns.

  Kieran stopped asking for his Daddy well before Antony gave up on it. The first day that happened, Lindsay had cried for hours after putting them to bed.

  And now she had another funeral to plan. She and her brothers spent as little time as possible on the decision-makin
g about the service and large reception. And when she arrived for the funeral at the large Methodist church where she’d married Anton, it had made her cry even harder. Recalling herself, giddy with the thrill of pissing off her parents, fairly zinging from head to toe with a constant, low-level horniness, and eager to get her husband alone, she’d spent that day flushed with success.

  Now it represented her failure at everything. She gripped her boys’ hands, and they ascended the long flight of steps to the door. They were both somber, thanks to her lecture that morning about best behavior. They’d reached a shaky detente after being together non-stop, more or less twenty-four/seven, for six solid months. Antony had calmed considerably, as if worried he’d upset her. He had done that very thing enough times to scare him. Keiran was sweet and easy-going as always, less inclined to dramatic reactions to his brother’s random bouts of bullying, which had a welcome calming affect on Antony.

  Her head had been pounding for three days straight. She’d tried to eat some of the food people brought by once word got out about her father’s passing. But every bite she put in her mouth gave her heartburn, so she’d been living on protein drinks, interspersed with the occasional banana and cup of coffee, the two things she did crave.

  The baby felt like a bowling ball hanging off her front, heavy as lead, and constantly throwing her off balance. It had been kicking up a storm for the past two days, but thankfully had gone quiet this morning. The whoosh-whooshing sound she kept hearing, the echo of her own heartbeat, got louder, almost drowning out the words coming at her out of the mouths of the people gathered to honor her father.

  She wiped shaking fingers across her dry, cracked lips, letting go of Kieran, since he could be trusted not to run off. Antony pulled at her once he caught sight of his uncles, so she released him with a sigh of relief. Surveying the huge sanctuary, stuffed full of horse cronies, church friends, golf and card-playing families, she got a scary rush of déjà vu from the service for her mother that she’d also attended without Anton, at her insistence.

  He’d shown up to that one of course, with his mother and brothers, and left before she could tell him to do just that. She hadn’t brought the boys, though, thinking he might show and they’d flip out. Her fury had sustained her then. But now all she had was bone-deep exhaustion, an eye-burning headache, and a barely functional existence that she was starting to question.

  “Don’t try to out-stubborn him,” her father would have probably said to her right now.

  “I’m not,” she’d reply. “I’m right. He’s wrong.”

  She blinked, realizing that Kieran was no longer clinging to her skirt. Her vision was getting fuzzy around the edges, and a thirst the likes of which she’d never experienced gripped her, making her lick her lips and look around for a water fountain, all the while knowing there weren’t any in the vestibule or sanctuary. The whooshing noise increased. Her skin prickled, and she broke out in a cold sweat. People kept coming at her, moving their mouths and saying words she couldn’t hear.

  A small tickle of fear lit her brain. Was she dying? Having a stroke? Going into early labor?

  As if hearing her own wildly churning thoughts, her stomach tightened, making her gasp and bend over on reflex. Someone grabbed her arm while someone else was yelling, but she kept her eyes on the floor, concentrating hard on not dying at her father’s funeral in front of her children.

  “Lord, help me. Please, please, please, oh, Jesus God, that hurts!” She yelled the last words.

  Out of the corner of her eye, while her vision went nearly all dark, she spotted him.

  “Anton,” she gasped, holding out her free arm. “Ow … ow … Oh … no …” She looked down and saw the dark stain between her feet, then glanced up and saw him, her husband, his face thinner, lined, and gray with panic.

  “We called an ambulance,” somebody said.

  “Out of my way,” Anton insisted when people tried to help her to a chair. But all she wanted to do then was drop to her knees in the spreading pool of blood. So she did. But then she was lifted up and into Anton’s arms. She put her arms around his neck and tried not to hear the panicky sounds of her sons calling for her, crying, and, in the case of Antony, yelling to be “put down! Mama is sick!”

  “Shhh, honey, it’s all right. I’ve got you. Move!” Anton’s deep, gravelly voice made her want to cry, but she hurt too much, all over, head to toe. And she was so thirsty she didn’t believe she could produce any tears.

  “It hurts. There’s b-b-b-blood.”

  “I know. I’m taking you to the hospital myself.”

  That was the last thing she heard for a while.

  She woke in a near-dark, stuffy room, pinned in place by IV lines in each arm. Her throat felt shredded. When she tried to move her legs and sit up, the pain nearly made her pass out. Alarms sounded. Her door opened and a cadre of nurses piled into the room. Lindsay hated hospitals. She’d checked herself out as quickly as possible after each of her boys were born.

  She froze, terror gripping her from head to toe when she felt for the distinctly non-existent lump of her pregnant stomach. That thing she’d been hauling around, resenting it and everything it represented had become so much a part of her, she burst into tears at its absence, knowing it could only mean one thing.

  “Shhh, honey, it’s all right.” A nurse patted her arm while she lifted the cover over her lower half and made an adjustment.

  “Ow!” Lindsay flinched.

  “It’s just the catheter. Doctor says we have to leave it in a few more hours, but I sure don’t know why. You’ve recovered so well.” She patted Lindsay’s leg. “Try to relax and lie still. You gave everybody a real scare.”

  “B-b-b-baby?” Tears blinded her. “I lost it?”

  “No, quite the contrary. We almost lost you.”

  Lindsay blinked and put one of her needle-speared hands on her flatter stomach. “But it’s too early.”

  “Well, he’s in the NIC-U for now, but only because it’s protocol. He was already over six pounds, and with a great set of lungs on him if his caterwauling is any indication.”

  “He’s … crying …” she said, feeling idiotic and slow, but unable to process that the “it” she’d been harboring had materialized into a living, breathing baby. “Him?”

  “Oh, yes, without a doubt.” The nurse winked at her. “But you were touch and go. They took the baby by C-section. Your husband was there, and he got to hold his boy for a minute before they had to take him to isolation. Poor old thing. He’s not been happy since.”

  “The baby?” She stared up at the blank white ceiling when the nurse said she needed to check her stitches.

  “Well, him, too.”

  “Where is he?” She didn’t even know which he she meant at that point. “And can I get a cheeseburger?”

  The nurse chuckled. “The doctor will be glad to know you asked. You are way too thin, dehydrated, and borderline diabetic, but we’ve fixed that up. Time to eat so you can feed that fine young man screaming his fool head off in the nursery.” She covered her with the thin blanket. “I’ll get them both for you, honey. The nurses will be glad to have the boy with his Mama, I’m thinking.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  Life, as it was wont to do, eased into a familiar, post-baby rhythm. Lindsay considered herself a semi-expert now. Less inclined to freak out at every sniffle and cry. More relaxed, which she hoped would translate to a relaxed newborn.

  But Dominic Sean Love was the sort of baby who nursed so often he seemed permantently attached to her boob, and who, when he wasn’t eating or shitting, was crying.

  Anton had apologized, tears streaming down his face as she held her third son for the first time and put him to her breast.

  He’d brushed her hair off her face, kissed her forehead, nose, cheeks and lips while Dom latched on so hard she winced. But she accepted it, and did her own apologizing for being so stubborn. They sat together, watching Dominic nurse, his tiny fists covering his fa
ce or pressing against her skin as if to force more milk out of her.

  Once home, Anton had been in full charge of Antony and Kieran for a couple of weeks while she regained her strength and tried to keep Dominic satisfied. By the end of the first month, he was still nursing five or six times a day, but had caught up, nutritionally speaking, to the point where he would actually sleep a few hours at a stretch.

  Antony mostly ignored him. But Kieran was fascinated by the tiny baby, and would stand by her chair while she nursed, touching his face, his hands, his feet. He also loved to sit on the bed, watching him sleep in the bassinette she kept on her side for ease of nightly duties.

  It took almost three months before he settled into something resembling a routine and became more than simply a screaming, eating, pooping machine.

  He would gaze up at her, his Love-brown eyes shining, giving her almost more guilt than she could bear over how badly she’d behaved by refusing to take care of herself—and him—while carrying him.

  Perhaps, because of the guilt, she allowed herself to enjoy him more than she ever had the other two.

  By his sixth month, Dominic had formulated a flirty personality. He’d charm the pants off total strangers in the grocery or at church with his huge grin and grabby hands. His newborn tufts of dark hair had fallen out and been replaced by light, golden-blond strands. But he was volatile, and she still couldn’t predict when he’d start screaming for no apparent reason—too early to be hungry, diaper dry, nothing poking him.

  She was sitting at the kitchen table, nursing him and thumbing through the newspaper one early summer morning, when Anton appeared, surprising her. They had not been sleeping in the same room since Dom’s birth. She insisted that he get a full night’s rest so he could manage the other boys. He’d been taking Antony with him to the brewery for the past few weeks, a few hours each day, hoping to redirect the recent destructive, temper-tantrum streak he’d been on.