Nowhere, Carolina

by Tamara Leigh

  “The letter Mrs. Templeton gave you?”

  “Yes.”

  He pulls out the pages and unfolds them. With a last glance my way, he gives his attention to the lab report. I know the moment he reads the results because he stiffens. “Negative.” He looks up.

  I nod. “For Gary.” I see the startle in his eyes and wish this were the end of it. “That’s why I went to Charlotte—to get a sample of his DNA, like I was trying to get from you the day you found me outside your hotel room. I was only moments from slipping into your bathroom to get a few stray hairs when I heard the elevator.”

  “That’s why you were there?”

  I clasp my hands hard. “And why a week earlier I slipped into the Grill ’n’ Swill after you lunched there in hopes of snagging a chewed toothpick or straw. But after the hotel incident, you were so suspicious that I decided to go after Gary’s DNA instead.”

  His nostrils flare. “Why didn’t you come right out and ask me to be tested?”

  Lord, help me. “That would have required an explanation.”

  “And confession.”

  Of my high school lies. “Yes, but since I was fairly certain Gary was Devyn’s father, it didn’t seem necessary, and I didn’t want you to…I couldn’t stand the thought of you knowing what I was all those years ago and seeing me that way still.” I shake my head. “I’m not. I’ve changed.”

  Reece pushes a hand through his hair. “Have you?”

  That hurts.

  He sits forward. “Explain the sudden interest in who fathered Devyn. Is it child support you’re after? I have done well for myself.”

  “Money?” It comes out shrill, and I clamp my lips for fear of awakening Devyn. When I speak again, it’s on a whisper. “All I wanted was to prove you aren’t Devyn’s father so that I…”

  “What?”

  “When she found out you and I dated in high school, she asked if you were her father, so I set out to prove to myself I hadn’t lied.”

  “You told her I wasn’t.”

  I start to raise my hands in the universal sign of pleading, but that’s so pitiful. “I didn’t think. I reacted.”

  He slowly nods. “All right, but now that we know she is mine, how are you going to explain it to her?”

  I feel sick. “We still don’t know that you’re her father.”

  His brow slams down. “You aren’t making sense.” He shakes the lab report. “If she isn’t Gary’s—”

  “Chase Elliot.” Really sick. “Devyn might be his.”

  Reece stares at me, saying more with his eyes than words could ever express.

  And all I can do is repeat, “I’m sorry,” and catch my breath at how husky my emotionally cramped drawl sounds.

  Reece rises and drops the lab report on my desk. “Anyone else I should know about?”

  I tip my head back. “No, it’s you or Chase.”

  His stare makes me feel like an ugly stain. “You haven’t changed, Maggie Pickwick.”

  That sends me to my feet. “How dare you!”

  Be Skippy—No! I don’t want to be Skippy! I want…I squeeze my eyes closed. I want to be Maggie. Maggie who kept her baby. Maggie who was saved. Maggie who is saved. Yes, she messes up big, but all who say, “I do,” to their Savior still make mistakes.

  Okay, Lord, I’m ready to be me. All I ask is that Your patience continue to outweigh my weaknesses.

  I open my eyes to find Reece tensed for what brews beneath my angry words. “You’re wrong. I’m no longer that spoiled teenage girl who seduced you to prove I was desirable, who trampled other girls’ feelings, who let anger and pride and alcohol land her in the backseat with Gary and then Chase, who nearly aborted her baby.”

  He flinches.

  “I’m Maggie Pickwick, a grown woman who left that other life to make a new life for herself and her daughter.” My eyes sting. “And I did, and I believe I did it well, but you came back and I set myself up for another big mistake. Pride again—wantin’ you to see only the new Maggie, not the old.”

  “Why?”

  His question is unexpected, but this time, pride is not getting a hold of me. “I stopped obsessing over what other people thought of me a long time ago and started focusing on how God sees me. But it turns out your opinion matters more than anyone else’s.”

  His mouth softens slightly.

  “Even God’s apparently, since I knew He wanted me to be honest with you and I ignored His nudges and the advice of those He used to try to reach me. Though I have changed, there’s obviously some of the old Maggie in the new, and I’m sorry she showed up.”

  He doesn’t say anything.

  Wet eyes, tight throat, a chest full of sorrow, I’d say we’re about done here. “You’ll be tested?” I ask, only to add, “Not that I want anything from you. It just would be good to know for Devyn’s sake so when she’s old enough…” Like when Jacob was old enough. He’s thinking it too, I know he is, though I can no longer look him in the eye.

  “I should leave.” He turns away.

  “Reece?”

  At the door, he looks around.

  “This is my fault, not Devyn’s.”

  “I know she isn’t to blame.” He twists the knob. “Good night.”

  A minute later, the front door closes. I drop into my chair, and all that stuff in my eyes, throat, and chest takes it as a cue to pour forth. I hug my arms on the desk, then bury my face in them as hurt squeezes out of all my tight places. I thought I knew what sorrow was, but this is worse. This goes deep, and all because I don’t just care what Reece thinks of me. I care for him. This is no teenage infatuation. And this is no ordinary bad day.

  Hey! What happened to your routine?”

  “Hmm?” I stick my head back inside the house and grimace at the sight of my backpacked daughter flipping through my daily word calendar. I forgot about that.

  “You’ve missed eight days.” She looks up. “Not that it’s a loss. I mean, come on—fustigate, lubricious, abnegation?” She shakes her head. “‘Highfalutin words’ is what Aunt Skippy would say.”

  And does. I may find ways to incorporate them, but they’re nearly always substitutions for more common and easily understood words.

  “Of course—”the teasing goes out of her voice—“I did recently hear someone use today’s word.” She pulls it off the pad. “Insipid. It’s what Bradley called me when he was assigned to be my lab partner.”

  Bradley, who she’s always going out of her way to help, even if it means interrupting our evening to meet him at the library and help him research a paper. “Oh, yeah? When was that?”

  She looks away. “Last Friday.”

  Friday…she was moody when I picked her up from school and turned moodier when I wiggled my way out of her suggestion that we stop by the auction house so she could see how the statue was progressing. Then came the silent treatment, and there was nothing I could do short of telling her I doubted Reece would be receptive to her company, which would have raised questions I’m not prepared to deal with just yet.

  Devyn gives a short laugh, but I feel her hurt, even without knowing what insipid means. “You know,” she says, “what’s wrong with simply saying, ‘Ugh, I have to partner with Devyn Pickwick. She’s so dull.’”

  I feel my mommy claws come out. Obviously, Bradley is moving up in the world, and Devyn doesn’t fit the new parameters. “Oh, Dev.” I step back inside and wrap my arms around her before the teenager she will soon officially become realizes what’s happening.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” she muffles into my arm.

  I ease back. “You are not insip—” I grunt. “You are not dull. You’re amazing.” I sweep her brown hair out of her eyes and loop it behind an ear. “And beautiful.”

  Eyes slightly distorted by her lenses, she sighs. “Thanks. I just I wish I had a…” Her mouth hangs open, but then she closes it and steps back. “I’m going to be late for school.”

  She wishes she had a father. That’s probably what
she was going to say. What she doesn’t know is that today, after waiting over a week for Reece to let me know if he’ll submit to paternity testing, I’m taking the matter into my own hands. But this time I’m doing it right.

  “I’ve been praying for this day.” Chase’s sixty-some-year-old mother stares up at me as she grips the door as if for fear of toppling over.

  I frown. “I’m sorry?”

  She nods vigorously, causing her cap of silver-streaked brown hair to swing. “If you wait long enough and your prayer is in His will, the good Lord will answer it the way you want.”

  Is she off a little? Maybe a lot? “Um…” I smile. “I’m Maggie Pick—”

  “I know who you are.”

  She should. After all, not only has she lived in Pickwick for as far back as I can remember, but she occasionally attends my auctions, the last time being when I nearly ran her over in my haste to get away from Reece and Yule.

  Her lightly lipsticked mouth curves. “I’ve been waiting for you a long time.”

  She has?

  “Mercy! Where are my manners?” She swings the door wide open. “Come in.”

  I’m no longer certain of the wisdom of that, and so I stick to the stoop.

  “Please. I know what you need. And I have it.”

  Something turns inside my mind, searching for focus, and when it finds it, spins out of focus again as if to look too closely on her words would transform me into a pillar of salt like Lot’s wife.

  “Maggie?” She says with more familiarity than there should be between us. “You are here about Chase, aren’t you?”

  Another brief moment of focus makes me swallow hard. “I need to get in contact with him.”

  “Yes.” She nods. “You should come in.”

  Feeling like Gretel should have felt when she entered the witch’s house, I assure myself that not only am I half her age but nearly a foot taller, and I cross the threshold.

  She closes the door behind me. “We can talk in the parlor.”

  Didn’t the spider say something like that to the fly?

  With a spry stride, she leads me to the rear of the little house. “Here we are.” She enters a bright room, the large windows of which overlook a wooded area that borders the Pickwick lands. “I was fixin’ to have me some coffee. Join me?”

  “Yes, thank you.”

  “Make yourself at home. I won’t be long.” She starts to step past me but pauses. “I am so glad you came.” Then she leaves me to once more try to bring everything into focus. She’s been expecting me, knew I was here about Chase—

  “Pecan sandies?” she calls from beyond.

  “Not for me, thank you.” As I move farther into the room, I take in the dark plank flooring, plump sofa, vibrantly colored chairs reminiscent of little girls’ summer dresses, an antique writing desk that would make many an auctiongoer raise the paddle, and family pictures around the walls.

  As I start to lower into a daffodil-print armchair, Chase’s senior picture grabs my attention. It’s the picture of a spectacled, gap-toothed girl beside it that makes me hover inches from the seat. No, that can’t be.

  I blink. It can be. I cross the room, and as I draw near the picture of the girl as she appeared two years ago, goose bumps break across my skin.

  I stop before the side-by-side pictures. That’s my child hanging on this woman’s wall. And that’s creepy. I am Gretel! This woman has no connection to Devyn, and yet she’s stuck her on her wall as if my daughter is her—

  Focus. Sharp Focus. I clap a hand to my mouth. This is why Mrs. Elliot has been waiting for me. She thinks Devyn is her granddaughter.

  I turn and move from picture to picture around the room. There are two more of Devyn. In one, she’s leaning against a low wall outside the front entrance of her school and reading a book (probably waiting for me to pick her up). In the other, her slight figure is partly enveloped by a beanbag in the school library, a book clasped to her chest, eyes closed. There’s also a framed newspaper clipping of the two of us standing outside the auction house on the day of its grand opening.

  “I imagine you understand now,” Mrs. Elliot says.

  I turn to where she stands in the doorway holding a tray. She gives what seems a hopeful smile, and I feel horrible for what I have to ask of her that could reveal this all to be an illusion.

  “Yes.”

  Smile brightening, she hurries to the coffee table and sets the tray down. “I’ve worked hard at being patient.” She lifts the coffee. “Waiting and waiting.” She pours a steaming stream of brown into one cup, then the other. “Hoping for a space to open up where I could squeeze myself into my granddaughter’s life.” She sets the pot down. “Just a little space, mind you. It gets lonely here in Pickwick, what with being a widow and my Chase long gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  She settles to the edge of the sofa and waves me over. “Sit down.”

  Discomfort crawls all over me, and I’m tempted to ask outright if she has a lock of her son’s hair and, if not, where I can find him. Instead, I return to the daffodil-print armchair opposite the sofa.

  “I suppose you’re curious as to how I got hold of the pictures of Devyn.”

  As I reach for my coffee, I glance at the picture alongside Chase’s. “Yes.”

  “I took them myself when I substitute taught at her school.” Her narrow shoulders puff with pride. “Was very discreet about it.”

  “I didn’t know you were a substitute teacher.”

  “For more than two years now—ever since I decided to find out if that girl is mine, like I always wondered when you turned up pregnant. Chase denied he was the daddy, but the older she got, the more I saw him in her. She’s mine all right.”

  Her claim makes me stiffen.

  “I even had her in my class twice.” She flashes two fingers. “And let me tell you, those were the best days.”

  Working over how to tell her she’s jumped the gun, I sip at the coffee.

  “So, Maggie, how do you propose we tell Devyn?”

  With a clink just shy of chipping china, I return the cup to its saucer.

  “Should we do it together?” she presses on.

  “Mrs. Elliot—”

  “Call me Corinne. We are family.”

  Maybe. “Corinne, I don’t know how to tell you this, but…” I draw a deep breath. “I don’t know if Chase is Devyn’s father, and that’s why I came. I need—”

  “But I know.”

  She thinks she knows. “Chase isn’t the only guy I was with—”

  “I know that too.”

  My breath deserts me.

  “That’s why when that mean boy at school stuck gum in Devyn’s hair a couple years back—and earned himself a hefty detention, I might add—I offered to cut it out for her.”

  Someone stuck gum in Devyn’s hair? She never told me.

  “It was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.” Mrs. Elliot rises to her feet. “And that’s how I know our girl is an Elliot.”

  Then she…?

  “Let me show you.” She crosses to the antique writing desk and opens it out. Shortly, she hands me an envelope. “It’s the proof you’re looking for.”

  Oh, Lord. I know what this is. With trembling fingers, I pull out the lab report. The samples submitted by Corinne Elliot are a positive match. Her son is Devyn’s father. Not Reece. Not. Reece. What remains of my hope flickers at the end of its wick.

  “I’m a grandmother, and since that’s all that’s left to me, with your permission, I’d like to enjoy it.”

  I look up at her where she stands beside me, clasping and unclasping her hands as if for fear I’ll refuse her.

  I want to. I want to reject that her son, who didn’t step forward and share in my responsibility, is my daughter’s father. I want to say the lab is mistaken. I want to rip up this stupid report and get as far from here as possible. But she is Devyn’s grandmother.

  One more flicker, then the hope goes out. I set the repo
rt on the coffee table and clear my thick throat. “You said being a grandmother is all that’s left to you. What about Chase? I tried to trace him over the Internet but couldn’t find anything. Is he…?”

  She shakes her head. “As far as I know, he’s alive.”

  “As far as you know?”

  Regret seams her mouth. “Second year of college, he went to Brazil for spring break. Got caught up in drinking and women and decided to stay. I was angry with him for throwing away his scholarship but kept thinking he’d get some sense and come on home. But not even when his daddy died. Last I heard from Chase was three years ago when he needed money to”—she leans forward and whispers—“to pay his way out of prison for dealing drugs.”

  My daughter’s father is a drug dealer.

  “I would have had to sell my house. I would have lost everything, and he probably would have gone back to dealing. So I told him no.” Tears tremble on her lashes. “I haven’t heard from him since.”

  I breathe in, breathe out, then rise and lay a hand on her shoulder. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know.”

  She grabs a napkin from the tray and pats her eyes. “Nobody does. People ask after him sometimes, but I tell them he’s doing fine, and I pray he is. Lord willing, one day he’ll show up on my step like you did.” Her smile is weak. “One answered prayer at a time.”

  Am I really an answered prayer? It’s selfish of me, considering how lonely this woman is, but I can’t help but wish God had answered my prayer that Reece would be in my daughter’s life, and therefore mine, even if only a little bit.

  “We’ll work it out, Mrs. Elliot. All I ask is that you let me determine when and how to tell Devyn.”

  She nods. “I’ve waited this long.”

  “Thank you.” I square my shoulders in preparation to leave.

  “Maggie?” She hands the report to me. “Now that you know, I won’t be needing this.”

  I hesitate before taking it from her.

  “One more thing,” she says.

  “Yes?”

  “I’m awful sorry about your artist.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m guessing you were hoping he was Devyn’s daddy. Everyone knows how much you liked him—even my Chase, who you wouldn’t have looked twice at if that Thorpe boy hadn’t broken up with you.”