by Loree Lough
She blew a puff of air through her lips. “Jealous? I’m not jealous. I’ll have you know I don’t have a jealous bone in my body.”
He looked almost wounded. “You don’t?”
Shaking her head, she announced emphatically, “Not a one.”
“So it doesn’t bother you that Carrie was my first?”
She giggled. “Not in the least!” After a moment she added, “Your first what?”
“My first love, of course.”
Grinning, Ciara rolled her eyes. “You weren’t in love. You were seven.”
“I wasn’t seven.”
“Everybody is seven in the second grade. Didn’t you just say you asked her to marry you in the second….”
“Yes, but I asked her again when we were in high school.”
This wasn’t funny anymore. He’d known this Carrie person since kindergarten, had asked her to marry him in high school. “So what did she say?”
Mitch blinked. “What did who say?”
Ciara gave his shoulder a playful slap. “Carrie, silly. When you asked her to marry you…the second time…what did she say?”
“She told me to take a flying leap.” He did a perfect Stan Laurel nod of his head.
“But…but you must have been sweet and handsome even then. Why did she say no?”
“Did I say she said no?”
“You said she told you to—”
“Take a flying leap. That’s right.”
Ciara exhaled a frustrated sigh. “If that isn’t a rejection, I don’t know what is.”
“We were both on the gymnastics team. I was on the parallel bars. She kept pesterin’ me to get off, give her a turn. And I said, ‘Gosh, Carrie, you sound just like a wife. Maybe we should get married.’ And she said, ‘Mitch Mahoney, why don’t you—’”
“’Take a flying leap?’” they finished together, laughing.
They lay there cuddling in silence for a moment before Ciara said, “What did this Carrie girl look like?”
“Mmmm,” he growled, “she was hot stuff. Blonde, blue-eyed, with the cutest nose I ever—”
“Sounds like you’re describing me!”
“Hmmm.” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “I hadn’t noticed….”
She quirked a brow. “Did you ever ask her to marry you again? After the uneven bars incident, I mean?”
“As a matter of fact, I didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“Hey, I wasn’t the brightest bulb on the tree, but nobody coulda called me dim-watted, either.”
“Dim-witted,” she corrected with a twinkle in her eye.
Mitch sighed. Clapped a hand over his forehead. “Carrie always got my puns.” He peeked between two fingers. “She thought they were funny, too.”
Ciara sniffed indignantly. “Well, she must have had a very strange sense of what’s funny.” She paused. “Did you want her to say yes?”
“Maybe, but only a little.”
She clucked her tongue, then said, “Say, our names are awfully similar…Carrie, Ciara…why you can barely tell them apart!”
“Hmmm.” He went back to massaging his chin. “What do you suppose it means?”
“That you were searching for a Carrie replacement…for years…and you found it in me!”
He wrinkled his brow. “You think so?” He gave it a moment of consideration. “Naw. I don’t think so.”
“I wonder what Sigmund Freud would say about it?”
“He’d say, ‘Mitch, if you have a lick of sense, you’ll get your high school yearbook and show your pretty little wife what Carrie really looked like, before she boxes your ears.’”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, when he climbed off the sofa bed.
Mitch rummaged on the bookshelf, slid the black volume from between three other yearbooks. He flipped to the back, skimmed the glossary, chanting, “Butler, Butler, Butler…ah, there she is. Page two-sixteen.”
He opened the book to the right page, handed it to Ciara.
She slid a finger over the glossy paper, stopping beside the postage-stamp-size black-and-white photo of Carrie Butler. The girl had short dark hair, a monobrow, and a slightly hairy upper lip. “‘French Club president, Math Club, Chess Club,’” Ciara read. She eyed him warily. “You really asked her to marry you?”
“What can I say? The guys were always pickin’ on her.”
Her heart thumped with love for him. “You mean, you risked being teased by the other kids, because you felt sorry for her?”
He shook his head. “Shoulda let you go on thinking Carrie was your twin, ’cause this is embarrassing.”
His reddened cheeks told her he hadn’t been kidding. “Mitch, I don’t think I ever loved you more than I do at this minute.”
He tucked in his chin. “Why?”
“Because,” she said softly, “you have a heart as big as your head, that’s why.”
And a man with a heart like that, she told herself, smiling happily, couldn’t cheat on his wife.
Chapter Ten
Ciara looked around her at friends and family who had gathered in response to Mitch’s invitation. On blankets spread on the lawn, in deck chairs, at the umbrella-shaded patio table, they sat, sipping iced tea and munching hot dogs.
“How’s my girl?” Joe Dorsey asked.
She held out her hand to the tall, gray-haired man who sat in the chaise lounge beside her. “Better than I’ve been in a long time, Dad.”
He squeezed, then patted her hand affectionately, his blue eyes glittering. “I have to admit, you look good. You look happy.”
“I am happy.” Ciara turned slightly in the chair to face him more directly. “Am I crazy, Dad? Am I out of my everlovin’ mind to feel this way?”
He frowned slightly. “Of course not. You’re young and beautiful and a wonderful human being. You have every right to be happy.”
Sighing, she glanced across the yard, where Mitch stood, tossing a softball back and forth with his nephew. The gentle July breeze riffled his dark curls, giving a boyish quality to the masculine angles and planes of his handsome face. Sunlight, dappling through the leafy trees overhead, sparkled in his dark eyes. His smile reminded her of the way she felt whenever, after days and days of gray skies and rain, the clouds lifted and the sun would come out. Lord, how I love him, she prayed silently.
But he’d left her, with no word or warning. Had put himself in harm’s way to apprehend an unknown criminal who’d committed some heinous crime…. Would he ever tell her where he’d been? What he’d been doing? Why he’d left the way he had?
Ciara sighed. “I love him,” she said softly, squeezing her father’s hand. “Maybe I am crazy, because I don’t know if I have what it takes—”
“To love him? Of course you have what it takes. Look at you,” he said with a nod of his chin, “sitting there. You’ve been sitting around, doing nothing, for two solid weeks now.” One graying brow rose as he added, “I know that must be tough, real tough, for a bundle of energy like you. But you’re doing it, because…” He waved a hand, inviting her to complete his sentence.
Smiling, she said, “Because I love this baby, that’s why.”
“And no sacrifice is too great for one you truly love.”
She gazed into his blue eyes. When she was a girl, they’d often played the “whose eyes are bluest” game. “Your eyes are so blue, the cornflowers will be jealous,” she’d say. “And yours are so blue, the sky wants to duel at dawn.” Shaking her head fiercely, Ciara would respond, “Mother robins could mistake your eyes for baby eggs.” “And the miners in the sapphire mines come home depressed,” he’d counter, “because they can’t find any stones as blue as your eyes.”
“Was it hard, Dad? Leaving the department, I mean.”
He nodded so slowly it was scarcely noticeable. “I’ve done easier things, I suppose.”
Ciara watched him glance around, saw that when he focused on his wife, his jaw automatically tensed and his lips tigh
tened.
“She was miserable,” he said in a barely audible voice. “You were too small to remember, I suppose, but there were times when I thought she might have a nervous breakdown.” He met Ciara’s eyes. “I couldn’t let it go on. I had hurt her for so long already. I had to do something to stop her pain.”
“You loved her a lot, didn’t you?”
His eyes crinkled a bit when he smiled. “You say it in the past tense. What makes you think I don’t love her still?”
“Oh,” Ciara sighed, “I’m sure you love her…the way Mitch loves Ian, the way I love you.” Slowly she shook her head. “But you don’t love her in a romantic way.”
For a moment—such a fleeting tick in time that Ciara would have missed it had she blinked—she read the gut-wrenching pain he’d buried in his heart for so many years. Her father tore his gaze from hers, stared at the dark green clover leaves between his sneakered feet. She had done more than strike a nerve with her observation. For the first time in her twenty-eight years, Ciara saw him not merely as her father, but as a flesh-and-bone man, with needs and dreams and yearnings like any other man had.
“You never did love her that way, did you, Dad?”
The corners of his mouth twitched as he struggled to retain his composure and control. “Ciara,” came his raspy whisper, “she’s your mother. You haven’t the right to say things like that.”
“I’m sorry, Dad. I just want to hear the truth…from you.”
“Well, I’m sorry, because I will never say anything disrespectful about her. She did a spectacular job raising you, and—”
“And you’re grateful for that. You even love her for that.” Ciara paused. “It’s all right, Dad. I’m not a little girl anymore. Lately,” she said, looking over at Mitch again, “it’s hard to believe I ever was a little girl.”
She sighed, returned her attention to her father. “I saw more than you realized. I know you both tried to hide it from me, but I knew, I always knew, that whatever you had wasn’t what some other kids’ parents had.”
He faced her, his eyes boring deep into hers. “What are you saying, Ciara?”
“That I love you both for what you did. You mentioned sacrifice a little bit ago. ‘No sacrifice is too great for one you truly love.’ You didn’t leave the department because you were worried about Mom. You left because you loved me, and since Mom was mostly in charge of me…”
His broad shoulders slumped, and Ciara wanted to climb into his lap as she had when she was tiny, snuggle into the crook of his neck and hug him tight until everything was all right again. But she couldn’t do that now, because she’d grown up and married, and soon she’d be a parent herself. If you didn’t learn anything else in these seven months alone, she thought, eyes on Mitch again, it’s that it takes a lot more than a hug to make everything all right again.
“If I’m even half the parent you’ve been,” she said, patting her tummy, “this little tyke will be the luckiest baby ever born.”
He swallowed. Blinked. Took a deep breath. “We were so young when we met, Ciara.” Shrugging, he said, “I had no idea what love was at sixteen. Never had another girlfriend. Never had a chance to…” He cleared his throat. “And I was too stupid to get down on my knees, ask the Good Lord if she was the woman He intended for me.” He shook his head again. “I don’t mind telling you, I did a lot of praying since you met Mitch.”
“Praying? Whatever for?”
A mist of tears shimmered in his eyes when he looked at her. “I prayed that you weren’t making the same mistake…handing your entire future over to someone who might have ulterior motives, to someone who saw what they could get and—”
He was angry now. Very angry. Ciara knew, because it was the only time he made that tiny pucker with his lips. Almost immediately he reined in his emotions. Taking a deep, cleansing breath, he cleared his throat.
“Ulterior motives? What ulterior motives would Mitch have had?”
“By taking all you had to give and giving nothing in return,” her father continued. “By choosing their needs over yours, without another thought—” He clamped his jaws together suddenly. “I’ve said enough.” He held one hand up as if to silence himself. “Said too much.” He sandwiched her hands between his own. “I’m sorry, sweetie. I shouldn’t have burdened you with—”
“You haven’t told me anything I didn’t already know.”
His brows rose at that. “But how could— I worked so hard to hide it from you. And to give her her due, I think your mother did, too.”
Ciara shook her head. “Don’t get me wrong, because I love Mom, but contrary to the old cliché, love isn’t blind.”
The furrow between his brows deepened.
“I know what she is. I know what she’s done. I know, because she told me, Dad. A long, long time ago.”
“What are you saying, Ciara?”
He already looked so miserable, how could she tell him that she knew why he had so quickly agreed to leave the department. He’d been wounded in the line of duty, and the injury would have prevented him from front-line work, but it wouldn’t have forced him into early retirement. He’d given it up because her mother had found out about his one marital misstep….
Ciara, still in elementary school at the time, had come home to find her mother crying at the kitchen table. Kathryn had wrapped her arms around her little girl and the words tumbled out in a puzzling, dizzying swirl. Words like betrayal and affair, and phrases like stabbed in the back and best years of my life. She’d been too young to understand fully…and just old enough to be afraid, more afraid than she’d been to date.
That night, through the wall that separated her room from her parents’, she heard their muffled voices in heated debate. And heard more confusing, scary words, like ultimatum and divorce, and one phrase that would echo in Ciara’s mind for a lifetime: “We’ll disappear, and you’ll never see her again.”
A week later her father had handed in his badge and gun.
A week after that, he’d begun teaching at the university.
She remembered those months just prior to the confrontation. It was the only period in her memory when her father had seemed truly happy. Had the “other woman” put that joy into his eyes? Had she opened up the part of him that had been sealed off by loyalty and vows spoken, and shown him what a good and lovable man he was? Ciara knew she should hate this woman who had come between her mother and her father. But how could she hate the one person who had made him realize his self-worth, who had made him smile…with his eyes?
She had overheard him once, sitting at that same kitchen table with his brother. They’d tipped a few bottles of beer, loosening their lips, and her father had poured out his soul.
It didn’t matter that Kathryn belittled and criticized him at every opportunity. Or that in place of the big family she’d promised, Kathryn coldly announced she would never have children. Years later, seeing the ‘I’m leaving’ handwriting on the wall, she appeased him by consenting to give him one child.
And it didn’t matter that she’d always put her own needs ahead of his, spending money faster than he could earn it, stuffing their house full of ancient, ugly things despite the fact that he’d made it clear he preferred a simpler, sparser life.
What did any of it matter, her father had asked his brother. Kathryn had committed no “sin,” and there was no getting around the fact that he had committed one of life’s most grievous transgressions. Little-girl Ciara, still hiding behind the pantry door, had whispered to herself. But being mean is a sin, and pretending is the same as lying, and lying is a sin….
She had replayed that conversation in her mind, many times, and in Ciara’s opinion, her mother’s icy anger was also a sin, a sin all its own. For decades, Kathryn’s acrimonious, acerbic feelings for her husband throbbed and seethed just beneath the surface, visible to friends, relatives, neighbors. Hadn’t Kathryn gotten the meaning of Matthew, Chapter Seven, Verse One: “Judge not, that you not be judged�
�? Didn’t she believe, as Ciara did, that God was all merciful, all-loving…no matter how great a man’s sin? If a small child could understand this, and the Almighty could extend the hand of forgiveness, why couldn’t Kathryn? Her father had admitted his sin, had atoned for it tenfold. The moment he acknowledged his wrongdoing, God had cleansed him of it, freeing him from further punishment. How long did his wife intend to penalize him!
“What are you saying?” her father repeated.
Ciara would not add to the burden that had bent him over, a little more each year, by telling him she knew what he had done as a younger man.
Ian stepped up just then. “You two must be discussing the stock market,” he said. “I don’t know any other subject that would put scowls on such handsome faces.”
Admittedly, the conversation had forced Ciara to take stock….
“Are you staying to watch the fireworks with us?” she asked her brother-in-law.
“Wish we could, but I promised the kids we’d go down to the Inner Harbor this year.” He rolled his eyes. “If it were up to me, we’d watch the fireworks in air-conditioned comfort on TV, but they’ve got their hearts set on it, and—”
“And as I’ve been telling him for years,” his wife interrupted, wrapping her arms around him from behind, “our kids are nearly grown. This could be the last time we see the fireworks with them.”
They’re so much in love, she told herself, after all these years together, they’re still crazy about each other, and it shows. Mitch had told her that Ian, the oldest of the Mahoney boys, had married at twenty; Gina had just turned nineteen. Theirs, too, had been a whirlwind courtship, speeding from a chance meeting to a date at the altar in less than a year. Isn’t it ironic, Ciara thought, that Mom and Dad went steady for three years, were engaged for two more before they said I do. If anyone should have been sure of themselves, it should have been the two of them….
She remembered something her father had said earlier: he’d been too young to know, too foolish to ask for God’s guidance. All the time in the world, she acknowledged, can’t give us the peace and assurance that comes from a moment of heartfelt prayer.
