The boys shrieked louder and tore around the house, out of sight.
The woman could have snagged them if she’d tried, but she clearly wasn’t trying. Hands on her hips, she paused in the driveway to catch her breath. She looked too young to be the mother of those boys, and her Williams College sweatshirt made her look even younger. But who knew? Teenagers became mothers all the time these days. Or else she might be older than she looked, wearing a sweatshirt that dated back to her college days.
In any case, she wasn’t the right Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon.
Gradually she stopped panting. She tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear and checked her watch. A breeze carried the giggles of the boys from somewhere behind the house, but she just shrugged and turned, reaching for the tricycle. Noticing Michael, she froze.
Not wanting to alarm her, he remained where he was on the sidewalk near the foot of the driveway. He turned his hands palm out, as if to prove that he was unarmed. He really didn’t think he appeared dangerous in his khakis and tailored blue shirt.
Still, he was a stranger, and she was entitled to be wary.
“I’m looking for Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon,” he said.
The young woman abandoned the tricycle and straightened up. “She’s not here,” she said laconically, informing him that she herself wasn’t the Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon who lived at this address.
He dared to take a step closer, and let his hands drop to his sides. “Do you know when she’ll be home?”
“Who are you?”
“An old friend.”
“What’s your name?”
He hesitated before answering, then realized his hesitation was making her suspicious. “Michael Molina.”
“I’ll tell her you stopped by,” the woman said, turning back to the tricycle.
No. That wouldn’t do. If the Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon who lived here was his Emmie and this woman told her Michael Molina had stopped by, she might pile her furniture behind the door and file a restraining order against him. Not that she had anything to fear from him, but after the way he’d treated her five years ago, he doubted she would want to see him. His plan had been to pop into her life and start apologizing so fast she wouldn’t have time to erect any defenses.
Of course, if he was at the wrong Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon’s house, the lady in the Williams College sweatshirt would mention that someone named Michael Molina had stopped by, and the woman who lived here would say, “Who?”
“It’s really important that I see her,” he insisted. He didn’t want to scare Williams College off, but he didn’t want her to blow him off, either. “I’ve been trying to find her for a long time.”
Williams. College abandoned the tricycle once again and turned to regard him. She scrutinized him—measuring him for homicidal tendencies, no doubt. He gave her his most winsome smile and sensed something thaw inside her.
“Okay,” she said. “Are you staying somewhere in the area?”
“Yes.”
“Then I’ll tell her you’re in town, and she can get in touch with you. Where are you staying?”
He held his face immobile while his mind revved. He hadn’t even bothered to find a room for the night. He’d simply gotten off the plane at Logan Airport, rented a car and headed straight for the Cullen Drive address in Wilborough Maggie Tyrell had provided. He’d thoughtlessly assumed that the moment Emmie saw him and heard his apologies, her heart would melt and she’d open her arms and her home to him.
Obviously that assumption had been pretty wide of the mark. He scrambled to recall the names of the motels he’d passed on his drive. “The Holiday Inn,” he said, praying the motel would have a room for him, on the chance that Emmie might call that evening.
“Okay. Michael Molina, Holiday Inn. I’ll tell her.”
He understood he was being dismissed. “Say it’s important,” he stressed, wondering if he sounded as desperate as he felt, wondering why he should even feel desperate. He was arguably crazy, chasing Emmie down so many years after everything had gone wrong. In all likelihood, she was more necessary to him as a memory, a fantasy of what might have been, than as a real woman in the present.
But he’d come this far. He’d paid good money to a detective to locate her for him. He couldn’t give up, not yet.
“I’ll tell her,” Williams College responded, sounding less than enthusiastic. Clearly she didn’t think it was important that Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon get in touch with him. She probably figured him for a pest, if not worse: a stalker, a felon, a dire threat to everything Emmie cared about. At one time, he supposed, that was exactly what he’d been.
If he continued to insist on how vital it was for Emmie to contact him, Williams College would definitely feel threatened. “Thanks,” he said, shoving his hands into the pockets of his khakis. “I appreciate it.” With a benign nod, he turned to go.
A sudden peal of laughter spilled into the front yard, capturing his attention. The two little boys raced around the house from the back, jostling each other and giggling. The minute they saw Williams College, they burst into simultaneous shouting.
“We saw this thing—” one began.
“It was so big—”
“And it was this big monster—”
They both dissolved in giggles again.
The woman folded her arms across her chest as she turned to them. She looked skeptical, but the corners of her mouth twitched upward, fighting for a smile. “A monster? How big?”
“This big!” one of the boys squealed, spreading his tyke-size arms wide.
“No, this big!” his buddy said, topping him, stretching his arms outward.
“No. this big!” It was obviously a competition to see which one of them could extend his arms wider.
“All right, you guys,” Williams College interrupted. “So it was this big. What color hair did it have?”
“Green!” hollered one boy, while the other shouted, “Poker dots!” That was silly enough to launch them both into gales of laughter.
The woman eyed Michael conspiratorially. He couldn’t resist a smile. In general, children—even cute ones—didn’t do much for him. What passed for childhood wisdom generally seemed about as profound as fortune-cookie messages, and adorable kids on TV made him gag. He could stare politely at the stilted school photo of some friend’s offspring and make appropriate comments, but he usually had to force himself to pretend he cared.
These kids, though... Their laughter was a tonic at the end of a long day that had begun that morning in Berkeley and had entailed a tiring transcontinental flight followed by a baffling drive from the airport through downtown Boston to this quiet village a half-hour north of the city. He knew he was on Cullen Drive in Wilborough, but he had no idea where he really was, at least when it came to Emmie.
What was a man to do at a time like this? He could groan, he could curse or he could grin at two scrappy little boys with huge imaginations who were in the grip of a giggle epidemic.
One of them, slightly taller than his friend, stopped laughing first, petering out with a few snorts and gasps. He gave the other boy a playful shove, then spun around, evidently intending to return to the backyard to deal with the poker-dot-haired monster. Michael glimpsed the boy’s brown eyes beneath the curved brim of the child’s baseball cap and his heart slammed against his ribs.
Beneath that cap, beneath the shock of dark hair, Michael saw his own face gazing back at him.
“I’M SORRY, Ms. KENYON, but I simply don’t see how we can make it happen,” the mortgage officer at County Savings and Trust said. His tone registered a level of sorrow Emmie knew he didn’t feel. He was a callow kid in an off-the-rack suit, a recent college graduate, no doubt. He’d likely majored in something utterly impractical and then hastily enrolled in a seminar on bank mortgage policies, and now he had the power to reduce her life to shambles.
She’d already tried the big banks, the megafinanciers with no true ties to Wilborough. They’d been politely chilly as they’d
rejected her mortgage application. She’d thought that maybe the one local bank with roots in the community might feel an obligation to keep its neighborhoods stable and its customers satisfied.
But Ronald Petit, the young mortgage officer who now held her fate in his hands, evidently didn’t think that satisfying Emmie and keeping her neighborhood stable were compelling reasons for him to stretch his bank’s mortgage qualifications. “I’ve been renting the house for three years,” she reminded him. “I’ve maintained the property. My landlord would love to sell to me. It would make life easier for everyone.”
“Everyone except us here at County Savings,” Ronald Petit explained. “I’ve gone over your application, Ms. Kenyon, and I just don’t see how you can do it. We have formulas to calculate eligibility, and I’m afraid you don’t come close.”
“I’ll be coming up for tenure next year. I’m sure I’ll get it,” she said with as much certainty as she could muster.
“And you’re earning a decent income,” he agreed, his voice so heavy with condescension she wanted to reach across his imposing desk and smack him. “But even if you do get tenure,” he went on, “it’s only one income. Most first-time home owners manage the financing by having two incomes.” He angled her application before his eyes as if he hadn’t already read it a million times—and probably snickered every time at the numbers she’d inserted into the blanks.
“In other words, you think I should moonlight evenings at the local hamburger joint?” Her mother had drilled into her that sarcasm wasn’t ladylike, but sometimes, Emmie believed, it was mandatory.
Apparently Ronald Petit was immune to sarcasm—or else oblivious to it. “You have one income and a lot of expenses. Your child-care costs—”
“In one more year, Jeffrey will be starting kindergarten. I’m going to be saving a lot of money on child care.”
“But the bottom line,” Ronald Petit declared, “is that you have nothing for a down payment. Your savings are negligible.” He seemed to have trouble pronouncing “negligible.” It was a word he might have been kind enough to avoid, given the pain it inflicted upon her. He attempted a sympathetic smile. “You know, a lot of people in your situation get help from their families. Perhaps your parents could contribute to the down payment—”
“No,” she said swiftly. Her parents could not contribute to the down payment. Her parents could not—would not—contribute anything at all. And Emmie would rather fall on a sword than ask them for help.
“That’s what a lot of first-time buyers do,” Ronald said, persevering.
“I’m not a lot of first-time buyers,” she snapped, then took a deep, calming breath. Arguing with the young bank officer wouldn’t do her any good. “I don’t suppose your bank has done any research on whether its mortgage decisions discriminate against single mothers.”
That got his attention. “Discriminate?”
“Well, when you mentioned two incomes, you weren’t talking about my taking a second job. You were talking about a husband and wife who both work, am I right?”
“In this economy, that’s often the way young families qualify for mortgages,” he agreed, watching her as if he expected her to spring a civil rights lawyer on him.
“And you’ve pointed out my child-care costs as a reason I don’t qualify.”
“I’m going by the numbers, Ms. Kenyon. There’s nothing I can do.” His sympathy seemed genuine now. “If I could approve your application, I would. I would love to. But I can’t. We’ve got a formula and we have to stick with it. If you could scrape up a bigger down payment, then you’d be able to handle the monthly payments on your income. But without a sizable down payment, you won’t. I’m just going by the formula.”
“Fine.” She wouldn’t beg and she wouldn’t weep. She would hang on to her dignity, because at the moment it was all she had.
Being rejected for a mortgage wasn’t the worst thing that had ever happened to her, she tried to console herself as, after a few bland words of thanks, she left the bank for the sun-glazed sidewalk outside. Mary-Elizabeth Kenyon, great-great-great-granddaughter of a Confederate officer who’d lost his left leg and his farm in the War Between the States, knew how to survive defeat. That particular talent had been bred in the bone. Kenyons fought, and sometimes they lost, but they never gave up. They simply threw back their shoulders, wrapped their pride around them like a mantle and marched on.
Pride wouldn’t put a roof over her head and Jeffrey’s, though.
The house on Cullen Drive was the perfect home for her and her son. It was just the right size, with a fine yard for playing in and a beautiful sun-kissed corner of the rear yard for her garden. The rent was manageable, and her landlord never badgered her. She would have been content to remain right where she was until Jeffrey was grown and gone-except that her landlord had fallen and broken his hip, and he’d decided to move to Tempe, Arizona, to be closer to his son and daughter-in-law. For him to buy a place in Tempe, he had to sell the house in Wilborough.
“I’d love to sell it to you,” he’d told Emmie. “It would make my life easier, and yours, too. Just to save myself the chore of having to list the place with a real-estate agent, I’d sell it to you at ten thousand below the listing price.”
The price was fair. But Emmie’s finances simply couldn’t accommodate it.
So she had to move. She had to uproot Jeffrey and find new housing, even though she knew she’d never find anything as ideal as her current residence. Just contemplating the physical labor of moving—changing all the utilities, packing everything into cartons, hiring a mover or renting a truck and corraling a few friends to assist her—brought tears to her eyes. A move could be exciting if you were moving to a better house and if you’d chosen to make the move. But she hadn’t chosen it. She had no choice at all.
Sighing, she slung her purse higher on her shoulder and walked across the parking lot to her car, an eight-year-old subcompact she’d bought used right after she’d gotten the job at the Oak Hill School. It wasn’t as if she didn’t live frugally. She worked hard and loved her job. She drove a clunker and said a little prayer every time she twisted the key in the ignition. She bought Jeffrey’s clothing in the discount shops and never entered a supermarket without her envelope of discount coupons. Over the summer she tutored children for extra cash. Vacation trips with Jeffrey were as simple as a day at the Museum of Science or the beach in Rockport. Her only extravagance was the preschool where Jeffrey was enrolled; it was the best preschool in Wilborough, and Jeffrey’s well-being was one area where she refused to stint, even if the tuition was astronomical.
When a single woman started with nothing but a degree in education and a baby, saving money for a down payment on a house was all but impossible. She’d done her best, but—as Ronald Petit had pointed out—most women looking for financing for a house were one-half of a two-income marriage, or else they turned to their parents for assistance.
Emmie couldn’t turn to her parents. That door was closed and locked.
If she’d survived her parents’ rejection, she reminded herself as she settled behind the wheel of her car, surely she could survive rejection by the mortgage officer at County Savings and Trust. Still, as she closed her door and leaned against the steering wheel, a few tears trickled through her lashes and down her cheeks. Damn. She didn’t want to lose the house. She didn’t want to move. She didn’t want to be at the mercy of Ronald Petit or anyone else. All she wanted was a nice, comfortable home for her son. Was that so unreasonable?
Most of the heat had left the day. May was an odd month in eastern Massachusetts, Emmie had learned: some days felt like mid-August; others, the thermometer never inched above sixty degrees. Today had been somewhere in the middle, warm enough at midday for her students to grow restless for recess, warm enough for her to open the windows and fill the classroom with the song of spring birds, but not so hot that the children grew limp from the heat. It was the sort of day Emmie would have liked to spend with Jeffr
ey, and if Gwyn from the front desk hadn’t chased Emmie on her way out of the school building at three-thirty, waving a phone message from Ronald Petit that said he would meet with her that afternoon to discuss her mortgage application, she would have picked Jeffrey up at the Sunny Skies Preschool and driven him to the playground by the community center so he could have played pirate on the colorful, rambling maze of swings and tubes and slides constructed in the center of the park.
Instead she’d raced back into the school building, phoned Claire—blessedly home for the summer break—and begged her to pick Jeffrey up at Sunny Skies. Claire had baby-sat often for Emmie during her senior year at Wilborough High, and Emmie had been distraught when Claire had left for college. Now she was back for the summer, eager to earn money. Jeffrey knew and loved Claire, which made her worth every penny Emmie paid her.
Her tears spent, Emmie rubbed the knotted muscles at her nape. If she and Jeffrey had to move from Cullen Drive, would they lose Claire as a baby-sitter? What if they had to move so far away that Claire wouldn’t want to bother driving across town, or across several towns, just to baby-sit for a couple of hours with Jeffrey?
The entire mess drained Emmie. Her head throbbed, and a lump of emotion, part anger, part frustration, part grief, churned in her chest. As a young woman she had left her comfortable existence and traveled thousands of miles to work with people less fortunate than she...but somehow she’d always thought that eventually, once she’d reached the age of thirty, her life might regain a bit of the ease she’d known as a child. She’d thought she would return to America and continue to teach and do good works here—but she would also be fifty percent of one of those two-income couples, living in a house she owned, raising her children without any financial stress—maybe even eating off nice dishes and taking winter vacations—a week in the Bahamas or skiing at Lake Tahoe.
She’d never thought she would return to America pregnant and abandoned. But she didn’t regret what had happened, because what had happened had given her something infinitely more valuable than a nice house and a gainfully employed husband, or winter vacations at the beach or on the slopes. It had given her Jeffrey, and it had given her herself.
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