Second Time's the Charm

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  He wore a size ten and weighed 175.

  As, he was sure, did many other average guys on campus.

  But how many of them had confessed to breaking and entering? Or done time for being caught red-handed with the things he helped steal?

  Hell, he’d had stolen beer in his belly, and on his lips, at the time of his arrest.

  Stuffing the remainder of his lunch in the trash, Jon swallowed, and said, “Well, I hope they catch the guy soon.”

  Mark nodded, chewing on the same type of bread and peanut butter he carried to work almost every day. “They will. You can count on that. Sheriff Richards is smart and determined. He’ll get the guy.”

  “So what’s up with you and Lillie? I heard you two were driving through town together yesterday.”

  Mark’s knowing glance gave Jon more pause. This thing with Lillie... They’d agreed to be careful.

  “It was strictly business,” he said. “That stuff with Abe I told you about. We took him to a museum for kids in Phoenix yesterday.”

  Mark asked about the museum, how Abe had liked it, what he’d done. He’d allowed Jon to distract him from his real question.

  Turning, Jon headed back toward the plant. Mark caught up with him as he slid his badge in the slot and reached for the door.

  “Funny,” Mark said, just behind him. “I heard that she said you two were ‘friends.’” Mark’s emphasis on the word was too obvious to miss.

  Lillie was talking about him. Them.

  Jon’s gut leaped. And his tension dissipated. Everything would be okay if he had Lillie by his side. Abe would be fine. And Jon...that dream of having a woman to look after, to protect. To look after him. Fight for him...

  Rein it in, dude.

  Mark was paged. And, with a teasing nudge to Jon’s shoulder and some pithy words that Jon didn’t catch, he was off.

  Jon got back to work, too.

  Lillie might like him fine now. Chances were good she didn’t have any idea about his past. His guilt. And if she got too close, she’d be bound to find out.

  And to have second thoughts.

  Kate had known. He’d been released from detention shortly after his eighteenth birthday. He’d had no family to turn to. No real friends.

  He’d called Barbara. She hadn’t wanted anything to do with him—not since he’d turned “bad,” as she’d called it.

  It was bad enough coming from juvie, but coming out after growing up as a ward of the state—no one believed he’d amount to anything.

  He’d been labeled. By everyone but himself.

  His foster brothers were already serving time again for other crimes. Jon was determined not to be like them.

  He’d needed a fresh start, and so he’d taken his parole officer’s suggestion and sought help from Kate’s uncle—a man who helped released prisoners start new lives.

  Kate knew that. Knew what jobs and housing her uncle reserved for the men he “rescued.”

  Jon’s ex-con status had been the reason Kate had come on to him to begin with. And, in the end, the reason why she’d left. He was convinced of that.

  If he’d been different―up-and-coming with a pressed white shirt and a trendy tie—they’d have moved to New York together. Abe, too.

  With the mental reminder, Jon tried to stop thinking about everything but that which was under his control, which, at the moment, meant conductors and production times.

  * * *

  LUNCH ON MONDAY was a brief affair for Lillie—a quick snack cup of pears and some crackers with cheese. After a busy morning at the day care—which included another surprising tantrum from Abraham while he was standing in a circle holding hands with a group of kids for movement class—she’d rushed to the clinic to assist with a four-year-old who’d split his chin open, and then supported a couple of children through radiology procedures.

  The worst was yet to come: a two-year-old with a bowel condition, requiring several surgeries that mandated tube feeding. The good news was that the condition wasn’t permanent. Little Manny’s prognosis pointed to full recovery and normal life span.

  Sadly, the toddler required a kind of semipermanent IV line that had to be exchanged. As she was already in radiology, Lillie made it to the room in plenty of time to get things ready for Manny. This was their second time together for this particular procedure. The first had been as close to a nightmare as Lillie could remember. The procedure, which consisted of inserting a thin catheter in the arm just above the elbow and guiding it by X-ray close to the heart, could be completed in a matter of minutes. Manny’s had taken an hour and a half. Partly because, after forty-five minutes of unsuccessful attempts to get his soft little veins to cooperate, Lillie had called for a break to let the little guy recover a bit.

  With the lights down low, music playing softly in the background and a plastic console that she could hold in front of the boy as he lay on his side on the table, she was ready. Manny liked to press buttons.

  He was crying as his distraught mother—a young woman who lived with her family on a cotton farm ten miles outside of Shelter Valley—brought him into the clinic.

  “Manny, sweetie, what’s wrong?” Lillie asked. Taking the toddler from his mother’s arms, acknowledging the grateful smile on the worried woman’s lips, she settled Manny on her hip, held the hot and sweaty little head against her chest and rubbed his scalp, talking softly to him as she carried him through the doors leading out of the waiting room.

  Not waiting for the boy to answer her, Lillie kept up a steady stream of quiet chatter, keeping her voice light, nonthreatening, as she told him that they were going to have a much better time together than the last time they’d seen each other. She told him about the box they were going to play with. The lights and buttons he would get to push.

  Thankfully, there were a couple of radiology rooms at the clinic. Lillie had purposely requested the one Manny hadn’t been in the last time for today’s procedure. She’d taken care to decorate the room with colorful stuffed animals and plastic wall hangings. An overabundance of them. Visual stimulation that would help distract the boy if his veins refused to cooperate again.

  “Look!” she said, picking up the console box at the same time that she set the boy down on the procedure table, intending for him to begin playing and not pay attention to where he was sitting. She’d scheduled fifteen minutes of alone time with the boy before his procedure was due to begin.

  Michael, the radiologist on duty, came in with his support staff right on schedule.

  “Look, Manny, it’s Michael! Do you know who Michael is?” she asked the little boy.

  Manny wasn’t crying, but there was mistrust in his eyes as he stared up at the short-haired man wearing scrubs with cars all over them.

  “Michael’s the zoom-zoom guy!” she said. “He can make everything go zoom! You want to watch how fast he is?” she asked, handing Michael a big plastic car and pointing to the ramp she’d pulled in from the playroom down the hall.

  Michael shot the car down the ramp a few times and let Manny play, too.

  “Okay, big guy,” Lillie said, scooping the child up with one arm while keeping the car in his toddler hands with the other. “You hold on to the car while we make you go zoom-zoom,” she said, glancing to make certain the technician had a papoose—a special cloth apparatus that would hold the boy still during the procedure—open on the table.

  “You’re going to go zoom,” she told Manny, not asking him if he wanted to so he didn’t have a chance to say no and then be ignored. He had no choice in this matter so she wasn’t going to feed his distrust by pretending like she was giving him one.

  With a few quick motions, she had the car on the table beside Manny’s head and the little boy was wrapped firmly in the papoose, with both arms free.

  Free because they migh
t need both and didn’t want to have to fight to get Manny back in the papoose a second time. And because she hoped to distract him from the arm Michael needed by engaging his right hand.

  With the little boy lying on the table, Lillie moved the toy cars as Michael situated him, keeping Manny engaged. The old line was out and the new one in before Lillie had a chance to move on to another distraction.

  “All done!” Michael smiled and mouthed a silent “thank you” in her direction.

  “Zoom!” Manny said, dry-eyed and ready to roll over the table some more as they released him from the papoose.

  With an ear-to-ear grin, Lillie returned the little boy to his relieved mother. Disaster averted.

  She’d distracted Manny—and herself, too. Her concerns about Abraham, her feelings for his father—those were distant.

  This was her life.

  Helping other people’s children.

  And she was good at it.

  * * *

  WHEN HE GOT off work a couple of hours early on Monday, Jon didn’t head straight to the day care as he would normally have done. After calling Little Spirits to check up on Abe, he turned the truck toward Phoenix and a drugstore where he could buy some personal items without anyone in Shelter Valley finding out about it.

  The existence of his sex life was none of their business. As it stood, he didn’t have a sex life. Might not have one ever again. But he’d already gone and created one child to the dismay of the child’s mother. He wasn’t going to risk a replay.

  With the condoms safely hidden in his backpack, waiting to be transferred to his nightstand drawer, Jon stopped at a busy construction site trash compactor and reached for his expensive glass suction cups. He’d left them right where he always did. In the bucket with his furniture movers. They weren’t there. And then he noticed that the bucket had tipped over. The cups had fallen out. Grabbing them, he tossed them, pushed the button to destroy the evidence and drove away as quickly as the speed limit allowed to pick up his son.

  Dinner that night was a messy affair. Jon made spaghetti that Abe insisted on feeding himself. After dinner, Jon took his son on a trip straight from the booster seat to the bathtub. After Abe’s bath, they retired to Abe’s playroom. Jon set himself up on the floor with his tablet and his laptop and Abe played happily—a normal, self-directed little man who was going to grow up to be president.

  With or without a mama.

  Life was good.

  * * *

  LILLIE WAS STILL working in her office Monday evening when her phone rang.

  Jon. She should tell him about Abe’s tantrum that day—although it had been the shortest one yet.

  It took her two rings to find the thing in the pocket of her big leather satchel.

  The phone sounded a third time as she read the caller display.

  Kirk.

  Her heart sank to her stomach.

  “Is this a bad time?” her ex-husband asked when she picked up.

  Glancing out to the quiet hallway beyond her office door, Lillie bit back her initial reaction and said, “No. What’s up?”

  “I need to talk to you, Lillie.”

  They’d already been through this. “So talk.”

  “I...just... Don’t hang up, okay? At least, not without... I’m breaking the rules already, aren’t I? Trying to tell you what you can and can’t do.”

  He sounded odd.

  “Where are you?”

  “Home.”

  Papa and Gayle had said he still lived in Scottsdale.

  “Are you drinking?”

  He’d never been a particularly heavy drinker.

  “No. Though it would probably be better if I was. Help take the edge off.”

  “What edge?”

  “Tell me about him.”

  Jon? How had he found out?

  Jumping up from her chair, Lillie held the phone to her ear with one hand and packed up the last of her things with the other. It was time to go home. She could finish charting in the morning.

  “Please, Lil. I know I’m scum for asking, but I have to know.”

  Jon was the first man she’d been seriously interested in since the divorce. Had her failure to replace Kirk kept him secure? Was that what his recent change of heart was all about? Not an internal struggle, a coming to terms with who he was as a person, but a need to know that Lillie hadn’t replaced him?

  “What do you want to know?” She wanted to know how Kirk had found out about Jon.

  If he was spying on her, having her followed...

  “Everything. I wasn’t there for any of our baby’s short life. It’s gotten to the point where I can’t even spend time with Ely because he’s such an acute reminder.”

  Outside, alone in the dark, Lillie walked briskly toward her car.

  Noticing a movement in the shadows, Lillie said, “Keep talking, Kirk. Just until I get to the car.”

  There was movement again. Maybe just a tree, its branches rustling in the breeze.

  There’d been another break-in the night before.

  “Where are you?”

  “Leaving work.”

  “Is anyone else there?”

  “Just the nurses and technicians on the night shift. No patients so far tonight, so no docs.” She was only a few yards from her car. And she knew that Kirk would call 9-1-1 immediately if―

  “You shouldn’t be out alone this late. Especially not with those break-ins. It’s pitch-black outside. I heard there was just another one. They still haven’t caught the guy.”

  Had the latest break-in made the Phoenix news? Or did he have an “in’” in Shelter Valley?

  Her key fob in hand, Lillie pushed the automatic unlock and dived for the car handle. “I’m alone at night all the time,” she said, sliding onto her front seat, pulling the door shut behind her and hitting the automatic lock.

  She was safe.

  “If that was a barb aimed at me, it hit its mark.” Kirk’s voice had dropped another octave. “And was well deserved.”

  That hadn’t been her intention. She didn’t have the energy to blast him.

  “Okay, we’ve had a conversation. Are we done now?” Lillie asked, ready to put the car in gear and head... She hadn’t decided where yet. Probably home. Maybe to stop someplace for a salad. Or to deliver the zipper-and-button toddler pillow she’d asked Bonnie to order for her and that had come in that day.

  “I need to know about him. Please, Lil.” His voice broke.

  And she caved. Pulling around to the front of the clinic where the lights were bright and she could be seen from the reception area, Lillie parked again.

  “I don’t have any idea what to say.” She didn’t know how much he’d been told. And she wasn’t about to give him any information he didn’t already have. She was sorry that he was suffering, but whatever he was feeling couldn’t come close to the devastating betrayal and heartbreak he’d put her through.

  “Maybe just little bits at a time,” he said. “Tell me about that last month. Did you feel him move? Remember that first time you felt him move? We were out to dinner with clients. I can’t remember where. But you jumped and spilled my water glass....”

  “It was at the Phoenician.” An upscale resort.

  She’d said the words without thinking—had traveled back in time with him without realizing where he was taking her.

  And...

  He was asking about Braydon. Not about Jon. Heat rising beneath her skin, Lillie realized something else. He’d just admitted to her that he couldn’t relate to his son, his living flesh and blood, because of unresolved issues regarding his dead one.

  Papa and Gayle had told her how Kirk’s lack of involvement hurt the little boy.

  Ely was paying for his father’s mis
takes.

  And that wasn’t right.

  So she did what she could. Granted Kirk ten minutes of question-and-answer time. And then, when she’d had enough, when she’d actually started to feel his pain, she cut the call off, put her car in Drive and turned it toward home.

  No matter what kind of transformation Kirk was making, or what kind of regret he was feeling, he was no longer Lillie’s business. Or concern.

  She’d do what she could to help him, for Ely’s sake, but she couldn’t take Kirk on again. Couldn’t afford to lose any more of her to a man who only thought of himself.

  Still, she felt his pain. They’d lost a son. Their son.

  After picking up the phone to call Kirk back, she dropped it again.

  She didn’t love him. She was absolutely certain of that. Please, God, don’t let her be so weak that she’d fall under Kirk’s spell again.

  Lillie made a U-turn.

  It wasn’t Kirk she wanted. She knew that without a doubt.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  JON HAD JUST put Abraham down for the night when he saw headlights shining in their living room window. He could close the blinds, block the regular passing of headlights up and down his street all night, but he preferred the company as he sat in the living room alone doing his homework.

  His rented condominium had an adjoining unit. And the complex contained forty-six other units that shared a total of twelve driveways with four parking spots in each. One of his neighbors must have just arrived home.

  He’d met the two young men who lived in the adjoining unit the day he’d moved in. He’d introduced them to Abraham, apologizing ahead of time if the toddler cried and disturbed them, and promised to do his utmost to keep the little boy happy. In return, he’d asked if it would be a problem for them to keep noise at a minimum after eight o’clock.

  He hadn’t seen or heard them since—except coming and going, usually as shadows in the night. They kept different hours than he did.

  But they were quiet. Which was all he cared about.

  A knock on his door had him jumping out of his seat.

  Not convinced that Abraham was fully asleep yet, he didn’t want whoever it was to knock again.