Finally a Mother

by Dana Corbit

  Clearly Mark wasn’t the only one annoyed that they couldn’t work outside today. Or maybe just that they couldn’t get away from her.

  “Blake,” Mark said in a warning tone, “that is not an acceptable way for you to speak to an adult.”

  The boy turned his head slightly to the side. “Sorry.”

  Without saying more, Blake returned to his work. How would she ever reach him if he refused to give her the chance? But the two paint cans, drop cloths, rollers and brushes stacked in the corner gave her an idea.

  “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  She had to laugh at their unenthusiastic grunts of acknowledgment as she ascended the stairs. When she returned just minutes later in work clothes and grabbed a paintbrush, neither guy said anything at all.

  “I thought it might go faster if the three of us worked together.” If nothing else, this was a way of supporting Mark’s work with Blake as he’d supported hers last night. That she wouldn’t have to make excuses to be in the same room as them was a bonus.

  “It’s your house,” Mark said finally.

  It wasn’t an engraved invitation, but it would have to do. He seemed as reluctant to spend time with her as she was supposed to be with him today. But, of course, she was only there to see Blake when he couldn’t hide in his bedroom, so what Mark wanted shouldn’t matter. She set up camp not far from where Blake was using a damp sponge to wipe down the walls he’d been scraping.

  “My parents always made me help them paint rooms when I was a kid.” She slid a glance Blake’s way to see if he was listening. “Did you ever do any painting at your...homes?”

  “Yeah, a few of them required slave labor.”

  Inwardly, she groaned. Why hadn’t she thought before asking that question?

  But Mark only chuckled. “Slave labor, Blake? If you’re so experienced at it, you’ll know exactly how today’s going to go. But here we call it community service.”

  “Same difference.”

  “At least the girls picked an interesting color.” Shannon used the paint key to open the can of cerulean paint. “My mom always picked colors with names like linen or peaches and cream.”

  Another grunt from Blake would have been better than his stony silence. From across the room, Mark whistled a familiar tune. When she recognized it as the old hymn, “The Garden,” she smiled. If she’d ever needed a reminder that she wasn’t alone—that God was with her—it was these past few days. He’d placed Mark in their lives for a reason, as well. And maybe through Mark she would finally be able to share her story with her son.

  She poured a small amount of paint into a tray and closed the can, but instead of settling in her original spot, she carried the tray and a brush to the corner closer to Mark. “Okay to start here?”

  “As good as anywhere,” he said.

  She dipped the brush and smoothed long strokes of the sky-blue paint in the corner. “I would have loved to paint my childhood bedroom a color like this, but my parents never would have allowed it.”

  “Why not?” Mark asked as if he understood his role in the conversation without her laying it out for him.

  “It wouldn’t have measured up to their standards of perfection. Just like I didn’t.”

  She was desperate to know if Blake was listening, but she couldn’t look at him, not and say what needed to be said. “I jumped through hoops at home, school and church to meet their impossible expectations. But none of the things I did were ever good enough. So you can imagine how they reacted when they found out that their only daughter was pregnant.”

  “What did they do?”

  She understood that Mark was playing along so she could tell her story, so it startled her that his interest appeared genuine.

  “They were ashamed of me and didn’t want anyone in our church to know about my pregnancy, so they shipped me away to my grandmother’s until the birth. I wanted...I wanted to keep my baby, but they were relentless.” She focused on the paint as she smoothed it on the wall, but her throat felt thick and heavy. Her eyes burned.

  “They said I should think of the baby first. That adoption was the right thing to do. That it was selfish of me to want to keep my child. When those arguments didn’t convince me, they told me not to expect any support from them if I brought a baby home.”

  “So you felt that you didn’t have a choice.”

  Mark didn’t look at her as he said it, but his words bolstered her. Was Blake really hearing her, too? Did he understand just a little?

  “When it looked as though I would give in, they assured me that I would be able to go on with my life.” She dipped the brush into the paint again, swirling it round and round. “They said no one would have to know. But they didn’t warn me that no matter what, I would always know what I’d done.”

  Mark didn’t say anything right away, making her wonder if she’d said too much. Finally, though, he lowered his putty knife, resting it on top of the tub of goop. “Thanks for telling me your story, but I was still wondering something. If you kept your pregnancy a secret from almost everyone, did you ever tell Blake’s father?”

  She gave him a sharp look. Why did Mark have to keep asking about Scott? Why was it so important to him to know about Blake’s father? But then she peeked at Blake, who’d paused from wiping the wall as if he didn’t want to miss what was being said. Suddenly, it made sense to her. Of course, Blake would want to know about his father. Mark had allowed her to use him as part of her information relay system, and now he was asking questions Blake would want answered. Though she wasn’t ready to share everything—she might never be—she would tell Blake as much as she could.

  “Yes, I told him, but he wasn’t...ready to be a dad.” She closed her eyes, took a deep breath and started again. “His name is Scott Turner. He was just a kid, too. I guess I would call him the bad boy. Everyone else did. Anyway, he pretty much disappeared after I told him I was pregnant.”

  “What do you mean pretty much?” Mark asked.

  “He made sure that my parents knew where to find him so he could sign off on the voluntary release of parental rights.”

  “Oh. Where is he now?”

  Having painted as high as she could reach without a stepladder, she sat on the aged linoleum floor and brushed strokes in a line just above the base molding. “It would make a more interesting story to say he’s in prison or something, but I don’t really know where he is.”

  Blake rinsed his sponge in a bucket of water and started wiping again, but since he continued to clean the same spot, he wasn’t making much progress.

  “So you haven’t kept tabs on him?”

  Mark asked the question too casually, and Shannon’s pulse took a humiliating stutter step. She couldn’t allow herself to start thinking that the officer might be jealous of a guy in her past. Mark was only here for Blake, just as everything he’d done had been for Blake alone. Even his kindness to her last night was ultimately for Blake’s benefit so that the boy could develop a relationship with his mother.

  “About five years ago I heard that he was doing construction work in Colorado. But let’s just say he and I don’t exchange Christmas cards.”

  Mark nodded, appearing satisfied with her answers. She could only hope Blake was, as well.

  “You’re right. Prison would have made for a more entertaining story.” He turned and pointed to her with a sheet of sandpaper in his hand. “Hey, I can check his criminal record on LEIN—uh, the Law Enforcement Information Network—if you like.”

  “Thanks, but that won’t be necessary.”

  “The offer stands.” He brushed his hand over a spot on the wall to make sure that the compound had dried and sanded it smooth. “A lot of bad boys pull it together when they grow up, anyway. I know I did.”

  “Maybe you just weren’t as bad as you thought yo
u were.”

  “That could be right.” He gave her a mean look. “All I’m saying is that it’s possible for people to turn their lives around if they really want to. Maybe that has happened for this...Scott.”

  Shannon’s hand jerked where she’d been painting, causing several droplets to land on the floor. She dabbed at the spots with a piece of wet paper towel. Again, she questioned Mark’s comments. What was he trying to do, convince Blake to track down his birth father the same way he’d located her? Especially now that she’d given him the name. But she reasoned, as Mark probably had, that encouraging Blake to idolize his birth father like some Al Capone–type character wasn’t the best idea, either. What if he decided to follow in the family tradition?

  “I’m sure he turned his life around,” she said with all of the confidence she could muster.

  When she caught Mark’s eye again, he nodded. Strange how his approval of her interactions with her son had become so important to her. She was supposed to be guiding him, and from the start, Mark had been instructing her. If she didn’t find something to teach him soon, she would feel downright obsolete.

  “If we’re painting this room to get it ready for the big Thanksgiving shindig, what preparations are the girls doing upstairs?”

  Mark’s words drew her back into the conversation. He seemed to understand that as much as she’d longed to share her story with her son, they’d spent enough time tromping around in the past for one day. Enough time leaving footprints over long-shielded memories. Relaxing for the first time since Mark and Blake had arrived this morning, Shannon took hold of the new, safer topic with both hands.

  “Oh, the girls are just as busy as we are,” she told him. “They each have a list of special chores to complete after their class work is finished. They’ll also help me with the baking and cooking.”

  “It sounds like a big deal.”

  As if Blake recognized that none of the new information applied to him, he set his sponge aside, grabbed a roller and crouched to pour paint into a pan.

  “At the rate you guys are going, we’ll still be painting this room at Christmas,” he grumbled as he wet the roller and started painting the spot Shannon had already framed in.

  “Wouldn’t want that,” Mark said with a chuckle. He winked at Shannon. “Is the Thanksgiving thing something you plan every year?”

  She tried to ignore the butterflies fluttering in her stomach over something as minor as a wink. What was she, an eighth grader? “This is the third time. It’s something for each new group of girls to look forward to while they’re living here. We invite their families, and we usually have a nice turnout.”

  She moved farther down the wall and kept painting along that molding. “The girls don’t get out much, other than taking turns joining one of the adults on grocery shopping trips or going with us on group outings to the movies or museums.”

  “Do they ever have visitors?”

  “Not many. Some of the parents are able to stop by on weekends and take their daughters out for dinner, but since our residents come from all over the state—a few outside the state—most parents can’t visit often.”

  She didn’t mention that some of the parents who never visited lived no more than thirty minutes away in bad traffic. Those were the same ones who’d already sent their regrets for Thursday. They and her own parents, who coincidentally or intentionally had been away on mission trips each time she’d hosted one of the events.

  “What about their...guys?”

  She grinned at his discomfort in asking about the young fathers. “They’re allowed to visit on weekends as long as they come with the residents’ parents. They also can call or text during nonclassroom time, but they seldom do that, either. For most of the girls who agree to come here, their boyfriends are already a distant memory, or will be right after their babies are born.”

  “Wait.” Mark cocked his head to the side. “Didn’t Trooper Davison say he was called here for a domestic involving one of the dads?”

  “That was about a year ago. The young man showed up to have a shouting match in the front yard with a fifteen-year-old resident. He accused her of lying when she named him as her baby’s ‘putative,’ or commonly accepted, father in the legal documents. A beautiful moment.”

  “Hmm. Sounds like it.”

  She didn’t know about that moment, but this one had become more pleasant than it had any right to be. With Mark’s help, she’d finally been able to make Blake listen to her side of the story, but it was more than that. She liked talking to Mark, enjoyed hearing what he had to say. She never forgot that Blake was right there, pretending not to listen to their conversation, but she found that she wouldn’t mind if it were just Mark and her. Alone.

  That wasn’t a good idea, and she knew it. She shouldn’t allow herself to become attracted to Mark Shoffner, not when she finally had the chance to form a relationship with Blake. But in truth she already was attracted, and in a way she hadn’t been drawn to anyone in years. Not since Scott. And only as an adult could she look back on that young relationship and understand that attraction was all she’d had then.

  But this thing with Mark was more than attraction. She genuinely liked him as a person, wanted to know what he thought and was convinced that he would make a great friend. This was dangerous. Because liking him tempted her to open herself up to him, to let him know the real her. To make herself vulnerable. She’d taken that kind of risk only once before, leaving her heart exposed, and she still bore the scars from it, both inside and on the outside from the emergency cesarean section. And vulnerable was the thing she’d promised herself she would never be again.

  Chapter Eight

  “Here. I can get that for you.”

  Blake bent over Kelly’s much shorter frame and lifted a tray of cut-up sandwiches from her arms. He indicated the cafeteria area with a tilt of his head. “Where do you want me to put it?”

  She pointed to a long table. Trays of fruit and vegetables and cups of yogurt were spaced along it beside pitchers of milk and plastic cups.

  “I could have done that myself, you know.”

  “I know. I just wanted to help a little.”

  “Okay.” But she narrowed her gaze at him.

  Shannon had to grin at Kelly’s suspicious reaction to Blake’s chivalry. After what the girls had been through, she couldn’t blame them for questioning the motives of teenage boys. As for Blake’s comment about helping, he’d already done more than “a little” of that while they’d prepared for lunch. He’d unstacked most of the chairs and moved tables from against the wall in the cafeteria area that doubled as an activity room for their prenatal exercise classes.

  If Kelly’s suspicion bothered him, he didn’t let on that it did. He only started back through the swinging doors into the kitchen and wrestled a tray from another girl’s hands. Shannon was tempted to remind him that the girls were pregnant—not invalids. But she was too proud of how sweet he was being to the girls, who often faced unkind comments from others, to say anything. It hadn’t been a bad idea to invite Mark and Blake to join them for lunch after all.

  “You see,” Mark whispered. “You shouldn’t have worried about having Blake around the girls.”

  Shannon shivered as his warm breath tickled her neck. How he could have been able to sneak up behind her, she couldn’t imagine, since she was usually overly sensitive to his presence. “I wasn’t worried. Not much, anyway.”

  “He’s great with them.” Mark’s gaze followed Blake as he emerged from the kitchen again, carrying a tray of cookies.

  Several of the girls had already lined up at one end of the table the way they normally did, and Blake took a spot at the end of the line.

  “But he’s been a curmudgeon all day,” Shannon said.

  Someone must have said something entertaining then because Bla
ke actually smiled.

  “Curmudgeon, huh?” Mark said. “And you were worried that he would bring all of that sweetness to the girls. No, Mom, he reserves that delightful behavior just for you.”

  He’d been joking, but it was the first time Mark had ever referred to her as Blake’s mother in any way, though he clearly believed she was. Even the DNA maternity test they’d scheduled for that afternoon was only a formality for later court proceedings. Her throat tightened. Hearing Mark say it was almost as great as she imagined it would be if—when—Blake would say it. Like a vote of confidence in a room filled with nos.

  She cleared her throat. “So I’m the privileged one?”

  “Yes, that’s you.”

  As the line became shorter, Mark and Shannon stepped to the end of it and started filling their plates. They paused as Chelsea took her turn saying grace so those who were already seated could start eating while the others finished getting their food in line.

  “The girls appear to be on their best behavior, too,” Mark said as he lifted his tray after the amen.

  She raised an eyebrow and waited for him to explain.

  “You were worried about that, too, weren’t you?”

  Guilt filled her as she glanced at the girls seated in groups of three or four. How could she have been concerned that her girls might be inappropriately flirtatious with Blake around? She was supposed to be one of the few people who was always on their side, who always believed in their potential and didn’t define them by their mistakes.

  “I just didn’t know how they would react to having a guy here. Even Miss Lafferty told us this was no place for a teenage boy.”

  “It was more him living here that she had a problem with,” he said with a chuckle.

  Ahead of them, Blake poured a glass of milk, but as he started toward the tables, he paused, uncertain.

  “Come eat with us, Blake,” Brooke called out. She indicated an empty seat between hers and Chelsea’s. “Don’t sit with the boring adults.”

  Blake glanced back at Mark, and, at his nod, he joined the girls at the table. As he sat down, Brooke introduced him to a few of the girls he had yet to meet, and then just when he lifted his hand to wave at them, she reached over and messed up his hair as one would a younger brother. His face turned crimson, and he shoved his hair out of his eyes.