Balancing Act (Silhouette Special Edition)

by Darcy, Lilian

  Almost before the words were out of her mouth, Scarlett caught sight of Brady, all the way down that red carpet runner, past all those unfamiliar people. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy,” she said, and toddled off like a rocket, arms stretched in front of her and bouquet held upside down.

  Colleen was not going to be eclipsed by her sister’s bold move. “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy, Daddy!” she yelled. She dropped her bouquet on the carpet, and then she ran.

  Everyone laughed, Delia picked up the bouquet, the girls reached the altar steps neck-and-neck, and all Libby could see through her sudden tears was a blur of color and light.

  Brady would know exactly why she was crying. Colleen had never said the word Daddy before. As soon as Libby reached him, he took out the starched and folded handkerchief from the breast pocket of his dark suit and gave it to her, and she carefully dabbed her eyes, thinking of smudged makeup and photos that would probably get kept forever, whether she looked like a raccoon or not.

  “Good timing, huh?” Brady murmured. “With the ‘Daddy’ thing?”

  “Perfect!”

  The two grandmothers whisked the two little girls onto their laps in the front row, and the ceremony began, with all Libby’s fears forgotten.

  Brady had never been in any doubt that Libby would look beautiful as a bride.

  She wore a pure-white gown that flowed to her feet in soft folds. As a concession to the winter weather, it had long, fitted sleeves, but it left no one in any doubt about the body beneath. The neckline was wide and curvy, showing off Libby’s fine, beautiful skin, and the fabric hugged her breasts and waist closely.

  Her hair was piled on top of her head, its complicated curls and folds catching the light, and her makeup had her face glowing with subtle, pretty color. White beaded slippers darted from beneath the hem of her gown with every step.

  What Brady hadn’t expected, and it almost knocked the ground from under his feet, was the strength of his own reaction. He felt as if someone had assigned a priceless art treasure to his care, and he had no idea of what he had to do to keep it safe and free from danger.

  He was dizzy with awe, totally daunted and dangerously exultant at the same time. They both knew what marriage was about. They had a combined total of nearly twenty years experience in the field. Was he remotely sane to be attempting it again, when he’d told himself, just a few months ago, that he never would? And was she? How sane was she? And what were her expectations?

  Sometimes he was convinced that for both of them this was simply the most promising out of a poor set of alternatives, but when he watched Libby coming, tear-blinded, down the aisle toward him, in the wake of two little green velvet mischief-makers, he knew it had the potential to be a lot more than that.

  If they kept the mistakes to a minimum.

  If they found the right reasons for trust.

  If the prospect of divorce remained a civilized potential escape route, rather than a pressurized chemical mix, primed to explode.

  During the crucial part of the ceremony, his head was cooler than he’d expected it to be, and he had time to think, Yes. Till death us do part. That’s still accurate, even if this marriage doesn’t last. We’ll stay in touch because of the girls. Friends, I hope, and with respect for each other.

  When he kissed her, it meant what it was supposed to mean—not a preview of their physical response to each other, put on like a show for the congregation, but a sealing of the solemn promises they’d just made.

  “I’m wondering if it would be possible for you to get any time off work in January, Mom,” Libby said as she drove her mother to the airport for her flight late in the afternoon.

  She’d changed into black stretch pants and a big pastel sweater, and had left Colleen at home with Brady. Both girls were deep in the oblivion of a late and desperately needed nap, after the excitement of the ceremony and reception lunch had kept them awake and buzzing for hours longer than usual.

  “Well, I probably could,” her mother answered with her usual caution. “Depending on the reason.”

  “I need to have some surgery. I have some uterine fibroids that need to come out, and I’d like my gynecologist in St. Paul to do it, when I come up to deal with the house.”

  “You’ll be selling it now, of course.”

  “I—uh—I guess it doesn’t make sense to keep it. But I haven’t decided yet.” She felt a twist of ambivalent regret as she turned into the short-stay parking lot and began to look for a space near the terminal building. The house had been such a strong symbol of independence and self-sufficiency for her over the past few years.

  “It definitely doesn’t make sense to keep it,” Val said. “You don’t need that extra work and worry. You’ve got no ties in St. Paul, now. And Brady’s place is lovely.” Her voice got foggy. “I’m so glad this has happened, Libby!”

  “Yes, it gives the girls more security, legally.”

  “Well, not that. It’s more— You can see now that I was right to be concerned about the idea of your adopting a child on your own.” Her mom’s speech gathered speed and force. “It’s so much better this way, Libby! Brady is obviously steady and successful and reliable—the kind of man you can depend on, like Glenn was, and you need that. A woman needs that, especially when she’s a mother, no matter how much she might pride herself on coping alone. I’m so glad you were lucky enough to find it a second time.”

  Libby turned into a vacant space and jerked the car to a halt. “That’s not why I married Brady, Mom,” she said, feeling her anger and impatience rise. “It was why I married Glenn, yes, and it was—it was—” Lord, she’d never actually said this before. She’d glossed it over, even to herself. “Too naive of me. A terrible mistake.”

  Her mother gasped. “You can’t say your marriage to Glenn was a mistake! He was a good man. He cared for you. He provided for you.”

  “And he took his price for it.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Why did I start this?

  Val looked wide-eyed, worried, disbelieving, the way she’d looked all through Libby’s nine years of marriage whenever Libby had let slip the slightest suggestion that anything was wrong.

  How could she explain? It was all so intangible.

  Val would have understood the betrayal of physical cruelty or verbal abuse, and would have supported Libby in freeing herself from such things, but Glenn’s quiet, self-centered domination had been so much more insidious, disguised as the “taking care of you” that Mom valued so much.

  Libby had interpreted it that way, too, for far too long. By the time she had matured enough to understand what was really happening, she had found herself locked inside patterns she couldn’t break.

  It was stifling, soul-destroying, and she hadn’t realized the fact until his illness had changed the balance between them. Then he’d clung to her until his death, reviving feelings in her heart that had been in danger of vanishing altogether. She’d grieved for him, but maybe, she now wondered, she’d forgiven him too much.

  Mom wouldn’t want to know about any of this. Not when it was all in the past, and not when it went so much against what Val had always wanted to think. She’d recognized her mother’s fragility in certain areas since she was a child, and had always protected it.

  “Nothing,” Libby said to her. “It’s not important now.”

  “No! You’re right! It isn’t! You see, Libby? You’re being unfair. You were always unfair to Glenn. Don’t make the same mistakes with Brady.”

  “I hope I won’t.”

  More than Val knew!

  “Can we talk about something else?” Libby asked, after a moment. “What do you think about January? I need to schedule the surgery, and this seems like the best plan. If you could stay for several days and look after Colleen while I get the house taken care of, as well. There’s a limit to what I can do from this distance. The surgery isn’t a big deal, but I’ll still need some time to recover before I can travel.”

  “What about Brad
y? Can’t he take time off?”

  “I—I don’t want to ask for something like that so soon.”

  “See? This independence of yours, Libby, it just makes trouble for someone else. Of course I don’t mind doing it. I’m your mother. But I think you’re underestimating Brady. You’re underestimating your marriage.”

  “The girls aren’t awake yet?” Libby asked Brady when she got home from the airport and found a quiet house.

  It was already 6:30, and he was sitting on the couch watching TV, still in his wedding clothes.

  “No, I think they’re planning on sleeping through.”

  Still in some of his wedding clothes, Libby revised mentally. He had his suit jacket off, his shirtsleeves rolled, his tie loosened several inches and the top two buttons of his shirt undone.

  “They need it!” she agreed.

  He had his bare feet propped on the arm of the couch, and when she took her eyes off him long enough to look at the coffee table, she discovered there was a picnic on it. Smoked salmon and caviar, crackers and cheese, French bread, French cakes and a bottle of champagne.

  “So, looks like we might get a bit of a honeymoon, after all,” he said. He looked at her, his gray-blue eyes sexy and smoky and wicked, and she couldn’t focus on the picnic anymore. Her nipples tightened and her insides felt like hot, melting fudge. “Should I open the champagne?” he added. “Oh, wait! Oh, shoot! I forgot! We had the girls still running wild when we got home and I— Shoot!”

  “What?”

  “—never carried you over the threshold.”

  “Oh. Oh, right.” To both of them, it suddenly seemed like a huge omission. Aloud, Libby tried to talk herself out of it being a big deal. “I guess it’s, you know, not as if this was a new place for us. Or a regular marriage,” she said.

  They looked at each other again. Then he said, “Damn it!” and rolled to his feet. “Get your jacket back on!” She’d slipped it off just a moment ago, and dropped it over the back of an armchair. He picked it up and held it behind her.

  “We’re really going to do this, Brady?”

  “Damn straight!”

  “You’ve got no shoes on.”

  “I’ll handle it. Some people walk over hot coals. It’s okay. Now, it’s gotta be the front door.”

  “Start at the bottom of the steps.” She’d caught his mood, now.

  “And I’m going to prop the door open with the stopper so it doesn’t blow shut in our faces.”

  “Good plan.”

  They were laughing when they went down the steps, and still laughing when he brought her back inside in his arms, eyes fixed on her face. She waited for him to say something solemn and romantic, but he didn’t.

  And that was probably a good thing, given the practical foundation for their marriage. Instead, he tipped her gently onto the couch and reached for the champagne. “We’re going to make this work, Lib,” he said.

  Christmas preparations overtook them the day after the wedding. The holiday was only a little over two weeks away, and neither of them had done anything about it yet.

  The pace of the construction industry eased off over winter, but Libby’s hours would be just as long. Toyland Children’s Center only closed on Christmas Day, and, a week later, for New Year.

  Libby apologized to Brady about it—about having to squeeze Christmas preparations into the weekends, about being too tired, most evenings, to talk about gifts. They had to co-ordinate their purchases so that both girls would get roughly the same things. There were only a few shopping days left by the time they’d drafted a list of what they intended to buy.

  But the obvious solution didn’t seem to occur to Libby.

  She could look around for a less demanding job.

  Or she could give up work altogether.

  Brady didn’t mind the idea of supporting her for a few years until she was ready to go back to kindergarten teaching, if only because it would mean he’d be able to take Scarlett out of all those hours of day care.

  It was wrong the way they were handling this, now that their marriage was a reality. They still weren’t operating as a family, and he didn’t know how to make it happen. It wasn’t just his problem, however. It was Libby’s, as well. He knew she was working too hard, trying too hard, thinking too much.

  He couldn’t find a way to confront her about it, however. Aware of how hard he found it to put emotions successfully into words, he hung back, reluctant to push, or create a crisis.

  Outwardly, everything was fine. When the two of them had such good times together with the girls, and with each other, Brady didn’t see how he could turn around and rock the boat by saying, “I want you to give up your job.”

  If Libby was unhappy with the situation, wouldn’t she do something about it? And there was more to all this than just the job, wasn’t there? He could state his feelings forcefully on that issue, and still end up with huge problems.

  The tension began to wind tighter inside him, and he got to that same point he’d been at before the night they agreed to marry, when he felt ambivalent about sharing a bed with her because he didn’t know what it meant. Their marriage wasn’t about love, and it wasn’t just about sex. So what was left?

  Most nights, Libby went to bed early after her pre-dawn start, and he was relieved—okay, physically tortured, sure, but emotionally relieved—to find her already asleep by the time he arrived.

  The days passed. They shopped and stayed up late two nights in a row to get the gifts wrapped because Libby got jittery about leaving it until the last minute. They decided on what dishes they were going to contribute to the big midday festive meal at Delia’s with the Cincinnati cousins. And then, three days before Christmas, they gave the girls an early evening meal and went shopping at the garden center for a tree.

  “It’s too mild for doing this, isn’t it?” Libby said as they drove. Even so, she was hunkered down inside her heavy Minnesota coat.

  “There speaks a girl from the north country,” Brady teased her. “It’s in the thirties.”

  She kept looking round at the girls in the back seat, as if wanting to check if they were enjoying this yet. Since they couldn’t remember last year’s Christmas, and only had a hazy idea of why they’d been taken out after dark, they actually weren’t. They were just sitting there quietly.

  “There should be snow piled everywhere,” Libby insisted. “And it should be cold enough to snap your fingers off. Around seven degrees.”

  “You can have seven degrees and snow. I’ll take the thirties, with bare ground.”

  She laughed. He liked that. He could almost always make her laugh.

  But then, as he parked the car right beside one of the open gates into the garden center, he found himself wondering if this wasn’t another of the illusions that only seemed to be deepening in their relationship. More wallpaper.

  Yeah, sure, they could whack a few funny lines back and forth, like Ping-Pong balls. They could enjoy each other’s company. But Libby held back so much that his trust about what lay beneath was getting thinner, not deeper. And that was wrong.

  Since the girls were already running ahead into the forest of cut and bundled trees, Brady let it go for now, the way he’d let it go so many times before and turned his attention to more immediate matters.

  Choosing a tree was one part science, one part art, and one part pure serendipity, Brady always felt. You could never really tell how it was going to look until you got it home and unwrapped, set on its stand and decorated.

  Given this reality, he didn’t believe in taking forever, nor in examining every tree in the lot. He liked to look at a reasonable, representative sampling of two or three different species, then make a decision. He suspected, too, that the girls wouldn’t stay excited about this for long. Christmas was still just a word to them, wrongly pronounced as “Tissmiss,” and the Santa at the mall on the weekend had made both of them cry in fright.

  “This one’s nice,” he said to Libby, after they’d spe
nt twenty minutes looking at the indoor displays of Santa scenes, nativities, snow and animals, that were set up for the children, and had come outside again.

  “Okay,” she answered vaguely, hugging herself in her coat. At least she had it unzipped, and the hood pulled back. Her hair was a spun-sugar mess that made him want to bring handfuls of it to his face and inhale its sweet, nutty scent.

  “Well, I mean, what do you think? Do you like it?” he asked.

  “Yes, it’s good. The right height.” Seeming oddly uninvolved, she turned away from him and said quickly to Scarlett, “Honey, let’s not touch the wreaths. Stay with—with me. With Mommy.” She still seemed to have trouble using that word when she wasn’t talking to Colleen, although he didn’t doubt how much she loved Colleen’s twin. “Isn’t this beautiful? Look at all the lights?”

  “Or there’s this,” Brady persisted. “It’s too thick around the base, but I can cut it down. It’s a good shape.”

  “Yes, it is,” Libby agreed.

  “Maybe too tall?”

  “Actually, I think so. You’re right.”

  “Or we could cut off the top. There’d still be room for an angel, or a star.”

  “Sure.”

  “How about over here? The Douglas firs? Do you have a preference?”

  “Uh…” She had a get-me-out-of-here look on her face, and Brady didn’t understand it. He wasn’t pressuring her, was he?

  Selecting a tree together was supposed to be fun. As far as he could tell, she’d seemed okay with it until they’d actually got out here amongst them all. She’d been focused on the girls, on the pretty displays indoors, and on telling him it should be colder.

  He stopped twirling the Douglas firs around on their stumps of trunk and came up to her. She almost flinched, and looked around at the trees. “There’s lots,” she said, in a strange tone. “There’s heaps. Go for it, Brady.”