A Promise of Forever

by Marilyn Pappano

  Neither had Ben, beyond images in the media, until Patricia had received this one. It was a simple flag: a red border surrounding white, a gold star, gold fringe across the bottom, two small gold tassels at the top. And yet its narrow borders encompassed so much: Remembrance. Pride. Honor. Sacrifice. Acknowledgment. Heartbreak. Loss. The giving up of dreams.

  Patricia felt all those things for the stepfather Ben had never known. He’d met George only three times, following his, Brianne’s, and Sara’s graduations from high school. How much could you learn about a man at lunch while he waited for a flight back to Germany? That he had a strong handshake. That he didn’t assume marrying their mother made him part of their family. That he didn’t expect a generous graduation gift to make up for Patricia’s absences, though he gave it anyway.

  The woman in front of him apparently had known the colonel, because she was controlling more grief than the three Nobles had scrounged up together. Ben stepped back and opened the door wider. “Come on in. I’m supposed to be keeping an eye on the grill until Patricia gets back.”

  She hesitated a moment then, with a deep breath, walked through the door and waited quietly. He locked up before leading the way back to the kitchen and gesturing out a large window. “Is it too hot for you outside?”

  She shook her head, and he thought maybe the heat would restore a little color to her suddenly pale face.

  He took a tall glass from a cabinet, then they walked out to the patio. She chose a seat halfway between him and the grill. He handed her tea before settling back into his own chair.

  She breathed deeply, then murmured, “Smells good.”

  “No credit of mine. My mother’s the grill master around here.”

  “I have a grill at home, but I can never get the igniter to work, and I’m not about to stick a match in there.”

  “Where’s home?”

  She hesitated before answering. “It’s Georgia now. Augusta. I just moved there.”

  “And your name?”

  Her fingers tapped against her glass. “Avi Grant.” She said it with a soft ah at the beginning.

  “Avi. That’s different.”

  “It’s not bad if you’re an Israeli football player.” She managed a bit of a smile, emphasizing how delicately pretty she was.

  “I’m going to take a shot and say you’ve never been an Israeli football player.”

  “What gave it away?” she asked with another faint smile.

  “Maybe the hot pink on your toes.”

  “Aw, you don’t know what they’re hiding inside those soccer shoes.”

  Definitely an Oklahoma girl who’d been away long enough to mute her accent, not get rid of it entirely. “You just visiting in Tallgrass?”

  “Yes. I got in this afternoon. Spending some time with my mom and dad.”

  And yet one of the first things she did was drop in on someone else’s mother. What kind of connection did she and Patricia have? Patricia had practically adopted Lucy and her neighbor, Joe Cadore, as if they were her own. Maybe Avi was another friend who’d made it easier for Patricia to do without her birth-given kids.

  The thought stirred the old ache deep inside at how easily she’d left them. How she’d just turned off her need for them until she’d found herself alone again and grieving. They’d grieved more than half their lives for her, while she’d found other people to take their place.

  That’s not fair, Lucy sometimes told him when his resentment spilled out.

  Kids didn’t have to be fair when their families were ripped apart through no fault of theirs.

  “Do you live here?” Avi asked.

  His eye twitched as he forced the familiar emotions back into their dark corner. “No. Tulsa.”

  “What do you do there?”

  “I’m a surgeon.”

  She raised her right hand, letting it swing loose at the wrist, and said, “Hey, Doc, it hurts when I do this.”

  “So don’t do it.” His smile was reluctant but formed anyway. Why not? His issues were with Patricia, not Avi Grant. “That joke’s been around longer than you and me both.”

  “Good things last.”

  This time he flat-out laughed. “You may be one of three people in the world who think it’s a good one.” Joe Cadore would likely be one of the remaining two, since he seemed to like anything that set Ben on edge.

  “Maybe your sense of humor needs a little nip-tuck work. Or maybe mine needs a little refinement.” She took a long drink of tea, and he watched. On second inspection, she wasn’t small and fragile-looking; in fact, she was close to his own height, with an air of substance about her. But in a way that had nothing to do with physicality, she did seem fragile. Even when she’d smiled, the look in her eyes was tinged with loss. Because of George?

  “So what took you from Tallgrass to Augusta?”

  Her gaze went a bit vague. “I’ve never actually lived here. My parents inherited my grandparents’ business when I was in high school. They paid people to run it for them, then as soon as I graduated and took off, they retired and started their second careers.”

  Ben noticed that she’d neglected to answer his question, but the sound of tires in the driveway made him let it pass. Avi heard it a beat later, sitting impossibly straight in her chair, head erect, hands knotted tightly in her lap. Not quite the response he would have expected for a woman waiting to greet a friend.

  Patricia came into sight around the corner of the house, her purse over one shoulder and a couple of recyclable shopping bags in hand. “I’m back, Ben. I’ll get the tomatoes in the salad and put the bread in the oven, and we’ll be ready to eat in…” Her gaze slid from him to the visitor, her head tilting quizzically to one side.

  Curiously, Ben stood to watch them. After a moment, Avi rose, too, the movement clumsy. She shifted her feet a few times, then swiped her palms down her skirt to dry them.

  Shopping bags crinkled as they slid from Patricia’s boneless fingers to the stone, and her purse followed. She took a few steps, then pressed her hands to her cheeks, eyes bright and teary, a cry slipping from her. She moved a few steps closer, caught Avi’s hands, and held her at arm’s length for inspection. “Oh, Avi, you’re home!”

  “For a while.”

  “And safe?”

  “Safe and whole.” Avi looked as if she might dissolve into tears, asking in a tiny voice “Are you angry?”

  Ben retreated to pick up the bags his mother had dropped. Close proximity to weeping women who weren’t his patients made the back of his neck itch. Them, he knew how to console and reassure. His sisters, Brianne and Sara, too. He’d gotten enough experience with that when he’d finished Patricia’s job of raising them. Outside of those females, though, he didn’t have a clue and didn’t want one.

  But he didn’t go inside and give them privacy. He might not like tears, but when he told his sisters about this, they would beat him senseless if he couldn’t finish the story.

  Patricia let go of Avi’s hands to hold her shoulders. “Why would I be angry with you?”

  “I made you a promise, and I broke it.”

  Patricia’s expression went blank for a moment, then her eyes widened, and she pulled Avi into her hug. “Honey, just making the promise was enough! No one could have possibly kept it. All you can do is your best, and if the worst happens, it’s not your fault, because you tried. Oh, Avi, sweetie, I could never be angry with you, never, ever.”

  Discomfort crept along Ben’s spine, making him turn and carry the bags inside. So Avi thought she had disappointed Patricia. He’d witnessed his mother giving the same sort of reassurance to his sisters a few months ago, taking their comforting over George's death and giving it back with soft words and softer hugs that they always, always held a place in her heart. She would have included Ben, too, but at the time he wasn’t sure he wanted that place. He still wasn’t.

  He could be friendly with her. He could spend time with her. He could tell her all the things about his life that she�
��d missed because she’d run off—and in twenty years, she’d missed a lot. But to this day he wasn’t sure if he wanted to be her son again, if he wanted her for a mother again. Friendship of a sort might be all he could handle.

  At the island, he set the bags down and unloaded the last-minute groceries. A bottle of Head Country barbecue sauce had been the only thing on her list when she left. There could be no grilled meats in her house, she’d decreed, without the made-in-Oklahoma sauce. Besides a giant bottle of that, she’d picked up sweet onions, late Porter peaches, a large green box of imperfectly shaped tomatoes, a carton of vanilla Braum’s ice cream, and a loaf of take-and-bake bread.

  In little more than an hour, she’d hit Walmart, a farm stand, Braum’s, and CaraCakes Bakery. His sisters, who knew a lot about shopping as an extreme sport, would be impressed.

  Ben put the ice cream away, read the instructions on the bread, and slid it into the oven, removed the salad bowl from the refrigerator, washed his hands and the tomatoes, and began dicing them. The deep ripe red of their thick skins took him back to sunny days in Patricia’s garden, sitting with her and his sisters on cool damp dirt, picking tomatoes and passing around the salt shaker. They ate them straight from the vine until their mouths hurt, until Patricia laughed and said, Don’t eat too many. There’s peaches for dessert.

  And he, Brianne, and Sara had insisted: We always have room for peaches.

  As he slipped a large bite of tomato into his mouth, she came inside, closing the door just loudly enough to chase away his memory in the old garden twenty-five years away. Seeing the tomatoes, she smiled. “Don’t eat so many you can’t stuff in a peach or two.”

  Some part of him was grateful that she remembered those afternoons. Some part just felt antsy as he dried his fingers, scraped the diced tomatoes into the salad, then left the cutting board and knife in the sink. Patricia joined him there, gazing out the window to where Avi stood, hands on hips, staring at a bed filled with red, white, and blue flowers. She looked…lost.

  “Her mother didn’t hint that she’d be home this soon. She looks so good. Don’t you think she looks good?”

  He shrugged and admitted, “She looks good.”

  Patricia looked at Avi again, then back at him, worry in the lines that wrinkled her forehead. “Do you really think so? I’m wondering if she’s not too thin, maybe just a little too pale. Do you think she’s a little thin?”

  Ben gazed at Avi again. She was on the slim side, but she also had some impressive triceps and biceps. He’d bet the abdomen covered by the pink dress was perfectly sculpted, and her quadriceps and hamstrings made her legs damn interesting to look at. Girly dress, soft warm skin, powerful legs… “She looks fine.”

  “Yes,” Patricia said absently, sounding less than convinced. After a moment, her mouth tightened and she refocused on the meal, gathering dishes, pushing a tray across for him to carry. He followed her outside, the fragrances of fresh-baked bread and spicy barbecue sauce drifting back to him.

  As soon as they’d set down their loads, she smiled, extending one hand to him, one to Avi. “I want to formally introduce you two. My favorite son and orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Ben Noble, and my second-favorite soldier in the whole world, Sergeant First Class Avi Grant. Our very own hero come home from the war.”

  Sergeant First Class. Deep down, something inside Ben twinged, turning sour. Avi was in the Army.

  Wasn’t that a kick in the gut?

  Chapter 2

  Sometimes it seemed karma didn’t care what a person was doing, how it was going, or how hard she was trying. It just smacked her anyway.

  That was how Lucy Hart was feeling Saturday evening. Heaving a great big pity-party sigh, she gave the pan on the stove another stir before checking the thermometer attached to its side. The pecan pralines were almost ready to scoop onto wax-paper-lined pans, where they would harden into luscious, sweet, melt-in-your-mouth miracles of fat-creating incredibleness that she should never again let cross her lips.

  Thursday she’d had her annual checkup, and the doctor brought up the dreaded subject: losing weight, following it with a comment about her blood sugar and her blood pressure. Her blood pressure, she’d wanted to point out, had been fine until he’d mentioned her weight. She’d given up regular pop. She hadn’t made fudge since May. She walked twice a day most days, no matter how hot and humid it got. She’d eaten broccoli without cheese sauce or ranch dressing, for God’s sake, and lost seventeen pounds, and all he’d been interested in was the twenty still left.

  Twenty plus twenty, honesty forced her to admit.

  But that wasn’t why she was making candy. Neither was the fact that the nurse had called yesterday to report that her blood sugar and cholesterol were high, or that this morning she’d picked up her brand-new prescriptions—her first in seven years. It wasn’t even the fact that it was Saturday night and she was home alone. Or that, the summer’s short interlude with Ben Noble aside, she might never have another date again.

  Certainly not with this big ol’ sorry case of whatever was wearing her down. She felt prickly. Edgy. Like her body couldn’t quite contain all the electricity and anxiety popping through it. It wasn’t PMS. She was safe from that for another two weeks. It was…

  Unable to put a name to it, she gave it voice. “Aarrgh!” For good measure, she stomped her foot, too, but it didn’t make her feel better. She just wanted to explode into a million little pieces, tiny jiggly bits of pure energy that would bounce and roll around before slowly coming back together into human form. Maybe twenty pounds’ worth of them would get lost in the process, lowering her blood pressure and cholesterol and blood sugar and making her feel less…more…

  She knew exactly how she wanted to feel: smarter, stronger, more capable. Thinner, prettier, more involved with life, with people, with everything. Less emotional, more hopeful, more confident, not scared, not living life on the sidelines. She wanted to feel the way she had seven years ago before Mike died on her, the coward, and shook up her entire life.

  Burnt sugar registered with her brain an instant before her nose. Giving a yelp that would do her dog Norton proud, she yanked the pan off the burner, then scowled at its contents. Nana had taught her early that there were two burnt foods that couldn’t be salvaged no matter what: beans and sugar.

  She set the pan in the sink to cool, then looked around at the mess that filled the counters. She could stay, clean, probably burn something else, and end up eating everything in total self-pity. Instead, she took a dog cookie from its jar. “Come on, Norton. Time for you to go into the bedroom a while.” Following the big dog down the hall, she dug her cell phone from her pocket and punched in her best friend’s number. “It’s me,” she said before Marti had a chance to finish hello. “My stove betrayed me. Let’s go have a treat somewhere.”

  She didn’t ask if Marti had plans. Marti was even more of a stay-at-home girl than Lucy was. She was happy with life at Casa Levin: regular contact with the Tuesday Night Margarita Club, occasional calls and visits with her family, and all the hours she wanted to devote to her job, her hobbies, or anything else that caught her interest. Marti wasn’t looking for love or marriage or anything that resembled a commitment. She wouldn’t even consider a pet.

  Lucy wished she was happy with her life the way it was, and truthfully, for the most part, she was. But Lord, she was tired of being alone at night. And being fat. And not doing things she wanted to do because she was fat. And lonely, despite the best bunch of family and friends a woman could wish for.

  She was immeasurably lonely for Mike and snuggling and kisses and sweaty sex and love and happily-ever-after.

  “Where do you want to go?”

  Images of their usual treat spots filled Lucy’s head—Braum’s for ice cream, CaraCakes for two-bite cheesecakes, Serena’s Sweets for pie, Java Dave’s for dessert disguised as coffee—but her mouth didn’t even water. Heavens, she had a whole counter full of brownies, fudge, oatmeal cookies, and peanut brittl
e that she would pack up and deliver to her neighbor in the morning. Joe Cadore was the high school football coach; his metabolism could handle the calories way better than hers.

  “How about we meet at QT and get a drink, then go to City Park?”

  Marti did everything with elegance and sophistication, and that included her snort. “You want to go to the park in three-digit heat and…what? Watch me spontaneously combust?”

  “I’ll bring you peanut brittle,” Lucy coaxed in a singsong voice. She shooed at Norton as he jumped onto the middle of the bed with the cookie—he usually waited until the door was closed behind her before doing that—but he closed his eyes and pretended not to notice. It wasn’t worth spiking her blood pressure, so she retrieved the yellow rubber ducky from his bed and laid it beside his head. His eyes opened to thin slits, and he sneakily swiped it in closer with his giant paw, beneath his chin, before feigning sleep.

  “Is it the airy kind that doesn’t get stuck in your teeth?”

  “Do I make any other kind?”

  Balancing her cell precariously, Lucy did her hair in a ponytail, then kicked off her flip-flops for a pair of walking shoes as worn as Norton’s ducky. She’d put a lot of hard miles on them since she’d bought them in June.

  Marti gave in as Lucy had known she would. “All right. You want me to stop by and pick you up?”

  “Nope. I’m gonna walk.”

  “It’s a hundred-and-crap out there, Lulu.”

  “Joe and I have been walking all summer. I’m not gonna melt.”

  “No, you’ll dehydrate, and there’ll be nothing left but a pile of clothes and those nasty shoes and your friends gathered around, saying ‘We loved her well.’” A soft, sighing sound came over the phone, as if Marti were fanning herself. “All right. I’ll be at the QT closest to City Park in ten minutes. No, better make it fifteen. I’ve got to find something appropriate to wear. And don’t forget my peanut brittle.”

  “Thanks, Marti.” Lucy hung up, left Norton on the bed with the door closed, and returned to the kitchen to bag a generous portion of peanut brittle. Before summer, she wouldn’t have dreamed of walking to the store—before she’d met Ben, before she’d fallen head over heels in lust and begun yet another diet-and-exercise program. Now she didn’t think twice about it. She put necessities into a bright orange sling backpack, grabbed a bottle of water, and headed out the back door.