No Matter What

by Janice Kay Johnson

  “What would you have said to Caitlyn today?”

  “She goes by Cait.”

  “Okay.”

  Trevor set his slice down. “I guess I’d have said I was sorry for being such a…” He swallowed whatever word he’d been about to use and said “jerk” instead.

  “You mean last night?”

  “And before, too,” Trev mumbled, head bent.

  There was a lot Richard wanted to say or ask, but he only waited.

  “When Mom got pregnant…um…” His cheeks had reddened. “Didn’t you use a condom?”

  “She was on birth control pills.”

  His head jerked up. “Then how…?”

  Truthful answer: I don’t know. Or, worse, I think I do know. What he said was, “They can fail, too. No method is a hundred percent. She might’ve forgotten to take a pill or two, or if a woman is on some medications they can interfere with how a hormonal contraceptive works.”

  Trevor sat staring at him and Richard absolutely could not tell what he was thinking. “So you didn’t do something stupid like I did,” he said at last.

  He’d trusted Alexa. That was stupid. Maybe. He never knew, not really, only suspected. He hadn’t asked or accused, because that might have made building a life together impossible, and by then they had an unborn child to think about.

  “I guess not. Things happen.”

  “I don’t want it to have happened,” Trevor said, barely whispering. “I want her to get an abortion.”

  “I don’t blame you.” Richard was hurting, too.

  “So why does she get to decide?” Trev’s eyes were suddenly hot with rage and his voice trembled.

  “You should be involved in the decision. But reality is, this is her body. What if you were trying to insist she have the baby and keep it? Would that be right for you to force that choice on her?”

  “I wouldn’t!”

  “Are she and her mother churchgoers? Abortion might be a choice that would be morally repugnant to them.”

  “Wow.” Elbows planted on the table, Trev buried his head in his hands. He was rocking, Richard saw, and yanking at his hair so hard it had to be painful. “I keep thinking I’ll wake up.”

  Richard felt compassion, sure, but this was one of those moments he realized how mad he was, too. No condom. God help them all.

  “I don’t know if they go to church,” his smart/stupid kid mumbled. “How should I know?”

  How should I know? He’d gotten the girl pregnant, and he didn’t know whether she believed in God. Oh, face it; what boy his age would care? All that mattered was would she or wouldn’t she.

  That probably wasn’t any fairer to Trevor, Richard realized, than his earlier thoughts had been to his father. So what. I don’t have to be fair. Serenity wasn’t a by-product of parenthood. More like an antonym.

  “Let’s take the rest of the pizza home,” Richard decided, and went to get a box.

  CHAPTER SIX

  AT THE SOUND OF THE BELL over the door ringing, Molly swiveled in her seat. She was ridiculously nervous. The new arrival was Richard Ward himself, tall, imposingly handsome, glancing around the sandwich shop until he spotted her at the table in the back corner. And, damn it, there was that loose-hipped walk that always stirred something in her.

  She’d been the one to suggest they meet for lunch, completely separate from their kids. He hadn’t argued, hadn’t asked why.

  She half rose when he reached the table, then sank back down. She wasn’t in the office. “The waitress left you a menu,” she said inanely.

  He nodded and pulled out a chair next to her, not the one across the table. Their knees might bump. They would bump. He took up way more than his fair share of space, and that, too, unsettled Molly. She was a big enough woman; she was taller than most men with whom she dealt.

  Oh, get a grip! You’re not an adolescent. But she was feeling a lot like one right now.

  “Mr. Ward, thank you for coming,” she said with more composure. This is Trevor’s father. Trevor’s father, Trevor’s father. She’d chant it as many times as she had to. This was not a date.

  A faint smile touched his mouth. “Don’t you think we’re past Mister and Missus?”

  “Richard,” she amended.

  He chose quickly from the menu and they both gave their orders. Then he regarded her gravely. “Has Caitlyn—no, Trevor says she prefers Cait—has she made a decision? Or are you wanting to tell me to butt out?”

  “I’d have suggested coffee instead of lunch if I were going to do that.”

  Now he outright grinned, and her heart damn near stopped. “Not option B, then.”

  “Or A.” Molly looked down at her place setting. “Partly I’m back to apologizing—”

  “No. Let’s not get mired there.”

  He was being more generous than she deserved. She swallowed and met those dark eyes again. “Okay. Thanks. Really I only wanted to talk. Listen to you, since I didn’t the other night.”

  “Have you told anyone else?”

  Molly shook her head. “Cait and I agreed not to for now. She swears she won’t tell even her best friend. If she decides to get an abortion, she could move on more easily if no one knows but you, me and Trevor.” She paused. “Assuming Trevor will keep it quiet?”

  “I think I can vouch for him.” He studied her for a moment. “He says now Cait won’t talk to him.”

  She made a helpless gesture. “She’s hurt, scared, confused.... Do you blame her?”

  “No. Neither does he. He said he guessed it was justice, after the way he dodged her.”

  “Really?” she said, surprised. “That sounds…”

  “Almost mature?”

  Molly laughed. “I was trying to think of a really tactful way to say it.”

  He smiled, too, mouth and eyes both. “Surely as a high school administrator, you must have a thesaurus worth of euphemisms at the tip of your tongue.”

  “You’d think so, wouldn’t you.”

  Their drinks came. Richard waited until the waitress was out of earshot. “Will you tell me about you and Cait? I asked Trevor if you were churchgoers, for example, and he had no idea. Is Cait’s father in the picture? Trevor thought you were divorced.”

  Her first uneasy thought was, why does he want to know about me? Was there any chance some of this chemistry she felt went both ways?

  Get a grip, she told herself again. Remember the way he stared at you that day when he had to wait for you to park. Inimical. Remember? If they’d been adversaries then, they were more so now.

  “I am divorced, and have been since Cait was a little girl. She was four when her dad and I separated and five when the divorce went through. She gets birthday and Christmas checks from him, and that’s about it. He started out with more enthusiasm. You know, the usual every other weekend thing, but that became once a month, then once every few months, and then…” She shrugged. “Church? We go, but not as faithfully as we should. I didn’t grow up in a church. I started when she was little, thinking Sunday school was one of the things parents did.”

  “Even though yours didn’t?”

  He was sharp, she had to give him that. “I didn’t have a father. Don’t remember my mother well. She was killed in a car accident when I was seven. I grew up in foster homes after that. I guess you’d have to say I learned parenting from the book. Literally.” She was trying hard to make it light, almost if not quite a joke. “I have quite a library of Now Your Child is Eight, Now She’s Eleven books. Either I skipped a few chapters in the Now She’s Fifteen one or the author left out some essentials.”

  The kindness in his eyes was almost unbearable. She had to look away from it. He waited a minute before responding. “When something like this happens, it makes you go back and rethink everything you’ve ever done, doesn’t it? Trevor surprised me by asking some things about my parents, so I guess he’s doing the same thing. You can’t help thinking the ‘why’ of this isn’t an accident. It can’t be as simple as a h
orny teenage boy and a girl with a crush on him. There has to be something bigger. Something we didn’t teach them. Some cosmic reason we didn’t.”

  “Someone didn’t teach Trevor to use a condom,” she said sharply, then closed her eyes tight in shame. “Oh, God. I’m sorry. I swore I wouldn’t do this.”

  “Hey.” His big hand covered hers on the table and squeezed before releasing her. “I set myself up for that one.”

  She opened her eyes to see that he was laughing, and for some reason she did, too. “The real lesson is, teenagers do stupid things. With the best will in the world, we can’t stupid-proof them,” she said at last, feeling a thousand times better.

  “No, we can’t,” he said, wryly enough to remind her that he’d gotten his own girlfriend pregnant when he was a senior in high school.

  She opened her mouth to say, yet again, I’m sorry, but closed it.

  “I keep thinking, what if I hadn’t knocked over the garbage. What would Cait have done? Would she have told me?”

  “What were her options?”

  Their lunches arrived, and they both pretended enthusiasm. He reached for the ketchup, making her aware of the flex of muscles beneath the crisply ironed shirt. And, oh, damn, his knee did slide against hers.

  Molly angled her legs away. “I don’t know. Go to a clinic, I guess. Find a way to get an abortion without telling me? Run away from home?” she said when they were alone again.

  “How likely is that?”

  “Not likely,” she said. “We were good friends until she fell head over heels for your son and decided I was the enemy because I wasn’t really happy about her boyfriend.”

  “Understandably unhappy.”

  He steered her skillfully back to telling him about her life. No, she admitted, there was no man around, no pseudo-dad Cait might have turned to. She didn’t say, I can’t remember the last time I went on a date. Never mind the last time she’d slept with a man. How did single mothers do that on any kind of regular basis? Especially without any loving extended family to serve as babysitters and backup? And, heck, it was harder now than when Cait was little. How did she justify having a sex life when she was steering her daughter to not have one? She did admit she’d been only twenty-one when Cait was born.

  “Yes, she was an accident. I was a junior in college, and almost as blown away when I realized I was pregnant as Cait is now.” For the first time she thought about the fact that she and Richard had both experienced much of what their kids were now. It seemed like an especially cruel slap from fate.

  “How did you handle it?” Richard asked. He’d been eating and listening, somehow keeping her talking with a question here and there. “I gather you did marry her father.”

  “Yes. And although it was really hard, I managed to stay in school. I went straight on to grad school, too. That was when…” Whoa. She waved a hand. “Irrelevant. The one thing I can say is, once Cait was born I never once regretted her.”

  “No, I felt that way about Trevor, too.” His mouth quirked. “Until the past couple of months. I can’t deny there’ve been a few moments of ‘What the hell did I do?’”

  Molly laughed, as he’d no doubt intended. “What about you?” she said. “I take it your marriage didn’t last.”

  “Not forever. We stuck it out for six years.” He was quiet for a moment, a frown gathering his dark brows together. He wasn’t looking at her, and she suspected he was seeing another time and place. “I have a daughter, too. Brianna. We call her Bree most of the time. She’s still with her mother.”

  “How old?”

  “Fourteen. I was appalled when I first realized Trev had hooked up with your daughter because I’m thinking, Wait. Don’t you realize she’s barely older than your sister?”

  “You sound like you miss her.”

  “Yeah.” He grimaced. “Truth is, sometimes I feel like I hardly know her. I’ve had her for occasional summers, a few weeks over the holidays....” He shrugged. “You know how it is. The older she’s gotten, the more of a mystery to me she is.”

  Molly found herself wanting to touch him. It was probably just as well that his hand wasn’t lying there conveniently close. “I suspect most fathers feel that way when their daughters became teenagers,” she said gently.

  His eyes met hers finally. The skin was crinkled at the corners. A smile that hadn’t reached his mouth. “You’re probably right. The sad part is, I thought I did know my son. Turns out I was wrong.”

  “Maybe you did. Maybe he’s not the same person he was a year ago, or whenever you last spent time together. Or maybe the person he was is only submerged.”

  “Submerged.” He shook his head. “How do you change that fast?” He seemed to be appealing to her, but didn’t wait for an answer, even assuming she’d had one. “No, it’s been even quicker than that. I was thinking back the other night. I must have talked to him for an hour toward the end of July. I heard all about his job—he worked at a Boys & Girls Club, supervising kids, coaching. Yeah.” He grinned ruefully. “Marvel at the idea, I don’t blame you. But that’s the kind of kid he was. Until…”

  “Until what?”

  “I have no idea. He won’t talk about it.”

  They talked about that, too. He was easy to talk to, she couldn’t help thinking, and he seemed to be relaxing with her, too.

  He told her that his ex-wife had remarried twice now, and that she’d separated from husband number three in August. That might or might not be related to Trevor’s current problems. “He never seemed that attached to the guy. Davis.” He said the name carefully, as if it left a taste in his mouth, but Molly couldn’t tell what kind. He wasn’t jealous, was he?

  “Did Trevor have a girlfriend?” she asked. Oh, she hated to mention this, but… “Is there any chance he got her in trouble, too? That he was…I don’t know, running from it?”

  Richard stared at her. “God. That’s an ugly thought.” But almost immediately, he was shaking his head. “That doesn’t make sense. No, he didn’t have a girlfriend, or, at least, not anyone serious. There was someone, but her dad got transferred to Houston and they moved the previous summer. And if he’d gotten another girl pregnant, surely he wouldn’t have been stupid enough to leave off the condom the next time he got in a girl’s…” He stopped, cleared his throat. “Sorry.”

  She, who had winced at the words that almost came out of his mouth, gave what was probably a sickly smile. “Teenagers are stupid, remember?”

  “Yeah, and he was clearly bewildered by the idea that pulling out wasn’t an adequate and recommended form of birth control.”

  Silly to become self-conscious, but she did. She could talk about pregnancy with this man, but change the topic to sex—yes, the act itself—and she was instantly flustered. So aware of him, all man.

  “Yes, he was. I haven’t asked Cait yet if she was fine with it at the time, too.”

  The way he watched her was almost enough to have her squirming in her seat. She’d never seen eyes of such a dark brown—except his son’s. His hair was as dark, thick, wavy enough to keep it looking disheveled most of the time. With that lean face and stark cheekbones, he had the fallen angel look. Except she associated that with men who exuded sin, and somehow he didn’t. If she had to guess, it would be that Richard Ward had spent a lifetime disciplining himself.

  “What about you?” she asked on impulse. “You haven’t mentioned a wife. Lucky woman, to have to put up with Trevor’s cheerful attitude.”

  “No wife. I’ve never been sure…” He stopped himself, expression closing down. Yes, definitely disciplined. “If nothing else, I didn’t want the kids to see both parents with revolving spousal doors. They’ve adjusted with their mother. I figured, enough is enough.”

  Did that mean he never intended to remarry? She didn’t know why that shocked her, as she wasn’t exactly in the market for a second husband, but…she wouldn’t rule it out, if she met someone. The right someone.

  Tempted to roll her eyes like
a teenager, she thought, Uh-huh. Sure. What you mean is, a completely trustworthy someone. Her standards this time around would be so exacting, she couldn’t imagine finding him.

  And, oh, yeah, he couldn’t be someone wanting to start a family.

  Richard Ward wouldn’t be, it occurred to her. He had two kids.

  “You’re going to live alone, all so your kids don’t have to get to know a new stepmother?” Molly congratulated herself on her tone, casual, possibly a little amused.

  “Let’s just say I’ve never gotten to the point of seriously considering it,” he said slowly, those dark espresso eyes on her face.

  What was he thinking?

  “So, do we have a timeline?”

  “A what?”

  “For a decision. You didn’t say how far along your daughter is.”

  “Oh.” That kind. “She’s seven weeks now. So yes. Obviously, an abortion has to happen in the next few weeks.”

  “Surely the sooner the better.”

  “Yes.” She bent forward, her stomach cramping. How strange. Painful cramps had once been a way of life for her. Menstrual cramps, but stress-related stomach ones, too. Divorce had miraculously cured the second.

  “Trevor wanted to know why the decision was Cait’s. Why isn’t it his.” Temper flooded her, but he shook his head. “I told him because it’s her body. That said…I ask that you think about him, too. He’s not ready to be a father.”

  She was still sizzling. “I doubt you were, either. You need to stop pushing. I said I’d talk to you, not give you a vote.”

  His eyes narrowed. “I seem to remember a promise that you’d listen to me.”

  Oh, hell. “I’ve listened.”

  “Have you?” He pulled out his wallet and tossed some bills on the table. “Seems to me that mostly you talked and I listened.” Their gazes met. “I’ve left enough to take care of the bill.”

  And he walked out on her again.

  Which she completely deserved, Molly admitted. What is wrong with me?

  Excellent question.

  * * *

  TREVOR STALKED CAIT the next day. Only way to put it. He told himself she was asking for it.