A Son's Tale

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  That she knew of, that is.

  “Sammie said he’d called you,” she said, in case Frank was worried that she didn’t know. “I told him it was fine with me as long as he wasn’t bothering you.”

  “He doesn’t bother me,” Frank said. “That’s one great boy you’ve got there. Kind of reminds me of Cal. Before everything went wrong, I mean.”

  She didn’t want to talk about Cal. Or think about him. But how did you stop thinking about a man who starred in your dreams every night?

  “He’s asked me if he can start coming by again, to play ball.”

  “Oh! I’m sorry, I had no idea that was why he was calling. He doesn’t know about your classes, or realize that you’ll be a lot busier now and…”

  Frank was shaking his head. “It would be the highlight of my week if you’d allow him to come over,” Frank said. “He told me he made the junior high team, but he’s the smallest one out there. He could use the confidence boost some extra court time will give him. I got my driver’s license last week and will be buying a car this weekend. With your permission, I could pick Sammie up from school one or two days a week and keep him until you’re off work.”

  “Does Cal know your plans?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you think you should ask him?”

  “No.”

  “He might not want my son at his home.”

  “It’s actually my home,” Frank said. “We’ve been living there rent-free as payment for my work at the nursing home. The landlord has agreed to let me continue to stay as long as I want. I’ll be working at the nursing home at least until I finish classes in December. And then, who knows?”

  The older man grinned. And she saw Cal. “Maybe, in a few months, after I’ve got some order back in my life, I’ll give Rose Sanderson a call. Cal says we should wait for them to call us. I can’t say I disagree with him. They’ll have been told about the update in the case and though the restraining order Rose got against me is long expired, it’s probably still best that we wait. Awhile. And then if I don’t hear from her, all bets are off.”

  Frank hardly resembled the hunched old man she’d met at Cal’s house that first day. “I hope everything works out for you.”

  “So what do you say? May I tell Sammie yes? May your son come play ball at my house?”

  Deny her son something he needed and wanted that she could provide for him? “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  She sat there, so close to Cal, and yet so far away, wanting to tell Frank to tell him hello. And not wanting to force herself where she no longer deserved to be. She’d made a huge mistake in judgment.

  She’d betrayed them both. Frank might be willing to forgive her, but clearly Cal wasn’t. He hadn’t called. Not even after the semester ended.

  And she didn’t blame him. How did you trust a woman who couldn’t seem to see a forest for the trees?

  “I have something else to discuss with you.”

  “Oh. What’s that?”

  “My son.”

  Her hands started to shake.

  “Do you love him?”

  She stared at Frank.

  “At the police station that day, your father said you were in love with my son.”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “So, are you?”

  The guy needed his pound of flesh. He deserved it. “Yes.”

  Straight-faced, Frank nodded. “I hoped so. Because I’m certain he’s in love with you.”

  “Not anymore.”

  “Now more than ever.”

  “He hasn’t called. Or come by. Or…”

  “Forgive me for saying so, but Caleb is a bit of a putz when it comes to the opposite sex.”

  “Frank, really, I’m sure he wouldn’t want you doing this.”

  “I’m certain you’re right, but my son’s a putz in large part because of me. He’s sacrificed twenty-five years of his life already, surely you don’t want to see him waste any more time?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Well, then, you can understand that neither do I. After all that Cal has done for me, I have to do this for him. And if he hates me for it—” Frank threw up his hands “—so be it. I can live with that. I can’t live with the knowledge that he’s so unhappy.”

  “Cal’s unhappy?”

  “He might not know it, he might think he wants to move to Louisiana, but he doesn’t. He wants to move in with you.”

  Tingles ran through her body, and then came to an abrupt halt. Frank couldn’t possibly know whether or not Cal wanted to live with her. That just wasn’t something he’d discuss with his father—or anyone.

  “Cal’s mother died when he was too young to remember her. I never introduced him to another woman until I asked Rose Sanderson to marry me. She adored Cal. And he adored her, too. She was the only woman he’d ever known and she treated my son as though he was as much her biological child as Claire and Emma were.”

  “Emma? Oh, yes. Claire’s sister.”

  “Yes. She was two years older than Claire. Four, the last time we saw her. Twenty-nine now. Cal tells me that he heard from Ramsey Miller that Emma is still living in Comfort Cove. Rose is, too. But I’m getting off topic here. After Claire disappeared and Cal said he’d seen her in my car and then they found her teddy bear there, Rose went a little crazy. She said some pretty bad things. And she threw us out. Cal could have forgiven her, I think, for turning on me. But he never understood how she could reject him so completely. I didn’t help him to understand. At the time, I was too busy trying to figure out how to stay out of jail and make enough money to raise him. I was scared and heartbroken and grieving for Claire, and Cal somehow learned not only how to handle rejection, but to expect it. First his biological mother left him. And then Rose rejected him.”

  “But once he got older, started dating…I don’t know a woman alive that would reject Cal now,” Morgan said, and felt her cheeks get warm.

  Frank’s chuckle intrigued her. “You’re wrong about that one. He’s had at least a dozen relationships that I’m aware of over the past fifteen years. He knows how to charm them, but he gives nothing of himself. No heart.”

  Cal had told her almost the same thing that last night he’d been at her house. The night they’d decided they were a couple. One that would start seeing each other after the semester ended.

  And the custody battle was over.

  “My son has never given a woman anything to hold on to. And every single one of the women he’s dated, being human, eventually breaks off with him.”

  “He never breaks it off?”

  “Never. Except maybe that woman he was seeing about the same time you started coming around.”

  Kelsey.

  “And he never, to my knowledge, has tried to make things better, either. He expects rejection. He gets it. And he moves on.”

  He’d said Cal was moving to Louisiana.

  That last day in his office replayed itself in her mind. The file she’d thrown at his feet. Her refusal to look at him. Or listen to him.

  She’d just come from her father and…

  “When Cal and I were at the police station, being questioned, he let it be known that he’d done research for that book he wrote in part to find out if there were any other unsolved abductions to which I could possibly be connected.”

  She turned sharply, staring at him. “He told you he doubted you?”

  “No. He told Detective
Miller that he knew I wasn’t guilty because he’d done his own checking. The point is, he did doubt me, and that’s okay.”

  “How can you say that? If he loved you, if he knew you well enough, he’d have believed in you and—”

  “It’s human to doubt,” Frank said, staring her right in the eye. “It’s healthy to doubt. The beautiful formula for humanity has two major counterparts, head and heart. The head brings doubts to keep you in check. The heart propels you forward to keep the head in check. It’s a perfect system when we let it do its job. Cal let it do its job. He doubted me, but his heart knew I was innocent. He was compelled by his heart, he lived by his heart, and his doubts had him double-checking me just in case his heart was leading him wrong.”

  There was freedom in what Frank said. Huge freedom. If she could accept it.

  “Where you were concerned, he listened only to his head when it came to our troubled past. He should have told you about Claire Sanderson before he asked you to bring Sammie to our home.”

  “He’s really moving to Louisiana?”

  “He accepted a position there.”

  “Did he tell you I rejected him?”

  “No. He hasn’t mentioned you at all.”

  Her thoughts tumbled around one another. Minutes passed.

  “I’ve said what I came to say.” Frank opened the car door, got out and closed it behind him. She watched him go.

  * * *

  CAL WROTE HIS LETTER giving notice to Wallace University, effective immediately. It was the fifth such letter he’d written. He knew he was giving them too little time to find a replacement. And yet, his decision to leave felt right. The job in Louisiana beckoned. He and his father would probably do well to have some time apart after so many years of being joined at the hip. They had to find their own lives.

  In the fourth-floor office he’d grown quite fond of, he read the letter one last time, hit Print, put it in an envelope and tossed it in the intercampus mail bin on the edge of his desk.

  “Excuse me, Professor?” The words came at the same time as a knock on his partially open door.

  “Come in.” He turned toward the door, knowing that he’d just made the right decision to leave. He was hearing Morgan’s voice, and would continue to do so as long as he stayed there.

  “I was wondering if I could ask your opinion on something?”

  The voice was still Morgan’s.

  And so was the body attached to the voice.

  Cal didn’t move. Except to say, “I’d be happy to try.” He assumed she was seeking some kind of academic advice.

  Still, he couldn’t believe that she’d come to him for advice of any kind. He’d lied to her. And Morgan was sensitive to being misled.

  It had been a few weeks since he’d seen her. She was thinner. Too thin. And still gorgeous. Her jeans and tank top were new to him. Her hair longer and loose. He liked it that way.

  “I have a problem.” She was staring at him. He liked it.

  “I’ll help if I can.”

  “I screwed up. I doubted where I should have believed and believed where I should have doubted and I don’t know how to fix that.”

  His world stopped spinning uncontrollably. Just like that. There was no sound. No big ringing of bells. No huge bounding waves. No knock on the head.

  Just, very simply, what had been grossly wrong was suddenly right.

  He didn’t have to think. His heart spoke. “I think the best thing to do is to understand that everyone makes errors in judgment. They’re part of the human experience.”

  When she opened her mouth to speak, when he saw that her lips were trembling, he started to tremble, too. “Is there a way to make things right even when there’s been a very severe error in judgment?”

  Was she asking him to fix things between them? To unlie to her?

  “The point of erring is to learn,” he told her. “If you learn from your mistake, then you’ve made it right.” The reason he marked papers, rather than just slapping grades on them, was so that his students could learn from their errors. They were in his classes to learn, not to get everything right. They didn’t need to be there if they got everything right.

  He gave the lecture every first day of class. Morgan had heard it many times.

  She frowned, and Cal couldn’t take any more. Standing, he held her in front of him, looking straight into the heart of her, hoping she could see the heart in him.

  “I learned, Morgan,” he said. “I swear to every power there is that I will never ever lie to you again. Not ever. For any reason.”

  “You learned?” She looked confused. “What did you have to learn? You know everything, Cal. Do you have any idea how hard it is to live up to the man you’ve idolized for years?”

  “Probably about as hard as it is to live up to the woman who has more heart in one finger than you’ve dared to have in your whole life.”

  He thought he just might have a chance at life again when her brow cleared and she smiled a long, slow smile he’d never seen before. “Head and heart,” she said.

  “I’m not following.”

  “Your father said that the perfect balance in life is a melding of head and heart. You’re head and I’m heart and I guess that means that together we make the perfect pair.”

  “My father?”

  She nodded, still smiling. Like she knew the secrets of the universe. “Frank came to see me a few days ago.”

  “He did.”

  “Yeah, he says that you don’t really want to move to Louisiana.”

  That was news to him. His father had done nothing but encourage him to make his own choices.

  “He says that you love me.”

  Cal wanted to take offense, or be angry, or some other suitable male response. Instead, he smiled. “He did, did he?”

  “Mmm-hmm, right after he made me tell him that my father had been right that day at the police station when he’d said I was in love with you.”

  Wait. He stared. Had she just told him she loved him?

  “This is the part where you either kiss me or head for cover,” she said. “Because if you’re waiting for me to end things and let you off the hook, you’re going to be waiting for a really, really long time.”

  He might be stupid, but he wasn’t a fool. “Morgan Lowen, will you marry me?”

  “I was kind of hoping you’d kiss me first. How can I marry a man I haven’t even kissed?”

  He pulled her up against him, letting her feel how hard he was. “Is that a yes?” he asked.

  She moved against him. “I guess it has to be, huh?”

  “Probably. Unless you’re going to spend your whole life fantasizing instead of living.”

  “Nope. I learn from my mistakes.” Her eyes clouded and she grew completely still. “Telling you I’m sorry will never be enough for doubting you, Cal. But I am sorry. I hurt you to the very core by giving credence to what my father was telling me rather than letting you explain your side of the story.”

  “You have nothing to be sorry for, love. You did absolutely the right thing. The thing I’d have had you do. You were protecting your son. I lied and that laid the groundwork for what came after. You didn’t trust me because I’d betrayed your trust with those first lies I told you.”

  “You didn’t really lie, Cal. You told the story your father had taught you to tell in order for the two of you to preserve some kind of life after he’d been unfairly persecuted. At the time, I was nothing to yo
u but a stranger, really. You guys were in survival mode.”

  “Survival mode or not, I will never lie to you again.”

  “I know that.”

  “I love you, Morgan Lowen.” He’d never said that to a woman before. Not even to Rose Sanderson, though he’d wanted to tell the woman who’d once been a mother to him that he loved her.

  “And I love you, Caleb Whittier. Now are you going to kiss me or do I have to wait until the wedding?”

  Like a good professor, he answered her question immediately. Thoroughly.

  With a whole lot of passion.

  Her college professor taught her that reality was far better than the fantasy worlds they studied. And that she had pretty damn good judgment, after all.

  EPILOGUE

  “IS HE ASLEEP?” Cal leaned over Morgan’s shoulder to peek into Sammie’s room one night in late August. Sammie had played his first scrimmage game that night—nothing official, just an end-of-summer practice game that his coach had set up with a neighboring junior high school.

  “Yeah.” Reaching for Cal’s arms she wrapped them around her, covering his hands with her own at her stomach. “He’s still got his jersey on.”

  “He held his own with boys who are all older and bigger than he is.” Cal sounded like a proud papa.

  “Thanks to you and your dad.”

  Cal gave her a squeeze and led her across the hall to her room. “Sammie’s talented,” he said. “And a hard worker. Wonder where he got that characteristic from?”

  She smiled vaguely. She’d been too busy to go out with Cal all week because she’d been making her wedding dress. “About the wedding,” she began, changing the subject.

  “What about it?”

  “I’m fine with having it at the country club, fine with Mom and Daddy paying our way, but I will not wear a dress that man purchased when I pledge myself to you for the rest of my life.”

  Cal’s lips, moving all over her neck, were wreaking havoc with her concentration.

  “It wouldn’t have mattered, sweetheart, you know that, don’t you? What you’re wearing or who paid for it won’t affect the meaning of that day. You’d look good in anything,” he said, trailing his lips across one bare shoulder. “Besides,” he added, “your father is your family, even if he is an arrogant ass.”