“That’s where you’re wrong, child. She wasn’t always like that. Not before.” Pause. Puff. Doris O’Brien’s pale gray eyes scanned the street, flitted over Audra and settled on her face. “You have your mother’s eyes. Warm as a shot of whiskey on a cold night.”
Audra didn’t want her mother’s eyes. She wanted nothing of her mother. And yet, since she’d arrived in Holly Springs, the comparisons hadn’t stopped.
“Did you know she wanted to be a nun?” Doris laughed. “Didn’t see that one coming, did you? She loved the taste of the wafer, and the way her spirit felt like flying after confession. Said she wanted to marry God and commit her life to Him. Pure. Chaste.” Puff. Puff. “What? You don’t believe me?”
“Nothing I remember about my mother was pure or chaste.” Who was this woman? Had she escaped from an institution?
“You only remember the after. Corrine wanted to become a nun. That was the plan. We were both going to join Benedictines. Then she met Malcolm Ruittenberg. She started having feelings for him, sexual and the like. It wasn’t like she was doing anything, she was just thinking about it like any other normal teen. She went to confess to Father Benedict and the next thing I knew she told me to hell with Father, to hell with the Catholic Church.” Doris took a long drag on her cigarette and blew out a ring of smoke. “It was a bad time. Your grandmother talked to Pastor Richot and he agreed to meet with your mother. Things settled down after that, thank God. Then one day she turned up pregnant and word had it four or five boys could have been the father. One was even a college student.”
“And?” Other than the nun part, nothing was a surprise.
“I knew her. She’d never even kissed a boy, let alone allow five to touch her that way.”
“Maybe you didn’t know her as well as you thought you did.”
“I knew her. I’m saying something happened.”
“Like what?”
“Like somebody took something she wasn’t offering. Or she loved the one she offered it to and he didn’t return the love.”
The woman spoke in circles. “Why can you only surmise? Where were you this whole time?”
A sad smile crept over Doris O’Brien’s weathered face. “I was making my own sins.”
***
Alice opened the door and slipped inside. Slivers of light escaped through the blind slats, jetting across the bed, illuminating bits and pieces of the room. A baseball glove. A globe. A stack of Russian history books. A Yankee pennant. She didn’t need full light to know the details of her son’s room. A mother always remembered. The bed creaked as she sank onto it. They’d bought it from Sears with a bold guarantee the bed would last longer than its user. An uncomfortably true statement.
Christian was gone, the blond boy with the quick smile and kind words who studied nuclear disarmament treaties. The past was one gigantic puzzle he once told her, and what a privilege to put the pieces together. He’d traveled to Russia and Nepal, China, and Italy. I’ll take you to Italy before your sixty-fifth birthday, he’d promised. Alice was sixty-four. Her son was gone and her heart was breaking. She had to figure out a way to keep her granddaughter with them a little while longer. Certainly Audra Valentine owed them that much.
Joe’s voice boomed over the television downstairs as he explained the actors of On Eden Street to Kara. He could lose himself in that silly soap for a scrap of the day. At least Audra Valentine couldn’t touch him there. But what about Alice? How was she going to keep from going crazy? Or so depressed she couldn’t move, or think, or feel? Kara was the only one who could save her. She would be her reason to breathe. Alice spread her hands on Christian’s bed, sunk her fingers into the navy down as she inhaled a steadying breath. One way or another, Kara was staying.
Joe yelled at her from the living room. “Alice? Can you bring me a glass of iced tea? Four cubes. And bring our girl a root beer.”
Alice brushed her hands over her apron and stood. Oh, how the man loved to bellow. Did he ever speak in a normal voice? With one final glance around her son’s room, she quietly closed the door and hurried to the kitchen where she gathered drinks on a tray and carried them into the living room. Joe sat in his gray barcolounger with Kara tucked in his lap. “Educating our girl, are you, Joe?”
“I’m telling her about Sebastian and Rebecca.”
“She got another man’s baby in her tummy,” Kara said, nodding at her grandfather. “And there’ll be hell to pay now, right, Grandpa?”
Joe cleared his throat and cast a sheepish look at his wife. “The girl’s very perceptive. “
Alice handed them their drinks and sighed. “It’s only a story, Kara. All make believe, no matter how much Grandpa thinks it’s real.”
“Uncle Peter’s not make believe,” Kara said, her golden brows pulling together. “He’s a doctor on television and in real life.”
“Is he now?” Joe flashed a look at Alice that said, Let me get to the bottom of this Peter character, once and for all.
Kara nodded her head with great importance as one about to reveal a deep secret. “He’s Dr. Perfection. He fixes people’s bodies.”
“Good God, you mean he’s the butt and boob doctor?”
“Joe! Careful what you say!”
Joe snatched the remote and flipped through the channels to On Demand. He’d become quite good at working all the gadgets of the HD flat screen Jack bought them for Christmas. Supposedly for both of them, but Joe claimed squatter’s rights early on, said now he could watch his darn soap and Norm Abrams in HD.
“There he is!” Kara pointed to a handsome man in green scrubs. “That’s him.”
Joe leaned closer and squinted. “Hmmmm.”
“That’s Uncle Peter?” Alice thought he was much too good looking to be such a close friend of the family. Men with looks like that, and a charm he so obviously possessed, usually weren’t just friends with anybody.
“Isn’t he the most handsomest man you ever saw?” Kara’s blue eyes clouded. “Next to Daddy, I mean.”
He was handsome, she’d give him that. An inch or two shorter than Christian’s six foot three frame, with a close-cropped beard and streaks of silver in a healthy head of chestnut hair. Tanned, trim, toned. Warren Beatty with wireless glasses. Warren Beatty. Dear Lord, in his younger days, there hadn’t been a woman alive who could resist his charms. A tingle of suspicion clung to her brain.
“He’s a pretty boy,” Joe said with a grunt and a huff. “Look at those eyes. Bluer than Clorox’s Toilet Bowl Cleaner. I’ll bet he’s got all the girls just pouring themselves over him.”
“He’s got lots of girlfriends,” Kara said, “but he likes Mommy best.”
Chapter 9
“It’s life, Alice. We can either choose to live it, or lose it.”—August Richot
August Richot believed in the power of forgiveness. He said God’s children were noble creatures who might lose their way but deserved the light of another chance. He preached this on Sunday mornings to a packed congregation, taught this in his Bible study classes, and prayed this along the bedside of the infirm in Holly Springs Memorial Hospital. God was all forgiving, all knowing, all understanding.
This is why Alice Wheyton sought him out one sunny afternoon four days after her son’s funeral. Father Benedict knew about dogmas and doctrines but what did he know of living them? Pastor Richot lost a wife to multiple sclerosis and raised a son and a daughter. He knew grief. He knew loss.
Alice first started meeting with him after Rachel died. She’d needed to understand how a good and noble God could strike down such a pure and innocent child. Father Benedict called it destiny and simply added Kara’s name to his prayer list, reminding her in his soft voice it wasn’t her place to question our Almighty Savior. Pastor Richot offered no explanation other than his belief that God would provide strength to carry her through this horrible grief. He did not try to stop Alice when she railed against the Creator. He simply listened, then put her in touch with a family the next town over w
ho had lost a daughter Rachel’s age to leukemia. Alice attended prayer groups and grief counseling, even dragged Joe twice, though he barely spoke to anyone, and she met with Pastor Richot every week for the first year. Gradually, life settled into a pattern of unspoken loss and by the third year, Alice could sit on Rachel’s bed without breaking down. Joe never said a word about the time she spent in their daughter’s room or the Barbies she lined up side by side year after year. He was a good man who knew her grief was too deep for him to touch.
And now that grief had tumbled into an abyss too deep and dark for even Alice’s stalwart faith. God had snatched another child. Jack was all she had left. And Kara. Pastor Richot would know what to do. He possessed a more practical, sympathetic attitude than Father Benedict. Besides, from the looks of things, they were going to be relatives. Leslie would make a wonderful daughter-in-law—unlike Audra Valentine who had kept their only grandchild on the opposite side of the country.
“Alice, you look like you haven’t slept in years.”
She offered a withered smile to the man who’d become as much friend as confidant. “I feel like I haven’t.”
He nodded and slid into a worn leather chair next to her. “I know.” His voice spilled over her in soothing tones. People said when he spoke, their troubles softened, and when he prayed with them, those troubles shrank.
“Pastor Richot, I just don’t know what to do.” He’d told her long ago to drop the title and simply call him August, but she’d not been able to do that. Alice wanted reminding that he was a man of the cloth, a guide to her troubled soul with years of schooling and experience.
“Why don’t you tell me about it?”
She yanked a tissue from her shirt pocket and dabbed her eyes. “Where on earth to begin?” She sniffed. “I’ve got to find a way to talk her into keeping Kara here. I can’t let her go yet. She’s all I have left of Christian. Doesn’t that woman know that? Can’t she have at least a little concern for the people who loved him?” Her voice rose with her conviction and the realization that Audra Valentine probably didn’t know and wouldn’t care if she did.
“I assume we’re speaking of your daughter-in-law?”
“Who else forces me to confession once a month?”
“Have you tried asking her outright?”
Alice let out a huff of annoyance as she recalled the debacle. “I did. She gave me a flat out no. I’m thinking Jack should talk to her.”
August Richot shifted in his chair and rubbed his jaw. “You gave me the impression Jack didn’t look too kindly on her.”
“He doesn’t, but if anyone can persuade a person to do something, it’s Jack.”
“The boy does have a way of getting people to see his side of things when he sets his mind to it. He’s got Leslie drooling for a ring but convinced it’s not the right time. Now what man could keep a woman like my daughter at bay and willingly, to boot?”
Alice worked up a smile. “He’s a charmer when he wants to be. Too bad it isn’t often enough, though he does have a way with his patients.”
“There is the art of diplomacy. You know, if Jack were more of a team player, he’d be the Assistant Professor of Pediatric Neurosurgery right now, instead of Grant.” When she frowned, he shrugged and said, “Don’t look so shocked. I love my son but he has his shortcomings.”
“Grant’s a wonderful doctor.”
“He needs to get past the accident. Selling out to the bureaucracy isn’t going to bring back Jennifer or the use of his hand.”
“It’s still so tragic.”
“It’s life, Alice. We can either choose to live it, or lose it. Grant has years ahead, but he’s got to let go of his bitterness.”
“Children rarely do what we want them to, you know that, don’t you?”
“Unfortunately, I do.”
Just talking with the pastor lifted Alice’s heavy heart. He truly was possessed of goodness, and holiness. Everyone liked him, everyone listened to him. Perhaps ...“Could you speak with her?”
The man started in a fit of coughing, so hard Alice thought she’d have to give him a good whack on the back. “Pastor Richot?” His face turned beet red, the coughing worsened. Alice jumped from her chair and whacked his back. Once. Twice. “Should I call the doctor?”
“No,” he croaked. He motioned toward his desk. “Water.”
Alice retrieved his glass and hurried toward him. His dark eyes grew huge beneath his wire-rimmed glasses. She’d heard of people keeling over after a fit of coughing and the last thing she wanted was another death. “Maybe I should call your son?”
He shook his head. “Something in my throat. I’m fine.” He sipped the water. “Fine.”
Alice sat down in the chair again and folded the creases in her slacks. Good Lord, she’d thought for a second she was about to lose someone else she cared about. She swiped at her eyes. Pastor Richot’s breathing evened out and the red faded to his usual tan. “Has that happened before?”
He focused on his glass and didn’t answer right away. When he did speak, his voice sounded as though his lungs were parched despite the water. “Once or twice.”
The fact that he admitted it scared her. Once or twice from a man’s perspective, usually meant five or six times. When Joe first started coughing six months before the doctors discovered his emphysema, he only admitted to once or twice.
“I would feel better if you let me call Grant. Or at least Leslie.”
He waved a hand at her. “You know those medical people. They’ll want to send me to get poked and prodded. I don’t have the time or the need for any of it. I’m fine, Alice.” He forced a smile. “The good Lord as my witness, I’m fine.”
Chapter 10
“Is that the truth or a wish?”—Jack Wheyton
Audra was leaving in two days. Jack wanted to send her packing today but he’d seen the way his mother clung to Kara, trying to pull pieces of Christian from the child for memory’s sake. It tore at him and rendered him helpless, a feeling he tried to avoid whenever possible. Christian had named him executor of his estate which provided the perfect guise for a face to face meeting with Audra. A public venue would be the smart thing to do, but when had he ever been smart when it came to Audra Valentine?
He called her after morning rounds and told her they had business to discuss regarding Christian’s estate. She had tried to invent some ridiculous excuse about promising to take Kara for ice cream, as though he were dense or at least, considerate to their situation. Jack was neither. “Her grandparents will be thrilled to take her. Have my father give you directions to my house. It’s in Landemere, thirty minutes from Holly Springs. Be here at eight.”
By 8:15, Jack started doubting whether she’d show. She might just call later and tell him to take his papers and go to hell. They both knew it wasn’t about the papers. It wasn’t even about Kara. It was about ending what had started too many years ago—closure. Finding out the whys that made him jumpy when Kara was around, made him refuse to think about Audra, which of course, never worked. He’d only seen one picture of her in nine years. She sat on a swing, her dark head thrown back in laughter, eyes closed, lips open. Pure bliss. Her cotton shirt stretched over a belly ripe with child. In that instant, Jack knew if he didn’t erase her from his life, he would end up hating his brother for taking something Jack considered his. But had she ever been his? He intended to find out.
The doorbell rang at 8:35. Jack downed the rest of his scotch and slid into a pair of beat-up loafers. He’d worn jeans and a T-shirt with paint splotches to prove she didn’t matter. When he opened the door, there she was, staring back at him in her designer top and slacks, her feet in tiny pumps with rhinestones. She might have been nervous but he’d have to remove the first and second layer of skin to detect anything close to heat.
“May I come in?”
“Sure.” Jack held the door wide, determined not to inhale the faint scent of expensive cologne that reminded him of the honeysuckle she’d worn when he
first met her. This one, of course, would cost much more. After all, it was all about the money now, and the appearance. Wasn’t it? He intended to find that out, too. And where Dr. Perfection fit into the picture. “I thought we’d sit on the deck?” Open air, in front of God and the sky. Less likely he’d try to strangle—or kiss her. “I’ve got wine, water, tea?”
“Scotch?”
Interesting. “Scotch it is.” At nineteen, she’d barely been able to sip a beer. They made their way to the deck and Jack handed her the glass, careful not to touch her skin. He sank into a lounge chair and sipped his drink. He’d built this house two years ago, 3,500 square feet of stone-washed brick, a tribute to his father’s profession.
“You have a beautiful home.”
Kind words. Forced. He wanted none of it. All he wanted was the truth. The evening sun shot through her hair, sparking bursts of red and auburn highlights. The first time he saw her she’d been standing against the window of his apartment and the sun had been in her waist length hair...
“...and an incredible view.”
“Did Christian know about us?” There. Finally, he’d spoken the words he’d held inside for nine years. She jerked and spilled scotch on her slacks. The wet spot seeped into the beige fabric but she didn’t seem to notice. “Answer me, dammit.”
She closed her eyes and sat very still, head bent as though pulling away to an untouchable place where not even his cruel words could harm her. Why did she have to make it so very difficult? A simple yes or no to clear up the years of wondering would be sufficient. Unless she was hiding something from him. Something deep and dark. “Is Kara my child?”
Her head shot up. “No!”
Jack clinked the ice in his glass and considered her vehement denial. “If you do the math, it’s a little off.”
“She’s not your daughter.”
“Is that the truth or a wish?” He’d never wanted to face the possibility that Kara could be his daughter, but with Christian gone and Audra two feet from him, he had no choice.
Pulling Home (That Second Chance) Page 6
