A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  He had forgotten to kiss her good-bye. He always kissed her on his way out the door. This morning of all mornings she’d been expecting a last, lingering reassurance from last night.

  But he hadn’t even stopped to tell the dog to have a nice day.

  To squelch her worry, Abby cranked the song on her CD player. If David was concerned about something, he would tell her soon enough. She prided herself on how he shared everything with her.

  Above her, broad sweeps of meadow spilled downhill between dense walls of pine along the Snow King ski runs. The chairlift, empty and still, dangled over the green like a charm bracelet, swaying every so often in the breeze and portending a different season. The winter that seemed just ended would begin again too soon—the days of woolen caps and snowflakes and skiing that made these baseball summers all the more precious and rare.

  Abby looked back and saw Braden running into the field beside first base, the brim of his cap tilted skyward. The coach waited for him there, probably to share some intricacy of the game.

  Her shoulders lifted and fell with her sigh.

  She glanced at the flock of stay-at-home moms. They sat perched above the field on bleachers, bare knees tucked beneath the hem of their sweaters, their faces fresh and rested from sleep, their fingers entwined around steaming thermal mugs.

  Abby hated leaving. No matter how much she loved her job at the shelter, she found it difficult turning away from this and dealing with women whose lives weren’t nearly as straightforward as her own.

  As she did every day at this time, she faced resolutely forward and drove away. She headed the several blocks into town, bypassed the town square, and parked in front of the shelter on Hall Street. For another moment she listened to the music, remembering what the song was meant to be: a love letter to God, something she was supposed to sanction in the very depths of her soul.

  I will be glad and rejoice

  in your unfailing love,

  for you have seen my troubles,

  and you care about the anguish of my soul.

  You have not handed me over to my enemies

  but have set me in a safe place.

  Yes, she thought. Yes.

  Above all things, Abby loved trusting in the Father and in her husband. She loved how comfortable and protected her believing made her feel.

  When David stepped inside the turnstile at Ripley’s Believe It or Not, he found Susan Roche waiting. He recognized her from behind as she stood gazing at a life-sized replica of a horse covered with buttons and shards of multicolored glass. A HORSE OF A DIFFERENT COLOR, the sign beside her read.

  David stood rigidly for a moment, noting the slope of Susan’s shoulders and the perfect length of blonde hair, while she stared up at the gigantic statue.

  “Hey,” he said at last. “You got here early.”

  Susan started, as if she hadn’t expected him to arrive so soon. She kept her purse raised against her like a shield as she came forward to greet him. She walked the way she’d always walked—with calm resolve, as if she knew exactly where she was going and what she had to do.

  For one instant, David was tempted to hold out his hand to her. But only for an instant. The gesture seemed much too businesslike, too grandiose. So he stood before her with his wrists dangling at his sides, feeling the half grimace on his mouth and remembering how once, long ago, he would have touched her.

  “How strange it is,” she said, a sad smile on her face, “seeing you like this.”

  She had aged. That surprised him. In his mind he would always picture Susan as the confident college TA, come to spend a summer of freedom in the mountains. She’d been young enough to wait tables at Jedediah’s and crazy enough to try parasailing.

  Susan said, “I’ll bet you thought you’d never have to hear my name again.”

  “Of course I—” David stopped. No. He wouldn’t reduce himself to platitudes. There wasn’t anything he could say to save this situation or make it less complicated, so he didn’t try. “No. I didn’t want to ever see you again.”

  “That’s what I thought.”

  Silence stood between them like a wall. He struggled to find something else to say. “What have you been doing these past years?”

  “Acting grown up,” she said, reminding him of how young she’d once been. “Living my life.”

  A group of youngsters jostled in through the door and shoved one another out of the way to buy tickets. One by one, they pushed through the stile. Who were these kids? Someone who might know Braden? Out of desperation, David did touch Susan this time. He grazed her arm with his hand, fully aware of the contact.

  “Come back here.” He paid for two admission tickets, slipped ahead, and guided her into the shadows of the museum. “Let’s walk.”

  She let herself be led. And, as if she could read his mind, she asked, “How is your family?”

  He didn’t dare answer that question for her. He steered her past the exhibits of a buck that had died with its antler impaled on a hornet’s nest and the skull of a cow with two heads. “Tell me about your life instead,” he said. “Where are you living?”

  “I’m in Oregon. On Siletz Bay. Teaching in a private school there.”

  “Sounds like you’re doing well.”

  “It’s a good place to dig up clams.” The laugh she made sounded strident, as if it had erupted from her. “You know I’ve always been good at digging things up.”

  “Yes, I know.”

  She stopped behind him and leaned on the railing. “How is Abigail?”

  “Abigail is fine. Just fine.”

  “And the baby?”

  Braden, a baby. David almost smiled, thinking how odd that seemed. It had been years since he’d thought of his son that way. “The baby is nine years old. Not a baby anymore.”

  “They grow up fast, don’t they?”

  “He’s going into fourth grade this year.”

  “Your son is smart, isn’t he? I’ve always known any child of yours would be smart.”

  David laughed outright. “Well, he could use some help in reading. We have a hard time getting him to sit down and read a book.”

  “Really.”

  “He’s okay in math, though.”

  “You’re proud of him.”

  “He’s an easy kid to be proud of.”

  For some reason, Susan wouldn’t look at him. Her eyes had focused someplace in the distance over his left shoulder. She asked, “You never had any other children, then? Just the one?”

  “No. No more. Just Braden.”

  He furrowed his brow at her. This seemed an odd line of questioning. He’d started answering her because Braden, at least, seemed a safe topic to discuss. But she had gone on and on with it. On and on about Braden. On and on about nothing.

  “Who does he look like? You? Or your wife?”

  David strode ahead of her again, past a sign that read IS IT THE WORLD’S SMALLEST MAN? NO! IT’S THE WORLD’S LARGEST CIGAR! He didn’t stop to look at the huge roll of tobacco looming high above his head. Let her catch up with him. He never should have agreed to this. Never. Ever.

  “Things are happy in my family now. Our lives are good. Better than most.” He added pointedly, “Better than they were before.”

  Susan leaned over the railing, her palms flat on the round metal, her shoulders bearing her weight, saying nothing.

  “Susan, do you mind telling me why you’ve come?”

  She gazed somewhere past him, somewhere into something he couldn’t see. “I swear to you, David. If there had been any other way, I wouldn’t have done this.”

  “It’s been nine years. What could possibly have happened that would—”

  “It hasn’t just happened now.” She met his eyes. “It’s been going on for a long time.”

  A sense of danger rose within him. Whatever Susan’s words would be, there would be no escaping them. He felt sure of it. She’d trapped him with something; he already knew this truth. And he’d given her the mea
ns to do it. He, too, ran his hand along the rail, as if establishing contact.

  “I have a daughter,” she said. “An eight-year-old named Samantha.”

  Oh.

  Oh.

  “You do?”

  How pathetic—how inadequate and unsteady—his question sounded.

  “Yes.”

  His heart scudded forward while he figured the math in his head. “She’s eight?”

  “She’ll be nine in two months.”

  “Oh.”

  Susan began to fumble around in her purse. “Do you want to see a picture of her? I have one in my billfold.”

  “No,” he said, sounding frantic. “No. I don’t want to see her.”

  She glanced up, and it horrified him even more to see that she wasn’t surprised by his reaction. She had expected him to respond this way. And that meant… That meant…

  “You don’t have to see her, David. But you have to hear me out.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “We’ve gotten this far. We can’t turn back from it now.”

  All the questions he had never asked her. All those inquiries about her own life, her own children, her relationships with other men. The uncertainty of them loomed like a hammerlock, ready to wrestle him down. He couldn’t speak for a moment.

  “We’ve gotten along well, Samantha and me.”

  He found his voice. “There isn’t anyone else, then? Just the two of you?”

  “Just the two of us.”

  His heart pummeled. “Did you ever marry?”

  She met his gaze head on. “She has never known her real father.”

  Another beat. “You’ve raised a child alone?”

  “There have been good things about that. I’ve liked being in control of Sam’s life. I’ve liked sheltering her. I’ve liked it that no one else has tried to interfere.”

  “Susan.”

  “Things are different than they once were. A child without both parents isn’t asked many questions. Employers are willing to work around a single parent’s schedule.” She fumbled in her purse again and held her wallet open. Even in the shadows beyond the Ripley’s exhibits, he could see a photograph in a plastic sleeve, lined up neatly among Susan’s other essentials—her Oregon drivers’ license, her credit cards. “Look at this picture, David. Please.” She held it out to him, cupping it in her hand. “I want you to see her face.”

  He reached to take it and hated himself all the more because his hands shook. “I don’t—”

  “You have to,” she said. “You don’t have any other choice.”

  He stared at it.

  A wrinkled school photo, taken the way all school photos are taken, with the color slightly off hue and the mouth of the subject too broad as if the photographer had used some ridiculous joke to make this little girl laugh. Long brown hair flew all over her shoulders as though she’d just come running in from the playground. Dark eyes a lot like Susan’s and a gap-toothed grin that reminded David so very much of his own son’s.

  No.

  Susan took the billfold between her fingers so they both held it together, balanced between their two hands. She too gazed down at the picture. For a moment they said nothing.

  “She’s a pretty girl.”

  “Do you think she resembles Braden?”

  He didn’t mince words. “Yes.”

  “I’d thought perhaps she would.”

  David raised his eyes from the photo and met Susan’s gaze. Their fingers touched over the plastic sheath of the wallet. He felt as if he’d been slugged, sucker punched by something come to pillage him. It took every ounce of his courage even to say it; his tongue almost wouldn’t go around the words. “She’s mine.”

  Susan nodded. “Yes.”

  For the moment, the ramifications upon David’s own life were overshadowed by the magnitude of this one truth. For all these past moments, he’d feared Susan’s answer. Now the impact of finally knowing was profound.

  This girl, a part of him.

  Flesh of my flesh. Bone of my bone.

  Around her neck Samantha Roche wore a delicate necklace of pink stones, one tiny spangled heart resting sideways in the camber of her throat. Her denim collar hung open in a lopsided V, perfectly matching the happy jut of her chin. Through all those strands of cottony, uncombed hair, he could see one ear peeping through, the shape of a seashell. She smiled at him, at all the world, revealing teeth that her mouth hadn’t quite gotten the chance to grow into yet.

  David found it impossible to examine this little girl’s face and not be moved by her. A human instinct, as old as Creation, surged within him: fathership. With this daughter he shared lineage, the same stock and strain. The blood of a dozen Treasure ancestors coursed through this child’s veins.

  Bemused, David followed Susan as she wandered on past a collection of bedpans, a display of assassination comparisons between Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy, a rolled ball of rusty barbed wire that must have been six feet wide. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he asked, keeping his voice low and noncommittal. She could very well have phoned him after she’d moved to Seattle to give him this news. By the sin of omission, she’d stolen something remarkable from him. “Why wait until now?”

  “It didn’t make any difference, did it? From the beginning with you, I knew where I stood.”

  “You didn’t have much faith in me,” he said.

  “I had plenty of faith in you. I had faith in your faith. I knew how religious you always claimed to be. I had faith you would never leave your wife.”

  Her words hit him hard. Because she was right. Because he had told her once that he knew what he was doing was wrong, that he struggled with it—that underneath it all, no matter what he believed about God, he was human. Human like everybody else.

  Chapter Three

  What is it you want from me, Susan? Why this, now? Why, after all these years?”

  She didn’t answer right off. She kept walking, away from him.

  David panicked. Apprehension charged the length of his spine. “I’m not telling Abby about this, if that’s what you’re here for. Things are good between us now.”

  “I can’t promise she won’t find out,” Susan said. “I’m sorry.”

  “That can’t happen. It would kill Abby if she found out what happened between us… and when.”

  Susan wheeled toward him. “That’s all you think about, isn’t it? Yourself. How to cover your mistakes.”

  “No. There’s more to it than that and you know it.”

  “Oh, yes, David. There’s more to both of our stories. So you can forget thinking only of yourself.”

  He waited.

  “Sam got the flu on Memorial Day and she wouldn’t get over it. I had it, too, but mine ended in three days. And Sam just kept feeling so…tired.”

  David closed her billfold, which he’d been holding open all this time. He handed it back to her.

  “They did some blood work and then they called me. They said she needed to come back in. So we went back. And back. And back. We’ve seen three different doctors since then—one in Portland, two in Corvallis. They’re all telling us the same thing.”

  “What? What are they telling you?”

  For the first time, when he looked at Susan, he noticed her red-rimmed eyes. For the first time she didn’t seem like such a predator to him, but instead only a mother, as trapped by her indiscretion as he was by his. For the first time he noticed she looked bad.

  “Do you know what it’s like to tell a little girl she has leukemia, David? First I just said, ‘They’ve found something in your blood they want to check. There’s something that doesn’t look right. Your blood’s sick.’ Then the doctor walked in and said, ‘Well, Samantha, you have leukemia.’ Without even preparing her. She didn’t say anything. She sat looking at him with a straight face like he’d walked in and said, ‘You have strep throat.’ ”

  His reply came out empty, frightened, helpless. “Susan.”

 
“She didn’t cry until she got out into the hall. She took my hand and looked at me and she said, ‘Leukemia, Mama? But people die from leukemia.’ And I said, ‘Well, you won’t. I won’t let you. You’re going to be all right.’ ”

  “I don’t know what to say.”

  “It isn’t what you can say, David. It’s what you can do. She’s a good candidate for a bone-marrow transplant. Only we haven’t been able to find the right donor.”

  The awful truth sank like weighty stones in his stomach. So this was it, then. This was the reason she had come.

  “Are you thinking it might be me?”

  Susan nodded. “Possibly.” At Ripley’s Believe It or Not, he stared at a replica of a woman with brass rings around a neck that must have been stretched to fourteen inches long. EXPERIENCE THE ODDITY, the placard read. Susan touched his sleeve. “You might be the only chance Sam has of staying alive.”

  Along the far wall at the Community Safety Network hung an oil painting of five distinguished ladies, known since the 1920s as The Petticoat Rulers of Jackson Hole. Five women who’d grown disgruntled with the way men governed this town and so took matters into their own hands.

  In a spirited contest, running upon—among other things—a platform of fencing the town cemetery so cows couldn’t graze over the final resting places of beloved townsfolk, these women had defeated their male opponents by a three-to-one margin and since then been lauded as the first fully woman government in the United States.

  Mrs. Grace G. Miller, Miss Pearl Williams, Mrs. Genevieve Van Vleck, Mrs. Faustine Haight, and even Rose Crabtree, the proprietor of the Crabtree Inn, gazed down from their cameos with solemn countenances and deep-set, sepia-toned eyes. You can do this, too! they seemed to be saying. You can be in charge just like we were!

  Abby checked the pink message slips strewn across her desk. She dropped one onto the pile, then picked it up and read it again:

  Sophie H. has decided to leave today. You’ll want to talk to her.