It's Never too Late

by Tara Taylor Quinn

  Maybe she’d come on too strong.

  And maybe he was a decent man who’d been wrongly accused.

  She went home and documented the event.

  * * *

  ADDY WAS SITTING in her living room, in jeans and a short-sleeved pullover with her computer on her lap, when Mark knocked on her sliding glass door Friday night.

  She couldn’t pretend she wasn’t there. Her curtains were open, and her car was out front.

  He was reaching out to her. And she’d promised herself she’d be there for him. For him. Not her. She opened the door.

  “You’re avoiding me.” He looked her straight in the eye.

  “Yeah.”

  “Please don’t.”

  She felt her nipples harden just peering into those blue eyes that looked at her with such directness. She dropped her gaze and ended up staring at the black T-shirt stretched across his muscular chest.

  “I’m here as a friend if you need me, Mark. But I don’t completely trust myself around you. And I don’t fool around with married men,” she said.

  “I’m not married.”

  “Engaged, then.”

  “I’m not that yet, either.”

  “Yet.”

  “I told Ella I didn’t want to marry her.”

  She stepped outside. “How’d she take it?”

  “About like I expected. She understood, but she’s willing to try to make the best of things as they are.”

  “So, wait.” She frowned. “Does that mean you are getting married?”

  “It means that I don’t know. I made the offer. She’s trying to figure out if accepting it is the best thing to do.”

  “You told her you didn’t want to marry her, but that you would.”

  “Yes.”

  She’d never heard of anything more bizarre. More destined for failure.

  And she didn’t doubt for one second that if Mark married Ella, if the marriage failed, it wouldn’t be because of him.

  She also knew that he deserved better—far better—than spending the rest of his life with a woman he didn’t love.

  “You curled your hair.”

  She’d forgotten. “Yeah.”

  “I like it.”

  Matt Sheffield hadn’t been impressed. Thank goodness.

  “People raise children together from separate households.”

  “I’m in Shelter Valley. She’s in Bierly. It’s a little far to commute.” Taking her hand, he led her to their chairs, which were both still on her side of the patio. Sat down. “And getting married is the right thing to do. I’m not going to abandon my child. I know what it’s like to grow up without a dad.”

  “You’re staying here, then?”

  “Yes.” No doubt in his voice on that one.

  “Have you told Nonnie? About the baby?”

  “I just did tonight. I’m sure you’re going to hear about it tomorrow. I work from two to eight, by the way, instead of noon like she told you.”

  “Your schedule changed?”

  “No. She says she got the days confused, but she’s lying.”

  “Nonnie lies?” Mark hated lying.

  “Only when she’s being conniving. But this time she came clean, which is why I know she lied to you to begin with.”

  Leaning back in her chair, Addy watched him. “She wanted me there when you got home.”

  His expression serious, he said, “She noticed that we haven’t been spending much time together.”

  “She lied to me about your hours before you told her about Ella.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You still haven’t told me how she reacted to the news.” Nonnie had told her once that she’d love to live long enough to see Mark holding his own child in his arms.

  “She spit.”

  “What? On the floor? Nonnie wouldn’t do that. She’s a stickler for clean floors.” Addy had caught the old woman with a bucket and a mop moving slowly over the kitchen floor with her wheelchair earlier that week and discovered that mopping floors was one of the items on Nonnie’s list of daily chores.

  “I told her at the dinner table. Her plate was empty. And she spit on it.”

  “She doesn’t like Ella?”

  “Not any more than Ella likes her.”

  “Ella doesn’t like Nonnie?”

  “She’s jealous of Nonnie’s influence on me.”

  “Her influence on you? It’s the other way around, I’d say. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard Nonnie say, ‘Mark doesn’t want me to do this, or eat that, or try...’”

  He chuckled. “Ella thinks I try too hard to please my grandmother.”

  “You have good reason to.”

  “Ella doesn’t know that.”

  “How can she not? She knows you live with Nonnie. She knows Nonnie raised you.”

  “She doesn’t know that I ran away. With the exception of a very few people, no one does.”

  Addy knew. Just like Mark knew things people she’d known for years had never heard. It meant something.

  Maybe they just felt free with each other because they knew they’d be moving on soon and never see each other again.

  “Ella thinks that a lot of the choices I make are due to Nonnie, when, in fact, they’re choices I’d make regardless.”

  “Such as?”

  “Putting work before pleasure.”

  “That’s kind of a given, isn’t it?”

  “She always thought I worked too much.”

  “Did you?”

  “Maybe. But we needed the money.”

  “What else?”

  He shrugged. “Just lifestyle choices. She likes to walk a little more on the wild side than I do.”

  “Partying, you mean?”

  “Just being irresponsible.”

  She was glad he’d come knocking. Hearing his voice again was good.

  “What does Nonnie think you should do about Ella?”

  “Ask her for custody.”

  She turned toward him. “Do you think Ella would give it to you?” Visions of a single Mark living next door with Nonnie and a newborn flashed through her mind. A play pool, right there, just a couple of yards from her fountain. Little fingers reaching up over the edges of the rock bowl...

  “If I paid her she might.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It wouldn’t be easy for her, but I think there’s a chance, if she decides that she doesn’t want to marry me, that she’ll agree to give me custody of the baby. I know she’s always been afraid of being a single mom.”

  “Afraid? Why?”

  “Ella barely graduated from high school. There’s not a lot around Bierly for her to do. Her job at the factory, there’s no room for her to advance there. She could take sideway moves, but let’s just say she’s never going to get rich. Or even make enough, on her own, to buy a home.”

  “You’d pay child support.”

  “That would help with the child’s expenses, but I’d also expect joint custody, which means she’d be equally responsible for half of the expenses.”

  He’d clearly given this a lot of thought. And was a lot more in control than he’d been four days before, when he’d first come to her with the news.

  He had that sense about him. That he could handle anything. Including her deception?

  “It’s hard, being a single mom in Bierly, for another reason. There aren’t a lot of options there, relationship wise. Even fe
wer when you’re asking a guy to take on someone else’s kid.”

  “You’d think, if someone loved her he would...and at our age, chances are he’d have kids, too.”

  “Having a baby will greatly limit her social life, which means that she’ll have fewer opportunities to be out meeting people.”

  “Partying.” She said it again, needing to not like the other woman.

  “Yeah, maybe, but not like you might think. Ella doesn’t do drugs. And she won’t drink enough to get drunk.”

  “Still, she’d sell her kid so that she’d doesn’t have to stay home at night?”

  “Maybe not. She really wants a family and I think she’ll make a good mom. As long as the situation is right for her. I’m just saying I don’t know.”

  “Are you planning to find out?”

  “I don’t know that yet, either....”

  The statement hung there. As if he wanted something from her.

  “I wouldn’t do it,” she blurted into the night. “Not for money or opportunity, not even if I thought my child would have a better financial future without me. I think a mother’s love is more important than any of that.”

  “What about a father’s love?”

  “Of course.” She was talking to a father-to-be. “The point is, a child needs love more than he or she needs financial security. And knowing that, I would keep my child with me at all costs.”

  She saw that little play pool again. And thought about giving her child away so that she’d have an easier life...

  “Would you raise a child by yourself if it came to that?”

  “I don’t think I’d deliberately get pregnant, if that’s what you’re asking, but if I ended up alone and pregnant, yes, I’d raise the child.”

  At the moment, being a single mom was the only way she could see it ever happening. The only man she’d ever met who’d even tempted her to think about such things in a practical sense, opening her heart to the idea of having a family of her own again, was Mark.

  And he was not an option.

  * * *

  MARK WORKED ALL WEEKEND, making up hours from the previous weekend. Or so he told himself. The hours were offered so he accepted them. Ella used to accuse him of using work as an escape.

  Maybe she’d been right.

  At least he never turned to a bottle. Or split like his old man had done.

  Nonnie was determined that he was going to buy custody of his child and she was doing better, physically, as though through sheer strength of will she could hang around to help him raise the baby. Several ladies from Shelter Valley were over on Saturday to teach her some kind of domino game. It sounded as if they played it on a board with little wooden trains. They’d had two tables worth of players and while he had no idea what dominoes and trains had to do with each other, he’d buy a houseful of both to keep the enthusiasm he heard in Nonnie’s voice when he called home during his dinner break.

  Addy was there when he called. She’d brought chili over for dinner. He wished he was there, too.

  Instead, because Nonnie was tired and going to bed early, he agreed to stay and work until midnight, and when he got home in the wee hours of the next morning, his neighbor’s lights were out.

  He didn’t hear from Ella. And he didn’t text her.

  He worked second shift Sunday, too.

  It was for the best.

  * * *

  “THAT GIRL’S LYING.”

  “Pardon?” Addy stopped rolling the little ball of dough in her hands, staring at the older woman sitting next to her at the kitchen table, filling her cooking sheet twice as fast as she was.

  “Ella.” Nonnie practically snorted the word. “Trying to trap him, that’s what she’s doing.”

  Mark was Nonnie’s boy. It followed that she’d blame the woman, any woman, for the situation he was in.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “She ain’t no more pregnant than I am.”

  “How can you know?”

  “I got my ways.”

  “Mark said Ella’s been to the doctor.”

  “I don’t believe it. Not in town. News would’ve spread quicker than fire.”

  “If she thinks she’s pregnant and didn’t want anyone to know, she could’ve have gone out of town.” It was what Addy would have done.

  Nonnie shook her head. “Ella ain’t got her driver’s license. It’s why she lives in town.”

  “She doesn’t know how to drive?”

  “She knows how. She drove drunk and lost it.”

  Addy wasn’t up on DUI law, but she knew enough to know that the woman must have done something pretty severe to lose her driving privileges.

  “While she was dating Mark?”

  “Before. She’s got another year before she gets it back.”

  “Someone could have driven her.”

  “And then it wouldn’t be a secret no more.” Nonnie was clearly in denial. “Mark also says she told her ma about the baby,” the older woman continued, “and if she did the entire town would know by now. It’s not on Facebook, and Bertie hasn’t heard about it, which she would’ve if Ella was pregnant.”

  “Ella asked her mom to keep quiet until she knew what she and Mark were going to do about the baby.”

  “Ha!” Nonnie’s blue-veined hands didn’t miss a beat as she completed a tray of what would soon be chocolate chip cookies, pushed it aside and pulled another one in front of her. “Dot ain’t kept a secret since she was born. I’ve known that girl all her life and if she had any idea that her Ella finally got my Mark locked down I’d have been getting phone calls within the hour.”

  “But Ella hasn’t decided whether or not she’s going to marry Mark.”

  “’Cause she knows she ain’t pregnant. If she was, that would be enough reason to spread it around. Everyone knows Mark would do the right thing and marry her.”

  “If you thought she was pregnant, would you expect that, too?” She was just curious.

  And anxious to finish baking Mark’s favorite cookies—a job she’d volunteered for so that Nonnie wouldn’t be lugging trays in and out of the oven alone. She rolled a little faster so that she could get back to work.

  “No, I would not,” the woman said succinctly. “Much as I want that boy to settle down with a real family of his own, I know he wouldn’t be happy with Ella, and a kid doesn’t need to grow up in a household lacking joy.”

  During their morning visit, Nonnie had told her she was going to bake cookies. Mark had been working long hours and still had homework to do and a test to study for the next day—his first big exam according to Nonnie—and she’d wanted a treat waiting for him when he got home.

  To give him energy to do his schoolwork, she’d said.

  And Addy had volunteered to help.

  “Don’t you think Mark should be the one to decide what makes him happy?”

  “Nope.”

  Addy didn’t agree, but she wasn’t going to argue, either.

  “That boy is a rare one,” the woman continued. “He makes one mistake in his life—an understandable one if you ask me—and he spends the rest of his life afraid to think of himself ’cause he’s afraid to make the same mistake twice.”

  Addy’s fingers slowed and then started up again. She didn’t want those piercing eyes turned on her. Didn’t want to become any more entangled with the Hebers and their challenges and their sense of justice that so closely mirrored her own.

  Di
dn’t want to feel as though she was a part of them. As though she’d come home.

  But she couldn’t help or change her feeling that what Nonnie had said was completely, one hundred percent correct.

  She couldn’t help believing that Mark Heber wasn’t just being a gentleman, doing the right thing, by offering to marry Ella. He was martyring himself because he’d been a scared kid who’d run away from home when he’d found out his grandmother was sick.

  “You got to stop him.”

  The soft ball in Addy’s fingers flattened. Nonnie was staring at her. Not even blinking.

  “What?”

  “He’s got a thing for you. Any fool could see it, and where my boy is concerned, I’m no fool. You could stop him from ruining his life.”

  “Me? What can I do?”

  “Sleep with him, that’s what. If he sleeps with you, he’d have to give in to those feelin’s he’s got for you. Besides, once things get intimate, he’ll feel beholden to you, too.”

  “Except that she’s pregnant and I’m not.”

  “She ain’t, either. He’s just feeling guilty ’cause he slept with her and then left her high and dry.”

  Was there truth to that? Was Mark’s conscience making him prey to an avaricious woman who wanted him at any cost?

  He’d said he wasn’t sure he believed Ella about being pregnant.

  He’d also told her he wanted to make love with her. He told her with his glances, his body language, every single time they were together.

  And she probably told him, too. Lord knew, she thought about it all the time.

  Couldn’t seem to stop thinking about it. Especially in bed at night, or in the shower, with the water sluicing over her skin in a trail his hands could...

  If she slept with him, could she really save him from a lifetime of unhappiness?

  “You like him.”

  “Yes, I like him, but—”

  “You more than like him.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “It’s like I said. It’s your job to save him.”

  “Absolutely not.” Finishing the last one of her cookies, Addy wiped her hands on the moist paper towel beside her, pushed back from the table and carried two of the four laden trays over to the preheated oven.