Love Built to Last

by Lisa Ricard Claro

Sean shrugged. “I like powerful machines.”

  Rebecca’s lips curved into a feline smile. She dropped her gaze to his broad chest and brought her eyes back up, inch by slow inch, as if peeling off his shirt. She leaned toward him and said, “So do I,” in a tone that widened Sean’s eyes a fraction of an inch. A second later her eyes crinkled at the corners. She laughed, and said to Maddie and Brenna, “Men. They’re so easy.”

  Sean watched her saunter away. It took him a full minute to find his tongue.

  “Wow. She’s—wow. She just played me and I totally don’t care.”

  Maddie and Brenna burst out laughing. Cynthia, sitting a good fifteen feet away from them, looked up from her phone, yawned, and went back to texting and checking her email.

  “Take a breath, Sean,” Brenna said, amused.

  He gave a self-deprecating laugh. “Damn. What’s her name again?”

  “Rebecca Walker.” Maddie’s laughter trailed the name.

  “Right. And she’s related to the guy who remodeled your kitchen, right?”

  “Caleb. He’s—” Maddie looked around expecting to see Cal with Dante and instead spied him laughing with a pretty blonde. “Over there.” Make that a gorgeous blonde, with cascading hair and a figure trending toward hourglass.

  Sean nodded. “Caleb Walker, that’s right. I actually remembered his name when Brenna told me. He was a big football jock at Bright Hills High the year they won the state championships. Quarterback, I think. Brenna, Jack, and I went to the Catholic school at St. Pat’s, so we ran with a different crowd, but the whole town was into football that year because of how well the team did.”

  “I didn’t know him back then, but I could pick him out of a crowd now.” Brenna wriggled her eyebrows at Maddie and grinned.

  “If I remember, he got a full ride somewhere out of state,” Sean said.

  Maddie nodded. “Auburn. And that was years ago. Why do you remember that?”

  Sean shrugged. “It’s football related, and that was the only time Bright Hills ever made it to the finals. Anyway, we didn’t run in the same circles.” Sean’s eyes, mirrors of Jack’s, scanned the area the Walkers and Kinkaids had claimed. “Why’d Mom set up this little shindig, anyway? I’m not complaining. I’m just curious.” He looked over to where Rebecca stood talking to both sets of parents.

  Maddie followed the trajectory of his gaze and lowered her voice. “I bet you’re wishing you hadn’t brought a date with you right about now.”

  Sean dragged his attention from Rebecca and glanced at Cynthia who continued to play with her phone. He shrugged. “She’s shy.”

  Brenna barked out a laugh. “When y’all first got here I asked your girlfriend there a legal question about partnerships and LLCs. She informed me she didn’t graduate from Hah-vahd for the purpose of giving out free legal advice. I wasn’t looking for a dissertation, I was just making conversation.”

  Sean cringed. “Sorry. She’s a gifted attorney, but she won’t win prizes for her people skills. I guess I better go see how she’s doing. Excuse me, ladies.”

  Maddie watched Sean go. She wondered if there would ever be a time when she could spend time with Sean without seeing Jack. They shared the raven hair and so-blue eyes of their Celtic ancestors, as did Brenna. God was in a fine mood the day he created the Kinkaid gene pool, no doubt about it.

  Sean said something to Cynthia who responded with a roll of her shoulders and then returned to tap-tapping her phone. Sean glanced over at Maddie and Brenna, shrugged, grinned, and made a beeline straight for Rebecca, now in deep conversation with Papa Ron and Big Will.

  They looked great together, Maddie mused. Sean, so handsome it hurt to look at him, and Rebecca, no slouch herself in the gorgeous department. She tossed her curls over her shoulders and said something that had Sean and Papa Ron both throwing their heads back in laughter, and Big Will shaking his head in obvious amusement.

  Maddie watched the body language going on. She knew flirting when she saw it. Sean and Rebecca were fully engaged in it.

  Maddie sensed Cal watching her before she met his gaze. He stood on the periphery of the Walker/Kinkaid Fourth of July outpost in the same spot where she had seen him talking to the blonde woman earlier. He motioned “come here” with his fingers.

  “I’m ditching you for Caleb,” she said to Brenna.

  He met her halfway. She smiled up at him, pleased beyond measure to be here at the park on the Fourth of July with the Walkers and the Kinkaids, and glad, so glad, that Brenna hadn’t told her what Edie had planned. Had she known, Maddie was certain she would have nixed the whole thing.

  “I’m thinking it’s time to send our mothers into giddy fits of delight,” Cal said.

  “What’s your plan?”

  “Behold, TJ is nodding off in the chair with Grampa Boone, Pirate is curled up at their feet. I’m inviting you to go for a walk with me. Just the two of us.”

  “A walk? Is that all you’ve got to incite giddy fits of matriarchal delight?”

  “As it happens, I plan to hold your hand, and there’s a pretty fair chance I’ll kiss you.”

  “How can I turn down an offer like that?”

  “You’d be a fool to say no.”

  Maddie looked back at the group. Sada and Edie talked together, but with the aid of some maternal radar, swiveled their heads toward Maddie and Cal.

  “That’s just eerie. How do they know?” Maddie asked.

  “Watch their expressions.” Cal walked over to where Edie and Sada sat. Maddie couldn’t hear Cal’s words, but she knew the moment he told them they were going off alone.

  A brilliant smile overtook Edie’s face. “Yes, of course, dear! By all means!”

  “No worries, sweetheart. We’ll keep an eye on you-know-who if he stirs. Shoo!” Sada put both hands on Cal and sent him off with a mighty shove. “Go on now, and have fun!”

  The moment Cal turned his back, the moms slapped their hands together in an exuberant high five.

  “So who is that you were talking to earlier?” Maddie asked at the outset of their stroll. She kept her tone nonchalant.

  “I’ve talked to a lot of people today. Give me a clue.”

  “Oh, you know, just a little while ago. Blonde. Pretty.”

  “Oh, her. You jealous?”

  “Don’t flatter yourself. Of course not. I’m just making conversation.”

  “Oh, okay.”

  Maddie waited. And waited. Damn him. “Fine. Yes, okay? I was jealous. A little. Do I need to be? Who is she?”

  Cal grabbed Maddie’s hand and swung her around for a quick hug. “That was Shelley, my next door neighbor.”

  “The one who watches TJ? The one who thinks you’re ruggedly handsome? That Shelley?”

  “Yes. Wait. What? She thinks what?”

  “Never mind.” Maddie laughed and tugged out of his arms. The more he reached for her, the farther out of his reach she went.

  “C’mon now, you can’t say something like that and then clam up.”

  “I can and I will. Your ego’s plenty big already.”

  Maddie squealed in surprise when he scooped her off her feet and tossed her over his shoulder caveman style.

  “Hey, put me down!” She choked out a laugh. “It’s not fair. You’re bigger than I am.”

  In the next second he complied, setting her down and tripping her up in one fluid movement, so that when they fell he landed first and took the brunt of it, much as she had seen him do with Rebecca earlier, only this time he was the perpetrator rather than the victim. Another second and their positions reversed. Maddie lay on the ground beneath him. He knelt over her legs, withholding his weight, but kept her trapped between his thighs. He cuffed her wrists in one hand and brought her arms over her head. Mischief danced in his eyes and giddy merriment twirled up from Maddie’s belly. She squeaked with laughter before his fingers ever began tickling her.

  “Don’t you do it, Cal. No. Don’t you—Caleb!” Maddie wheezed in a breath. He wasn
’t even touching her yet, not really, just a butterfly flutter of fingers across her ribs. But her skin tightened in anticipation and controlling her responsive giggling became impossible.

  “Tell me what I want to know,” he sing-songed. His fingers squiggled along her abdomen.

  “Nothing, it was nothing.” His fingers danced. Maddie erupted with visceral laughter. “Stop, stop! Sweet Lord, Caleb.”

  He paused, waited for her to catch her breath. When her breathing eased, he created the finger claw once again and wriggled it in front of her face, lowered it toward her belly.

  “Fine, fine! I’ll tell you, you big buffoon. Get off me.”

  “Promise?”

  “Yes, yes. I promise.”

  He swung off of her and settled beside her in the grass, head propped up on his hand. Maddie stayed where she was, staring up at the vast expanse of cloudless sky for the second time that day. She turned her head and felt a quickening in her belly when her eyes met Cal’s. He splayed his hand over her abdomen and offered a gentle caress instead of a tickle.

  “So, I’m what? What did she say now? Ruggedly what?”

  “Handsome, you idiot. Ruggedly handsome.”

  “And you know she said this because?”

  Her lips tugged in a grin. “I shouldn’t have to reveal my source.”

  “I’ve got a pretty good idea who the little blabbermouth is.”

  “Did you ever date her? Shelley?”

  “No.”

  “Why not? She’s very attractive, and you must like her or you wouldn’t let her watch TJ for you.”

  Strands of Maddie’s hair had escaped her braid to skim across her cheeks with each errant breeze. Cal smoothed the hair back from her face and weighed his answer. “I value her more as a caretaker for TJ than I ever would as a romantic interest, and if we dated, even just once, and things ended badly, it would be a disaster. I guess if my attraction to her were strong enough it wouldn’t matter, but,” he shrugged. “Not worth the risk.”

  “I don’t know whether to be flattered you consider me a worthy romantic interest or insulted that you don’t value me more as a caretaker for TJ,” she said, her tone prim.

  Cal turned onto his back and folded his hands over his hard belly. He lay side by side in the grass with Maddie looking into the endless blue.

  Maddie closed her eyes and listened to the buzz of voices, the high-pitched squeals of children, and the more distant hum of traffic. Somewhere in the park, a radio station had set up a tent and music played. She felt more than heard the steady rise and fall of Cal’s chest beside her and sensed the pulse of his blood where their bodies lay close but not touching. She identified that tingling awareness, as if every molecule in her body were subjected to a magnetic draw by his.

  Certain Caleb had more to say, Maddie held her tongue. Surely, he knew her last comment was meant as a joke. But just in case he didn’t, she found his hand with hers and held it while she waited.

  Chapter 12

  The day Gwen died had been just like this one, an otherwise splendid day boasting bright sun in a near cloudless sky. Pleasant breezes kicked up at just the right intervals to ease the heat.

  Cal noted those things in a peripheral way on what became his final walk from the parking lot into the hospice where Gwen lay dying. Huge beds of multicolored petunias and salvia circled the base of the building like a flowery moat and it pained him that Gwen, who appreciated creative design in all its forms, would never see it.

  He’d left her for an hour, just an hour, to spend a few precious minutes with their son whom he had neglected during the weeks spent sitting by Gwen’s bedside watching her slip away from him.

  “TJ needs you, too, Caleb,” Sada had told him. So he dragged himself away from Gwen.

  Gwen’s room was decorated to approximate a bedroom, with floor-to-ceiling draperies made from a satiny fabric the color of soothing teal, that blocked every trace of outdoor light when necessary, and faux Japanese screens, painted with ruby-throated hummingbirds, that were intended to hide the medical equipment that monitored Gwen’s vital signs and dispensed medicine to ease her pain.

  Many of Gwen’s personal items lay in evidence of her existence there—family photos, the little glass figurines she collected, music she’d never listen to, favorite books she would never read again.

  Caleb was a man who built things, fixed things, but he couldn’t fix this.

  Some mornings in those first few seconds upon waking he’d lie in bed, eyes closed, and think, “Thank God, it was just a nightmare,” until clarity dropped like a guillotine.

  He lowered himself into the chair by the bed, a big comfortable recliner, and sat poised on the edge of the seat. He swallowed the rising bile in his throat, held Gwen’s hand, and willed his own strength into her, knowing with preternatural intuition that he would lose her before the day ended.

  He brought her icy hand to his lips. Her frail chest rose and fell, shallow breaths coming farther and farther apart.

  The morphine and other drugs had kept her in and out of consciousness for days, so when she opened her eyes he held his breath. She smiled, the barest hint, and the sound of her voice destroyed him.

  “Been waiting for you,” she whispered. “Hold me in your lap, okay?”

  Cal looked at the tubes and wires, and panicked. What she wanted was an impossible request, yet how could he deny her anything? But, being a man who specialized in fixing and building, he shifted the architecture of medical monitor placement, moved this, untangled that, and when he lifted her into his arms, he handled her as if she were the finest of spun glass. He was so big, and she so breakable.

  He settled them into the cushy chair, helped her curl into him, and drew a blanket from the bed over both of them. Cal rubbed his cheek over the peach fuzz on her scalp. Chemo had caused alopecia and the hair was just beginning to grow back. He thought it ironic that her hair still grew when the rest of her body was shutting down. He breathed her in, lay his hand over her heart to feel it beat. And with each faint thump, each shallow breath, he wondered with sickening dread, is this her last? Is it this one? This one?

  He assumed she was off again in her morphine dreams but when he shifted to look at her face her eyes were open and watching him. And in that moment, like a miracle, she was his again.

  “I love you.” He told her what she already knew, desperate for her to hear the words and understand them before she drifted away from him again.

  “I know. I love you too. Listen, Cal, I need a promise.”

  “Anything.”

  “Promise that you’ll let me go, that you’ll build a happy life.”

  Cal stared at her. The words stuck in his throat.

  “Don’t be a jerk.” Her favorite phrase teased a pitiful smile from him. “Promise me.”

  And, for the first time in their life together, he told her a deliberate lie. “I will. I promise.” He choked on the words. “What about TJ? What do you want for him?”

  “If you keep your promise, TJ will have everything he needs.”

  She closed her eyes and settled into him, drifted off for the last time. They stayed like that for hours while the afternoon waned and evening fell. Cal listened to the lengthening spaces between her breaths, her heartbeats, until there were no more.

  The touch of Maddie’s hand seeking his jolted him back to the present. He considered all that had happened in his life that led him here to this place, this day, this time, this woman. He had struggled with the grief of losing Gwen, but he at least had TJ to bring him focus, TJ to remind him, every day, why he had to put one foot in front of the other. Maddie didn’t have that. It was no small wonder so much of her life revolved around Jack. Her heart had nowhere else to go.

  Cal brought Maddie’s hand to his mouth and kissed the back of it, then rubbed the inside of her wrist along his jaw, where the light brush of his stubble against her tender skin made her shiver and smile. He sat up and drew her with him, kept her hand in his.
<
br />   He wanted to tell her about his promise to Gwen, what happened, how it came about, why everything going on with the two of them, Caleb and Maddie, was so damned amazing and important and, hell, yes, miraculous. He’d spent the last three years making an effort to live, to do more than sleepwalk through his days, because of TJ, but in the end he’d still just been going through the motions. And now what he felt for Maddie was unexpected and wonderful, happening at the speed of light. The magnitude, the sheer aliveness of it, terrified him even as he reveled in it. He was feeling again.

  And if he told her all of that now, before she was ready to hear it, she’d flutter away like one of her fireflies. Yes, she was holding his hand, but she still held tight to Jack with her other one.

  So he measured his words. “I promised Gwen I’d build a happy life for TJ, and that means being careful who squeezes into our little circle. As it happens—” He leaned over and gave her a breezy kiss. “—there’s plenty of room for you.”

  “It took a long time to find those words, Caleb,” she said.

  “Are they the right ones?” He smiled, working to lighten the mood.

  “It’d be nice to know what you’re really thinking.”

  He had nothing to say to that, so he stood up and pulled her with him.

  They walked a little farther. The conversation strayed to music and movies, and then to books and food. They talked about Maddie’s “do-gooding” with the animal rescue group, about Cal’s long time bromance with Dante—”For the love of all that’s holy, why can’t you just say we’re friends?”—and Maddie’s BFF status with Brenna. They discussed politics, alcoholic beverages, Star Trek—fans—and Twilight—not. And by the time they circled back around to the gazebo, they were laughing and joking and, for more than the sake of provoking unabashed glee in Sada and Edie, holding hands.

  TJ ran up and Cal scooped him up. “Daddy! Where’dja go?”

  “Miss Maddie and I went for a walk.”

  “How come I couldn’t go?”

  “You were taking a nap with Grampa Boone. We didn’t want to disturb your rest. You want to be sure you can stay awake for the fireworks, right?”