“I know. I—”
“Her son gets hurt, it’s one of the worst moments in a mother’s life, and what did you do? You abandoned her. You walked away just when she needed you.”
Brett didn’t feel like defending himself to Sharon’s friend, but he couldn’t let her accusations go unchallenged—especially since they contained more than a few grains of truth. “I walked away because I was the last person she needed,” he said.
Deborah sniffed cynically. “Things get tough, and some men disappear. Sharon needs a man who isn’t going to disappear on her. We all do,” she added under her breath, then glanced behind her at her daughter, now shrieking in ecstasy as her father gave her a piggyback ride. Sniffing again, Deborah turned back to Brett.
“Do you know when Sharon will be back?” he asked.
“Did she know when you’d be back?” Deborah retorted.
He sighed. As much as the woman exasperated him, he admired her. She was a loyal friend to Sharon. He wanted Sharon to have someone like Deborah in her corner.
And maybe she was right. Maybe he didn’t deserve another chance with Sharon. He’d blown it not once but twice, first by letting Max get hurt and then by abandoning her, as Deborah said. Whether or not he was the reason things had gotten tough for Sharon, he’d disappeared when she’d needed someone to remain with her, to provide support and reassurance and love.
He couldn’t refute Deborah. Whatever defense he might have had crumbled beneath her condemnation.
He nodded, muttered, “Thanks,” and stalked down to his car. He wished he wasn’t the kind of man who disappeared. But he was honest enough to acknowledge the possibility that he was.
* * *
About midway through the birthday party, Sharon ducked into the bathroom and downed four aspirin. She’d had a pretty good idea how much hullabaloo six two- and three-year-olds could produce, even when their mothers were present to keep them calm. “London Bridges” had disintegrated after five minutes. A sing-along had lasted maybe eight. The children were too excited to sit still for cake; they’d plundered the sheet cake Sharon had baked last night, and then romped off, leaving the kitchen table and floor littered in golden crumbs and smears of chocolate frosting.
The mothers were not as much help as Sharon had hoped. To them, Max’s birthday party was an opportunity to schmooze with other mothers. They sipped the coffee Sharon had brewed for them, issued occasional reprimands to their children, and then resumed their conversations about potty training and flash cards and the rumor that one of their children’s classmates at the Children’s Garden Preschool was still being breastfed at three and a half years of age.
Of all the mothers, only Deborah was actually making an effort to help Sharon maintain order. She marshaled the children in and out of activities and scolded a youngster she saw pushing another guest in a tussle over a balloon. She made sure the mothers got unmangled pieces of cake once the children had departed from the kitchen. While Sharon organized the kids in an overly giggly game that had them pretending to be different animals, Deborah quietly gathered up some of the toys the children had strewn across the playroom floor.
Sharon was more grateful for Deborah’s assistance than she could say. To have to host Max’s birthday party after the worst two weeks of her life was bad timing, to say the least.
The worst two weeks of her life? No, that wasn’t true. Even as she arranged the children into a line for a simple game of “Simon Says,” her mind wandered back through the long days after Max’s accident and Brett’s desertion. Surely she’d been through worse, hadn’t she? What about when Steve had died?
Max hadn’t been born yet when she’d lost Steve. And she’d been too inexperienced to realize how difficult the job of raising a newborn alone would be. And Steve... of course she’d loved him. But she’d also been furious with him for being so stupid, so reckless on the ski slope. That anger had gotten her through the dark days.
Brett’s departure from her life didn’t anger her. It left her sad, regretful, wishing there was some way he could escape the ties that tethered him to his past.
“Simon Says, touch your nose,” she said slowly. Olivia was the first to find her nose. One little boy had to think a minute, but eventually he remembered where his nose was. “Great! Simon Says, touch your ear.” Amid bubbly laughter, the children all touched an ear. “Okay. Touch your other ear.” All of them obeyed. “Oops—you’re all out,” she said, then laughed to assure them no one was going to lose this game.
Except, perhaps, “Simon” herself. The aspirin hadn’t diminished her headache. Her watch told her the party still had fifteen minutes to go. And once the children were gone, she was going to have to hose down the kitchen, steam-shovel the playroom and remove Max from the ceiling, where he might just wind up, given how bouncy he was.
“Simon Says, jump up and down,” she said, foolishly hoping she might coax the kids into burning off some of their excess energy. They jumped—and shrieked, just for the hell of it. “Simon Says stop jumping up and down!” she shouted above the din. They stopped, out of breath and giggling. “Start jumping again.” Three children jumped, and all the children dissolved in wild laughter. They flopped onto the floor, guffawed so hard they burped, screeched each other’s names and gasped at the hilarity of it all.
She checked her watch again. Twelve minutes before this would be over.
“Sharon?” one of the mothers called from the living room. “There’s a man at the door.”
“You want me to get it?” Deborah offered. “It’s probably Raymond.”
“Sure.” The one bright spot in her otherwise worst two weeks had been the first tender buds of reconciliation sprouting between Deborah and Raymond. He’d been so diligent and devoted, phoning every night, stopping by to see if she needed anything, bringing her car to the shop for its tune-up. “I’ve talked to him more in the past week than I did in the six months before we separated,” she’d confided to Sharon just that morning. “He’s part of our lives again. All those months when he was always traveling with work, putting in the hours and not even bothering to phone home—he wasn’t in our lives then. He is now.”
Sharon was thrilled for Deborah, and for Olivia, too. Children needed fathers.
Her gaze followed Deborah up the stairs, then came to rest on her own son surrounded by his playmates on the carpeted floor, all of them convulsed with hysterical laughter. He needed a father, and she’d hoped... Damn it, she needed a partner as much as Max needed a father. Not because she couldn’t cope on her own, not because she couldn’t support herself and her son. She could. She’d been doing it for three long years.
But she wanted someone by her side. Someone to lean on, to talk to, to share with. Someone she trusted. Someone honest and smart, someone who knew himself and didn’t have to prove anything to anyone.
“Hi.” A male voice she recognized too well reached her through the hubbub.
She spun around to see Brett descending the stairs, a gift-wrapped box in one hand.
What was he doing here? She hadn’t invited him to Max’s party.
Silly thought. She would never have invited him. She understood that a children’s birthday party would likely be his definition of hell. All the ruckus, the clutter, the high-decibel revelry. All those little bodies darting around the room, throwing soft foam balls and balloons and broken pretzels at one another. It was her concept of hell—or it would be if Max didn’t appear to be having the time of his life.
He was in the thick of the pretzel battle, flinging crumbs in all directions. Shuddering, Sharon backed toward the stairs and figured she would attack the room with her vacuum cleaner later. Scrubbing the place would be easier than asking the children to stop throwing snacks.
Brett gave her a shy smile and handed her the package. “This is for Max, but he seems otherwise occupied.”
She cringed as a blizzard of pretzel crumbs flew through the air. And cringed again at the realization that Brett had sto
pped by only to drop off a present. How he’d even known it was Max’s birthday she couldn’t guess, but his generosity was counterproductive, raising expectations where she ought to have none.
However, she knew her manners. “Thank you,” she said. “It wasn’t necessary.”
He shrugged, then ventured further into the room. “Hey,” he said, quietly but firmly enough to attract the children’s attention. “No more throwing pretzels.”
One little boy tested Brett by tossing the pretzel in his hand.
“I said no more.” Brett lifted the bowl of pretzels out of the children’s reach and placed it on a high shelf. This gesture was met with stunned silence.
Sharon held her breath, unsure of whether he was going to yell at the children—or lead them in another game. He did neither. He simply met their stares.
She checked her watch again and cleared her throat. “I think it’s time for everyone to say good-bye now,” she announced, too bewildered by Brett’s presence to sound pleased that the party was reaching its end. “I’ve got goodie bags for all of you, so let’s go upstairs now.”
It took another ten minutes for the children to pair up with their mothers, receive their bags of treats and toys, recite the appropriate thank-you’s and bye-bye’s and clear out.
Deborah and Olivia lingered after all the other children and mothers were gone. Olivia and Max hunkered down to examine one of the presents he’d received at the party—a pair of plastic roller-skates designed to clamp onto his shoes. The thought of her little boy, his chin and knees bearing fresh scars from his recent accident, roller-skating petrified Sharon. But she had to let him learn to skate. Someday, heaven help her, he’d probably want to learn to ski, too.
“How are you doing?” Deborah asked, stacking the empty paper coffee cups the other mothers had left in the living room. “You want me to stick around?” She shot a discreet glance in Brett’s direction. He stood at the top of the stairs, staring down into the playroom with an expression bordering on horror.
“I’ll be fine,” she said, not sure she meant it.
“Okay.” She handed the stack of cups to Sharon and called to her daughter. “Livie? Time to go home.”
“It’s a roller-skate,” Olivia announced.
“That’s right.”
“I want a roller-skate.”
“We’ll see.” Deborah exchanged a look with Sharon, half sympathy and half exasperation. “It was a great party, really.”
“Uh-huh.” Sharon smiled wearily.
“I mean it. No tears, no bloodshed. What more could you ask for? Come on, sweetie,” she called to Olivia. “It’s time to go home.”
Olivia took her mother’s hand and gripped her goodie bag tightly. “Is Daddy home?”
“He’s coming over in a little while.” Deborah peered over her shoulder. “Call me,” she murmured, then shot Brett another look.
Before Sharon could respond, they were out the door. Max pushed his new roller-skates across the floor as if they were toy cars. Brett still hovered at the top of the stairs.
She didn’t know what to say. She was still holding the stack of cups, and disorder awaited her everywhere she looked, so she stated the obvious. “I’ve got some cleaning up to do.”
“Can I give Max his present?”
“Of course.” She felt out of whack, out of sync. She’d just endured ninety minutes of mayhem after two weeks of heartbreak. Her son was three years old. Two weeks ago, he could have died, but instead he’d just celebrated his third birthday.
And the man who’d rushed him to the hospital and gotten him the medical attention he’d needed, the man who believed the accident had been his fault, was now in her home.
She escaped into the kitchen—another scene of demolition. Let Brett do what he’d come to do, for whatever reason he’d come to do it. She was in no condition to figure out what he was up to.
She heard a blare of sound—Max’s exuberant hoot. “Wow! Mommy, Mommy, look!” he bellowed, clomping up the stairs and into the kitchen. She didn’t want him to enter; the floor was covered with smashed bits of cake and gooey dribbles of melted ice cream. But she couldn’t stand in the way of his excitement as he charged into the room, holding a bright red toy fire engine. “Look, Mommy! It makes noise!” He demonstrated by pressing a button, which caused a siren to sound. “And look at this!” Another button caused the red light on the plastic roof of the truck to flash. He pressed the siren button again, and released a peal of laughter. “Look, Mommy!”
She forced a smile, but wondered why Brett would have bought such a clamorous toy for her son. Probably because he was planning to run away again, leaving her to suffer through the noise alone.
“Did you say thank you to Brett?”
“Thank you,” Max recited, even though Brett wasn’t in the room. Then he dropped to his hands and knees and started to push the fire engine across the floor.
“Not in here, Max. The floor is filthy. Go play in the living room, honey.”
“Okay.” He pressed the siren button and grinned, as if the sound was his favorite lullaby. It echoed in Sharon’s head, undermining any effect the aspirin might have had.
Brett took Max’s place in the doorway. “Wow,” he said, gaping at the torn napkins, the bent paper plates, the singed birthday candles on the counter by the sink, the soggy paper tablecloth with “Happy Birthday” printed on it in primary colors. “It looks like a war zone.”
“That’s what it feels like, too.” She tossed all the plates into the center of the table and lifted the edges of the tablecloth, gathering it into one large, lumpy bundle of trash.
Brett picked a careful path through the crumbs, plastic forks and smears of icing until he reached the table. He helped Sharon lift the bundle of garbage from the table, then carried it to the trashcan. His face was intent, his mouth set in a line of concentration. From the living room came the whine of the fire engine.
“Why are you here, Brett?” she asked.
He turned from the trashcan, almost took a step and then caught himself and detoured around the small mound of cake he’d nearly ground with his shoe. He gazed at her, his face softening slightly, hinting at a smile. “The short answer is, I love you.”
She sank into the nearest chair, momentarily overcome. She’d had two weeks without a word from him. He’d left her with nothing but his insistence that he had somehow caused Max’s injuries and that she was better off without him. In the intervening time, she’d submitted her portfolio to the city’s birthday committee, snapped countless portraits of anxious high school seniors, spent her evenings with Max and her nights alone, wondering why Brett’s absence hurt so much, why she missed him so crazily, how he’d managed to insinuate himself so deeply into her heart.
She’d invited six of Max’s classmates from the Children’s Garden Preschool to his birthday party. She’d bought all these colorful plates and napkins, baked a cake, and barely survived an hour and a half of pandemonium.
And now Brett was standing in her kitchen—actually, pulling the broom and dustpan from the closet and setting to work sweeping up the bits of food on the floor—and declaring that he loved her.
He’d claimed that was the short answer. “I think I need the long answer,” she said.
He kept sweeping, dutifully cleaning up a mess others had made. “I missed you, Sharon. I missed...” He sighed, then knelt down and pried a sticky bit of frosting from the floor tiles. “I missed talking to you, and watching you work, and looking at you. And having sex with you. I just—I kept telling myself I was doing you a favor by staying out of your life. I thought it would be better for you.” He smiled wryly. “But it wasn’t better for me.”
“Because you missed having sex with me.” Not that she’d minimize the importance of that. She’d missed having sex with him, too. She’d missed it a lot.
“I kept attending the Daddy School,” he admitted, surprising her. “I couldn’t seem to give that up. And that made me realize I c
ouldn’t give you up, either.”
“Brett.” She noticed dampness on the table from where spilled milk had seeped through the tablecloth. A discarded napkin lay within reach on the counter, and she used it to blot up the moisture. “It doesn’t matter whether you can give me up or not. I’m a mother. I’ve got a son. That’s not going to change.”
“I know.” He sighed again, apparently in resignation. “I don’t like having Max in my face all the time. I don’t like when he whines. I don’t like having to deal with his diapers—or having to clean up after his party,” he added, using the broom’s bristles to create a rather impressive heap of crumbs and dirt at the center of the floor. “I bet you don’t like those things either—but they don’t stop you from loving him.”
“Of course I love him,” Sharon confirmed. “I’m his mother. You don’t have to love him, though. You’re not his father.”
“He needs a father.” Brett propped the broom against the counter and stared directly at Sharon. “I lost my father. I know what that’s like. Max needs a father.”
“But you don’t want to be somebody’s dad,” she reminded him.
“Why don’t I?” He lifted the dustpan, fiddled with it for a moment and set it back down. “Because I don’t want to get stuck with the hard parts of the job? No one wants to get stuck with that. Big deal. Not wanting to lose half my soul to a kid is normal. It makes me like a million other fathers. And mothers, too. None of us wants to do the hard stuff. But it needs to get done, so we do it.” He reached for the broom again.
“How did you know it was Max’s birthday?”
“I was here last week. You and Max weren’t home, but your neighbor saw me. Deborah. She told me. Actually, it was her daughter who spilled the beans.”
“Then why didn’t you call? Why did you just show up without warning?”
He stopped sweeping and stared at her again. “Do you think this was an easy decision for me? Admitting that I love you enough to make room for Max in my heart?”
Heart Stealers Page 69
