Abby, Get Your Groom!

by Victoria Pade

  “The information was what we wanted,” Dylan said, as if he didn’t want Abby reminded any more than she already had been about how things had turned out for her.

  Or maybe it was something he didn’t want to think about himself.

  He wouldn’t have been the first man she’d met who felt that way.

  Then to her, he said, “Is there anything else you want to know, Abby?”

  “I don’t know what else to ask,” she answered.

  “Then maybe we should go.”

  “You can call me if there’s anything else that you think of. I pretty much told you all I know—we just worked together, me and young Gus. But could be I’d have an answer if there was something else you thought of.”

  “We appreciate that,” Dylan told him. “And thanks for seeing us today. For what you did tell us.”

  Dylan took a business card out of his pocket and handed it to the elderly man. “If there’s anything I can do for you, let me know.” He pointed his chin at the ragged lounger as he and Abby stood. “A new chair for starters—on the house—if you want one.”

  The old man grinned. “I might take you up on that! Can’t get this one to lean back anymore.”

  After making more inquiries into which of the Camden Superstores the former employee frequented, Dylan said, “I’ll call the furniture department there tonight. Go in whenever you’re ready and pick out what you want. I’ll leave word to have it delivered and set up for you. And anything else you need,” he said with a glance around at the retirement apartment that was not shabby but also not luxurious.

  Marty arduously got himself back to his feet to walk them to the door, telling them along the way how nice it was to have visitors, how pleased he was to meet them both and thanking Dylan in advance for the new chair he was in line for.

  Then Abby and Dylan were outside again, headed for the SUV.

  With more knowledge than they’d had before.

  And Abby unsure how she should feel about it all.

  But grateful that Dylan didn’t press her to talk and instead seemed to realize that she needed some space to just process it on her own.

  * * *

  After leaving their visit with Marty Sorensen, Abby and Dylan picked up the lockbox and some fast food for dinner. Then they went back to Abby’s apartment.

  While they ate burgers and fries at her small kitchen table, they used the key that Gus had sent through the prison chaplain to open the lockbox.

  There were no gold coins inside. No key to a safety deposit box full of diamonds. No will making Abby queen of a small country. No obvious treasures at all. Instead there were documents and photographs.

  One of the first things Abby took out was Gus Glassman’s driver’s license.

  Marty Sorensen was right, Gus had been a big man with a listed height of six feet five inches and a weight of two hundred and sixty-eight pounds.

  Abby studied the picture on the license the way she’d studied the newspaper photo that she’d found on the internet, but again no sense of familiarity came. She did note, though, that he didn’t look at all intimidating as he smiled for the camera in that particular picture. Instead, he looked like an amiable enough guy who wouldn’t hurt a fly.

  She handed the license to Dylan for him to see and took out a birth certificate.

  It took a moment before it sank in that it was hers.

  “Abby Nicole Glassman,” she read out loud. “Huh...” she said, trying the names on to see if they fit.

  But she’d always been Abby Crane. Plain Abby Crane. And that’s what felt right.

  “Does this mean I have to change everything to this name?” she wondered out loud.

  “I’m not sure. But I’d say that right now your legal name is Abby Crane, isn’t it?”

  “That’s on the birth certificate I’ve always used. It was issued when I went into the system.”

  “So it’s valid?”

  “It has an embossed stamp—I’ve been told that’s what makes it official.”

  “Then I’d say that if you wanted to add the Nicole and switch to Glassman you’d probably need to do that through a court.”

  “But I don’t have to.”

  “I can’t see why you would if you don’t want to. But I’d think that you should at least have the right date added for your birth.”

  Abby hadn’t thought to look at that part of the certificate and when she did Dylan leaned far enough sideways to see it, too.

  “You’re eleven days younger than you thought,” he said as if that were a positive.

  “I suppose I do need to use that,” she said, thinking how weird it was to have the birth date she’d always given be different now and repeating it in her head a few times to remember it.

  She set her original birth certificate aside and pulled out the rest of the documents in the box.

  There was another birth certificate, this one for Anna Lynn Doyle. Born January 3, 1953. And there was also another long-expired driver’s license for Anna Lynn Glassman.

  “Wow, that could be you,” Dylan marveled when they both looked at the picture on that license.

  He was right. It was like looking at a photograph of herself and that set off something in her. Some tiny sense of connection.

  “That has got to be your mother,” Dylan added.

  Anna Doyle had the same ultra-curly dark hair, the same round, nearly black eyes and the same fair skin. About the only difference was in the way she wore her hair—cut into a short cap the way Abby had been forced to wear hers before she was on her own.

  “Strange...” she said softly.

  After staring at it for a while Abby set it on top of the pile of other documents on the table.

  What came next in the lockbox were pictures galore—none of them in frames, all just loose in the box. And suddenly Abby found herself more curious and inclined to dive into them.

  But before she did, Dylan commented that there were dates and notations written on the backs of those that were facedown.

  “I’m finished with this burger, how about you?” he asked, glancing at the mostly eaten dinner they’d both been ignoring for some time.

  “I’ve had enough,” Abby answered.

  “Then how about you let me take these pictures over to your coffee table and organize them chronologically? Then you can look at them in order and get a feel for your timeline.”

  Abby liked that idea. So while she threw away the burger mess, Dylan took the lockbox and its contents into her tiny living room.

  He had all the pictures in one stack for her when she joined him.

  The lockbox was on the floor by then, leaving the coffee table free. Abby sat close beside Dylan on the sofa where they both perched forward to look at the photographs together.

  Then she took the first one on top of the stack.

  “Oh,” she breathed the word in pure reflex when what she was seeing hit her.

  It was an ordinary photograph of a woman sitting up in a hospital bed, dressed in a hospital gown, holding a swaddled newborn—a mother looking down at the infant she’d just given birth to.

  And that infant was Abby.

  She’d had a head full of curls right from the start. And rosy-red, full round cheeks. And there was enough of a resemblance even then to stamp her as the child of the woman holding her. A woman smiling, with happy tears glistening in her eyes as she gazed adoringly at her new daughter.

  This was not anything Abby had ever imagined or fantasized or dreamed of. It was nothing flashy or glitzy. Yet in its simplicity, in the pure commonplaceness of a mother holding the baby she’d just met, Abby finally began to feel as if this might be real.

  Very quietly, as if he knew things were beginning to get to her, Dylan said, “On the back is the nam
e of the hospital where you were born. It’s the hospital Gus left you in—maybe he thought by bringing you back there, you’d be safe.”

  And possibly happy, too, because of the happiness that the young couple had shared there that day, Abby thought when she read the writing on the back. She set the picture on the coffee table and discovered underneath it a second shot much like the first, except that it added the Gus Glassman of the driver’s license to the scene. He was also on the hospital bed, his long arms around both mother and child as he beamed down at them.

  A lump formed in Abby’s throat but she swallowed it.

  She and Dylan went through all of the photographs one by one from there, reading what was written on the backs, and laying them out together on the coffee table.

  The pictures chronicled the first two years of her life. There were more from the time when her mother must still have been alive, and among those there were many of her with her mother or with her father, either or both of them holding her or looking on.

  There did seem to be a gap between when she was about three months old and when she was possibly six or seven months old, and after that it was Abby alone in all the pictures. But it was apparent that she’d been adored, as dozens of tiny events were memorialized, and whenever either or both of her parents were in the shot she could see the love and laughter and pride emanating from them.

  “There’s a VHS tape in the lockbox,” Dylan said when they’d finished with the photographs. “I can take it to our tech guys and have it transferred to—”

  “I have a VHS machine,” Abby told him. Yes, they were outdated, but on her budget nothing got replaced until it broke. Likely not a concept that a Camden would understand.

  Dylan took the tape from the lockbox and handed it to her. “Should I go? Would you rather watch it on your own?” he asked.

  “No, it’s okay,” she said without telling him how much his being there with her through this helped. He was just supportive enough without smothering her. He seemed to know exactly when to give her a moment to herself, a little time and silence to study a photograph. Exactly when to crack a gentle joke or point out to her some telling detail that she was overlooking.

  And, for some reason, his perspective, his easy acceptance of what they were seeing as her life, her family, also helped her to begin to accept it as real.

  There wasn’t much on the videotape. It was a recording of her homecoming from the hospital and then a touching scene of Gus sitting with her in a rocking chair, feeding her a late-night bottle and talking to her about all the things he was going to teach her and how he wouldn’t ever let anyone or anything hurt her.

  And it was that that brought back the lump in Abby’s throat and tears to her eyes to go along with it.

  She fought hard to keep from crying. To her, tears were a sign of weakness that she’d spent a lifetime suppressing.

  But there she was, with that videotape playing right in front of her and the man who was her father holding her, feeding her, saying things to her that she’d always longed to hear a father say to her, and nothing she did stopped the tears from rolling down her face.

  Dylan didn’t say a word. He just put his arms around her, pulled her against his big, hard chest and held her there, a safe haven for a meltdown that came out of pure, raw emotions that suddenly couldn’t be contained.

  There was no sobbing, only silent tears that coursed down her face while she was cocooned in the warmth of those arms, her head against the rock wall of pectorals that felt strong and powerful enough to protect her from the world.

  And no amount of telling herself to stop, to push out of those arms, to reject the solace he was giving her, could make her do it. Instead she stayed where she was, accepting the kind of comfort that was rare to her.

  But she wasn’t used to being that vulnerable and emotionally exposed, and she fought to stop the tears. Once she’d succeeded, she eased herself away from him.

  “I’m sorry. That was dumb,” she apologized.

  Embarrassed, she stood and went to her bathroom for a tissue that she used to mop herself up in a hurry before coming back to the living room and immediately turning off the television.

  “It’s me who’s sorry,” Dylan said, somehow making it easier for her as she rejoined him on the sofa. “Losing your mom was destiny, I guess, but I’m sorry for the part my family had in costing you the dad who obviously loved you a lot.”

  She almost cried again, but this time years of experience at not showing or giving in to how she felt kicked in to stop it.

  “Yeah, I think he did,” she said softly, her voice cracking despite her efforts. “And he didn’t seem like what I thought he was.”

  “A bad guy,” Dylan filled in.

  “How could he be like he was with me and then do what he did for a job?”

  “I know it’s hard to reconcile. Believe me, I know.” He’d already told her that he’d had to learn to separate the men he’d known as loving family from the kind of people they were to outsiders. “But I can’t imagine—especially after seeing these pictures and that video—that leaving you didn’t just tear that guy apart,” he added.

  The tears threatened yet again because Abby couldn’t imagine that, either. Not now.

  “And believe me when I tell you,” Dylan added, “that had GiGi known that a two-year-old was being left the way you were—by even just someone who was an employee, let alone that anyone in the family had had anything to do with that child being fatherless—she would never have let it happen.”

  “So I might have ended up your foster sister?” Abby somehow found the wherewithal to joke.

  “Or maybe Margaret and Louie would have ended up with an adopted daughter of their own,” he suggested.

  “And we would have grown up like brother and sister.”

  He laughed. “Who knows?” he allowed.

  Their eyes were locked for a moment and Abby wondered if he was thinking what she was—that she was glad they hadn’t grown up in any situation that would have resembled a sibling relationship.

  But regardless of what he was thinking, out of that momentary silence he drew a deep breath, sighed, and said, “It’s getting late and I should let you sleep on all of this.”

  It was late by then and she had a morning full of errands before the afternoon and evening doing the trial run for his sister’s wedding.

  And somehow it helped her feel more in control again to be able to deny herself the extra time with him that she still wanted.

  So, when he stood to go, she walked him to her door.

  “Thanks for all you did—finding Marty Sorensen and taking me to meet him and getting the lockbox.” And for tonight when he’d weathered so smoothly her open emotions and brought to it all such a perfect combination of comfort and compassion and humor to help her wade through it.

  But that was more than Abby could say.

  “It was nothing. I was glad to do it,” he said, deflecting her gratitude as he stopped at her apartment door and turned to face her.

  He reached a hand to her upper arm and squeezed, sending something warm and glittery all through her. “Are you okay? Will you be okay if I go?”

  It almost seemed as if he wanted her to say she wouldn’t, that he wanted her to ask him to stay.

  And, heaven help her, she wanted to.

  But only because of how much she liked being with him. She was accustomed to taking care of herself no matter what the circumstances.

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I’ll be fine. I just have to let everything sink in. And remember a new birthday...”

  He squeezed her arm again, looking down into her eyes as if searching for a sign that she really would be all right. And that caring, too, was something unfamiliar to her.

  Unfamiliar and so sweet and so appealing as well as un
usually tempting to her.

  Then, when she wasn’t thinking at all about anything beyond that, he leaned over and kissed her. Just briefly. Just a brush of his lips to hers.

  Yet it was still enough for sparks to erupt in Abby to top off an evening that had already been intensely emotional.

  Then it was over, and he straightened up and all she could think was that she wanted him to do it again.

  But he didn’t. He smiled a small smile that said that kiss might have somehow taken him a little by surprise, too, and said, “If you need anything—anything—even just to talk about today, call me. Three in the morning—it doesn’t matter.”

  Abby nodded, thinking that he didn’t know that that was not something she would ever do, but appreciating the offer and the fact that he genuinely seemed willing to be her middle-of-the-night sounding board if she needed one.

  “I’ll see you tomorrow,” he said then.

  “To be our guard at the gate while we do girlie things,” she quipped.

  He smiled, and out of the blue he kissed her again—much like the first time, so lightly that his lips were barely touching hers.

  Yet it was enough to infuse her with even more confusing feelings when her response was the inclination to fling herself against that big chest of his again and have his arms around her the way they’d been when she was crying.

  But she kept a tight hold over those desires and merely stood there, doing nothing more than tipping her chin up to access and return that simple little kiss before it ended, too.

  Dylan said good-night then and she let him out, firmly closing the door behind him before she turned back to that lockbox, those pictures and that videotape.

  Only instead of thinking about any of those, it was still Dylan who was on her mind.

  Leaving her wondering why, in a long history of keeping all but two people at arm’s length, she couldn’t seem to keep this guy—of all guys—at least that far away.

  Why, even knowing better, it was so impossible for her to want to...

  Chapter Six