by Jodi Thomas
Blaine turned her attention back to the door as she heard voices.
“She’s somebody—” a voice drifted through the crack in the door “—important, I bet.”
“So what’s she doing downtown at a women’s free clinic?” another more twangy voice asked. “They said she wouldn’t tell the nurse at the desk anything but that she needed to see a doctor.”
Blaine moved closer to the door, knowing that if she let them shut her inside the room she would be alone with her problem and the worry might overwhelm her once more. If she really was pregnant, she wasn’t sure how she’d deal with carrying a child knowing her husband didn’t want one.
“In a remarkably moving story, Thomas examines these very different lives and creates characters readers truly care about.”
—Romantic Times on
The Widows of Wichita County
Also by JODI THOMAS
THE WIDOWS OF WICHITA COUNTY
JODI THOMAS
FINDING MARY BLAINE
Contents
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
One
Blaine Anderson pulled the linen drape away from a wall of windows in her bedroom. A chill brushed over her, soft as breath. Early spring hesitated, she thought, waiting for the last exhale of winter, just as she always hesitated, waiting to live.
She’d learned long ago that with any joy came the knowledge it wouldn’t last. Before she’d started school, her parents gave her birthday parties. First came the excitement with the gifts, friends attending, and the cake with candles, then came the fights her parents always had afterward. Blaine quickly learned the lesson. With the highs came the lows.
She looked out over the waking city of Austin. The warmth of the newborn sun couldn’t burn away the chill she felt floating on the air. Like an invisible cloud, change drifted near. But Blaine wasn’t a warrior who’d ride out to face it. She was a coward who’d hide and hope it wouldn’t find her nestled into the urban hills of her hometown.
She always liked the way Austin, Texas, welcomed spring’s anticipation—like an aging adolescent who clings to his music long after the days of high school are gone.
Blaine stared out from the third-floor balcony of their town house. She loved the rolling hills, the blending of new and old. A college town. The state capital. A small town stretched into a metropolis where power and politics danced while history and promise played.
A part of Blaine wished she could be Rapunzel hiding away in a tower, letting only her love climb up. Crowds frightened her. Even the traffic set her nerves on edge. If she’d had her choice, she’d have been a small-town librarian not a big-city archivist. She would have worked with children, stocked books and spent her days curled into a chair reading, not doing research for companies who would probably never read her reports.
But Mark’s work was here and, in truth, he’d blown their budget to buy a town house with balconies and garden space so she wouldn’t feel cramped. The place, though part of a huge complex, was quiet and gated for security. Normally, Blaine found peace here, but the past few weeks hadn’t been quite normal with morning runs to the bathroom and restless nights of worry. It was time to face her fears. This was one problem she couldn’t simply ignore until it went away.
Something was wrong deep inside her and she’d have to go out to find answers.
Her smile didn’t reach her eyes as she thought of how people in general frightened her but having to share her worries with strangers bordered on terrifying. Except for marrying Mark, she felt as if she’d lived alone all her life. Her mother, once Blaine’s father left, had worked nights. By grade school, Blaine let herself in every afternoon, made her own dinner and only rolled over in bed when she heard her mother come home around midnight. She often sat her dolls at the kitchen table so she wouldn’t have to eat alone.
Blaine crossed to the dresser and lifted her keys, then glanced back, making sure everything in the room was in order. Perfect. Every room of her house was a showroom of modern design and contemporary art.
Blaine walked down the stairs thinking that living with Mark was probably the closest thing to living alone. Most days she felt as though she had all the advantages of a husband with little of the bother. Even from the first, they’d both respected one another’s privacy. Both only children, raised by almost absent parents, they’d fit perfectly as a match.
She heard the shower as she walked past the spare bedroom where he’d been sleeping while working nights. No matter how late he worked, Mark rose at dawn and ran two miles before getting ready for work. He was a man of order, no highs or lows in his nature. Even the dining-room table, now covered with his work, had an order about it.
When she crossed to the kitchen, she knew his juice glass waited in the sink for her to move it to the dishwasher. In the ten years they’d been married, the details of their life had settled into a balance. If Mark decided to run for an office on the Railroad Commission, there would be another shifting. She’d have to accompany him more in public, maybe even do a little entertaining, but he’d promised, win or lose, they’d take a long vacation after the election and when they returned, he’d make any transition seamless, if possible.
Blaine loved that Mark was so driven by goals. She was proud of him. It hadn’t been easy for a kid from a town the size of a dust spot on the map, with a career-drunk father, to climb all the way to partner in one of the most powerful law firms in Austin. She loved listening to his plans, watching his dreams unfold.
Blaine could never be a dreamer. She was a watcher of people and of life. The players like Mark had to have an audience. He needed someone in his corner, someone he could count on, and she loved being that person even though he seldom looked back. But they both knew, when he did, she’d be standing right there.
As she crossed to the sink, she stumbled over Tres. The huge old calico pushed her foot with one paw and rolled over.
“’Morning.” Blaine knelt to scratch the cat’s ears. “Found a new place to get in the way?” It had been a constant amazement to Blaine how the cat never managed to sleep in any of the baskets she’d bought for her. “Glad you weren’t here when Papa came by or he might have flattened you into a rug.”
Tres purred. Blaine smiled thinking of how Mark hated being called the cat’s papa. He’d complained about the animal since she’d brought Tres home six years ago. The kitten had been half-starved, living behind a Dumpster in the alley near work. For the first few months Mark swore she’d brought home a rat. Even now, he didn’t quite get the
concept that one lives with a cat, never owns one.
Tres, for a trash-eating kitten, had quickly become a very particular cat. She only ate her cat food if Blaine scrambled an egg with bacon bits and mixed it in with the food. Blaine knew she spoiled the animal, but with the help of the microwave she could have Tres’s breakfast ready within a few minutes.
Grabbing an egg she bumped the refrigerator door closed with her hip and reached for the cat-food box in the broom closet. She always scrambled the egg in an old blue bowl that didn’t match any set of dishes. It took the microwave heat well and Blaine told herself blue was Tres’s favorite color.
She smiled, thinking of how she had to bite her lip when Mark pulled the same bowl from the cabinet for midnight ice cream. If he’d never noticed it was Tres’s breakfast bowl, she wasn’t about to tell him.
When she straightened from serving the cat food, she took the pen lying beside the phone and scribbled out a note to Mark. For a long moment, she stared at it, wondering if she should have said less…or maybe more.
She could feel the invisible balance of their life together shifting. One piece of paper, not even an ounce in weight, might sway the scales. The ideal life. The perfect couple. After this day it all might crumble.
She dropped the note beside Mark’s keys, grabbed her jacket and ran out, suddenly in a hurry to turn over the hand fate dealt her.
Two
Blaine stared at her reflection in the window of the private waiting area. An automatic sprinkler outside the clinic had hopelessly streaked the glass, blurring the view and whitewashing her likeness into a ghost. Not quite there, not quite gone.
The effort from fighting the morning traffic into downtown only added to the feeling of panic she tried to ignore. But she could no longer walk around the problem, watching it grow even as she ignored it.
Placing her hand on the sill, she wished the spring’s warmth could somehow pass into her. She felt frozen inside. The bleak kind of cold folks get when they forget to care if they live or die. Her mother’s words from years ago drifted back to Blaine, “You’ll never be anything but a little mouse, Mary Blaine. You’re a mouse of a girl and you’ll be a mouse of a woman.”
Once, her mother had even told her that Blaine had been the reason her father left. “No one can love the weak,” she’d shouted. “Folks only tolerate the meek.” Yet when her mother raged, Blaine always hid, never facing her, proving her mother right.
Blaine pressed her hand against the glass, needing bravery now to face what the doctor might tell her today…what she’d have to tell Mark tonight. Her mother was wrong, she thought, I’ve just been storing up courage all my life.
The alley view did nothing to ease the sorrow lodged in her soul. Rusty Dumpsters, trash, worthless boxes, wooden crates. An old tin shed ran along by the alley too rickety to hold more than lawn equipment and looking as out of place among the brick buildings as Blaine felt she did in the free clinic. At thirty-two, she looked as if she could still be in her mid-twenties, but panic rapidly aged her toward senility today. After ten years of calm, trouble had found her. It grew inside her even as she denied it.
She watched a man carrying a brown paper grocery bag stroll into the shed. He came out a moment later and looked around, then disappeared once more.
Blaine turned her attention back to the door as she heard voices.
“She’s somebody,” a voice drifted through the crack in the door. “Important, I bet.”
“So what’s she doing downtown at a women’s free clinic?” Another, more twangy, voice asked. “They said she wouldn’t tell the nurse at the desk anything but that she needed to see a doctor.”
Blaine moved closer to the door, knowing that if she let them shut her inside the room, she would be alone with her problem and the worry might overwhelm her once more. If she really was pregnant, she wasn’t sure how she’d deal with carrying a child knowing her husband didn’t want one.
Mark had his plan. She wasn’t sure she could face him and kill his dream. Children were a someday goal to Mark. He’d had to live with the burden of being an unwanted child and he’d sworn many times that he’d rather have no children than bring one unplanned into the world. He still had the belt scars across one shoulder where his father beat him while swearing that Mark’s birth had ruined his life.
“I don’t know why she’s here, but she’s rich.” The first young woman’s whispered tone traveled from the hallway. “Maybe she’s checking us out, planning to do volunteer work or make a sizable donation. It wouldn’t be the first time. Just ’cause we don’t see them, don’t mean Austin ain’t full of folks with deep pockets. Some might want to help.”
Glancing through the slit in the door, Blaine noticed two women wearing white standing a few feet away. Their backs were turned to her, but they both seemed young and as thin as she fought to stay.
A baby would change her thinness. Blaine touched her waist. A baby would change everything. Mark might never leave her, but she hated the thought of him staying and resenting her. How many times in their marriage had he questioned whether anyone should bring new life into what he always called “this mad world”?
“You notice her clothes?” One girl giggled from just beyond Blaine’s door. “She’s wearing a month’s pay. I’d die for an outfit like that. It’s classic.”
Blaine grinned, thinking she’d worn her plainest, oldest pantsuit today. Both her shirt and trousers were baggy, holdovers from ten pounds ago before she’d dieted from slim to fashionably thin. She wanted to pass unnoticed through the doors of the clinic, hoping to have questions answered and tests run before she talked to her husband. She wished she could circle unnoticed through life for a while, but she had not even made it through a clinic without people talking about her.
The door opened and the voice had a face. “Excuse me.” A young woman entered, dressed like a nurse, but Blaine would bet there was no degree behind the uniform.
“You’ll need to put these on.” She held out a gown and paper slippers while she leaned her head toward a corner of the room that had been blocked off by what looked like an old shower curtain. “And we’ll have to ask you to take off all your jewelry. I’m not sure what kind of tests the doctor will want to run.”
Blaine slipped the wedding rings from her left finger as though removing a trinket and not thousands of dollars’ worth of gold. “Would you keep these safe?” she asked the girl, knowing her chances of walking out with the rings were better if she gave them to an employee. “Sindi?” Blaine read the name tag dangling from the girl’s waist.
“Sure.” The girl slipped the ring into her vest pocket. “My desk is just next door. I won’t let them out of my sight.” She seemed pleased Blaine trusted her. “I’ll put your coat at my station too, if you like. Things have a way of walking off around this place.”
Blaine handed the girl her fur-trimmed jacket, made more to show off the highlights of her hair than for any warmth. She couldn’t help but notice Sindi naturally had almost the same color curls, brushing her shoulders just as Blaine’s did. Blaine no longer remembered her natural color. It had been almost twenty years since she had first bleached her hair and began her journey to become someone else.
“Bet your husband will want you coming home with this.” The girl petted the coat as if it were alive.
Blaine wanted to answer that she was not sure he would notice if she came home at all. He had paid little attention when she ordered the fur, only saying “Happy Birthday” while he wrote the check. That had been the week he’d argued his first case before the Texas Supreme Court. He’d rambled on about his strategy all through her birthday dinner.
She realized Mark never asked about her hair color. The transformation had been complete by the time she met him in college. For all she knew, he thought her a blonde. They’d both gotten what they wanted that May. He’d been accepted to law school and she’d slipped on his engagement ring. The only comment she could ever remember him making came the
night he asked her to marry him. He’d said something about her being a knockout blonde who wasn’t saddled with any kids and that spelled perfection in his book.
Shouts rumbled from somewhere down the hallway.
“I’ll be right back.” The girl’s blue eyes danced with excitement. “Go ahead and change. Remember, the gown opens in the front. It’ll be a while before a doctor will get to you. We’re running short-staffed today. Half the town’s out with the flu and it hit us extra hard this week. Seems like everyone with kids called in sick. I guess I’m lucky to live alone and have no one passing germs to me.”
Yelling echoed into the room once more.
“Is something wrong?” Blaine couldn’t make out words from the angry voices. They came from the crowded waiting room where she’d sat for over an hour trying not to touch anything.
“No. We can handle it. Being short-staffed is nothing new.” Sindi wrinkled her eyebrows. “Oh, you mean about the noise. Probably just someone upset over waiting. Or a drunk or someone high on drugs wanting meds. The doctors don’t like to call the cops unless we have to. Usually with the police comes the press and with all the nuts out there today, a place like this doesn’t need publicity. We’ve got our own security. They’ll pull Frank in and he’ll take care of the problem. He may have a bad leg, but he can put the fear of the devil in most folks.”
Sindi offered a pat on Blaine’s arm. “You’ve nothing to worry about. You’re about as far as you can get from the noise. Nobody’s coming way back here to cause trouble.”
Blaine nodded, remembering the guard she’d seen standing in the parking lot lighting a cigarette when she’d walked in. Though this clinic was advertised as a full-service facility for women, she guessed the abortions they did were controversial and, being in this neighborhood, probably brought in all types. Downtown Austin brimmed with druggies and the homeless, she’d seen them often enough on the streets.
The girl hurried out. Blaine turned back to the window as she set aside the gown and slippers. Maybe she wasn’t pregnant. A doctor had told her years ago the odds were against it ever happening and Mark had accepted the news with a single nod, eliminating children from his plan without comment.
