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He was standing up there to the left of the preacher, about as handsome as a guy could be with his muscled shoulders and football receiver long legs, wearing the black tuxedo she and Koralynn had picked out for him. His eyes turned her way as he gave her a distant—though she knew sincere—smile before his gaze moved past her. He looked like he was almost shaking with nervous anticipation as he waited for his bride to appear.
Bailey wasn’t sure why she and Danny had never been able to bond. Was it him? Her?
Lord knew she’d tried to be open with him. For Koralynn’s sake. Bailey would do anything for her best friend and she knew that her lack of closeness with Danny bothered Koralynn.
“And...fill...my...nights...with...”
Step. Pause. Step. She didn’t miss a beat. Koralynn and Danny had been sleeping together since the night of senior prom when Bailey, as class president, had crowned them king and queen. For a second, Bailey’s admittedly frozen heart warmed as she thought of her friend’s joy anytime Danny was around.
Step. Pause. Step.
Bailey’s gaze traveled from Danny to the man standing beside him, a couple of inches taller, a little lankier, but missing nothing in the looks department. Jake’s hair was a bit shorter, a bit more styled, than Danny’s. His eyes, though, were a lot more mysterious—probably hiding the jokes he was telling himself about everyone there.
Jake Murphy, Danny’s best friend.
He stared at her, his face expressionless.
They’d done it, too. Had sex. That same night. It hurt. He’d wanted to try again. She hadn’t. Until that damned Homecoming weekend her junior year at Wesley...
Step. Pause. St—
Passing the fourth pew on the bride’s side, Bailey saw her mother. Alone.
Stumble.
Her mother had married again after Stan. The guy from her firm, the one she’d had the affair with. But after the first year, he’d become a judge and she’d spent more time going it alone than with her husband. And the more she was alone, the more she drank.
It was always like that. Things started out great.
Step. Pause. Step.
Then after the wedding, that aura faded into familiarity. And bills. Responsibility and compromise. Wants denied. Arguments. Morning breath and flu. And then one day husband and wife couldn’t stand each other.
She reached the first pew. Mama Di’s smile was blissful—and she was looking right at Bailey. Her gaze told Bailey that Mama Di thought she was beautiful. Inside and out. It told her she was loved as only a mother could love a child.
Bailey smiled. She hated the trembling in her lower lip.
Step. Pause. Step.
And turn.
The “Wedding March” began.
Chapter Three
I couldn’t believe it! It was finally happening! In a few short minutes I was going to be Koralynn Brown. Mrs. Danny Brown. I supposed I should be nervous. Mom told me I might be. That I could get scared and start to worry about all the changes that were happening so quickly. College graduation. Bailey going to law school. My first teaching job. And now, marrying Danny and moving into our own place.
But I wasn’t nervous at all—unless you counted the irrational fear that the world would end before I could make it down the aisle. Or there’d be a fire. Or one of us would get deathly sick or in a car accident or...
“You ready, baby?”
Daddy’s voice had an unfamiliar quiver and he squeezed my hand. I glanced up at him and for a second there, I did panic. I was getting older. Which meant Daddy was, too. And Mom.
“I’m just getting married, Daddy,” I whispered, alone with him in the vestibule at the back of the church. The “Wedding March” was supposed to play one stanza before we started up the aisle, to give everyone a chance to stand before I appeared.
We’d been talking about the ceremony for months. And had rehearsed the whole thing the night before.
“It’s not like I’m leaving town, or anything,” I said, still looking up at him. “And it’s not like I’ve never lived away from home. My college dorm was way further than Danny’s and my house is.”
He smiled. Nodded. Patted my hand.
And had tears in his eyes.
I got all choked up, too.
The second stanza started.
“I love you, Koralynn Mitchell,” Daddy said, taking the first step forward. “You might be exchanging my name for his, but you’ll always be my baby girl.”
“You love Danny, “ I reminded him, on the next step. But I think I was asking for confirmation, too.
“’Course I do, baby,” Daddy said. “I’m just being a silly old man, having trouble giving up my girl.” We were at the door to the sanctuary.
“You’re not getting rid of me that easily,” I told him, clutching his elbow for all I was worth. Mom had worried that I might stumble in my shoes. I hardly even knew I was wearing the four-inch spike heels. I’d taken years of ballet, so walking on the balls of my feet came naturally.
“I’m proud of you, Koralynn,” Daddy leaned over to say as we walked through the door and the music swelled. “You’ve made my life perfect...”
The way I figured it, Mom and Daddy had given me a perfect life. So perfect that sometimes I worried that something bad would happen to spoil it all. Obviously I was prone to irrational worries...
I smiled as Daddy and I started up the long aisle, excited and a bit uneasy, too, as I met the eyes of so many people I’d known my whole life. Everyone I loved was in that room. Would we ever be together like this again?
For a happy occasion?
My gaze sought Bailey’s. She was up there waiting for me. Jake was up there, too. Waiting for Bailey, or at least that was my theory. And I hoped my best friend would find the strength to open her heart to him before he moved on.
“You made a good choice,” Daddy leaned over to tell me.
I nodded. Smiled. And then I saw Danny. We’d talked about whether his tux should be brown or black. His shirt gold or rose colored. I forgot all of it as I looked him right in the eye and knew that my life was just beginning.
I wasn’t marrying this man because my parents liked him. Or because, as Bailey said, he was crazy about me. Plain and simple, I was marrying him because I couldn’t imagine life without him.
October 2008
Hands trembling, I sat down on the cold hard chair next to my best friend, took her into my arms and held on.
“Oh, my God, Kor. Oh, my God.” Bailey’s voice was muffled against my neck.
“I’m right here, sweetie. And I’m not going anywhere.”
Bailey’s older brother, Brian, accompanied by his state-supported part-time caregiver, was on a flight up from Florida, but wasn’t due for another couple of hours. Which left Bailey and me alone in the ICU family waiting room.
“Oh, God, Kor, I didn’t...I had no idea....”
Nestling my face against her hair, I spoke just above her ear. “There’s no way you could have known,” I said. Bailey’s mother’s life had been like a roller coaster since before Bailey was born. Who could have predicted that this latest divorce would cause her to...
“He was a judge,” Bailey said. “How could I possibly think she’d win against a judge?”
“You trusted the justice system,” I told the woman who was currently ranked at the top of her class in her last year of law school.
“This is the man who used his power to get out of paying every single contractor they’d hired to remodel their house. Threatening those companies, saying he’d cause difficulties from the registrar of contractors, was wrong. And that’s only the beginning of his duplicity,” Bailey said. “But he wins.”
She sat, seemingly staring at nothing, her expression more vacant than I’d ever seen it. Worse even than the night she’d told me about Stan, the pedophile asshole who should be in prison for what he’d done to her.
I thought, for the hundredth time, that I shouldn’t have promised Bailey I’d keep her secret. I should have told Mom. Should have known that Bailey would need counseling, at the very least. Instead, I’d helped her lock herself deep inside and now, all these years later, I feared she’d never find her way out again.
“He had her arrested for driving her own car,” she reminded me.
“It was in his name.”
“But she’d had exclusive use of it since they’d purchased it,” she said. “And he’d never told her she couldn’t continue to drive it after they separated. Sending his deputy after her was clearly a misuse of power.”
Which didn’t matter at the moment. What mattered was that Bailey’s mother was on life support, lying in a hospital bed a few doors away, because she’d attempted suicide earlier that evening.
“He’s going to pay for what he did.” I offered her what I could.
“He’s a judge, Kor,” she said again. “He doesn’t just know how to work the system. He is the system. And he’s connected to everyone else who’s part of it, too.” Bailey’s voice sounded dead. But at least she was talking.
“By law he’s held to a higher standard, not a lower one,” I said.
Bailey sat up, the expression in her eyes bleak. “And who’s going to prosecute him? An attorney who’ll have to appear before him? An attorney whose paying clients will be facing him at some point in the future? Because it’s damn sure that my mother, a five-time-divorced paralegal who has a history of problems with alcohol abuse and has had numerous affairs, including one with this very same judge, hasn’t got a chance.”
“It was the right thing to do, to report his misuse of power. To report the contracting debacle.” I clung to the one time Bailey’s mother had had enough backbone to stand up for herself.
Because Bailey had stood behind her and guided her all the way, and I wasn’t going to have my friend beating herself up about it.
I clung to what I knew was right. What Bailey believed was right. And I clung to my friend, giving her every ounce of strength I had.
“Anyway, when I said the judge was going to pay, I wasn’t talking about paying in a court of law,” I added softly as the silence ticked slowly by. “The one thing he’ll never be able to escape is his own karma. Somehow or other, he’ll pay for this....”
An hour passed with no sight of the doctor. No further word. We were waiting for them to stabilize her so we could see her. Bailey and I walked down the hall for cups of weak, machine-dispensed coffee. At half past midnight, we were the only nonemployee, nonpatient people in the waiting room.
“Danny probably wants you home.” Bailey’s voice sounded loud in the corridor as we walked back to our seats for the umpteenth time.
Hard to believe I’d been married for over five years. Seemed like five weeks. And forever, too. Danny was my life. Danny and Bailey.
“He wants me right where I am,” I told her. He’d offered to come to the hospital with me, but I knew Bailey needed me there alone. And he’d been fine with that. Bailey had been in my life longer than he had.
Danny might not be close to Bailey, but he didn’t ever get in the way of our connection. He respected its sacredness. Half an hour later, our coffee cups empty, we moved from chairs to the couch farther back in the room. Bailey’s shoulders were drooping, her long dark curls falling limply around her face. Putting my arm around her shoulders, I pulled her against me. Danny had already called the sub line for me, requesting a substitute teacher the next morning.
“We’ll get through this,” I assured her. “You and me. Together.”
“I know.”
“I love you, Bail.”
“Love you, too.”
* * *
With her head on Koralynn’s shoulder, Bailey contemplated sleep—the same kind of sleep her mother had embarked on when she’d taken an overdose of sleeping pills eight hours earlier.
The kind where you didn’t have to worry about waking up.
And there was the difference between her and Mom. She thought about it. Mom did it.
“I should’ve been with her,” she said. Mom had called. Wanted to meet for dinner. Bailey had a moot court competition in the morning and had put her mother off in favor of preparing to win the case. She wasn’t just vying for grades; a win could give her the positioning she’d need to get on with a reputable firm as soon as she graduated.
Or could have given her. There was no way she was going to the competition now.
“You were with her all the time, Bail.” Koralynn’s voice wafted over her. And Bailey listened. After two years of law school, she trusted people less now than she ever had, except for Koralynn. But she still believed in Koralynn. Believed Koralynn.
Her best friend, and maybe Mama Di and Papa Bill, seemed like the only people left on earth who still honored the truth.
“I could tell by her tone of voice that she was struggling.”
“She was always struggling. You held off going to law school right after college because she’d just found out the judge was having an affair and she thought she was getting divorced. You took money from him for your first year of law school because she begged you to—so she could prove you were all one big happy family. Then last year when they separated you took her to live with you. You’ve spent every weekend with her for months. And some evenings, too. You’re in your last year of law school, with more on your plate than most of us could manage, and you think you haven’t done enough? She should be giving to you, Bail. Maybe that would take her out of herself a little. She’s your mom—you should be able to expect help from her, not constantly feel guilty for not giving her more!”
“I should never have encouraged her to file that complaint against him.”
“She did the right thing. It’s the judicial commission’s mistake that they ruled unethically. Besides, that was six months ago.”
“Yeah, but she never got over it.”
“Which is why you helped her write a request for reconsideration. And she could talk to the reporter from Political Times. Or go to Channel Six, since they do exposés. She has a lot of options.”
Like moving away from Pittsburgh, for one.
“I should’ve known tonight was different.”
“How was it different, Bailey? She’s been at the end of her rope for more than a year. For most of our lives, it seems. I’m sorry to sound harsh, especially now, but it kills me to see you try so hard and then lose so much of yourself because she doesn’t come through. Her journey is hers, and she probably does her best, Bail, but what I see is that you do everything for her, ask nothing for yourself, and then feel like you don’t do enough.”
Bailey told herself she should sit up. Hold the weight of her own head.
“I want you to promise me something, Bail.” Koralynn’s voice sounded more serious than usual.
“Of course. Anything.” She could give Koralynn everything she had for the rest of her days and never be even.
“Promise me that if you ever need anything, you’ll come to me. Promise me you’ll ask me for it.”
