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Still painfully aware of Kimmy behind her, she gave out a bland expression of sympathy. “I am so sorry to hear that.”
“Why?” he asked dryly. “I don’t think anyone else is.”
“Is he—”
He answered before she completed the question. “He’s still alive. As of now. But it doesn’t look good. They’ve got him over at Norman Regional.”
She wanted to cry out, What did he say about me? Did he tell you? Is that it? Is that why you’ve called?
She asked, very carefully, “Have you…talked to him yet?”
“I saw him a couple of hours ago.”
“And?”
“He’s very sick. Other than that, he hasn’t changed a bit. What time will you call?”
She bit the inside of her lip and accepted the fact that if Marsh did know about Kimmy, he wasn’t going to talk about it now.
Which was a good thing. She couldn’t afford to talk about it now, anyway.
She glanced at the stove clock—6:23. After dinner Kim would be busy with homework. “In an hour?”
“Good enough.”
She hung up, gave herself a few seconds to compose her features, then turned back to the table and slid into the chair across from her daughter.
Kimmy, always a good eater, had finished her casserole and her salad. She’d started in on a drop biscuit. The biscuit was giving her trouble, breaking apart as she tried to butter it.
“Here.” Tory held out her hand—which surprised her by not shaking one bit. Kim passed the biscuit across. Tory buttered it. Kim watched the process with great interest. “Jam?” Tory asked.
“Um. Yes, please.”
Tory spooned a dab of strawberry jam onto each crumbly biscuit half. “There you go.” She set the halves back on Kim’s plate.
Kim picked one up and brought it to her mouth. Before she bit into it, she asked, “Who was that you were talking to?”
Tory’s smile felt like something glued onto her face. “Just an old friend.”
Kim set the biscuit half down again. “You said that before. What old friend? Who?”
“No one you know.”
“You said that before, too.”
Tory faked a warning frown. “And that is all I am going to say, Miss Nosy Pants.”
Kimmy groaned. “Mama. Pants can’t be nosy.”
“Eat that biscuit. And finish your milk.”
“Then can I have a Ding-Dong?”
“The milk and the biscuit. Now.”
Tory spent the next hour trying not to let her daughter see her distress, and seesawing back and forth between acceptance of the fact that she would have to meet with Marsh and frustrated fury that such a thing should be necessary.
After all this time.
After she’d accomplished what she would once have called impossible—letting go of her lovesick dream that Marsh would someday return to her, would go down on one knee and beg her to marry him, would swear he couldn’t live another minute without her at his side.
It hadn’t been easy, but lately Tory had managed to achieve a pleasant, peaceful kind of balance in her life. Her parents, in their forties when she was born and now both nearing seventy, had retired to New Mexico. They had left their roomy ranch-style house to Tory and their beloved granddaughter. Tory owned her own business and enjoyed her work. Her daughter was beautiful, healthy, bright and well adjusted.
Things were going great.
And now this.
Marsh Bravo—back in town.
His return could shatter everything, could turn her peaceful life upside down—just as his leaving had done a decade before.
Still…
Marsh Bravo was her daughter’s father.
That fact remained, undeniable. He had a right to know his child.
And Kim did ask about him. More and more often of late. In the end Tory really didn’t have much of a choice in the matter, and she knew it. She would have to meet with him.
When Tory called Marsh back, she did it from the privacy of her bedroom, with the door closed. She’d already gotten hold of Betsy, the high school girl who lived three doors up the street. As a general rule, Tory used Betsy Tilden whenever Rayanne Pickett, next door, was unavailable.
Rayanne Pickett was like a member of Tory’s family. She was a dear friend to Tory’s mother and as good as an extra grandma to Kim. Tonight, though, Tory didn’t want to take the chance that Rayanne might question her about where she suddenly had to get off to, after nine on a weeknight. Rayanne, like Tory’s parents, would not be thrilled to learn that the boy who had gotten Tory in trouble had returned to town.
True, chances were that Rayanne would have to know eventually.
But “eventually” was not tonight.
So Tory had asked Betsy first. And Betsy had agreed to come over at nine-fifteen, after Kim went to bed.
Tory kept the second phone conversation with Marsh brief. “I’ll meet you in the lobby of your hotel,” she said after a terse exchange of greetings. “About nine-thirty?”
He didn’t try to keep her talking, only said, “That’s fine—and Tory?”
“Yes?”
“Thanks. For agreeing to see me.”
She didn’t know what to say to that, so she didn’t say anything, just quietly set the phone in its cradle.
Tory agonized over whether or not to tell Kim that she was going out. As long as Kim stayed in bed where she belonged, she didn’t have to know. But then, if Tory said nothing, and Kim woke up and found her gone—no. That wouldn’t do.
So when bedtime came, Tory told her daughter that she had to go out for a while, that Betsy would be there if Kim needed anything. Kim asked the logical question, the one Tory had been dreading.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s grown-up business,” Tory said, choosing evasion over an outright lie.
Kim got the message. “You mean you won’t tell me.”
“That’s right. But I promise. I won’t be gone too long.”
A crafty light came into Kimmy’s big dark eyes—eyes she’d inherited from the father she’d never met. Yet. “You know what? I think I should stay up. I can keep Betsy company and wait for you to get home.”
Tory cut that idea off at the pass. “Uh-uh. Betsy will have homework to keep her busy. And you can wait for me just fine—right here in your comfy bed, with the lights out.”
“Aw, Mom…”
“Give me a kiss.”
“Oh, all right.”
Betsy arrived at exactly 9:15. Tory thanked the girl for coming on such short notice, invited her to help herself to anything in the refrigerator and promised to return by eleven at the very latest. Betsy waved a hand and told Tory not to think she had to rush.
Tory went out to the garage and got into her car. It was then, as she slid behind the wheel, that her heart decided to start racing and her hands began to shake.
She flipped down the visor and lifted the cover on the lighted mirror built into it. “Calm down. Take it easy. Everything is going to be all right,” she whispered to her own reflection.
It didn’t seem to do much good. Her heart still pounded too hard and her hands kept on quivering.
She shut the mirror, flipped the visor up and started the car.
The drive was a short one. And the closer she got, the faster her heart seemed to beat. She was nothing short of a nervous wreck by the time she nosed her car into an empty space about twenty feet from the hotel’s front entrance.
Was this really happening? Somehow it didn’t feel real. Would she even recognize him? Would he recognize her? And what, if anything, did he know about Kim? What should she say if he did know? And what if he didn’t?
Lord. It all went around and around.
And at the center of it was Kimmy.
Tory had never lied to her daughter about Marsh. Kim knew that Tory had loved Kim’s father with all of her heart. Tory had explained how he had had to go away suddenly, how she had tried to get in touch with him, but never knew where he had gone and so could not find him.
The story, which was the truth, had been enough until just recently. But lately Kim’s questions kept getting tougher.
“Don’t you think we better look a little harder now?” she would ask. “Don’t you think he needs to know he has me? Don’t you think it’s something that he would really want to know?”
“Yes,” Tory always answered, a catch in her throat. “Of course he would want to know. And we will start looking. Very soon.”
That kind of reply wasn’t going to work for much longer.
And now, well, maybe it wouldn’t have to.
That would be good.
Wouldn’t it?
Tory got out of her car. The wind was up and a light, misty rain had started falling. The wind plastered her skirt to her thighs and blew her hair across her face. Absently Tory raked her hair back out of the way and made for the wall of glass that led to the hotel lobby.
The automatic doors swung wide as she reached them. Tory stepped between them, entering a vestibule. She felt windblown and a little soggy and more nervous than ever. Just keep moving, she thought. And she did, taking big, determined strides. Another set of doors swung open for her and she entered the lobby.
She saw him immediately.
He stood near the marble-topped check-in desk.
Oh, God. Her silly heart was flopping around in her chest like a landed trout.
He was different—and yet not different. The square-jawed, full-lipped, wonderful face—a face she’d always thought belonged on a poet or a priest—was the same. So was the thick brown hair, though it was cut somewhat shorter now. And those eyes—deep-set, heavily lashed. Those eyes had not changed at all.
He had filled out. He was broader in the shoulders, deeper in the chest.
No trace of boy left, she thought with a sinking feeling that might have been dismay. All man, now…
And his clothes…expensive clothes. Good slacks, a high-dollar polo shirt with a tiny designer monogram on the pocket. And his shoes…
Fine, beautifully made shoes.
Shoes that looked as if they cost a good sight more than the 150 baby-sitting dollars she had pressed into his hand on the night he left her—money he did pay back. She’d found it tucked into the only letter he sent her three months later, the one that said she should forget him, that he was no good and she could do better and he wasn’t coming back, after all.
He was never coming back….
For some crazy reason, looking at him now, Tory felt the heart-stopping pain of that letter all over again. Standing in that hotel lobby, windblown and rain-damp, her gaze locked with his, she was spinning back in time.
She was sixteen again, and four months’ pregnant, barely a child herself, about to have a child—a girl who had waited with longing in her heart. A girl who had trusted. A terrified girl who loved with fierce abandon, a girl who was going to have to get used to the idea that she and her unborn child would be facing the future alone.
That had been the lowest point, the worst for her—reading that letter. Worse even than that last night—the night he finally turned on his father and gave Blake Bravo a large taste of his own bitter medicine.
He had cried in her arms that night.
And there had been blood—most of it dried by then.
She remembered that so clearly, how black bloodstains can look in the moonlight.
When she sneaked out to meet him and saw the blood smeared all over him, she’d had to put her hand over her own mouth to keep from crying out.
He saw her fear for him in her eyes and shook his head. “It’s not my blood—not most of it, anyway. It’s his. My dad’s blood…” With a low, anguished moan, he reached for her.
And she went into his arms, held him, though she feared that the blood would smear on her, too, that later she would have to hide that pair of pajamas in the bottom of a drawer until she could sneak them outside and bury them deep in a full trash can.
He whispered to her between ragged sobs. “I hit him. Hard. More than once. And when he finally went down, he cracked his head on the side of the table. God, Tory. I think I killed him….”
