Yours and Mine

by Debbie Macomber

  Yours and Mine

  Debbie Macomber

  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

  One

  “Mom, I forgot to tell you, I need two dozen cupcakes for tomorrow morning.”

  Joanna Parsons reluctantly opened her eyes and lifted her head from the soft feather pillow, squinting at the illuminated dial of her clock radio. “Kristen, it’s after eleven.”

  “I know, Mom, I’m sorry. But I’ve got to bring cupcakes.”

  “No, you don’t,” Joanna said hopefully. “There’s a package of Oreos on the top shelf of the cupboard. You can take those.”

  “Oreos! You’ve been hiding Oreos from me again! Just what kind of mother are you?”

  “I was saving them for an emergency—like this.”

  “It won’t work.” Crossing her arms over her still-flat chest, eleven-year-old Kristen sat on the edge of the mattress and heaved a loud, discouraged sigh.

  “Why not?”

  “It’s got to be cupcakes, home-baked chocolate ones.”

  “That’s unfortunate, since you seem to have forgotten to mention the fact earlier. And now it’s about four hours too late for baking anything. Including chocolate cupcakes.” Joanna tried to be fair with Kristen, but being a single parent wasn’t easy.

  “Mom, I know I forgot,” Kristen cried, her young voice rising in panic, “but I’ve got to bring cupcakes to class tomorrow. It’s important! Really important!”

  “Convince me.” Joanna used the phrase often. She didn’t want to seem unyielding and hard-nosed. After all, she’d probably forgotten a few important things in her thirty-odd years, too.

  “It’s Mrs. Eagleton’s last day as our teacher—remember I told you her husband got transferred and she’s moving to Denver? Everyone in the whole class hates to see her go, so we’re throwing a party.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Nicole and me,” Kristen answered quickly. “Nicole’s bringing the napkins, cups and punch, and I’m supposed to bring homemade cupcakes. Chocolate cupcakes. Mom, I’ve just got to. Nicole would never forgive me if I did something stupid like bring store-bought cookies for a teacher as wonderful as Mrs. Eagleton.”

  Kristen had met Nicole almost five months before at the beginning of the school year, and the two girls had been as thick as gnats in August from that time on. “Shouldn’t the room mother be organizing this party?” That made sense to Joanna; surely there was an adult who would be willing to help.

  “We don’t have one this year. Everyone’s mother is either too busy or working.”

  Joanna sighed. Oh, great, she was going to end up baking cupcakes until the wee hours of the morning. “All right,” she muttered, giving in to her daughter’s pleading. Mrs. Eagleton was a wonderful teacher, and Joanna was as sorry as Kristen to see her leave.

  “We just couldn’t let Mrs. Eagleton move to Denver without doing something really nice for her,” Kristen pressed.

  Although Joanna agreed, she felt that Oreos or Fig Newtons should be considered special enough, since it was already after eleven. But Kristen obviously had her heart set on home-baked cupcakes.

  “Mom?”

  Even in the muted light, Joanna recognized the plea in her daughter’s dark brown eyes. She looked so much like Davey that a twinge of anguish worked its way through Joanna’s heart. They’d been divorced six years now, but the pain of that failure had yet to fade. Sometimes, at odd moments like these, she still recalled how good it had felt to be in his arms and how much she’d once loved him. Mostly, though, Joanna remembered how naive she’d been to trust him so completely. But she’d come a long way in the six years since her divorce. She’d gained a new measure of independence and self-respect, forging a career for herself at Columbia Basin Savings and Loan. And now she was close to achieving her goal of becoming the first female senior loan officer.

  “All right, honey.” Joanna sighed, dragging her thoughts back to her daughter. “I’ll bake the cupcakes. Only next time, please let me know before we go to bed, okay?”

  Kristen’s shoulders slumped in relief. “I owe you one, Mom.”

  Joanna resisted the urge to remind her daughter that the score was a lot higher than one. Tossing aside the thick warm blankets, she climbed out of bed and reached for her long robe.

  Kristen, flannel housecoat flying behind her like a flag unfurling, raced toward the kitchen, eager to do what she could to help. “I’ll turn on the oven and get everything ready,” she called.

  “All right,” Joanna said with a yawn as she sent her foot searching under the bed for her slippers. She was mentally scanning the contents of her cupboards, wondering if she had a chocolate cake mix. Somehow she doubted it.

  “Trouble, Mom,” Kristen announced when Joanna entered the well-lighted kitchen. The eleven-year-old stood on a chair in front of the open cupboards above the refrigerator, an Oreo between her teeth. Looking only mildly guilty, she ate the cookie whole, then shook her head. “We don’t have cake mix.”

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “I guess we’ll have to bake them from scratch,” Kristen suggested, reaching for another Oreo.

  “Not this late, we won’t. I’ll drive to the store.” There was an Albertson’s that stayed open twenty-four hours less than a mile away.

  Kristen jumped down from the chair. The pockets of her bathrobe were stuffed full of cookies, but her attempt to conceal them failed. Joanna pointed toward the cookie jar, and dutifully Kristen emptied her pockets.

  When Kristen had finished, Joanna yawned again and ambled back into her bedroom.

  “Mom, if you’re going to the store, I suppose I should go with you.”

  “No, honey, I’m just going to run in and out. You stay here.”

  “Okay,” Kristen agreed quickly.

  The kid wasn’t stupid, Joanna thought wryly. Winters in eastern Washington were often merciless, and temperatures in Spokane had been well below freezing all week. To be honest, she wasn’t exactly thrilled about braving the elements herself. She pulled on her calf-high boots over two pairs of heavy woollen socks. Because the socks were so thick, Joanna could only zip the boots up to her ankles.

  “Mom,” Kristen said, following her mother into the bedroom, a thoughtful expression on her face. “Have you ever thought of getting married again?”

  Surprised, Joanna looked up and studied her daughter. The question had come from out of nowhere, but her answer was ready. “Never.” The first time around had been enough. Not that she was one of the walking wounded, at least she didn’t think of herself that way. Instead, her divorce had made her smart, had matured her. Never again would she look to a man for happiness; Joanna was determined to build her own. But the unexpectedness of Kristen’s question caught her off guard. Was Kristen telling her something? Perhaps her daughter felt she was missing out because there were only the two of them. “What makes you ask?”

  The mattress dipped as she sat beside Joanna. “I’m not exactly sure,” she confessed. “But you could remarry, you know. You’ve still got a halfway decent figure.”

  Joanna grinned. “Thanks…I think.”

  “I mean, it’s not like you’re really old and ugly.”

  “Coming from you, that’s high praise indeed, considering that I’m over thirty.”

  “I’m sure if you wanted to, you could fin
d another man. Not like Daddy, but someone better.”

  It hurt Joanna to hear her daughter say things like that about Davey, but she couldn’t disguise from Kristen how selfish and hollow her father was. Nor could she hide Davey’s roving eye when it came to the opposite sex. Kristen spent one month every summer with him in Seattle and saw for herself the type of man Davey was.

  After she’d finished struggling with her boots, Joanna clumped into the entryway and opened the hall cupboard.

  “Mom!” Kristen cried, her eyes round with dismay.

  “What?”

  “You can’t go out looking like that!” Her daughter was pointing at her, as though aghast at the sight.

  “Like what?” Innocently Joanna glanced down at the dress-length blue wool coat she’d slipped on over her rose-patterned flannel pajamas. Okay, so the bottoms showed, but only a little. And she was willing to admit that the boots would look better zipped up, but she was more concerned with comfort than fashion. If the way she looked didn’t bother her, then it certainly shouldn’t bother Kristen. Her daughter had obviously forgotten why Joanna was venturing outside in the first place.

  “Someone might see you.”

  “Don’t worry, I have no intention of taking off my coat.” She’d park close to the front door of the store, run inside, head for aisle three, grab a cake mix and be back at the car in four minutes flat. Joanna didn’t exactly feel like donning tights for the event.

  “You might meet someone,” Kristen persisted.

  “So?” Joanna stifled a yawn.

  “But your hair…Don’t you think you should curl it?”

  “Kristen, listen. The only people who are going to be in the grocery store are insomniacs and winos and maybe a couple of pregnant women.” It was highly unlikely she’d run into anyone from the bank.

  “But what if you got in an accident? The policeman would think you’re some kind of weirdo.”

  Joanna yawned a second time. “Honey, anyone who would consider making cupcakes in the middle of the night has a mental problem as it is. I’ll fit right in with everyone else, so quit worrying.”

  “Oh, all right,” Kristen finally agreed.

  Draping her bag strap over her shoulder, Joanna opened the front door and shivered as the arctic wind of late January wrapped itself around her. Damn, it was cold. The grass was so white with frost that she wondered, at first, if it had snowed. To ward off the chill, she wound Kristen’s purple striped scarf around her neck to cover her ears and mouth and tied it loosely under her chin.

  The heater in her ten-year-old Ford didn’t have a chance to do anything but spew out frigid air as she huddled over the steering wheel for the few minutes it took to drive to the grocery store. According to her plan, she parked as close to the store as possible, turned off the engine and dashed inside.

  Just as she’d predicted, the place was nearly deserted, except for a couple of clerks working near the front, arranging displays. Joanna didn’t give them more than a fleeting glance as she headed toward the aisle where baking goods were shelved.

  She was reaching for the first chocolate cake mix to come into sight when she heard footsteps behind her.

  “Mrs. Parsons! Hello!” The shrill excited voice seemed to ring like a Chinese gong throughout the store.

  Joanna hunched down as far as she could and cast a furtive glance over her shoulder. Dear Lord, Kristen had been right. She was actually going to bump into someone who knew her.

  “It’s me—Nicole. You remember me, don’t you?”

  Joanna attempted a smile as she turned to face her daughter’s best friend. “Hi, there,” she said weakly, and raised her right hand to wave, her wrist limp. “It’s good to see you again.” So she was lying. Anyone with a sense of decency would have pretended not to recognise her and casually looked the other way. Not Nicole. It seemed as though all the world’s eleven-year-olds were plotting against her tonight. One chocolate cake mix; that was all she wanted. That and maybe a small tub of ready-made frosting. Then she could return home, get those cupcakes baked and climb back into bed where most sane people were at this very moment.

  “You look different,” Nicole murmured thoughtfully, her eyes widening as she studied Joanna.

  Well, that was one way of putting it.

  “When I first saw you, I thought you were a bag lady.”

  Loosening the scarf that obscured the lower half of her face, Joanna managed a grin.

  “What are you doing here this late?” the girl wanted to know next, following Joanna as she edged her way to the checkout stand.

  “Kristen forgot to tell me about the cupcakes.”

  Nicole’s cheerful laugh resounded through the store like a yell echoing in an empty sports stadium. “I was watching Johnny Carson with my dad when I remembered I hadn’t bought the juice and stuff for the party. Dad’s waiting for me in the car right now.”

  Nicole’s father allowed her to stay up that late on a school night? Joanna did her utmost to hide her disdain. From what Kristen had told her, she knew Nicole’s parents were also divorced and her father had custody of Nicole. The poor kid probably didn’t know what the word discipline meant. No doubt her father was one of those weak-willed liberal parents so involved in their own careers that they didn’t have any time left for their children. Imagine a parent letting an eleven-year-old wander around a grocery store at this time of night! The mere thought was enough to send chills of parental outrage racing up and down Joanna’s backbone. She placed her arm around Nicole’s shoulders as if to protect her from life’s harsher realities. The poor sweet kid.

  The abrupt whoosh of the automatic door was followed by the sound of someone striding impatiently into the store. Joanna glanced up to discover a tall man, wearing a well-cut dark coat, glaring in their direction.

  “Nicole, what’s taking so long?”

  “Dad,” the girl said happily, “this is Mrs. Parsons— Kristen’s mom.”

  Nicole’s father approached, obviously reluctant to acknowledge the introduction, his face remote and unsmiling.

  Automatically Joanna straightened, her shoulders stiffening with the action. Nicole’s father was exactly as she’d pictured him just a few moments earlier. Polished, worldly, and too darn handsome for his own good. Just like Davey. This was exactly the type of man she went out of her way to avoid. She’d been burned once, and no relationship was worth what she’d endured. This brief encounter with Nicole’s father told Joanna all she needed to know.

  “Tanner Lund,” he announced crisply, holding out his hand.

  “Joanna Parsons,” Joanna said, and gave him hers for a brisk cold shake. She couldn’t take her hand away fast enough.

  His eyes narrowed as they studied her, and the look he gave her was as disapproving as the one she offered him. Slowly his gaze dropped to the unzipped boots flapping at her ankles and the worn edges of the pajamas visible below her wool coat.

  “I think it’s time we met, don’t you?” Joanna didn’t bother to disguise her disapproval of the man’s attitude toward child-rearing. She’d had Nicole over after school several times, but on the one occasion Kristen had visited her friend, the child was staying with a baby-sitter.

  A hint of a smile appeared on his face, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “Our meeting is long overdue, I agree.”

  He seemed to be suggesting that he’d made a mistake in allowing his daughter to have anything to do with someone who dressed the way she did.

  Joanna’s gaze shifted to Nicole. “Isn’t it late for you to be up on a school night?”

  “Where’s Kristen?” he countered, glancing around the store.

  “At home,” Joanna answered, swallowing the words that said home was exactly where an eleven-year-old child belonged on a school night—or any other night for that matter.

  “Isn’t she a bit young to be left alone while you run to a store?”

  “N-not in the least.”

  Tanner frowned and his eyes narrowed even more. Hi
s disapproving gaze demanded to know what kind of mother left a child alone in the house at this time of night.

  Joanna answered him with a scornful look of her own.

  “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Mr. Lund,” she said coolly, knowing her eyes relayed a conflicting message.

  “The pleasure’s mine.”

  Joanna was all the more aware of her dishevelled appearance. Uncombed and uncurled, her auburn hair hung limply to her shoulders. Her dark eyes were nice enough, she knew, fringed in long curling lashes. She considered them her best asset, and purposely glared at Tanner, hoping her eyes were as cold as the blast from her car heater had been.

  Tanner placed his hands on his daughter’s shoulders and drew her protectively to his side. Joanna was infuriated by the action. If Nicole needed shielding, it was from an irresponsible father!

  Okay, she reasoned, so her attire was a bit outlandish. But that couldn’t be helped; she was on a mission that by rights should win her a nomination for the mother-of-the-year award. The way Tanner Lund had implied that she was the irresponsible parent was something Joanna found downright insulting.

  “Well,” Joanna said brightly, “I have to go. Nice to see you again, Nicole.” She swept two boxes of cake mix into her arms and grabbed what she hoped was some frosting.

  “You, too, Mrs. Parsons,” the girl answered, smiling up at her.

  “Mr. Lund.”

  “Mrs. Parsons.”

  The two nodded politely at each other, and, clutching her packages, Joanna walked regally to the checkout stand. She made her purchase and started back toward the car. The next time Kristen invited Nicole over, Joanna mused on the short drive home, she intended to spend lots of extra time with the girls. Now she knew how badly Nicole needed someone to nurture her, to give her the firm but loving guidance every child deserved.

  The poor darling.

  Two

  Joanna expertly lowered the pressure foot of her sewing machine over the bunched red material, then used both hands to push the fabric slowly under the bobbing needle. Straight pins, tightly clenched between her lips, protruded from her mouth. Her concentration was intense.