Summer Shadows

by Gayle Roper

  But Abby started her new job tomorrow and couldn’t help with the girls again. So what was she to do with Karlee and Jess all day? It was a given that the woman who had been in charge of Karlee on Friday wasn’t getting near her ever again.

  Celia scowled. If she felt a weird gratitude to the driver, she felt nothing but resentment and bitterness toward the woman to whom she’d entrusted Karlee and not a little anger at herself for choosing so poorly. All she could say in her own defense was that she had been desperate for help, and the woman had seemed nice. In fact, she probably was nice. She just shouldn’t be responsible for small children.

  Celia shut her eyes and swallowed. Letting herself get angry with the woman wasn’t helping anything. It was creating its own nasty wrinkle in her spirit, a wrinkle that would grow, expanding until she was so rumpled spiritually and emotionally that she’d be fit for only the rag pile.

  Whatever happens, Lord, don’t let me become like Aunt Bernice, all nastiness, suspicion, and bitterness. But, Lord, I do have to go to work tomorrow. What am I to do? I can’t not go to work. I need the job. I need the income. I need the insurance coverage.

  Tears stung her eyes. Sometimes she got so tired of fighting to survive.

  She looked again at her sleeping daughter. What would they have done if there had been no health coverage? She knew how rare it was that fledgling massage therapists were employed fulltime with all the perks that entailed. Pinky, that brilliant and flamboyant owner of the Seaside Spa, was one in a million. She was also a single mom who understood what it was like to be squeezed in the ever-present, ever-tightening vise of no relief. No relief from the financial problems of paying the rent or buying new shoes for little growing feet. Crank it tighter. No relief from the laundry, the shopping, the cleaning. Crank it tighter. No relief from the presence of kids, the disciplining of kids, the energy of kids, the needs of kids. Crank it several turns tighter.

  “Oh, Lord, what should I do?” she whispered into the darkened room. “Help me, please!”

  “Mom.” Jess stood in the doorway. She held out the cell phone. “It’s for you.”

  Celia looked beyond the ceiling once again. “You use cell phones today instead of still small voices?”

  Smiling at her joke, she took the phone from Jess, who raced back to the living room and her movie. “Hello?” The tiny cell phone was the only phone she had. She couldn’t afford both a traditional phone and a cell phone, so she had never activated the line into her small apartment. With the cell, she would always be within reach, should the girls ever need her. Not that being available had done anything to save Karlee on Friday.

  “Celia? This is Pastor Paul.”

  Celia blinked. Not God’s still small voice, but that of one of his emissaries. Maybe God did answer through cell phones.

  “I’m calling to ask if you need help with your girls tomorrow.”

  Astonishment kept Celia tongue-tied.

  “Celia? Are you there?”

  “Yes, yes, I’m here. In fact, I was here praying for an answer to that very problem.”

  “Tell me what you need, and we’ll see what we can do. I’ve already had a couple of ladies call me to volunteer. They didn’t want to call you without my calling first since you haven’t been part of Seaside Chapel long enough to know them. I’m calling to vouch for them and their characters.”

  “They know me?” Celia couldn’t believe it.

  “They know Karlee. The prayer chain, remember? They saw her in church this morning. That little bruised and battered face is enough to break anyone’s heart.”

  Celia’s throat choked with emotion. That these wonderful people in Seaside cared enough to come through for her was another miracle of the first order. She had to swallow several times before she could answer. “Both Jess and Karlee need care all day. I work from nine till six, six days a week.”

  Celia was sure that the long hours and six-day involvement would kill the desire of anyone to help. It was just too much. Well, she understood that because it was too much for her many times, and it was her survival she was fighting for, her girls whom she loved more than life itself.

  “Okay, no problem,” Pastor Paul said. “There are a couple of grandmoms who would love to help. Their own grandkids live quite a distance away, and they want a kid fix. I’ll have them call you to finalize the plans rather than stay in the middle and confuse things. Expect to hear from Doris Winsky and Mona LaFever. I think Mrs. Winsky will be the main baby-sitter.”

  Grateful beyond words but ever cautious, Celia asked, “How much do these women charge?”

  “Oh.” She could hear the surprise in Pastor Paul’s voice. “There’s no charge.”

  “What?” Celia’s voice was a squeak.

  “No charge,” Pastor Paul repeated. “They’re doing this as a service to the Lord.”

  Celia hung up in a daze. Responsible day care and no charge! How could this be?

  The phone chirped again, making Celia jump. It couldn’t be Doris Winsky or Mona LaFever already.

  “Celia, it’s me, Abby.”

  “Why are you whispering?” Giddy with relief over the resolution of the baby-sitting problem, Celia wanted nothing more than to giggle at her friend’s bizarre behavior. “Are you hiding from the bad guys and need rescuing? Or is Fargo after you, and you’ve escaped up a tree and don’t want him to know which one? Or did you somehow get a sore throat in the last couple of hours?”

  “I don’t want my mother to hear,” Abby hissed.

  “Your mom? I thought she and your father were going home early this evening.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “They didn’t leave yet?”

  “He left. She’s staying.”

  Celia heard the anger and distress in Abby’s voice. “That’s not a good thing, I take it.”

  “It’s a terrible thing!” Abby all but wailed, forgetting to keep her voice down. “I don’t want my mother to be my keeper.”

  “But she loves you,” Celia said, thinking how wonderful it would be to have a mother who was so interested in her daughter that she stayed with her to help her get settled.

  “Does she?” Abby gave a sad little hiccup of a laugh. “Then why can’t she let me live my own life?”

  Celia didn’t have an answer. “What can I do for you?”

  “Come to dinner tomorrow night.”

  “I was just there yesterday and today. Aren’t you getting a bit tired of me and the girls?”

  “Celia, you’ve got to come! I’m afraid of what I’ll say to Mom if you’re not here. Please come. Please.”

  Although Celia thought Abby was overreacting, the woman was clearly desperate. She thought of Abby sitting with her in the hospital Friday night and baby-sitting yesterday, and she knew she had to help no matter what she thought. “I can be there by about six-thirty.”

  “Wonderful!” Relief flowed out of the receiver in waves, washing Celia in its rosy glow. “You are my new best friend.”

  Celia hung up feeling bemused. Abby’s new best friend, huh? She could deal with that very well, though she had to admit that she didn’t understand what was so terrible about having your mother for a houseguest, especially when she was as nice as Mrs. MacDonald. Now if the houseguest were her own mother, whom she hadn’t seen since she married Eddie, then there’d be a problem.

  Awful as Eddie had been, he’d been better than her embittered, hate-filled mother. Anything was better than her mother, even living with Aunt Bernice and Poor Uncle Walter, even struggling alone and constantly hitting your head against the proverbial brick wall.

  But Mrs. MacDonald was fun and helpful and loving. She was also a mean cook. Still, Abby knew her mother much better than Celia. Maybe the warm public persona wasn’t evident in the intimacy of family. Lots of people thought Aunt Bernice was the soul of Christian love, but they’d never bothered to check their opinions against the experience of Celia or Poor Uncle Walter or even the girls.

  Celia was t
ired to the bone when she fell into her narrow bed in the smaller of the two bedrooms in their third-floor apartment. She always had to remind herself to duck when she got into or out of bed because of the steep pitch of the roofline. The first time she’d made up the bed, she cracked her head hard enough to bring tears. The headache lasted for two days. But it was her apartment, her bedroom, her faded pink walls and ugly pink floral curtains.

  And she had Doris Winsky to watch the girls. Even over the telephone she had sounded warm and grandmotherly. God was good.

  When morning came, Karlee was in an ugly mood. She sat on the sagging sofa, aching all over, lower lip stuck out in a pout to end all pouts. She tried to cross her arms, but the cast kept foiling her attempts, which only made her grumpier. She proclaimed in a loud voice that she didn’t like any of the four kinds of cereal in the house, she wasn’t about to let Celia leave her with a lady she’d never seen, and she didn’t want to have anything to do with any lady named Doris Winsky.

  For her part, Celia was delighted with Mrs. Winsky. She was in her late fifties, had been a widow for “way too long,” which translated to seven years, and had three kids who lived all over the country.

  “California, Indiana, and South Carolina,” she said, looking not at all like a Norman Rockwell grandmom. Instead of gray hair, Mrs. Winsky’s was a warm brown. Instead of old lady curls or a bun, she had a sophisticated wedge cut. While Celia couldn’t call her slim, she was trim, dressed in jeans and a T-shirt.

  I hope I look half as good when I’m her age.

  “I’m glad my kids are all doing so well, but the loneliness gets to me every so often.” Mrs. Winsky picked up the dirty breakfast dishes and carried them to the sink. “I always ask God to give me projects to serve Him and keep the loneliness at bay. Your sweet girls are just the thing. I have one little granddaughter, but she belongs to the son who lives in California, so I don’t get to see her much. I don’t know when the other two will ever get married, let alone give me some more little ones.”

  Doris Winsky sighed at the unfairness of it all, then shook herself for all the world like a retriever emerging from the water. “So don’t you worry about Karlee. We’ll be fine. I need her, and she needs me.”

  “Mrs. Winsky, I can’t begin to tell—”

  “It’s Doris, dear, and don’t bother. Go. Have a good day. After we clean up here, we’ll go to my house. I’ve got lots of kid stuff including a swing set.”

  To her surprise, Celia did have a good day. There was only one open hour in her appointment schedule, and the surfboarding gentleman of last week called to fill that. Abby also called, scheduling an appointment for Wednesday evening at five o’clock. As she had promised, she asked for Celia.

  “I am so pleased at the way your schedule is staying filled up,” Pinky said as she looked over the calendar for the next day. Her pink T-shirt, pink capris, and pink tennies should have looked ridiculous on her, but they didn’t. Instead they looked like Pinky. “I’ve never hired anyone full time before, and I wasn’t certain if it was a good idea or not. I just thought it was worth a try because I was getting so tired of balancing all the part-time schedules.”

  “I’m glad you took the risk, what with Karlee’s accident and all.”

  “What accident?” Pinky was all concern. “Is she all right?”

  Celia had to laugh at herself. Since Karlee’s accident was the main item in her life at the moment, she had assumed it was of equal importance to all others too. Here was proof that the majority of the world not only didn’t care about Karlee, they didn’t even know!

  “A hit-and-run?” Pinky shrieked when Celia told her what happened. “Some lowlife hit your little Karlee and ran?”

  Celia nodded, thinking about Mrs. Ebsen, lying on her back in the next room, wearing nothing but a pink sheet. In theory the woman was relaxing to the soothing music piped into the room, but with Pinky shrieking at full volume, the desired tranquility might prove unattainable.

  “What are the police doing?” Pinky demanded, her bottle-blond hair with just the hint of pink to it quivering with indignant energy. “Have they arrested anyone yet? Were there any witnesses? Any physical evidence? You did say that Karlee’s all right? Is she in the hospital? What in the world are you doing here? You should be with her!”

  Pinky’s face was fuchsia with emotion and distress, a fine match to the multiple shades of pink in which the spa was decorated. Celia had never quite figured out how the place managed to avoid looking like Dame Barbara Cartland’s boudoir.

  Calming Pinky took ten minutes of earnest talking, gave Mrs. Ebsen time for a nice little power nap, and threw Celia’s schedule off by that amount for the rest of the day. Still, before she knew it, the day was over and she found herself on Mrs. Winsky’s doorstep, nervous about how Karlee had fared. Jess let her in with a smile on her face, and Karlee looked up at her from her seat on the sofa with all the hauteur of a young Queen Bess surveying her subjects.

  “Mrs. Winsky told me this is my sofa,” she announced as soon as Celia kissed her hello. “No one, not even Jess, can sit here unless I say so. That’s because I’m sick, and it’s important I get treated good.”

  Doris laughed. “That’s a close approximation to what I said, although I don’t remember having my nose quite so high in the air.”

  “It is what you said,” Karlee assured her.

  “Did you have a good time?” Celia asked as soon as she and the girls were buckled into the car.

  “I did,” Karlee said. “She made me hot dogs.”

  Jess smiled. “She’s very nice, Mommy. Much nicer than the other lady.”

  “Well, you don’t have to see that other lady ever again,” Celia promised as they pulled up to Abby’s house and parked behind a big, powerful motorcycle. They weren’t even out of the car before a little red sports car squealed to a stop in the drive. To Celia’s surprise, Marsh Winslow was driving it. Somehow she hadn’t thought him the little red car type.

  “Is this your car, Dr. Winslow?” Jess, impressed, asked when he climbed out.

  “You like it?”

  Jess nodded, glancing at their car and trying to hide a sigh. Poor baby, Celia thought. Embarrassed by our car. But at least it runs.

  “I like it too, but it’s not mine.” He sighed deeply, theatrically, and let his shoulders slump. The kids giggled. “It belongs to my friend Rick over here.”

  Celia had been watching Jess, but now she turned her attention to Rick and blinked. As he walked around the car and stopped beside Marsh, she said, “Did anyone ever tell you—”

  “Yeah,” he said, putting his hand up to stop her. “But my last name is Yakabuski.”

  She nodded, thinking he was every bit as handsome as the famous movie and TV star he so resembled. She had watched Rick Mathis as Duke Beldon on A Man against the West every week for five years, wondering if there were any men on the planet like Duke—considerate, clever, and principled—or if he was just the figment of some writer’s imagination. Duke had ridden into the sunset three years ago, and now Rick Mathis played cowboys both on TV and in the movies, but she still missed Duke.

  Even Eddie had watched A Man against the West. “Now there’s a man’s man,” he’d say. “He don’t let no woman or screaming kids tie him down.”

  Now that she thought about it, it was the nights Duke Beldon rode into their home that Eddie was the nastiest. Was it the contrast he saw between himself and the fictional cowboy, or was it Duke’s freedom that he desperately wanted? The latter without doubt, considering how he finally scarpered.

  Celia became aware that Rick was staring at her. She tried not to squirm, but she knew what she looked like, all weary and dirty from a tiring day, makeup long gone, shirt wrinkled and spotted with oil, and her hair all wild from the open car windows. Maybe now she’d get up the courage to touch enough of Poor Uncle Walter’s five thousand dollars to get the air-conditioning fixed. But then again, why should she? The damage was already done.


  When Rick turned and looked at the little girls, she sighed in relief.

  “And who are you angels?”

  Her oldest grinned, as susceptible as any woman to the smile of a handsome man. “I’m Jess and she’s Karlee.”

  “Are you related to the beautiful blond angel standing beside Dr. Winslow?”

  Beautiful blond angel? Celia felt like turning to see who was standing behind her.

  Jess had to look too. “You mean our mom?”

  She need not sound quite so surprised, Celia thought.

  “She’s too pretty to be a wife and a mom,” Rick said, looking at Celia. She felt her cheeks flame.

  Jess shrugged. “Well, she is. At least she’s a mom.”

  Rick shot a glance in Celia’s direction. As clearly as if he’d spoken, she could see him thinking but not a wife?

  Rick turned back to Jess. He raised his hand to his mouth and used it as a shield, like his question was a secret no one was to hear. “What’s her name?” he stage-whispered.

  “Mommy,” Karlee answered before Jess could say anything.

  Celia couldn’t help it; she laughed.

  “No,” Rick said with commendable kindness. “I mean the one big people call her.”

  “Celia,” Jess said. “Celia Fitzmeyer.”

  Rick stepped close and stuck out his hand. “Hello, Celia Fitzmeyer.”

  Feeling foolish and special at the same time, Celia shook his hand. When was the last time anyone had flirted with her, even as harmlessly and aimlessly as this? “Nice to meet you, Rick.”

  “Believe me, the pleasure is all mine.”

  The low rumble of his voice slid across her weary nerves like salve over a scrape. His eyes locked on hers, and she stared back like an idiot. Her tongue stuck to the roof of her mouth. Her mind went blank.