Second Harmony

by Barbara Bretton

  "And so I told the workman to tell him I'd call."

  Elinor's gaze never once wandered from her daughter. Sandra understood the enormous physical effort that required and the love that made it possible.

  "And have you called him?" Elinor asked.

  "Not yet."

  "Will you?"

  Sandra laughed, but it sounded nervous and breathy and embarrassingly hopeful. "You're the mother," she said. "I thought you would have all the answers."

  "If I recall, my answers haven't always been the wisest."

  "I don't know what to do."

  "I think you do, honey."

  Sandra arched an eyebrow. "Do you know something I don't?"

  Elinor said nothing, but Sandra noticed the fine beads of sweat breaking out along her mother's hairline. At times, the effort required for her mother to coordinate her thought processes with the muscles necessary for coherent speech was as taxing as running a marathon would have been for someone else.

  "I know you," Elinor said finally, "and I knew Michael."

  "Meaning?"

  "Meaning maybe this time you should follow your heart."

  "This from the woman who taught me the way to happiness was through a 4.0 grade point average?"

  Thank God nothing had yet been able to extinguish the fire of life in her mother's eyes.

  "Mothers don't always know everything, Sandy."

  Sandra pulled in her breath sharply. "That's the second time someone has called me Sandy in the past four days."

  "Michael?"

  She nodded. "Michael."

  "Call him, honey. Don't make the same mistakes I made."

  For a second Sandra was confused.

  "My situation's nothing like yours, Mom. I'm not a teenager. I'm in no danger of getting pregnant, and I don't have the damnedest idea if I'll ever see him again."

  Elinor closed her eyes for a second. "You will."

  "You don't sound happy about it."

  "I love Michael," Elinor said. "I always did. Sometimes I wonder if I should have just let you two kids run off to Maryland and get married."

  Her mother's words shook Sandra more than the weekend's twin hurricanes.

  "I'm glad you didn't," she said, forcing a laugh. "I'd probably be a divorced mother of four by now."

  "No," Elinor said slowly. "I don't think so."

  "This whole conversation is making me feel odd, Mom."

  "That's because you know I'm right."

  "I don't know any such thing."

  "In your heart you do."

  She pushed her bangs off her forehead and shifted around on the bench.

  "What's the point to all of this?" she asked her mother finally. "It's over. We can't change the past, can we?"

  "Maybe not, but you have your future ahead of you."

  "And US-National owns it. You're getting forgetful, Mom."

  Elinor's pithy four-letter response shocked Sandra into silence.

  "My body may be withering, but my mind isn't. Don't ever forget that."

  How could she? That was the hideous reality of ALS, and the hardest thing of all to bear.

  "No company owns you, honey," Elinor continued. "No job is worth your life's blood. You deserve more. I want you to have more."

  "I'm sorry," Sandra said finally. "I wanted to change the subject, and that seemed the best way."

  "Give yourselves a chance. Fate brought you two together for a reason. Find out what that reason is."

  She tried to ignore the odd tug of emotion her mother's words conjured up. "What I'd really like to know is why you never told me you and Michael kept in touch."

  "You never asked."

  "Don't play games, Mom."

  Elinor sighed. "Think back ten years. Would you really have wanted to know I was consorting with the enemy?"

  "I suppose not," Sandra said grudgingly. "But I have to say it came as a big surprise when he told me."

  "He told you about our letters and phone calls?"

  "Yes. He said you both fell out of touch a few years back and he never understood why. That was when you became sick, wasn't it?"

  Elinor managed a nod. "Yes."

  "Why didn't you tell him?"

  "Why would I?" her mother countered. "The fact that I'm dying isn't something you work into a casual conversation."

  "I don't think there was ever anything casual about either one of you. He was always like a son to you, and God knows he loved you. You should have told him."

  Elinor looked at Sandra, her blue eyes huge. Her long eyelashes cast shadows against her cheekbones. "You didn't, did you?"

  Sandra shook her head. "When I realized he had no idea what happened, I thought I should speak with you first."

  Her mother nodded, her eyes drooping shut with relief.

  "What did you tell him?"

  "The first thing I could think of, that you were traveling."

  "Good."

  Sandra cleared her throat. "I'd like to bring him by, Mom. I'd like you to see him again."

  "No!" Elinor's voice was vehement, stronger than Sandra had heard it in months. "I refuse. You wouldn't do that to me, Sandra."

  Sandra stared at her mother. "But I –"

  "No !" The word was louder this time, even more forceful. "Not like this. Let him remember the way I was."

  "He cares for you, Mom. He'd want to know." I need for him to know. Andrew Maxwell's reaction to Elinor's condition was never far from her mind.

  "Respect my wishes on this, Sandra. Don't humiliate me. If you love me, you'll do this one thing for me."

  But before she could question her mother further, Lucie popped up, all smiles and apologies. She was not about to let one of Elinor's good days go by without her obligatory bout of physical therapy.

  The moment for explanations disappeared.

  Sandra walked back into the building with Elinor and Lucie, her mind only half on Lucie's nonstop monologue on hurricane trivia gleaned from the Daily News. They stopped in front of the door to the PT room. Lucie, her knitting needles poking out of her pocket, gave Sandra a quick hug, then slipped inside to ready the equipment for Elinor.

  "Give 'em hell," Sandra said, bending down to kiss her mother. "Remember: no pain, no gain."

  "Honey," Elinor said, "maybe you're the one who should remember that."

  #

  It had been rough going for a while, but Elinor had pulled it off.

  She had smiled at her daughter until the doors swung shut behind her, then had closed her eyes and willed her heartbeat to slow down to a rate that wouldn't send Lucie and the rest of the PT staff into a panic.

  Back in the early stages of her disease, she had been embarrassed by her lack of physical dexterity. Her body's unwillingness to cooperate with her brain had made her uncomfortable around people, and she had withdrawn from her old friends and sought to disappear.

  Thanks to the staff at Fair Oaks, she had finally grown to accept her condition and allow herself the luxury of friendship.

  But when Sandra had mentioned bringing Michael McKay to see her, she had let those old fears out of hiding and had used them shamelessly to manipulate her daughter.

  Elinor would have moved heaven and earth to keep Sandra from making the biggest mistake of her life.

  The breakup with Andrew Maxwell had been more difficult than Sandra had ever let on. Elinor had seen the dark circles beneath her daughter's lovely eyes, had noticed the way she had thrown herself into work with even more determination than usual in an effort to battle down the fears Andrew had brought to light.

  No matter how often Sandra denied it, Elinor knew that her illness, her dependency, had been the root cause of the breakup, and she would be damned if the same thing happened again.

  She'd already done enough to hurt her daughter. The scholarship she'd begged and borrowed and stolen for had changed Sandra's life in ways that went far beyond education. That opportunity had broken apart her daughter's relationship with Michael McKay, exactly as El
inor had hoped it would.

  At the time, it had seemed the kindest thing she could do for both of them. There was a world out there waiting to be discovered, and those two kids could never discover it if they were saddled with children and bills and the numbing realities of adult life.

  If what they had was real, it would survive; and if it didn't – well, better to find out now.

  Now she wondered how she could ever have believed she could play God with something as precious as love.

  Sandra was truly her mother's daughter. The blood that ran in Sandra's veins was so purely her mother's that it sometimes terrified Elinor when she thought of her own mistakes.

  Elinor had loved once, and had never loved again.

  A ridiculous fact, but a fact nevertheless.

  All of the love that Frank Ryan had refused had been channeled into the daughter he never knew.

  For Sandra, it was Michael McKay. Elinor didn't need to hear her daughter say those words to know it was true.

  Now that he was back in her life, now that there was a chance for them to find the happiness they both deserved. Elinor would be damned if her daughter lost the man she loved because of the illness that was taking her life.

  Let Sandra think her vain. Let Sandra think her foolish and sad.

  Elinor didn't care.

  All she wanted was to give her daughter this one last gift: a second chance with the man she loved.

  #

  Sandra lingered for a while after her mother disappeared into the therapy room.

  Elinor wasn't a woman given to elliptical statements; she was normally as blunt as Sandra had been before she turned herself into a rising corporate star schooled by Harvard Business to talk a great deal while saying very little.

  Once she poked her head into the therapy room to see how Elinor was progressing, but the intensity of the workout, and the breadth of her mother's pain, had her hurrying back to the solarium to say her goodbyes to Larry and the others.

  "Next time you come up, we'll have that game of draw poker you keep promising me," she said to Larry. "I've been practicing keeping that poker face you showed me."

  Larry's laugh started at his toes, rumbled its way up through his bony body, then erupted in a loud guffaw that was so outrageous everyone else in the room burst out laughing.

  "Just you keep that face you got," he said, patting her hand. "And while you're at it, find yourself a nice young man to bring up here for Thanksgiving dinner. You'd make your mama's day."

  "She said that?" Elinor had never married, and she had raised her only child to be an independent woman. "That hardly sounds like my mother, Larry."

  Larry looked genuinely puzzled. "Don't all mothers want to see their kids happy and settled down?"

  Sandra forced a laugh and stood up to leave. "I'm very happy, and I'll be settled as soon as I get all those boxes unpacked."

  "Don't tell me," Larry said. "Tell your mama. She's the one who worries."

  She pulled her car keys out of her pocket and practiced her poker face on him. "Well, next time you two talk, you tell her for me, okay?"

  She hurried down the corridor at a near run, but, damn it, she couldn't outdistance the feeling that in four short days her entire life had been turned upside down.

  Hurricanes Henry and Iris might have spared her house, but they'd done a number on her heart.

  When her mother had refused to let Michael know about her condition, a sudden wave of relief had weakened Sandra's knees. Now the memory of it shamed her, but it didn't lessen the sense of being given a reprieve.

  She stopped in front of the pay phone in the hospital lobby.

  Why not?

  It was time to stop playing games.

  Michael's phone number just happened to be in her wallet and, God knew, her telephone credit-card number was committed to memory.

  Her hand was shaking as she reached up to pop off her huge button earrings, and her stomach was twisted into sailor's knots. How on earth had men managed this as a steady diet in the days before women's liberation?

  The telephone looked about as inviting as a woman-eating Venus flytrap.

  "Coward," she muttered to herself.

  The whole point of this visit to see her mother was to be forced to sort out her feelings, and now that she had begun to make sense of them she was ready to turn tail and head for the hills.

  The truth was painfully simple: she had finally managed to take him into her bed, but she was afraid to let him into her life.

  The concept of no pain, no gain suddenly acquired a new dimension.

  Life had been a lot easier when they were teenagers. All a girl had to do was own a telephone and have a vast reservoir of patience. The burden of decision used to rest squarely on the boy's shoulders, where she was beginning to suspect it belonged.

  Well, she wasn't seventeen anymore and women no longer sat by the phone waiting for it to ring.

  The rules had changed forever.

  Sandra picked up the phone and dialed Michael's number.

  ~~

  Chapter Six~~

  The hawk was in there, and Michael was going to find him.

  He moved his chisel another fraction of an inch and brought the hammer down again and again, the rhythm of his tapping in synch with the music blasting through his Walkman.

  The fifth time his hammer struck the chisel, the curved beak of a raptor emerged; on the tenth blow, the angle of its head.

  "All right," he muttered, pushing his hair off his face with the back of his arm. He had the son of a bitch in his sights, and now he was going in for the kill.

  He rocked back on his heels in order to get a better angle. His thigh muscles ached from the squatting position he'd been in the last hour. No wonder most catchers were bowlegged. Who wouldn't be, squatting down for nine innings, 162 days a year?

  The chisel was in place; he raised his hammer, and was about to strike when Leon Williams, in his ever-present red leather bomber jacket popped up at his side.

  ". . . on the phone."

  Michael looked at him. "What?"

  Leon shot him one of his best former tough-kid looks and yanked the Walkman off Michael's head.

  "Hey, man, if you wanna hear, you gotta take off the machinery."

  "The only thing between you and death right now, Williams, is the fact that I'm too tired to kill you." The hawk was disappearing back into the limestone and, damn it, he wasn't sure he could recapture it. He glared at the young man next to him.' This'd better be good."

  "Phone for you, boss man." The tough-kid look slid into a wicked grin. "It's a woman. A fine-sounding woman."

  Bobby, Julio and Ray looked up from the template they were positioning on a virgin slab of limestone.

  "A lady's callin' the boss man?" Julio let loose with a howl. "We gotta hear about this."

  "Get back to work on that piece of rock, guys, or you'll be hearing about it on the unemployment line."

  He tossed his Walkman down on his workbench and headed toward the phone in the anteroom.

  "Must be serious."

  "He don't get no calls at work ever."

  "What about that fine fox down in the art place?"

  "You think maybe he –"

  Michael shut the door on his four speculating apprentices, and picked up the receiver balanced on the windowsill.

  "McKay here."

  There was a laugh, throaty and feminine, then, "Not very cordial, Michael."

  He leaned against the door. Just the sound of her voice was enough to send his blood shooting south.

  "I wasn't expecting to hear from you, Sandy." There was nothing in their past to make him think she would ever take the initiative.

  "The workmen came by yesterday afternoon."

  She paused, but he couldn't think of anything to say, clever or otherwise.

  She cleared her throat. "You'll be happy to hear I can now use my driveway for its intended purpose."

  "Great." Say something, you jackass. He c
ould usually shoot his mouth off with the best of them. Why was he suddenly finding it hard to come up with words of more than one syllable?

  "If this is what it's like calling someone for a date, it's no wonder males have such a high incidence of stomach ulcers."

  Tension loosened its hold on his vocal cords. "Beginning to feel sorry for the enemy?"

  Her laugh had always done wonderful things to him, and time hadn't changed a damn thing.

  "I never thought you were the enemy."

  He looked out the window, at the parking lot littered with cars and trucks and eight-tons labs of Indiana limestone. Four fat and ornery pigeons pecked at the wrapper from a Milky Way bar and ignored the apple core not twenty feet away from them.

  "What am I then, Sandy? What the hell are we?"

  "You're making this awfully difficult, McKay." The hesitation was gone from her voice, and he detected an undercurrent of amusement. "I just might hang up on you."

  His old self-confidence reappeared. "Come on, Assistant Vice-President. You must've called for a reason."

  "I called to thank you for sending the workers."

  "That's all?"

  "I called to see how you were doing."

  "Don't kid yourself, Sandy."

  "I called to tell you to go to hell."

  "Getting warmer."

  "Damn it, Michael. I'm beginning to wish I hadn't called at all."

  Everything they'd said and done and imagined throughout that long and wonderful night swept over him, sending caution up in flames.

  "Too late. This time there's no turning back. You knew that when you picked up the phone." He wanted all of her, or nothing at all.

  "Are you trying to scare me?" she asked.

  "Have I?"

  "Sorry to disappoint you, McKay, but I don't scare easily."

  "We have a lot of years to catch up on," he said, thinking of his marriage, his son. "You may be surprised."

  Again that wonderful laugh. "So might you, friend."

  That gave him pause.

  They made plans for Wednesday night. He needed time to get David settled in, and he needed time to figure out how to tell Sandra he was a father.

  He had no idea how she felt about children; she might turn around and walk out of his life the second he broke the news.