“What do you want me to do?” he asked grimly. She jumped. He’d moved over to her while she was lost in thought, and now he was peering into her bag. “Sit down,” she told him, nodding toward the ground beside her. “I’m going to give you a manicure. Sit. Give me one of your hands.”
Jake sat down, cross-legged, and held out a hand. For a minute, at least, they had privacy. When she closed his hands inside hers, he felt both her misery and her happiness to see him. “Why did you come here today?” she whispered.
Their eyes met. “I promised I’d come for you when you were old enough to vote.” There was nothing light or teasing about the way he said it.
Sam gave a slow, helplessly satisfied sigh. “And I’ve always wanted you to.”
“Then it’s time.”
“You know that’s not true. I can’t walk away from my mom and Charlotte. Aunt Alex pays most of our bills, and I owe her some kind of loyalty, whether I like it or not. I can’t support them—not yet anyway.”
“I can.”
“Jake.”
He leaned forward, cupping her hand between both of his, his face taut, his eyes full of unwavering determination. “I have a house. A good-size house. There’s plenty of room for them. I have money—not a lot, but enough. I made twenty-thousand dollars last year, selling stones. I help my parents pay taxes on the Cove and send Ellie expenses that aren’t covered by her scholarship. But I’ve saved every dollar I could. We’d be all right.”
“You’d do that? You’d take my mother and sister into your house and—”
“Our house,” he corrected her. “Yours and mine.” When she looked at him in speechless shock, he added quickly, “We can make this work, lady. And there won’t be anything your aunt can do about it.”
Sam stiffened. “Except influence my mother. I don’t know if Mom would agree to something that upset Aunt Alex. If I have a sense of honor, it didn’t just come from my dad. My mother may be loyal to the wrong people, sometimes, but she takes that loyalty very seriously. And, Jake”—she gazed at him sadly—“you can’t tell me your parents would accept us. They don’t have any reason to want Aunt Alex’s relatives in their family.”
“My mother’s feud is with Alexandra. I’ve never heard her say a bad word about your mother.”
“That’s not the same as welcoming her with open arms. And if you think there’s bad blood between your mother and my aunt now, just think what—”
“You’re afraid Alexandra will try to hurt me”
Sam inhaled sharply. “Yes. You and your family.”
“The only way she can hurt me is by keeping you away.” He hesitated, searching her eyes. “And if there’s no way she can do that, then there’s nothing to be afraid of.”
Sam’s mind whirled. She and Jake had been together only briefly, and no more than a half dozen times throughout their lives. Yet he could show up here and invite her—and her family—to move into his house.
And she not only believed he meant every word of it, she wanted to accept.
He was watching her closely. “I know you and me haven’t had a chance to learn all the little things about each other. I’m not saying you have to move in and marry me. Or do anything that doesn’t strike your fancy.”
His awkward, gallant hint melted her. “You’re forgetting,” she replied softly. “We’ve been married for a long time.”
Slowly, his face relaxed. The pads of his fingers moved gently on her palm.
He said nothing else while she worked on his hands. She called the others over and held his hands out in hers, as if she’d created them. “Great. See?”
“To work,” the photographer urged. They went to a tall stool he’d covered in black cloth. Mrs. Path Walker handed Jake a heavy silver ring and told him to try it on for size. It would fit only his little finger. He cast curious looks at Samantha, who had placed a smaller, matching ring on her left hand. The symbolism made her giddy.
“Now, pal,” the photographer said, stand behind her and put your arms along hers. Yes. Like that. Now, let’s see, let’s see—”
Sam’s back was pressed against Jake’s chest, and her hips brushed his thighs. She felt the contact like a magnet. His hands lay over hers. She rearranged them, slid her fingers through his, and the photographer purred, “Yes, oh yes.”
“Take the photos,” Samantha ordered raggedly.
“Take your time,” Jake countered.
Chapter
Fourteen
“Mom!”
Sam barely had the word out of her mouth before her mother, dressed only in a thin, sweat-soaked T-shirt, collapsed in a pale heap among packing boxes on the bedroom floor. Sam splattered a glass of iced herbal tea across the carpet and bounded to her mother’s side, yelling for Charlotte to help her. Because Mom claimed man-made chemicals only insulted her immune system, Sam had been bringing her tea every few hours with a couple of anonymous aspirin dissolved in it.
After watching Mom’s flu grow worse for the past three days, Sam was beyond any twinges of guilt over the deception. Mom was sick and in bed already when Jake brought Sam home from Mrs. Path Walker’s. Jake, giving in to Sam’s urging, had left without Mom knowing he’d been there. Sam decided to say nothing until Mom began feeling better.
Hearing what Jake had proposed would be a shock, she knew.
Charlotte bolted into the room and shrieked when she saw Sam wedging both hands under Mom’s shoulders. “It’s okay. She just fainted,” Sam said with all the false composure she could muster. She was so accustomed to being in charge, she automatically shoved her own terror out of her mind and concentrated on calming Charlotte. “She’s okay,” Sam repeated. “Help me get her back in bed.” Charlotte shrieked again but grabbed Mom’s ankles.
Together they hauled Mom’s limp body onto the rumbled sheets of her double bed, bumping the bedstead. Mom’s strings of quartz crystals swayed from thumbtacks on the pine headboard. Sam scooped the annoying strings into one hand and tossed them over the board, then pulled blankets up to Mom’s thin shoulders.
“I thought she was feeling better!” Charlotte cried. “She said she felt better after Ms. Peace-Hope rubbed mint leaves on her!”
Sam clamped her mouth tight to keep from offering the opinion that Mom’s “doctor” was a quack who’d do more good rubbing mint on Charlotte’s homemade fudge. Sam grabbed a damp washcloth from a bowl on the nightstand and wiped Mom’s face hard, as if she could scrub away the bright pink smear of fever on her cheeks. Mom stirred weakly, and her eyes fluttered. Sam knelt on the bed and cupped her hot face. Fear pounded in her throat. “Mom, you keeled over. I’m calling an ambulance.”
Mom’s eyes opened. She made a wheezing sound of dismay that ended in “Nooo.” Her voice was a croak. She panted for air, then coughed. “I’m fine. Just need more time to let my body expel the toxins. Hate hospitals. Call Joy Peace-Hope.”
Charlotte, who had been clinging to a bedpost, said, “I’ll do it!” and bounded out of the room. Sam gritted her teeth and told Mom, “I’m scared. I’m calling an ambulance. And if Ms. Peace-Hope gets in my way, I’ll dehyphenate her.”
“Sammie,” Mom whispered with weary rebuke. Again Mom coughed with that terrible wheezing sound deep in her chest. “You need more optimism. Good energy. Trust me. I know you think I’m letting you down. I’ve always let you down, but please …” Mom’s voice trailed off, and Sam watched her struggle not to cry. Close to tears herself, Sam stroked her mother’s damp golden hair and chewed the inside of her mouth until she tasted blood. “You didn’t let me down,” she lied. “But I’ll have a lot more good energy once a real doctor tells me you’re okay.”
“Guilt,” Mom said, and moaned. “That’s why I’m sick.” Her head lolled from side to side. “Guilt over trusting Malcolm Drury. Guilt over not being able to run a successful business. Guilt over not being able to do what Alexandra can do for you and Charlotte—if you’d let her.”
“Mom, you’re sick because you inhaled a ger
m.”
“Do you hate me?” Mom’s hand fluttered around one of Sam’s hands, then clung weakly to it. Choking down tears, Sam looked firmly into Mom’s tired blue eyes. “No. Not ever.”
“I know … my ideas seem foolish to you. I never meant to hurt you. From the day you were born, I made mistakes, but—”
“I wouldn’t trade you for a thousand mothers who do ordinary things.”
“I should be more like Alexandra. I want you to respect me the way you … respect her. She won’t let you down.”
“Respect?” Sam’s voice rose. “It’s you I’ve always respected. You and Daddy, and not Aunt—”
Mom began coughing and shivering. The cough became a long spasm. Sam frantically pulled her onto her side and pounded her between the shoulder blades until she gasped for air and the coughing stopped. The skin around her eyes and mouth was bluish-white. The fear in her eyes matched Sam’s terror. “I’m calling for an ambulance,” Sam said. “And that’s all there is to it.”
Mom made a hoarse mewl of defeat.
“You let her lie there—burning up with fever and coughing her lungs out—and didn’t call me. Why?” Aunt Alexandra asked the question with an air of wounded trust as she stood with her hands on her hips in the center of the small waiting room of the intensive care unit. Charlotte was huddled on a couch in the corner, too tired to cry anymore. Sam stood facing their aunt, so numb with dread and exhaustion, she had to concentrate on keeping her knees locked. Her legs felt rubbery.
Finally Sam managed to say, “I don’t like to order her around.”
“Well, you’d better learn to. If you’d called me sooner, I’d have insisted she see a doctor before. Frankly, I’m surprised at you for taking chances, honey. You know how irresponsible your mother is. I count on you to—”
“She’s not irresponsible. Don’t ever call her that.”
Amazement, displeasure, and then a kind of grim resolve swept across Aunt Alex’s face. She sighed and put an arm around Sam’s taut shoulders. “All right, honey. It’s just that I’m upset too. Your mother has pneumonia.”
Charlotte made a noise. “Is she going to die?”
Aunt Alex reached her before Sam could. Enfolding Charlotte in her silk-sleeved arms, Aunt Alex said, “No, of course not.”
Charlotte clung to her but peered tearfully over her shoulder at Sam. “Sammie?”
“No way,” Sam told her. “People don’t die from pneumonia. It’s no big deal.” She meant that. Her confidence was rising now that they were at the hospital. Drugs and oxygen tanks and neatly uniformed people with stethoscopes around their necks—those were reliable threads she could knit into a solid safety net.
“Come with me,” their aunt said gently. “We’ll go downstairs and I’ll buy you a snack at the cafeteria. Nothing to worry yourselves about now. I’ll take care of you.”
“Charlotte could use some food, but I’m not hungry. I’ll stay here.”
Aunt Alex raised her head sharply and looked at Sam. Command met quiet refusal in an invisible tug-of-war. “I do appreciate your sense of responsibility,” Aunt Alex said with an edgy smile. “Directed in the right channels, determination is a wonderful asset. We’ll have to talk about that sometime.” She took Charlotte’s hand. “But not right now. Come along, Charlotte. You and I will visit the cafeteria. Now, cheer up. Your mother is going to be fine, and as soon as she gets out of this place, I’ll take all three of you to Highview for a nice rest, and you can make your mother a pot full of chicken soup.”
“Mom doesn’t eat chicken,” Charlotte said wearily. “Not even eggs. Not even when I make eggs Benedict.”
“Well, that’s going to change.”
As Aunt Alex led her from the waiting room, Charlotte looked back at Sam doubtfully.
Sam waited until she was certain they’d entered an elevator down the hall, then strode out of the room. She pushed through the double doors to the intensive care unit. Nurses in white pantsuits looked up from various chores. One of them peered at her over a central desk lined with monitors, each of which reassured her with the steady, pulsing lifelines on their screens. “I know it’s not time to visit, but I’d like to see my mother. Just for a minute.”
“She’s sleeping, hon.”
“Could I just go in and hold her hand?”
“Well, all right.”
A minute later Sam was alone with Mom in a glass cubicle with drawn blinds. The sight—Mom lying there so pale and still, outfitted with tubes and wires, her lashes making faint gold fringes on the bluish skin beneath her eyes—made Sam want to turn away, to shrink inside her own skin. She moved woodenly to Mom’s side and put a hand on one of hers. “I love you very much,” she whispered raggedly. “I’ve never wished you were like Aunt Alexandra.”
Mom’s lashes fluttered. She inhaled—a watery sound—and looked up at Sam groggily. A wistful smile appeared beneath the clear oxygen tube taped below her nose. “You’re as strong as she is. Good. Be strong … now. Take my … wedding ring.”
Dread, the kind she didn’t want to name, squeezed Sam’s chest. “No,” she said, shaking her head stiffly, recoiling at the thought.
“It keeps … sliding off my finger. Don’t want to lose it. Please.”
That explanation made sense; Sam could deal with sensible requests. “I’ll get a piece of surgical tape from a nurse. We’ll tape your ring so it won’t fall off.”
“No. Please. Please.” Mom coughed. Sam trembled. “Okay. It’s all right. Easy, easy.” She put a hand on Mom’s forehead and stroked as gently as she could. Mom relaxed. “Your daddy always said you have his mother’s hands. She was a nurse at one of the mills.”
Sam had heard the story many times, and it worried her that Mom seemed to have forgotten that she knew. “Working with cloth must be in the Ryder genes. But we’ve never accounted for Charlotte. No great cooks in the family tree.”
Mom managed a weak smile. “Charlotte’s a new branch.” Sam was glad she’d stopped talking about the ring. But her mother moved her fingers weakly under Sam’s hand. “Take it,” she said. “Please. I’ll feel better, knowing you have it.”
Tears crept down Sam’s face. She slid off the plain gold band and clutched it tightly in her palm, absorbing the warmth. “I’ll keep it just until you get out of here.”
“Look after Charlotte. I know you will. And make peace with your aunt. She loves you. I won’t have to worry about my girls … being all alone.”
Sam froze. “Don’t talk that way.”
“If something happens to me … I put it in my … will. She’ll be Charlotte’s legal guardian.”
Sam’s knees buckled. Bitter protest failed under the tide of fear. I have plans, she wanted to shout. Jake and I have plans. Sam braced herself against the bed’s metal railing. “Nothing is going to happen to you.”
A nurse appeared in the cubicle’s doorway. “Time’s up, hon.”
“Mom, promise me you’re going to fight to get well.”
“Tired, so tired,” Mom answered. “Love you.” Her eyes closed. Sam gripped her hand. “Mom. Everything’s going to be all right. I have something I have to tell you. Maybe it’s what you need to hear. Mom, we don’t have to go on the way we have. Please, wake up and listen.”
“Let her rest,” the nurse whispered, waving Sam out.
Sam stared at the slow, labored, rise-and-fall of Mom’s chest. “It’s steady,” she said, nodding hard. “You’re going to be all right. I’ll tell you later. Remember that. I’ve got something very important to tell you.”
When Sam continued to hold her mother’s hand, the nurse gently pulled her away.
The next thing Sam knew, she was back in the hall outside the stern double doors, dazed, not quite certain how she’d gotten there, tears blinding her. She had her head down, watching her hands as she rubbed Mom’s wedding band between her numb fingertips, as if for luck.
A broad, big-knuckled hand closed carefully over both of hers. She jerked her hea
d up. Jake gazed at her with stark intensity. For the briefest moment his attention flickered to the doors of the intensive care ward. His hand tightened convulsively on hers. The sympathy and alarm that swept into his expression frightened her. Mom was going to be fine. There was no reason for him to look as if he thought otherwise.
She opened her mouth to protest, but the words wouldn’t come. The moment had finally arrived when neither of them were children anymore, and all the brief, furtive encounters over the years had always, without rhyme or reason, seemed destined for the stark, nearly desperate way he was looking at her now.
He knows. Somehow, he always finds me when I need him. But I can’t need him. Not yet. Maybe not ever.
“I’m scared,” Sam admitted. “She’s really sick.” Her throat worked painfully. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
Jake exhaled softly and pulled her to him. They stood there, holding each other, her head resting on his shoulder. His lips moved against her temple. “You haven’t talked to her about us yet,” he said.
“No. I knew it’d upset her. I wanted to wait until she was stronger. I tried to tell her just now—she was saying awful, morbid things about the future—but she fell asleep.” Sam drew her head back and looked at him desperately. “She made me take her wedding ring. She claimed she’s worried about losing it while she’s in the hospital. But the way she talked about it—and, God, she told me to take care of Charlotte, and”—Sam could barely say the next words—“she told me she put a note in her will. If anything happens to her, Aunt Alex will become Charlotte’s guardian.”
Jake looked shaken. “Your aunt drove your mother to this point,” he said urgently. “Why didn’t I see it coming? Your mother’s got to fight. She’s got to do it for you and your sister.” He paused, his expression becoming even harsher, more urgent. “Your sister,” he repeated. “She’s only fourteen.” He took Sam by the shoulders. “We can’t let her be turned over to Alexandra like property. No judge is going to take her away from Alexandra.”
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