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
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Thank you for reading
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Title Page
Copyright
CHAPTER ONE
Summer Carson’s mother left her in the grocery store when she was ten years old, standing in the produce section next to a perfect pyramid of cantaloupes. As they approached the fresh herbs, Willow stopped and flung a hand into the air, dramatic, Scarlett O’Hara style.
“I forgot my coupons,” she said, a touch too loudly and with a fake Southern lilt. “Left them in the car. I’ll just run back and get them.”
Summer thought to herself, this is normal, right? But her memory replayed scenes from earlier that morning, each one of them featuring a glass of honey-colored bourbon.
“You just wait right here, honey,” Willow said, patting Summer’s hand where it rested on the grocery cart handle. “I’ll be right back. Pick out a cantaloupe, would you?”
Because she was an obedient child, Summer lifted melons to her face, one at a time, choosing one that smelled so much like it had already been cut open that her mouth watered. She set it carefully in the basket. Then she waited. And waited. After quite some time had passed, the produce man approached and asked if she was all right.
“Just waiting for my mom,” she said.
She applauded herself for sounding calm, when inside, doubt had begun to creep its way into the spotlight. Yes, her mother should be back by now. No, it shouldn’t take more than a minute to run out to the car and come back in. Maybe she should just check and make sure the car was still there. It wasn’t. A quick glance outside revealed their beat up little hatchback was gone. Maybe Willow got out to the parking lot and realized she left the coupons at home. She just ran home to get them. Or to get another glass of bourbon, a little voice whispered.
Rather than subjecting herself to further questioning, Summer decided, she would get the shopping done. She walked slowly through the store, adding the usual items to the basket: orange juice, organic eggs, whole wheat bread.
She completed a full circle and then walked back to the produce section. Still, Willow wasn’t there. Distant alarm bells began to sound in Summer’s brain, and she forced herself to swallow, loosening the feeling of panic that lodged in her throat. Music played on the speakers, and Summer mouthed the words to “Sixteen Candles,” which she knew by heart. She and her mother used to sing it over and over while washing dishes, mopping the floor or folding laundry.
The grocery store doors whooshed open and a police officer walked in. He scanned the produce department in half a second, and his eyes landed on Summer. He walked towards her.
A million thoughts ran through her mind. An unpleasant swirling sensation took over her stomach.
Was her mother dead?
Had she driven drunk, again, and finally crashed?
Had she killed someone? Someone else’s mother?
Was the policeman here to arrest her, Summer, for letting her mom leave the store parking lot after taking a few slugs from her flask?
Was he here to take Summer to the hospital to say her final good-byes?
“Hi, there,” the police officer said.
Summer took a deep breath.
“Hi.”
***
Twenty-four years had passed since the day Willow Carson drove off and left her daughter standing next to the cantaloupe, and Summer—now Summer Gray, thirty-four and married with her fifth child on the way—remembered it as crisply as if it were yesterday. Fifteen years had passed since Summer had even spoken to her mother. So why did the grocery store memory still cause her heart to race with panic?
She stood in the cluttered kitchen of her adult life, putting away groceries. The clandestine cantaloupe that had triggered the flashback rolled toward the edge of the counter. She caught it and set it behind the knife block in the corner.
“Don’t forget about that melon until it’s moldy and smelling up the kitchen,” Summer said.
“Talking to yourself again, Mom?”
She laughed. “Yes, Sarah. And I’ve heard you doing the same. At eleven.”
“I got it from you.”
“You did. And my good looks.”
Summer’s sons, Luke and Nate, barreled through the kitchen door as Sarah began putting groceries in the pantry. “You left Hannah in the car, Mom,” Nate said.
“I did it on purpose,” Summer lied. “So she wouldn’t run into the street while we were unloading groceries.”
Actually, she’d forgotten Hannah, whose little face would be crimson with rage when Summer eventually released her from her car seat.
She saw Sarah give her a skeptical look out of the corner of her eye, her eleven-year-old expression a bit too adult (and perceptive) for Summer’s taste.
“What?” Summer said. “I did.”
“Well, we’ve got all the groceries inside now, Mom,” Luke said. “I used the Force to carry them in.”
Someone made a lightsaber sound, and Summer laughed. “Can one of you please use the Force to get Hannah out of the car and put the rest of the groceries away? I’m exhausted.”
The boys threw their arms out at the pile of bags on the kitchen floor, shrugged when nothing happened, and disappeared into some distant galaxy. For a moment, Summer felt a prickle of guilt at having forgotten Hannah, but she quickly brushed it away. She wasn’t her own mother, after all. Mistakes happened. And as long as those mistakes didn’t happen on a ninety-degree day, everyone turned out fine.
She was just distracted, exhausted and eight months’ pregnant. And so what if she secretly longed to get into a semi-major car accident or experience a semi-major illness so she could get a few days’ vacation in a hospital bed? The thought gave her a strange sense of being pampered: nurses checking on her every couple of hours, someone delivering her food and taking the empty dishes away, no one expecting her to clean or drive or remember any appointments, field trip forms, lunch money or special projects. So what if she imagined driving the van right into the light pole in the middle of the grocery store parking lot so she could be whisked away in an ambulance? Not as sleek as a limo, but still. A hospital holiday. It could be a new thing. But she’d never really do it.
No, she wasn’t her mother. When it had come time for Summer to create her own family, she had follo
wed one rule: Whatever Willow had done, Summer would do the complete opposite.
So instead of having just one child, she was intent on having five.
Instead of the numerous flighty romances Willow ignited and squelched in rapid succession, Summer chose a husband who was dependable, reliable, and a good provider.
Instead of leaving her children at the grocery store, she left them in the car on a hot July day.
“Ugh,” she found herself saying out loud as she pulled the van door open to Hannah’s chants of “Out! Out! Out!”
Hannah had learned to walk earlier than all the other kids had, so now, at fifteen months old, Summer could simply set her down on the driveway and herd her into the house.
She smiled as Hannah toddled through the doorway, her pigtails sticking up on either side of her head. The moment was fleeting, though. Summer heard her phone ring just as Hannah walked directly into the doorjamb and started screaming.
An emotion she couldn’t quite pinpoint began to rise up in her stomach as she scooped up the baby and carried her into the kitchen. Was it stress? Urgency? Frustration? The phone kept ringing, and although she knew it wasn’t possible, Summer thought it sounded increasingly insistent.
While she could have sworn she put her phone on the counter, she couldn’t find it among the bills, school papers, grocery bags and groceries. Hannah continued to scream and only then did Summer notice she had a huge goose egg just above her right eyebrow. Pushing a pile of papers out of the way, Summer set Hannah on the counter. The movement unearthed the phone. Summer answered it, grabbed a bag of peas out of the freezer and pressed it to Hannah’s face, which, naturally, produced a fresh round of shrieks.
“Hold on, please,” Summer said into the phone.
She moved Hannah into her high chair, tore open the bag of peas and dumped some on the tray. Then she locked herself in the bathroom.
“Hi, Summer, it’s Amy from Dr. Thibedeau’s office.”
Dr. Thibedeau, the kids’ pediatrician, let the kids call him Dr. Tippy Toes. They loved it.
“Hey. Did I miss an appointment or something?”
Normally, Amy would laugh, but when she didn’t, Summer felt that feeling intensify. Stress. Anxiety. She wasn’t sure.
“No,” Amy said. “It’s Luke’s results from the scan. Dr. Thibedau wants you to meet with the heart specialist. I’ve already put the referral through, and they should be contacting you, um, pretty much right away to make an appointment.”
They hung up and Summer sat down on the edge of the bathtub. An appointment with the heart specialist meant Luke’s scan hadn’t come back normal. From everything Dr. Thibedeau had said, an abnormal result meant surgery.
***
The police officer must have noticed ten-year-old Summer’s panic, because he put a hand on her shoulder, knelt down so they were eye to eye, and said, “Don’t worry. You’re not in trouble.”
“Is my mom okay?”
“That’s why I’m here. The store employees called us because they noticed you’ve been in the store by yourself for a pretty long time. Do you know where your mom is?”
That tight feeling in her throat again. She tried not to cry, but her voice shook when she answered. Her eyes stung and she blinked, hard. “She said she had to go back to the car to get her coupons. But she was taking so long that I went to look for her and the car was gone. I was thinking maybe she realized she left the coupons at home, and went to get them. So I did the shopping. But she hasn’t come back.”
The policeman nodded. Summer noticed his dark eyes taking in everything about her, from the messy ponytail and the too-tight jeans to the too-short shirt and the white Reeboks with the hole in one toe.
“We’ll find her. Why don’t you come with me?”
When she hesitated, he stuck out his hand for a handshake and said, “I’m sorry. I haven’t introduced myself. I’m officer Andy Telluride with the Juniper Police Department.”
He bought her a box of Cheez-Its and a soda, which would have sent her mom into a tizzy. He let Summer sit in the passenger seat of his patrol car while he used the radio to give someone else her address. While they waited (for what, Summer wasn’t sure), he asked her lots of questions about her life. Which school did she go to? What was her favorite subject? What was her favorite book? He had a daughter about Summer’s age, he told her, and she was reading “The Chronicles of Narnia.”
A while later, the radio squawked and Summer heard another man’s voice: “We found the subject. She’s passed out on the couch at home. Says she came home to get coupons and fell asleep. Drunk as a skunk, this one.”
Officer Telluride jumped, startled, and tried to turn the radio down, but Summer had heard enough. The drinking had gotten progressively worse during the past several months and people they encountered often whispered things like, “Wow, she’s plastered,” or, “Three sheets to the wind.”
It almost had to come to this, didn’t it?
Officer Telluride drove Summer home and asked her to wait in the car while he talked to her mother. She nodded, but when he went inside, she crept up to the front door and pressed her ear hard against its hot pink surface. Willow had insisted they paint it a gaudy coral to symbolize love and beauty. “We’ll have both here, won’t we, Summer?” she said at the time.
Not at the moment. Officer Telluride spoke calmly, but even through the front door Summer could hear the anger in his voice. He told Willow how scared Summer was, how hungry she was and how she had wandered the store for hours, alone. He explained that there are very bad people in the world, and one of them could have come along and snatched Summer right up.
While Summer felt a tiny bit defensive, she also felt more than a little angry at her mother. Because everything the policeman said was true. And because Willow didn’t seem to register any of it. Summer could hear her saying over and over like a mantra, “I thought it was just for a minute.”
When Officer Telluride came out the door, the energy radiating off his body in waves, he nearly stumbled over Summer.
“Sorry,” she said.
Again, he knelt down so he could look straight at her. “I’m going to give you my card,” he said. “If anything like this ever happens again, I mean ever, you call me. Do you understand?”
She nodded, grasped the card in her hand, and hugged Officer Telluride around the waist. He put one arm around her shoulders and squeezed back.
That was the first time Willow Carson disappointed her daughter, but it wasn’t the last.
CHAPTER TWO
Most Thursdays, Summer looked forward to her Happy Hour meetings with her two best friends. In her ongoing quest to be reliable, unlike her mother, Summer had become the sounding board and the steadfast support for Delaney Collins (who was now Delaney Rhoades) and Josie Garcia. Not that they didn’t support her, too, Summer thought as she approached the swinging doors of Rowdy’s Saloon.
But over the course of the past twenty years, Summer had become the proverbial lighthouse. Her role was to provide guidance, find the silver lining, say the right thing. She could meditate her way through anything. Until recently. Life had become increasingly complicated.
Several months ago, her husband, Derek, had lost his job. Her freelance graphic design income wasn’t quite enough to support a family of six. Then the Grays turned into a growing family, with Gray Baby Number Five on the way. Derek got a new job, but the hours were long, which meant Summer was home with the kids and the new puppy, Chuck, pretty much around the clock.
And now Luke. Her perfect little boy. He’d always had a heart murmur, and his pediatrician had recently become “concerned” about it. He’d ordered a million tests and then referred them to a heart specialist. The heart specialist hadn’t called to make an appointment yet, and not knowing what was wrong or how the doctors planned to fix it set Summer’s nerves on a razor-thin edge.
Happy Hour always provided some solace, because it gave her the chance to focus on Delaney and Josie and th
eir lives. She looked forward to the weekly meetings like one of her children looked forward to a birthday party. Not that she’d had many birthday parties when she was a child, but she understood the excitement.
Summer could hear the twang of country music before she pushed the doors open. As she entered the saloon, Delaney waved in greeting. Summer took a deep breath, squared her shoulders and smiled.
“Your drink’s on the way,” Josie said with a smug, teasing smile.
Summer rolled her eyes. “Thanks. I love lemon water.”
They giggled, and Summer slid onto her stool and pointed at Delaney. “You love lemon water too, don’t you?”
Benjamin, Rowdy’s long-time bartender, sauntered over with a tray. He set glasses of water in front of Summer and Delaney, and a vodka cranberry in front of Josie. Then, with a flourish, he set a bowl of green olives between Summer and Delaney.
“She just smirked,” Delaney said, gesturing at Josie with her water glass.
“I did not!”
“You did, too! You smirked because you get a vodka cran and we get waters.”
“Now, now, ladies,” Benjamin said. “Don’t argue. It’s not good for the babies.”
He tipped his black cowboy hat and walked away, and a beat of silence ensued.
“Actually, Delaney,” Josie said, “I smirked because I was thinking about the first time you ate a green olive during Happy Hour. Your eyes rolled back in your head and you were like, ‘This is so good.’ That’s how we knew you were pregnant.”
Summer nodded. “Yep. You’d been making fun of my green olive obsession for months. And now you have one, too.”
Delaney laughed. “Too true.”
“So how are you feeling, Dee?” Josie asked. “You’re officially into the second trimester.”
“I mean, being pregnant is miraculous and everything,” Delaney said, “but it’s so uncomfortable. Why didn’t you warn me, Summer?”
“You’ve seen me through four pregnancies. And a half. I thought you knew.”
“You’re always so stoic, though,” Josie said.
The Motherhood Intervention: Book 3 in the Intervention Series Page 1