“You pay for the lawyer and it’s yours.”
Bemused, she shook her head. “I’m never going to get to L.A.”
He spun her chair around and scooted her back into the hallway. “Yes, you will—unless you want me to pick up your Oscar for you. Now go back to work.”
“I haven’t said yes.”
He gave her a knowing grin. “But you didn’t say no.”
“If you’re going to strong-arm me you could at least do it over dinner.”
“You’re on. Eva’s Roost tonight.”
“That better not be some hamburger joint.”
“Would I do that? Never mind, don’t answer.” He put his hand to his heart. “Eva’s Roost isn’t the biggest restaurant in this area, but it’s the best. I’ll give you another five percent if you don’t think so, too.”
She liked the odds. “You’re on.”
Christina didn’t get home until two-thirty the next morning. She was an hour into her second wind and unable to sleep, so got up and went into the kitchen for a snack. As usual, Rhona had the refrigerator fully stocked, everything from pudding cups to lunch meat. She settled on strawberry yogurt.
She shuffled down the hallway to Jessie’s study, her ragged stuffed bear tucked under her arm. Standing at the door eating her yogurt, she looked inside. A full moon and the neighbor’s outdoor lighting cast the room in off-white ghostly light and deep shadows. With just a little imagination she could picture her father sitting at the antique desk, looking back at her.
“I loved you, Daddy,” she said softly. “How could you convince yourself I would be better off without you?” She understood now that no one had told her he’d died. It was something she’d made up when he left and never came back. He had to be dead—otherwise he would have come for her.
“Was it really just easier to walk away than to fight for me?” Christina snaked her hand around the corner and flipped the light switch. Decorator lighting recessed in the ceiling and tucked over and in the bookshelves lit the room in a soft glow.
Christina put her half-finished yogurt on the table next to a wingback chair and went around the desk. She’d been in this room a dozen times, looked at the books, at Frank’s Purple Heart, at the things on Jessie’s desk, at the pen propped in a mounted block of gold quartz. She’d never felt free to do more than look at the arrowheads or spent bullets or to take down one of the books or open a drawer or look inside the battered, leather-covered box on the corner of the desk. To do so felt like an invasion of privacy.
Now, driven by a need to better understand the man who had willingly abandoned her, Christina propped her bear against the lamp, sat in his chair, and reached for the box. She lifted the top, looked inside, and pulled out a woman’s watch, the face narrow, the band delicate. Next she found a man’s pocket watch, a pair of screw-back earrings with a matching necklace, and a pair of old wire-rim eyeglasses. There were yellowed letters, a page from a family Bible listing births, deaths, and marriages of relatives dating back to 1820, and old black-and-white photographs curling at the corners.
Christina set the letters aside and studied the photographs. Even as a young boy, Jessie was easy to identify. Standing with his arms stiff at his sides, posed in front of an unpainted farmhouse, he had the same hungry, faraway look in his eyes that she remembered as a child. The others she named by elimination. The thin girl with braids over her shoulders and a toothless grin would be her aunt, the boy in overalls and a cap pulled low on his forehead, her uncle. Her grandparents had been captured in the kitchen, her grandmother standing near the stove, a spoon in her hand, a calico apron covering her dress. Her grandfather leaned against the counter, a smile of mischief and joy directed toward the woman he clearly loved.
Christina stared at the picture. She could almost feel their happiness. Her grandmother must have been an extraordinary woman to survive what awaited her. “How did you do it, Grandma?” she said softly. “How did you have your heart broken so many times and still go on?”
There were other pictures, including a baby picture with Jessie’s name on the back. He was bare-skinned on a bearskin rug and plainly unhappy to be there. Most of the photographs had been taken on the farm, but there were a couple of mountain scenes where whoever took the picture stood back so far, she would need a magnifying glass to tell who the people were.
She couldn’t see herself in these people, but then she’d never been able to see herself in any of her family. She looked pale compared to her half-brother and -sister in Mexico and dark compared to her sisters here. She’d never said so out loud, but there were times when she felt as if she didn’t belong anywhere or to anyone.
She picked up a picture of Jessie standing on a pillared porch, his face in profile, staring at a cloud of dust on the horizon. He looked isolated and solitary, a boy not yet a man, a child unaware that sorrow would shadow his footsteps throughout his entire life.
Was she his surrender, his acknowledgment that he had won battles but lost the war for personal happiness? Was it possible that he really had believed he was doing her a favor by walking away?
She held the photograph closer, and when her vision clouded with tears she held her father’s image against her chest. “I love you, Daddy,” she said again. “I always have. I always will. I wish you had given me the chance to tell you.”
Moments later she reached for her bear and automatically tucked it under her arm, the perch it had ridden for over twenty years since the day it came home with her from the zoo. As she moved to leave, the empty shelf where Frank’s medal had been kept caught her eye. On impulse, she crossed the room and put her bear on the shelf, adjusting his legs, centering him, then tilting his head just so. “Looks as if you have a new home,” she said, smiling through her tears. “Looks as if we both do.”
Chapter Fifty-two
Elizabeth
“We need to talk,” Stephanie said.
Elizabeth’s hand froze, the angel she was holding suspended beneath an already overloaded branch on the Christmas tree. She’d sensed a change in Stephanie since Thanksgiving, nothing tangible, just a confidence in her day-to-day decisions and an interest about things that didn’t affect her directly. She was insatiably curious about her new aunts and fixated on her cousins, Cassidy and John, even including the two of them in her Christmas shopping. As casually as possible considering her heart was blocking her throat, Elizabeth asked, “About what?”
“Me—the baby. I’ve done some things I need to tell you about.”
Elizabeth hooked the angel over a branch and watched it swing backward. “You want some tea?”
“Yeah, I guess. Just not that new herb stuff you got at the health food store last week.” She followed Elizabeth into the kitchen.
“How about the old herb stuff?”
“The peach isn’t bad.” Stephanie filled the teakettle with water and put it on the stove while Elizabeth got the tea bags and mugs.
Elizabeth leaned against the counter as she waited for the water to boil; Stephanie sat at the table. “I didn’t tell you the truth about my baby’s father,” she said.
Not even close to what Elizabeth had expected. “Oh?”
Stephanie flushed, her neck and cheeks turning a spotted pink. “His name is David Christopher, by the way. And I wasn’t high, he was. He wasn’t interested in me even though I’d been making a play for him on and off since our freshman year. I guess you could say I took advantage of him.” She nervously twisted her hair into a knot on top of her head and then let it fall free. “He found me the day after the party and apologized. God, Mom—can you imagine a guy apologizing for something like that? In case you haven’t figured it out by now, he’s kind of a nerd. I was so embarrassed when I found out I was pregnant that I couldn’t stay in school and chance him finding out. I knew if my friends knew it would get back to him eventually.”
“Why?” Elizabeth asked, managing with effort to keep the question nonjudgmental.
“Why what?”
“Why put yourself through this now?”
“When we were at Rachel and Jeff’s for Thanksgiving I tried to imagine that I was Cassidy’s mother and wondered what I would tell her when she asked about her father.”
The sentence was like a complex word game filled with intriguing clues. Why Cassidy and not John? Why speculate about a child you would never see grow to that age? Again, Elizabeth held her questions.
“Oh—I guess I forgot to tell you. The ultrasound I had when you were at Rachel’s was pretty conclusive. I’m going to have a girl.” She thought a minute. “No, I didn’t forget,” she admitted. “I just didn’t want you bonding with this baby any more than you already have.”
“I haven’t bonded,” Elizabeth protested. She thought she’d been so careful not to let it show, to the point of purposely not asking about the ultrasound.
“Oh, Mom, I see the way you look at the babies in the doctor’s office. You’re like some deranged stalker.”
“I’m sorry. That’s my problem, not yours.”
“Why are you and Dad so damn good to me?” The teakettle punctuated the question with a loud whistle. She got up to turn off the flame and pour the water into their mugs.
“You’re our daughter. We love you.”
“That’s what it’s like to be a parent? Your kid comes home and turns your life upside down and you just roll with it?”
“We’re keeping a diary of all this so we can blackmail you when we’re old and we need someone to take care of us.”
“I’m serious, Mom. Is this really what it’s like?”
“You’re focusing on one difficult time and missing all the good things that come with being a parent. Your father and I love being your parents. There isn’t anyone I’d rather share things with. There isn’t anyone I have more fun with when we spend a day together.”
“You had the whole summer planned.” She turned from Elizabeth and concentrated on dunking her tea bag, avoiding the look in her mother’s eyes. “Dad told me how disappointed you were that I didn’t want to come home.”
“He shouldn’t have done that.”
“No, but you should have.”
“Would it have made a difference?” Elizabeth asked, knowing the answer.
“No. But I didn’t know then what I do now.”
“It’s a lesson I wish you could have learned another way.”
“See? There you go again, putting me first. What about all the shit you’ve had happen to you this year? You even dropped out of school because of me. After you become a mother does it mean your kids always come first no matter what?”
Elizabeth added a spoonful of sugar to her tea and joined Stephanie at the table. “Why are you asking me that? Really?”
“I’ve decided to keep the baby.”
An emotional dam burst in Elizabeth. “I’m so . . . glad.”
“Don’t cry,” Stephanie said, reaching for the box of tissues Elizabeth kept on the counter. She took one and handed it to her mother and then another to wipe her own tears.
Elizabeth wiped her eyes and blew her nose. “What made you change your mind?”
“Lots of things. Whenever I called my friends at school it was obvious I didn’t fit in anymore. At first I was scared and then I was mad. Then I didn’t care.” She grinned sheepishly. “You think I might be growing up a little?”
“What about this David Christopher?”
“I told him I wasn’t coming after him for money or anything, and that I’d understand if he wanted to do the DNA thing when she was born. I just needed to know more about him so I could tell our daughter when she asked.”
“And what did he say?”
“Not a lot at first. He hadn’t heard that I was pregnant. He must have thought about it a lot, though, because he called me back a couple of days later and said he wanted to see the baby when she was born. He’s going to bring pictures of his family that I can give her when she’s older.”
“He sounds like a nice young man.” Elizabeth could feel herself moving down a road she had no business traveling.
“I went after him because he was the only guy who played hard to get. The more he resisted, the more I convinced myself I wanted him.”
“So what’s he like? Other than being a nerd.”
“He’s really smart—tall, dark hair, on the skinny side. Incredible eyes. Oh, Mom, his eyes. . . . There is one thing. He has these huge Dumbo ears. If my baby looks like him I’m going to have to start saving to have her ears fixed when she gets older.”
“What are you going to do about school?”
“That’s what I need to talk to you and Dad about. I’ve looked into transferring to Fresno State and finishing up here, but I’d need help. I could work part-time, but I’ll need someone to take care of the baby. I don’t want to put her in day care until she’s older and can tell me what’s going on with the people taking care of her.”
It was everything Elizabeth could do to keep from jumping in with suggestions. This was Stephanie’s show. “What other kind of help did you have in mind?”
“If I could live here until I was through school and only work weekends, then you and I could arrange our schedules so that one of us would be available to watch the baby while the other one was in class.” She peered at Elizabeth over the top of her steaming mug. “I don’t want you to wait to go back to school because of me, I just want you to help me so I can go back, too.”
“And Dad?”
She grinned. “He gets to pay for it. I’ll earn enough working weekends to pay for clothes and stuff for me and the baby, and maybe a little gas money, but that’s about it. I don’t see how people live on this minimum wage crap. I have to work four hours just to pay for a movie and popcorn and a Coke.”
Elizabeth laughed. “Welcome to the real world.”
But it wasn’t the real world that existed for any of them anymore. In less than a month she would deposit a check for ten million dollars into an account she’d had Sam set up at the bank, their first hint at the ways their lives would change. She’d had no idea interest rates were negotiable until local banks began bidding for their account. As Sam had said, them that has money, makes money.
If she could, she would leave the money untouched until Stephanie was through school, giving her the sense of accomplishment that would come from doing what she could on her own. But it was bound to come out. Christina or Ginger or Rachel would let something slip and—
The thought stopped her cold. When had she made the transition from wondering if the four of them would ever be sisters in the true sense to automatically assuming they would be a part of her life?
“What do you think of Christina and—of your aunts?”
“What brought that up?”
“Family.”
“They’re okay.” Stephanie shrugged. “When I first saw Ginger I didn’t think I would like her, but I do. It shouldn’t be legal to be that old and look that good. I really like Rachel and Jeff. I can’t imagine going through what they did and not feeling sorry for myself, but they don’t. And the kids are cool. I hope my little girl is like Cassidy.”
“And Christina?”
“I don’t know about her. She’s like . . . I can’t describe it. It’s like she’s always pissed off about something.”
“It’s a show. She’s actually a pushover.”
“I’ll have to take your word for it.”
Elizabeth sipped her tea, thoughtful again. “You’re not keeping the baby because you think it’s what I want, are you?”
“Isn’t it? What you want, I mean.”
“Yes—but it has to be your decision.”
“I can’t go back, and I can’t go forward always looking back wondering if I made the right decision. This isn’t anywhere on the radar for what I’d planned to do with my life. Sharon and I were going to share a loft in New York and live ‘Sex and the City’ until we were bored, and then we were going to find the perfect men and get married.”
> “And now?”
“The only thing I know for sure is that I’m going to be a mother and I’m going to graduate. I’m going to let the rest surprise me.”
“I’m so proud of you,” Elizabeth said.
“I’m kinda proud of me, too. At least I feel good about what I’m doing.”
Elizabeth smiled. “Want to go shopping?”
“What about the tree?”
“We can do it later when Dad’s home to help.”
“Christmas or baby?”
“Christmas today. I want to get something for my sisters.”
They’d gathered their coats and purses and were on their way out when Elizabeth stopped to touch her fingers to her lips and then to the heart-shaped medal she’d framed and hung by the front door. It was as much acknowledgment of Jessie as Frank.
Family.
Chapter Fifty-three
Rachel
Her battery on her new phone dead, Rachel used Ginger’s phone to call home midway on the trip to Sacramento and told Jeff she would call again when she arrived. It was the first time she’d been away since he’d come home from the hospital, and despite having a nurse for him and a sitter for the kids, she was nervous about leaving. But he’d insisted she go. He wanted to get back to a normal life, or one as normal as possible. Christina and Elizabeth and Ginger had called individually and suggested their last official meeting be held at her house, but Jeff insisted that they finish where they started, in Sacramento. Finally, not convinced, but unwilling to argue, she’d agreed.
“Would you look at that,” Rachel said as they neared Jessie’s house. The place was festooned with Christmas lights, wreaths, and garland. “I didn’t figure Christina for the decorating type.”
“Every time I think I have Christina figured out,” Ginger said, “she does something that surprises me.”
“Did you get her a present?”
“I thought we agreed we weren’t going to do that.”
“Uh huh.” Rachel sent her a knowing look. “You did, didn’t you?”
The Year that Everything Changed Page 36