Willow Brook Road

by Sherryl Woods

  “When you finish eating,” Sam told him. “Swallow, please, before you speak.”

  “Oh, yeah,” Bobby said, then made a show of chewing. He put the rest of the hot dog on his plate. “I’m done.”

  Carrie stood up. “Okay, then. Ice cream and cupcakes coming up.”

  “I’ll help you get them,” Sam said, standing to follow her.

  Inside, he moved close, turned her around and tilted her chin, then claimed her lips. “I’ve been wanting to do that since you got here,” he said, even as he reluctantly took a step back. “But that’s probably going to have to hold me. Given Bobby’s impatience, he could walk in here any second.”

  “Good thinking,” Carrie said. “But just so you know, it’s been on my mind, too.”

  “That’s encouraging.” When she turned and would have reached out to open the freezer door, he put his hand over hers. “Carrie, are we crazy?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’re in the middle of this life-altering career change. I’m an overnight single dad. Are either of us in any position to make our lives more complicated?”

  “I don’t know,” she said softly. “But I know what my grandmother would say.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That love doesn’t always come along when it’s convenient.” No sooner had the words left her lips than she blushed. “Not that we’re talking about love, of course. This is lust, right? That’s all it is.”

  She sounded so desperate, Sam barely resisted laughing. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

  “I honestly don’t know. How about you? What do you think is going on?”

  Before Sam could answer, Bobby burst into the kitchen. “What’s taking so long?”

  Sam drew in a deep breath. “We’ll be there in a minute. Why don’t you get the balloons from the dining room. Hang on tight, though, and I’ll tie them to something outside as soon as I get there.”

  “Hurry up!” Bobby commanded excitedly. “It’s gonna be too dark to see ’em float away pretty soon.”

  As he ran off, Sam once again turned Carrie to face him. “To be continued,” he assured her, then touched her cheek with a quick caress. “That’s a promise.”

  “Agreed.”

  Bobby chose that moment to race back through, the balloons clutched tightly in his hand. Sam and Carrie followed with bowls, plates, ice cream, cupcakes and candles. Sam pulled out his cell phone, ready to record the impromptu party.

  As Bobby had reminded them, the sun was sinking toward the horizon in a final burst of color. Carrie quickly lit the candles on the cupcakes and they all made wishes and blew them out, then Bobby solemnly released the balloons into the air.

  “Happy birthday, Dad!” he said, his head tilted up to follow the path of the balloons as they drifted away, bright spots of red, blue, green and purple dotting the last streaks of orange-tinted sky.

  Carrie started singing “Happy Birthday” and Bobby and Sam chimed in. Nearly overwhelmed by the sweet poignance of the moment, Sam recorded it all with his cell phone, then shut it off as the final notes of the song and the last balloon drifted away on the evening breeze.

  “That was the best birthday party ever!” Carrie said, giving Bobby’s shoulder a squeeze. “I know your dad is so happy you thought of it.”

  “I miss him,” Bobby whispered, then reached out for Sam’s hand. “But now I have you.”

  “That’s right,” Sam said, his voice oddly choked. “Now you have me.”

  For better or worse. And every single day, he intended to pray like crazy that it would be for the best for this little boy who’d lost so much.

  * * *

  The call from the school the morning after the birthday celebration caught Sam completely off guard. He was up to his eyeballs with trying to correct a serious glitch on the paper’s website when the counselor called to tell him Bobby had been in a fight on the playground. He’d gotten a split lip, which the school nurse thought might need stitches.

  “What’s wrong?” Mack asked when he hung up the phone, obviously shaken.

  Sam filled him in. “I can’t imagine Bobby in a fight. I have to go. He needs to see a doctor.”

  “Go,” Mack said at once.

  “Or I could get him,” Susie offered. She had brought in lunch for them since correcting the tech problem had both Mack and Sam tearing their hair out. Sam had discovered that Susie was convinced that Mack forgot to eat far too often. “Just call the school back and tell them I have permission to pick him up, then call Noah’s office and tell them it’s okay to treat him. I’ll bring him by here after that, so you can see for yourself how he’s doing.”

  Sam was sorely tempted to let her go. “I don’t know...” He hesitated, thinking of the boundaries that had barely been put into place. Relying on Susie, even in an emergency like this one, seemed risky. Still, this web problem needed to be resolved.

  Susie gave him a look that was almost pleading. “Please, let me do this, Sam. Bobby probably needs a mom’s touch right now.”

  Alarmed by her choice of words, Sam glanced at Mack, who gave a subtle shake of his head. That was enough to convince him his instinct to do this himself was right.

  “I’ve got it,” he said, standing up. “Thanks for the offer, Susie, but he’s bound to be scared. Besides, I need to get to the bottom of what the fight was about in the first place.”

  Susie looked as if she was about to protest, but Mack reached for her hand and gave her a pointed look.

  “Go,” Mack told him.

  “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” Sam promised. “Here are a couple of things you might try while I’m gone. I think we were getting close to fixing the problem.”

  “Don’t worry about it. Focus on what Bobby needs,” Mack said.

  Sam had a hunch this was yet another of those tests of parenthood, and for just a minute there, he’d almost failed it.

  * * *

  Mack steeled himself for a fight with his wife as Sam left the newspaper office.

  “Why did you do that?” Susie immediately demanded. “I could have taken Bobby to the doctor.”

  “Of course you could have,” Mack agreed reasonably. “But it wasn’t your place.”

  “A friend can’t step in to help?”

  Mack sighed. “Sweetheart, if I thought it was nothing more than a friendly gesture, I’d have gone along with it, but it was more than that and we both know it. So does Sam.”

  Susie scowled at him. “Such as?”

  “You said it yourself. You thought Bobby needed a mother’s touch. You’re not his mother.”

  “I know that.”

  Mack held her gaze and this time he knew he could no longer dance around the issue in an attempt to protect his wife’s feelings. “Do you really? I’ve seen how you are with Bobby. I’ve seen the longing in your eyes. I have to wonder sometimes if you’re not hoping Sam will decide being a dad is too much trouble, so we can step in.”

  “That’s a terrible thing to say!” she said, but she was trembling and the sad look in her eyes told the real story.

  “Can you deny it?” Mack asked gently.

  He saw how much she wanted to, but Susie never had been very good at lying, even to herself.

  “Okay, no, I can’t deny it,” she conceded wearily. “On some awful, selfish level, I think that child deserves two parents who would love and nourish him the way we could.”

  “Sam’s doing his best. And today is a chance for him to take one more step along the difficult learning curve of being a parent. You might have been able to handle the situation, but in the end, Sam has to fill the role of Bobby’s dad and we need to give him that chance.”

  Tears spilled down Susie’s cheeks. “You’re right. I know you are.”

  Mack stood up and closed the door to his office, then pulled his wife onto his lap. “Suze, I know how badly you want a child,” he said, holding her tight and brushing the tears from her cheeks. “I want that for you, for us.
And it will happen when the time is right. If I could make it happen today, I would.”

  “I know,” she whispered, resting her head on his shoulder. “I’m sorry I get so crazy. And I’m sorry I keep doing things that necessitate my apologizing to you, to Carrie, to practically everyone in my family. Sometimes I think this is the only thing in my entire life that matters, even though when I’m rational I recognize that I have so much to be thankful for.” She gazed into Sam’s eyes with regret. “I’m sorry if I make you feel as if you don’t matter enough.”

  “Come on, sweetheart,” Mack chided. “It’s not about me. I know that.”

  She sighed heavily. “I hope so, because I do love you more than anything.”

  “And we are going to get through this,” he said, praying it was a promise he could keep.

  19

  Sam found Bobby in the nurse’s office, holding a bandage to his lip, a bruise already forming under his eye.

  “Hey, buddy,” Sam said, sitting down next to him. “You’ve got quite a shiner coming on. How’d that happen?”

  The six-year-old regarded him with stoic silence. The nurse gave him a shrug suggesting that she knew no more than he did about whatever had caused the fight.

  “Let’s get over to the doctor’s office and let him take a look at your lip,” Sam suggested. “That’s a pretty bad cut.”

  Fear sparked in Bobby’s eyes. “Will he have to use a needle?”

  “He might,” Sam told him honestly.

  Bobby crossed his arms over his chest. “No!”

  “Buddy, we have to let the doctor decide and do whatever he thinks is best.”

  “No!” Bobby repeated.

  Sam cast a helpless look at the nurse. She sat down on Bobby’s other side.

  “You know he’ll give you something so it won’t hurt,” she told him gently. “And the rumor is that he has lollipops for his bravest patients.”

  “Gram’pa Mick has candy, too,” Bobby said, as if the doctor’s offering weren’t all that special.

  “But Grandpa Mick can’t fix up your cut,” Sam reminded him.

  Bobby seemed to be considering the truth of that. “I’ll go if Carrie comes, too,” he said finally, startling Sam.

  “I think this is something you and I can handle,” Sam told him, determined to hold his ground. He wasn’t sure why he was so insistent, but it seemed important to prove, if only to himself, that he could care for Bobby on his own.

  Bobby’s expression turned even darker. “No! I want Carrie.”

  As badly as he wanted to stay firm, Sam concluded this wasn’t the time or place for an argument. “I’ll call Carrie when we get in the car and ask her to meet us there,” he conceded. “If she’s free and close by, she’ll be there when we get there. How’s that?”

  “I guess that’s okay,” Bobby relented.

  A few minutes later Carrie met them at the doctor’s office, which was in the same block as her new business. She gave Bobby a reassuring hug, then glanced curiously at Sam as Bobby drifted off toward a selection of toys in the waiting room.

  “When you called, it almost sounded as if you weren’t sure I’d come,” she said quietly.

  “You have a lot going on right now. I wasn’t even sure if you’d be in town. I didn’t want to drag you all the way back from Julie’s.”

  “Nothing I have to do is more important than this,” she said, regarding him curiously. After glancing down to make sure that Bobby’s attention was focused on some LEGOs in the waiting-room play area, she said, “Didn’t you want me here? If that’s it, why did you bother calling?”

  Sam sighed. “It’s just that I rely on you a lot, most recently last night, to bail me out of yet another tight spot.”

  “The impromptu birthday party?” she said incredulously. “That was fun. It wasn’t an imposition. Sam, I know you and I have a whole lot of things we need to figure out.”

  “One of the things we agreed to was that we didn’t want to confuse Bobby while we were figuring out the rest,” he reminded her.

  “True, but I thought we were friends. Friends step up in a bind, no matter what else might be going on.”

  Sam suddenly felt ridiculous for making too much out of this. Had he wanted to use this incident to prove he was up to the task of fatherhood? Now wasn’t the time for his pride to kick in. Since he didn’t want to admit to that, he said, “But Bobby isn’t your responsibility.”

  Carrie held his gaze for a very long time, disappointment in her eyes. “One of these days we need to talk about the difference between responsibility and caring enough to be around for the people we love,” she said. “If you don’t get that, then maybe we shouldn’t even consider anything more.”

  Before Sam could say a word in his own defense—assuming he even had one—Noah McIlroy came out of the back to get Bobby and the moment ended, leaving Sam more shaken than he’d been in a long time. Not even the call from the school had gotten to him the same way that Carrie’s quietly spoken rebuke had.

  * * *

  Bobby isn’t your responsibility.

  The entire time Carrie was in the examining room, Bobby clutching her hand tightly as Noah put two stitches into his lip, she was fighting the hurt that had spread through her at Sam’s comment. How could they possibly have been so close last night, only to have him utter such careless words today? She’d thought they’d been making real progress toward something meaningful, and in a split second, he’d destroyed that illusion and put her in her place.

  She was aware of Noah studying her curiously, but knew he would never ask the questions that were so clearly on his mind, such as why she was here with Bobby or why she and Sam couldn’t even look each other in the eye.

  “Good job!” Noah told Bobby when he was finished. “You were very brave.”

  “The nurse at school said you might have lollipops,” Bobby said hopefully.

  Noah chuckled. “I do, indeed.” He pulled a carton with an assortment of flavors from one of the drawers. “Now here’s the deal. It might be best if you don’t eat this right now. Your lip’s going to be numb for a little bit longer and you don’t want to dribble all over yourself. Can you save this till tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” Bobby repeated as if it were an eternity until then.

  “But by tonight, I think perhaps you could have a Popsicle,” Noah offered as a consolation. “Maybe even two. The ice would feel real good on your lip.”

  Bobby turned to Sam. “Can we get some?”

  “I’ll stop at the store,” Sam promised.

  “I could take him home, while you do that,” Carrie offered, then couldn’t seem to stop herself from adding, “Unless I’d be overstepping.”

  Sam winced at her words. Noah looked even more intrigued. Carrie simply stood there and waited to see what Sam would say.

  “If you have the time, that would be great,” he said.

  “I’ll give Bobby a small dose of children’s Tylenol before you leave,” Noah said. “He’ll probably sleep for a while this afternoon. You can give him more later if he’s in pain, but as brave as he is, he should be just fine. Bring him back next week and I’ll remove the stitches. Call or stop by if you have any questions or if anything doesn’t seem right.”

  “Thanks,” Sam said, shaking his hand. “I appreciate your seeing us on short notice.”

  “Hey, playground war wounds always get priority around here,” Noah told him.

  Carrie added her own thanks.

  “How’s the day-care center coming?” Noah asked her.

  “All I need are the final inspection approvals and we’ll be ready to open. A few more weeks should do it,” she said, hoping her optimism wasn’t misplaced.

  “Great. I’ll have Jackson there on day one. Maybe you can give Cait and me a tour when she’s home this weekend.”

  “Absolutely,” Carrie promised, though she had a hunch that they were going to be far more interested in her relationship with Sam than they were in the selec
tion of toys and the color scheme at her new enterprise.

  Outside, Sam handed her a house key. “Thanks for taking Bobby home. I’ll be there as quickly as possible, so you can get back to work.”

  “Sure,” she said, barely resisting the desire to start a fight with him about his attitude toward her involvement. He’d called her, blast it all. And she wasn’t Susie, likely to misconstrue what his request meant. “We’ll see you at the house.”

  In the backseat of her car with his seat belt on, Bobby’s eyelids were already drooping from the day’s excitement. When she pulled to a stop in front of the house, though, his eyes blinked open.

  “We’re home,” she said, walking quickly around to help him get out. “You feeling steady on your feet?”

  “Uh-huh,” he said, then wobbled a little.

  Still he looked indignant when she offered to carry him. “I can walk,” he said, then headed unsteadily for the front door.

  Carrie opened it, then took him straight to his room. She removed his shoes and helped him onto the bed. His eyes were closed by the time his head hit the pillow. She sat next to him, her heart aching as she brushed his hair from his forehead. Long lashes that girls would one day envy brushed his cheeks. His sweet little mouth was swollen and red and there was already a bruise under one eye.

  “What on earth were you fighting about?” she murmured to herself as she watched the rise and fall of his chest. She wondered if Sam had any idea.

  She was still sitting there when Sam got home. She tensed at the sound of the front door closing, then made herself get up and go into the kitchen where he was putting away the Popsicles.

  He turned slowly when she came into the room. “How is he?”

  “Down for the count,” she said, noting the raw anguish in his eyes. “Are you okay?”

  He shook his head. “When I got my first look at him in the nurse’s office, I think my heart stopped.”

  “Get used to it,” she advised, wishing she had the right to put her arms around him and offer comfort. Less than a day ago, she would have. Now she felt entirely too uncertain of her status around here. “Little boys are prone to cuts and scrapes.”