by Dana Corbit
Reverend Hicks was the last to join in with them, his chuckle friendly and warm. Of the visiting ministers who rotated weeks in conducting services at the center, the kind grandfather was Shannon’s favorite. He didn’t feel compelled to browbeat the girls about their pregnancies the way some of the other ministers did. What point was there for them to schedule special church services for the girls so they could avoid judgmental stares if the ministers only brought more judgments into the house with them?
“Yes, I figured you all just might be able to relate to that.” He chuckled again, and then his expression became solemn. “But I’m telling you now that our Father has a purpose in all things. Even in our most difficult times.”
His expression turned serious as he stood at the lectern that faced the wingback chairs and settees serving as pews. “In Romans 8:28, Paul tells us that ‘...in everything God works for good with those who love Him.’”
Several of the girls shifted in their seats, suggesting that the sermon had either gone on too long for the pressure on their bladders or that they weren’t convinced of God’s purpose in their dark days. Tonya twisted her hair around her index finger, staring through the filmy lace curtains to the outside. Shannon could second the girl’s vote to be somewhere else, but she had a more specific destination in mind. In a few hours, she would be spending time with Blake—just the two of them—while Mark worked a last two-to-ten shift before the time off he’d scheduled to help the boy get settled.
“Oh, I see you questioning.” The reverend smiled as he drew in their attention again. “I probably would, too, if I was taking time out from my regular life, like you, and waiting to hatch like an egg under a heat lamp. Just remember to trust in God. You might not see immediately how He can use a difficult situation, but His purpose may become clearer to you down the road.”
The minister closed the service in prayer then, but his last words repeated in her mind. Was this her down the road? Maybe God had used those awful times in Blake’s past to bring them to the point where they could be together. Yes, it was beginning to make sense to her. She’d been looking forward to her time with Blake all morning, but now she couldn’t wait to get there. While before everything had seemed so complicated, it was suddenly simple. Now all she had to do was to get Blake on board, and everything would be perfect.
* * *
“No, I’m still not hungry,” Blake called from inside the bedroom where he’d been holed up behind a locked door for hours. “I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to watch TV. And I don’t want to have a mother-son video game tournament either, in case you’re interested.”
The hand that Shannon had raised to knock on the door again fell limply to her side. What more could she do? She’d thought that the smell of the food she’d prepared for the late-night meal he’d said he didn’t want would eventually draw him out. He was a teenage boy after all. One who’d recently missed a few meals at that. Now the truth became clear—Blake would rather starve than spend a single minute alone with her.
“I will not cry.”
But even as she whispered the declaration, the tears came hot and wet. She hated crying, and that was all she’d been doing since meeting her son on Friday. Some expert she was in working with troubled youth when she couldn’t make any headway with her own son. Again, she was struck with the stark possibility that Blake wouldn’t give her the chance to know him. How could she bear it if he didn’t? He was so close that she could almost hear his breathing, and yet he couldn’t have been further away from her. Out of her arms again. This time by choice.
Defeated, she descended the stairs and returned to the kitchen nook where the food she’d prepared was growing cold on the plates. Now the thought of the table she’d set for two seemed more than optimistic. Downright dumb was closer to it.
She didn’t bother sitting at the table, where she’d arranged sautéed chicken, rice and green beans on the plates. Instead, she dished the food into a few of the mismatched plastic containers she’d found in one of the cabinets and stored them in the refrigerator. Just as she’d toweled off the last pan and was putting it in the cabinet, two headlights flashed on the window.
Only a few minutes later, Mark turned a key in the back door lock but only edged the door open. “Is it safe to come in?”
“You mean, am I armed?”
He pushed the door the rest of the way open. He was in the same street clothes he’d been wearing when he’d left for his shift that afternoon, and he carried the same case that probably contained his weapon.
“Never hurts to be cautious.”
“Busy day at work?”
She could do this. She could pretend that everything was fine, that she hadn’t spent the past eight hours fighting for the only thing she’d ever wanted. Losing by many steps, big and small.
“Pretty routine, really.” But then Mark stopped, tilted his head and watched her for several seconds. “Tell me what happened.”
Shannon brushed at her face, though the tears had long since dried. Could he tell she’d been crying? She considered putting him off, but his eyes were so full of concern that she couldn’t keep her shoulders from slumping. “Blake’s been sulking in his room all night. He won’t...come out.”
She hated that her voice hitched when she said the last, but she couldn’t keep herself from adding, “He’s never going to give me a chance.”
“You’ve got that all figured out from one night?”
Shannon blinked. They weren’t the compassionate words she’d hoped for, but she shouldn’t have expected them from a guy who’d never bothered to hide his disapproval of her. “I don’t expect you to understand.”
“Oh, I understand.”
This time she just stared at him.
Mark took his time shrugging off his coat and hanging it on a peg on the wall. “I couldn’t get him to come out at first the other night, either.”
“At first? That means he did come out eventually.”
His lips lifted. “Yes, but he doesn’t have as much to be mad with me about.”
She swallowed, the comment like a kick when she was already down. “Wait. You arrested him.”
“Good point.” Rather than say more, he leaned casually against the wall, waiting.
“I tried everything. Talking to him through the door. Issuing several invitations. Cooking even though he refused to eat so that he would smell the food and get hungry.”
“Remind me to steer clear of you when you want to get your way. You pull out all the stops.”
She smiled at that. “I even played loud music on your stereo in the most offensive-to-teens genre I could think of to make him want to come out and shut it off.”
He lifted a brow. “What was that?”
“The music? Classical.”
“Good choice.”
“He didn’t even comment on it. He just stayed there.” Tears welled in her eyes again. “I even considered smoking him out.”
“Well, thanks for thinking twice on that one. It’s hard enough being the new guy at the post. I would never have lived it down if you set my house on fire while I was at work.”
“I had all of these great plans for tonight. I thought I knew everything about troubled teens, too.” She stared at her hands. “I don’t know what I expected.”
As much as Mark tried to resist their impact, Shannon’s slumped shoulders, her blotchy skin and swollen eyes from earlier tears tugged at his heart. For Blake’s sake he’d wanted to be indifferent to her, but he wondered if that was in Blake’s best interest at all. Maybe he should try to convince the boy to give her a chance to prove herself. He knew he would have given anything for the opportunity to prove himself to his parents...before it was too late.
“Maybe you expected too much too soon,” he said in a soft voice.
“But I’m runnin
g out of time.”
His chest squeezed over the anguish in her voice, and he had to hold his hands to his sides to keep from reaching out to her. He didn’t know whether it was her words or the twin tears that traced down her cheeks, but he’d lost the battle to remain immune to her pain. Instead of her defiant announcement that she wasn’t afraid of a tough legal battle, it was her broken spirit tonight that convinced him of her sincerity. She was as determined to be a mother to her son as he was to draw a line in indelible marker between the boy he’d been and the man he’d become. He had to respect her determination.
Instead of answering, he took the teakettle off the rear burner of the stove and filled it in the sink.
“Orange pekoe or Earl Grey?”
“Oh, that’s okay.” But when he looked back at her from the stove, she shrugged. “Earl Grey.”
He pointed to the dinette she’d cleared earlier, indicating for her to take a seat. She sat but immediately popped up again.
“If you’re hungry, I put the leftovers, a whole dinner, really, in the refrigerator.”
“Sit, will you? I already ate, and it doesn’t look like you’re going to, so why waste it?”
She shrugged and dropped back into the seat. Neither of them spoke until the teakettle whistled and Mark poured the water, dropping the tea bags into the cups to steep. He carried the cups and saucers to the table, moved back to the counter and returned with a sugar bowl and two spoons. Taking a seat across from her, he tried to ignore the way the skin on his arm tingled from her proximity. It really had been a while since he’d been alone with a woman, even in a nonromantic circumstance.
“Okay. Spill.”
“It’s just that I don’t understand why this is so hard. I have all of this expertise with other people’s children. I’m good at my job. Really.” She tilted her head toward one ear then the other as if weighing the statement. “At least I thought I was. But what kind of social worker can I be if I can’t relate to my own child?”
“The classical music probably didn’t help.”
She frowned as she wrapped the string of her tea bag around her spoon, squeezed out the water then set the bag aside. “Probably not.”
“Look, I don’t have as much textbook knowledge about teenagers as you do.” He took a sip of his tea and then grinned. “Practical knowledge, either. But you would tell me to be patient with Blake, so I’m going to tell you the same thing. He’s had a lot of changes to deal with in the past few days.”
Her eyes were still too shiny, but her lips pulled up in something close to a smile. “You’re right. I should be telling you that.”
“So listen to yourself. And don’t worry about the time running out. He’s here now.” He pointed up to indicate upstairs. “That’s all that matters.”
“And at some point, he might even decide to come down,” she said. She lifted her tea to her lips and turned her head away, appearing lost in her thoughts.
“How are you handling this new development in your life, anyway?”
She turned back to him. “Have you looked at me tonight? I’m not handling it that well.”
Oh, he’d been looking, all right, but he doubted she would want to know how little interest he’d paid to her mental well-being. “I think you’re doing all right. It’s a lot to digest.”
“You act as if it came as a big surprise to me that I had a child.” A sad smile spread on her lips. “Believe me, I never forgot it.”
“But you never expected him to show up on your doorstep like an overnight delivery, either.”
“No. That I didn’t expect.”
She’d been staring into the cup in front of her as if the deep brown liquid offered answers to her questions, but suddenly Shannon lifted her head and looked right at him. She seemed to be searching for something. Was she trying to decide whether he was just being polite or if he really wanted to know her story? He was surprised to realize that he did want to know. More than he had any right to.
“As I said before, I’d always planned to look for Blake after he turned eighteen. I wasn’t even sure how to get started, but I promised myself I would do it. The truth is that it was easy to think of it that way. As something in the future. It felt safe.”
Shannon lowered her gaze to her cup again. “I didn’t have to admit then that I wasn’t ready to face him. To have to explain myself. But then he was right at my door, standing in front of me, and I did and said all of the wrong things.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them again. “I’ve messed it up now. I don’t know what Blake was looking for, but I’ve disappointed him somehow. I’m worried that I’ve destroyed any chance for us to build some kind of relationship.”
“You don’t really believe that, do you?”
Her stark expression as she stirred her tea, though she’d put no sugar in it, suggested that she did believe it.
“Well, you’re wrong.”
“How do you know?”
“I might not know everything about teens the way you do, but I have to believe that any kid who went to so much trouble to, first, keep a letter from his probable birth mother through several moves and, second, to track her down, wants a relationship with her.”
She studied him with a confused expression. “I don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
“If you truly believe that Blake wants a relationship with me, then why do you keep planting yourself between us? Do you think he needs to be protected from me?”
“No. That’s not it.” But the words didn’t ring true, even to him, because that was exactly what he’d done. He considered giving her some vague answer, but she’d been open with him, so he told her the truth.
“I guess I was just worried about Blake. So many adults in his life have failed him. I didn’t want to be one of them.”
“Neither do I,” she said automatically, but then she stopped and dragged her front teeth over her bottom lip. “But I already did. I was one of the first.”
She closed her eyes and rubbed fingers in a circular motion over her temples. Clearly she’d never needed his blame. She’d been doing a great job of blaming herself.
“You were just a kid yourself then.” His words surprised him, but he found he wasn’t sorry for saying them. She needed reassurance, and after the way he’d questioned her, she deserved that much.
“If only youth could be a good enough excuse for the stupid things we do.” She smiled, but the expression didn’t reach her eyes.
“It’s as good an excuse as any other. You never said anything about Blake’s biological father, other than that he wasn’t involved. Was he...uh...as young as you were?”
Mark swallowed. Why was he throwing a question out of left field like that? It was like interviewing a burglary suspect and asking him why he’d murdered his mother. He was supposed to be bolstering Shannon’s belief that she could eventually get through to Blake, and he could only ask nosy questions about the boy’s deadbeat dad instead.
“Not quite as young. But that’s a long story.” She straightened in her seat and sipped her tea, though it had to be getting cold by now. “So tell me, why is it that you find it so easy to relate to Blake?”
He looked up at her abrupt change of subject. It was the second time she’d cut off his questions about the guy who’d deserted her. Clearly Blake’s birth father was still a sore subject for her, even after all of these years. Mark didn’t know why he was so curious about the loser, anyway. Guys who ran off on their pregnant girlfriends were as common as unplanned pregnancies. But this guy had bailed out on this particular woman, and it didn’t sit right with him.
“Are you planning to keep it a secret? Why is it so easy?”
He needed to stop daydreaming and give her an answer.
“I already told you I was a delinquent.�
�
“That’s it?” She tilted her head to the side. “All delinquents speak some common language? Like punkspeak or something?”
He grinned. “Something like that. With Blake, I just don’t pressure him too much.”
“And I do?”
Their gazes met, but neither said anything. They both knew the answer to that.
“Were you just a garden-variety delinquent, or did you really get into trouble?”
“Both, I guess. I threw firecrackers in the school trash cans, painted graphic pictures on the high school football field right before Homecoming and shoplifted stuff I didn’t want when I had money to pay for it in my pockets.”
“Why did you do all of that?”
“I guess it was the only way I could get my parents to notice me and not my annoying, overachieving brothers, Bill and David, and their awards du jour.”
Shannon drew her eyebrows together. “That’s the best story you’ve got? I work with troubled teens. I can top that story without even breaking the seal on one of the big case files.”
“Yeah, I guess it was ordinary delinquent stuff, but then I really did it.” He paused, trying to decide if he should stop altogether. The last person he’d told this story to had walked away from him and all of the promises she’d made to him. Another person he’d managed to disappoint. But somehow it seemed right to tell Shannon. She was like him in that she’d failed some of the people in her life, and her scars were every bit as deep as his.
“When I was fourteen, five of us got drunk and had the brilliant idea of going joyriding through town.” He took a deep breath, trying to tell the story without reliving it. “I don’t remember anything after I crawled into that car. I woke up in the hospital with only a bump on my head, but our friend, Chris, has been in a wheelchair ever since.”