It occurred to Jesse to hedge, of course, but then he had a strange feeling, as though Gresh were standing in the room with them, urging him to say the right things. He rubbed the back of his neck with one hand. “It isn’t that I don’t like her, Button.”
“You used to be her boyfriend,” Liza announced, reaching for a drumstick. “I’ve seen pictures in your yearbook, and you and Glory were kissing.”
Jesse chuckled, though he felt sad to the very core of his being. “Yeah. We used to kiss,” he retorted good-naturedly. “So what?”
“Did you love her?”
He tried hard, but he found that he couldn’t lie. “Yes, Captain Quiz, I loved her. Is there anything else you’d like to know?”
Liza caught him off guard by nodding and saying seriously, “Yes. I’d like to know who had me before I got adopted by Mommy and Daddy.”
Jesse looked away. So, she was back on that again. He’d hoped the phase was over. “Does it matter? Your mom and dad loved you a whole lot, and they did all the important stuff.”
Liza’s tone was solemn. “It matters. Someday, I’m going to find my real mom.”
“Sandy Bainbridge was your real mom,” Jesse said, and though he didn’t mean for it to be, his tone was on the sharp side.
His daughter’s large green eyes were filled with lingering grief. Maybe it was worse for her at Christmas, knowing Gresh and Sandy were gone forever, like it was for him.
“I just want to ask my mom why she gave me up,” she said with gentle defiance, and her lower lip quivered.
Jesse sighed and shoved his paper plate away, then braced his folded arms against the edge of the table. “She was a kid, Liza. She gave you up because she didn’t know how to take care of you.”
“Gramps told me once that she was eighteen,” Liza argued. “Women get married and have babies at that age all the time.”
Tonight, of all nights, she had to go into her forty-year-old-midget-posing-as-a-kid routine. “Trust me.” Jesse sighed, before slurping up a drink of soda through his straw. “Your mom wasn’t mature enough to take care of a baby.”
“Did she have a husband?”
“No. I mean, probably not.”
Liza narrowed her eyes. “You know what I think, Uncle Jesse? I think you know who my mom is.”
How the hell was he supposed to look the kid in the face and deny that? He stood and started gathering up the debris of their dinner, carefully avoiding Liza’s gaze. “How would I know that?” he snapped, turning and striding off into the kitchen.
He could feel Liza’s suspicious stare following him.
Jesse didn’t come back until he’d stood gripping the edge of a counter for nearly five minutes, trying to compose himself. The fact that none of this would be happening if Glory had just stayed in Portland where she belonged did nothing to improve his mood.
When he returned to the dining room, Liza had her school books and a bunch of papers spread out on the table. Jesse was infinitely grateful that the topic of parenthood had been set aside, at least for the moment.
The telephone rang just as they were working the last fraction problem, and Jesse went to the sideboard for the extension. “Bainbridge,” he answered, expecting the caller to be someone at the office.
“Jesse, it’s Ilene,” his cousin said. “The headache isn’t improving. Could you please keep Liza tonight?”
Despite his discomfort over the secret he was keeping from Liza, he liked the idea of their being like a real family, at least for one night. “Sure. But maybe I should call Doc Cupples and send him over to have a look at you.”
“That old quack?” Ilene retorted. “I wouldn’t let him clip my toenails. Besides, I know I’ll be better by morning.”
“Call if you need anything,” Jesse instructed. Then he said goodbye to his cousin and hung up. “Ilene wants you to sleep here tonight,” he told Liza. “She’s still not feeling well.”
Liza relaxed visibly, and Jesse realized she’d been expecting bad news. It broke his heart that the kid was only nine years old and already trained in the adult art of bracing herself against tragedy. “Maybe she needs to go to the hospital.”
Jesse kissed the top of his daughter’s head. “She’ll be fine, Spud,” he promised. “Did you work out that last problem?”
The child nodded, closing her books and putting her papers in a neat stack. It was a trait she’d probably gotten from Glory, Jesse reflected, since he tended to leave things scattered about.
“So what do you want to do?”
Liza’s face brightened. “Let’s get the Christmas stuff down from the attic. That way, we’ll be all ready to decorate when we get the tree.”
Jesse sighed dramatically, but he liked the idea as well as Liza did. He was looking forward to Christmas this year, though he’d spent the last ten dreading it. “Okay,” he said, shaking his finger. “But it’s a school night and you’re not staying up till all hours.”
She grinned. “Don’t worry, Uncle Jesse. I’ll mind real good.”
They brought the nativity scene down first; it had been one of Jesse’s mother’s most valued possessions, and he carried it carefully. The porcelain figures had been handcrafted in Italy before he was born, but he and Gresham had built the stable out in the carriage house one year, as a surprise.
After the crèche had been set in its place of honor, on the raised hearth of the living-room fireplace, the figures arranged just so, Jesse and Liza went back to the attic for the boxes and boxes of delicate ornaments and lights that always graced the tree.
Jesse was actually humming a Christmas carol as he sat in the middle of the living-room floor, a fire blazing on the hearth, untangling strings of lights. Liza had hooked them all together and plugged them in, and he suddenly found himself surrounded by bright knobs of color.
He laughed. “You’re no help, at all.”
Liza came and sat beside him, amid the twinkling tangle, and laid her head against his shoulder. Her statement caught him unaware, even though he should have been on the alert after that conversation they’d had earlier. “I think my real dad and mom might live around here.”
We got trouble, Jesse thought, right here in Pearl River. And it starts with a capital G. “Why do you say that?” he asked, still working with the twisted strings of rubber-coated wire.
“It’s just a feeling,” Liza answered. But then she pinioned him with those eyes of hers and asked him straight out, “Do you know who my dad is, Uncle Jesse?”
He answered hoarsely, without knowing why he did it. He was sure of only one thing: that lying to this kid was impossible. “Yes, Button. I know.”
“Who is he?”
Jesse drew a deep breath, exhaled, and set the lights aside to draw Liza gently onto his lap. She gazed into his face with total trust.
“He’s me,” he said raggedly, holding her tighter.
She didn’t seem shocked. In fact, she didn’t even seem surprised. “How come you gave me to Daddy and Mommy?”
“I didn’t, exactly.” Jesse tucked her head under his chin. “But it worked out okay, didn’t it? I mean, your daddy and mommy really loved you, and they took good care of you.”
Liza twisted in his lap, so she could look him directly in the eye again. “But they’re gone,” she reasoned. “If you’re my dad, you know who my mother is. Tell me, Uncle Jesse—please.”
Jesse shook his head. He’d had all the emotional strain he could handle for right then, and besides, he needed time to think before he gave Glory a permanent place in Liza’s life. She swore she’d changed, but Glory had a habit of disappearing just when somebody started loving her with everything they had. “I can’t do that, sweetheart. At least not tonight. For right now, I’m going to ask you to trust me and to believe that I’ll tell you when the time is right.”
She reached up to kiss his cheek, then settled her head under his chin again. “I love you, Jesse,” she said, and for a moment the scattered tree lights blended before Jesse�
��s eyes, making a collage of Christmas colors.
“I love you, too, kid,” he answered gruffly.
Eight
Liza arrived at the bank about five minutes before closing time and waited quietly in one of the chairs in Glory’s office. The child seemed distracted, and Glory was troubled by that.
“Is something wrong?” she asked, as she put on her coat and reached for her purse.
Liza’s small shoulders moved in a shrug. “Sometimes I wish I could be Nancy Drew and go around solving mysteries.”
Glory put a hand on Liza’s back and ushered her through the office door. “What mysteries would you solve?”
The little girl looked up with an expression of despairing resignation. “I’d find out who my real mom is, and ask her why she didn’t want me.”
A painful lump formed in Glory’s throat, but she made herself smile in spite of it. “I’ll bet she wanted you very, very much,” she said.
Liza shrugged again, and the two of them hurried out to Glory’s car. Glory turned on the engine and shivered as she waited for the heater to kick in.
At home, Glory made cocoa for Liza and a latte for herself. The apartment was warm; evidently the temperamental radiators were having a good day. Since Glory had spent the evening before putting things away, the place looked relatively tidy.
“You should put your Christmas tree right here,” Liza announced, standing by the bay windows that overlooked the street. She turned in a circle, with her arms stretched wide, as though clearing a space in the cosmos.
“I thought I would,” Glory agreed, setting the cocoa and latte down on the coffee table in front of her pale rose couch.
“When are you doing to put it up?” Liza inquired.
“This weekend, I hope. I’ll probably get one while we’re out tree hunting on Saturday.”
Liza’s smile was a little forlorn as she came to sit in Glory’s mauve wing chair and reached for her cocoa. It was plain she was trying to work up her courage to say something, and when she did, the words practically stopped Glory’s heart. “If a person loses one daddy, and then they get another one, can the second one die, too?”
She set her latte on the coffee table so it wouldn’t spill over onto the rug. Obviously, Jesse had told Liza who he was, but what had he said about her biological mother? Damn it, he might have warned her! She drew a deep breath and forcibly controlled herself! “Honey, anybody can die, and most of the time we don’t know when it’s going to happen.” She paused, praying silently for the right words. “The thing is, you can’t plan your life to avoid pain. You can’t say, ‘I’m not going to love this person, because if I do, I might get hurt somewhere down the road.’”
Unexpectedly, Liza began to cry. She put her cocoa down, crossed the distance between their chairs and scrambled into Glory’s lap, sobbing.
Glory held her child, her own eyes blurred with tears. “It’s okay, darling. You go right ahead and cry.”
“Uncle Jesse is a cop!” wailed the little girl. “He could get shot by a bad guy, or his car might go off the road when he’s chasing somebody—”
Glory kissed Liza’s temple. “He could also live to be a very old man, honey, like his grandfather.”
After a while, Liza began to settle down. “I g-guess you’d better measure me for my costume,” she said, sniffling. “I have to go and practice for the pageant tonight, and Aunt Ilene will be here to pick me up after she closes the store.”
With a nod, Glory set her daughter on her feet and went to get her sewing basket. She measured Liza according to the mimeographed directions.
It was Jesse who came by to pick the child up a few minutes later, not Ilene. He sent Liza to wait in the car and lingered outside Glory’s door, his hands in his coat pockets, his expression guarded and remote.
“You told her,” Glory said, standing there in the doorway. She knew he wouldn’t come in even if she invited him.
Jesse sighed. “Yeah. I told her part of it.” He paused for a moment before dropping the bomb that blew Glory’s tentative dreams to bits. “Liza’s been through more at nine than most people endure in a lifetime,” he said. “I want you to stay away from her until everybody gets their emotional balance back.”
For a moment, Glory held on to the hope that she hadn’t heard him right. “Stay away?” she echoed in a small voice.
“I don’t want her to get attached to you, Glory, only to be hurt later when you decide small towns and kids aren’t ‘you’ and move on.”
There was, unfortunately, no doubting what he’d meant that time. “I won’t let you do this, Jesse—I love that child as much as you do.”
His response was a quietly furious, “You can talk about love, but it takes a hell of a lot more than that to raise a kid. You’ve got to be able to stick out the tough times, and I don’t think you know how to do that.”
He turned then, and started to walk away. Glory started to call him back, then stopped herself. Jesse had obviously made up his mind and, for now, there would be no reasoning with him.
She closed the door quietly behind him, spread the white synthetic taffeta for Liza’s costume out on the kitchen table and tried to focus her tear-filled eyes on the printed instructions. She worked straight through dinner and by ten o’clock she had the outfit finished, right down to the tinsel halo and gauze wings trimmed with silver garland.
The next morning Glory dressed and went to work as usual, dropping off Liza’s costume at Ilene’s bookstore without saying more than a muttered, “Good morning.” Reaching the bank, she got out Pearl River’s thin phone book and looked under “attorneys” for the name of a lawyer.
There were only two in town, and the first one, Glory recalled, had been one of Jesse’s closest friends since kindergarten. She called the second, a man named Brock Haywood, and made an appointment.
He agreed to see her during her lunch hour.
On Saturday morning, Glory bought a tree from the straggly group displayed in front of the supermarket. One of the bag boys tied it to the roof of her car, and she headed straight home.
Whatever Christmas spirit she’d mustered was gone—she was only putting up the tree for appearance’s sake. Delphine and Harold would be worried if she didn’t do something to observe the holiday.
She was putting lights on the tree, having set it in its stand in front of the bay windows in her living room, when Jill pulled up. Glory was relieved to see her friend, but she also felt a desire to hide.
Of course she couldn’t since Jill had seen her.
“I thought you were going tree-hunting with Jesse and Liza,” Glory’s friend commented as she divested herself of her coat, hat and gloves. “I wouldn’t have stopped, if I hadn’t caught a glimpse of you through the window as I was driving by.”
Glory repeated a silent litany of reasons why she must not burst into tears and then said, in an awkward attempt to change the subject, “Weren’t you supposed to be skiing this weekend with that new boyfriend of yours?”
Jill rolled her eyes. “He turned out to be another creep.” She plopped herself down in one of Glory’s chairs. “I swear, if I ever do find a man I like they’ll probably feature him on ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ as an ax murderer.”
Glory laughed, despite the pain of her own situation. “How about some hot cider, or a latte?”
“A latte? You sophisticated creature! I’ll have one of those.”
The process of brewing two of the concoctions gave Glory time to pull herself together. It was inevitable, after all, that Jill would ask again why she wasn’t spending the day with Jesse and Liza as planned.
She sprang the question as soon as Glory returned with the two steaming cups and sat down on the sofa. “What happened between you and Jesse?”
Glory sighed. She’d never told Jill the whole truth, but it spilled out of her now, all of it. She related how the judge had forced her to leave town, how she’d come back and discovered that the daughter she’d given up had been adopted b
y Gresham and Sandy, how Jesse had ordered her to stay away from Liza for the time being.
“And you’re letting him get away with it?” Jill demanded, her face a study in disbelief.
“No,” Glory answered, shaking her head. “I’ve filed a suit for visitation rights.” She glanced at her watch and sighed again. “Jesse should be getting the papers soon.”
Jill put down her cup and covered her ears with both hands, as if expecting an explosion. After a moment, she grinned shakily and dropped them to her lap. “This ought to give tonight’s Christmas pageant a high degree of dramatic tension. You are coming, aren’t you?”
Glory nodded. “Nothing could keep me away.”
“Good for you,” Jill answered resolutely. That was easy for her to say, Glory thought. She wasn’t playing with emotional dynamite.
“Jesse Bainbridge?”
Jesse stopped in the hallway of Pearl River’s tiny courthouse, frowning at the old man who stood before him. “You know who I am, Harry,” he said. “I used to deliver your newspapers.”
Harry flushed. “I’m sorry, Jesse,” he said. And then he held out a folded document.
Jesse muttered a curse and accepted the papers without asking for a further explanation. He knew a summons when he saw one, and nobody needed to tell him who was behind it.
Delphine and Harold arrived at Glory’s apartment at six o’clock sharp, bringing a potted red poinsettia. While Delphine set the plant on the coffee table, Harold sniffed the air and smiled appreciatively.
“Something sure smells good,” he boomed in his big voice. “I’ll bet you’re as good a cook as your mother.” He put an arm around Delphine’s slender shoulders and squeezed.
Glory made an effort at a smile. “It’s my specialty, Spanish rice,” she replied.
Harold said he was looking forward to supper and sat down in one of the living-room chairs to watch the news on TV. Delphine joined Glory in the kitchen.
“You look like hell warmed over,” she told her daughter bluntly. “What’s happened?”
Glory made a major enterprise of taking the casserole dish from the oven and getting the salad out of the fridge. “Thanks for the poinsettia, Mama,” she said, hoping to deflect the conversation. “It’s lovely.”
Glory, Glory Page 11