After Victory: A Searching for Glory Novel (A Second Chance Love Story)

by Hunter J. Keane

  “I feel that way too sometimes, when I look at Denton. It already feels like he’s leaving me, slowly each day. I remember when he was born, I used to sit by his crib all night. Brad thought I was nuts.” It was months before I had been able to sleep in our bed again. I still had a hard time sleeping when Denton wasn’t home.

  “I have a video monitor in Jack’s room so I can watch him sleep when I’m away from home,” Glory admitted with a grimace. “Johnny probably thinks I’m nuts, too.”

  It was starting to snow again, big flakes floating past the window. “I don’t know how Jake does it with four kids.”

  “Jake is a superhero. He’s not human.” Glory’s eyes sparkled with admiration. “I learned a long time ago that you can’t compare yourself to him. Speaking of Jake…he’s quite fond of you.”

  This was not unexpected. It was only a matter of time before Jake became a topic in our getting-to-know-each-other-again session. “Jake is a good guy.”

  “The best,” Glory agreed.

  “I really like him,” I admitted, surprising both of us. “I’m not sure what he sees in a damaged girl like me, but I’m not asking too many questions.”

  “Kate.” Glory gave me a sympathetic smile. “You are a catch. Jake would be lucky to have you in his life. Johnny always says nice things about you.”

  I laughed. “Yeah, well, I think we can both agree that John has a thing for damaged girls. He’s not exactly an unbiased source.”

  Glory laughed too, loud enough that Jack stirred.

  “Is it weird that I’ve actually had a lot of fun today?” I asked hesitantly.

  “If it is, then I guess we are both weird.” She slowly rocked the stroller to calm Jack. “I don’t have any friends in town anymore. It’s nice to spend time with someone that isn’t a man or a child.”

  “Does that mean we should do this again?” I was glad that I hadn’t been alone in my feelings. It was much harder to make friends as a grown adult than it had been as a kid. “It isn’t a little weird hanging out with your boyfriend’s ex-girlfriend?”

  “Fiancé,” she said, shyly holding up her left hand. “And it’s only weird that it really doesn’t feel that weird.”

  “You got engaged?” I was surprised at first, staring at the modest but beautiful diamond. Then something warm spread through me. “That’s wonderful Glory. I’m happy for you.”

  “Thanks. You are the first to know, actually. Johnny is going to tell Jake and we still need to tell the kids.” She laughed again. “Is it weird that the first person I told is my fiancé’s ex-girlfriend?”

  “I’m honored.” I really was happy for both of them. “I’m sure the kids will be ecstatic.”

  “Speaking of the kids, I promised Jake I would pick up Chris from his friend’s house.” She glanced at the time on her phone.

  “I’m headed that way, too.” I finished the last of my latte.

  Glory was putting Jack’s hat back in place when her phone rang. She smiled warmly as she answered it. “Jake, you’ll never guess who I’m with-”

  I couldn’t hear his words on the other end of the phone, but I could tell from the way her eyes widened and her mouth opened in a silent gasp that he was telling her bad news.

  “Where is he?” Glory demanded, eyes watering. “I’m on my way.”

  “What’s wrong?” I jumped to my feet with her, prepared to help in any way possible.

  “There was an accident. Johnny.” She ran both hands through her hair and froze. “He’s at the hospital.”

  My heart thudded in my chest. “You need to go, now.”

  “But I have Jack. And what about Chris?” She looked at me, lost.

  I knew exactly what needed to happen. “Let’s get in your car. I’ll drive you to the hospital and then take Jack to pick up Chris and Denton.”

  It was the only thing that made sense. She was in no state to drive, and I needed a car seat for Jack.

  “I can’t ask you to do that,” she said as she started to tremble.

  “You’re not asking, I’m telling you it’s what we are doing.” I grabbed the stroller and handed Glory her coat. “Let’s go.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Jake

  It was unusual for me to be working on a Sunday. In fact, John tried to convince me to stay home. But I knew that we were understaffed at the shop and that my friend would be too considerate to guilt me into giving up my Sunday. So I volunteered to spend my morning working while Julia watched the younger kids at home. We had a pretty good deal worked out where she did free babysitting in exchange for me paying her phone bill. I’m not sure which of us had the better end of the deal.

  “The Toyota in four is done,” I said, dropping into the chair across from John’s desk. “Bad brake line.”

  “I’d say you’ve earned yourself a break. Five minutes.” John finished making a note on his clipboard and then grinned at me.

  “You’ve been smiling like a goon all day. What’s going on?” I kicked my feet up on his desk and leaned back in the chair.

  He looked almost bashful when he said, “I asked Glory to marry me last night.”

  “And?” I raised one curious eyebrow, hoping this story was going to have a happy ending.

  “She finally said yes.” He smiled again. “I guess that makes me the marrying-kind.”

  “I never doubted it.” For the first time in a long time, I smiled automatically. It was the way I used to smile before I lost Vic and began needing to remind myself to show an emotion other than grief. “Congrats, John. I owe you a drink.”

  “I think I’m done drinking with you for a while,” he said, his grin turning to a smirk. “You nervous about your big date? Do you even know how to date anymore?”

  My feet dropped to the floor and I stood. “Alright. Time to get back to work.”

  I could hear John chuckling softly as I left his office. He may have meant it as a joke, but it wasn’t all that funny to me. It truly had been a long time since I’d been on a first date. Almost eighteen years, in fact. I had no idea what the hell I was doing.

  I was elbows deep in a transmission when John appeared. “Hey, Mary Claymore’s car broke down again. I’m going to drive over there. Can you keep an eye on things until I get back? Glor is supposed to stop by in about an hour with Jack. I should be back by then, but if I’m not-”

  “I can handle it.” I waved him away. “By the way, Mary Claymore’s car is just fine. She’s just making up an excuse to get a house visit from you.”

  “Good thing she’s my type,” John said with a wink as he headed toward his truck.

  Mary Claymore was a woman in her eighties that had a big crush on John Carter. She called about a broken down car at least twice per month, and he always dropped everything to pay her a visit. As far as I know, he had never once sent her a bill. Glory liked to refer to Mary as his mistress, but everyone knew he just liked to make the old widow feel like she had people in her life that cared about her.

  Only ten minutes had passed when a familiar motorcycle screamed into the parking lot. The bike belonged to one of our best mechanics, Nate Stevens. He tore his helmet off as he jumped from the bike.

  “Jake, there’s been an accident.” His eyes bounced around wildly.

  “Really? Are you alright?” I gave him a good look and didn’t see any injuries. His bike also looked unharmed.

  “Not me.” He sounded breathless. “John’s truck flipped over down the road. An ambulance was just arriving when I came up on it. They were trying to get him out-”

  I was already running to my car. “Watch the shop, Nate!”

  “Yeah!” He stood helplessly with his helmet in his hand.

  Everything was a blur as I drove in the direction where Nate had pointed. I decided not to call Glory until I had something to tell her. John drove a big truck and there was a good chance he was fine. No need to cause panic just yet.

  As I got close to the accident scene, I knew that it was time to panic. Th
e entire area had been roped off and a dented semi was parked on the shoulder. John’s truck was flipped upside down in the middle of the road. I nearly forgot to put my car into park before hurrying toward the ambulance. They were just loading John onto a stretcher. He wasn’t moving.

  “Whoa. Stay back.” One of the police officers that I vaguely recognized put a hand on my shoulder to stop me.

  “That’s my brother,” I said, even though it wasn’t exactly true. “Is he okay?”

  “He’s still alive. Barely.” The cop gave me a sympathetic look. “You should call family and have them meet you at the hospital.”

  I waited to call Glory until I arrived at the emergency room. Besides not wanting to use the phone while I was driving, I also needed a few minutes to compose myself before we spoke. When I did call her, she ended up being the more composed converser.

  After she hung up, I hurried inside to find out more information. Because of the many trips I’d made to the hospital during Vic’s illness, I knew most of the doctors and nurses. It wasn’t hard to convince one of them to give me an update.

  “He has a lot of internal bleeding,” a nurse named Monica told me. “They are trying to stabilize him long enough to get him into the O.R.”

  “He’s going to be okay though, right?” I knew that she couldn’t possibly know the answer to that question, but I just needed someone to tell me that everything was going to be fine.

  She patted my arm and said, “He’s in good hands. We’re doing everything we can.”

  It took almost thirty minutes for Glory to arrive and when she did, she came running inside, breathless. “Where is he?” she demanded.

  “They just got him stable and are going to operate.” I put my hand on her shoulder and she barely seemed to notice.

  “How bad is it?” She bit hard on her lower lip, presumably to keep it from quivering.

  There was no sense lying to her. “Bad.”

  The doctor came out and let us know that John was being moved into surgery. He had internal bleeding around his liver, broken ribs, and bleeding in his brain. Glory was quiet as we took the elevator to the waiting room. It wasn’t until we stepped into the bright room, filled with uncomfortable chairs and worried family members, that Glory started to crack. It started with a soft tremble in her shoulders. My arms went around her just as she began to shake, tears finally falling from the glassy pools in her eyes.

  “This is my fault,” she said between sobs.

  “How could this possibly be your fault?” I asked, rubbing her back. She felt small and frail in my arms.

  She sucked in a big, halting breath. “Because my life was too good. It couldn’t last.”

  “Glor.” I pulled back and held her at arms’ length. “John was in an accident. That had nothing to do with you.”

  “I can’t lose him, Jake. I just can’t. He’s my everything.” She started crying harder and I pulled her back into my arms.

  “I know,” I whispered, remembering how that same thought had nearly brought me to my knees when I lost my wife.

  It took almost ten minutes for her to pull it together enough to stop crying. When she finally composed herself, she called John’s father to tell him what was happening. She didn’t go into a lot of details, probably because Mr. Carter was already in bad health and she didn’t want to overly-worry him. We sat next to each other on torn vinyl chairs while holding untouched Styrofoam cups of coffee.

  “I didn’t even ask. Where’s Jack?” I couldn’t believe it had taken me that long to think about anything happening outside the walls of the hospital.

  “With Kate. I was with her when you called. She dropped me off here and offered to take Jack and pick up the boys.” Glory’s voice was hollow. “I need to find someone to get him. John’s dad is coming here and he’s our usual babysitter.”

  “I can have Kate drop Jack and Chris off at the house. Julia can watch him.” Even as I said it, I realized it would never work. Asking her to watch her three siblings was a big enough task, adding a one-year-old to the mix was a recipe for disaster.

  She shook her head slowly. “No, I’ll think of something else.”

  John’s father arrived a short time later and then there were three of us sitting in anxious silence. A nurse came by about an hour into the surgery and let us know that it would be a while. There was a lot of damage to repair.

  “I forgot to say congratulations,” I said when the sparkle from Glory’s left hand caught my eye. Mr. Carter had left the room to find a bathroom.

  “Oh?” She was confused for a second until she caught where my gaze had landed. “Right. Thanks.”

  “John told me this morning.” I wasn’t sure if I should keep talking, but it seemed better than the silence we had been enduring. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen him that happy.”

  Glory kept staring straight ahead as she muttered, “It didn’t last long.”

  “Everything is going to be okay, Glor,” I said, trying to sound confident.

  “You know, I can still remember the first day I met him. That was, like, 25 years ago. How crazy is that?” Her head shook slightly as if she couldn’t believe it. “I literally don’t have a memory from my childhood that doesn’t include him.”

  I reached over and squeezed her hand. “You are going to make so many more memories with him. You and Jack and your little girl. A lifetime of memories.”

  “Maybe we already had our lifetime.” She leaned her head back until it touched the wall, closing her eyes.

  “I’m going to call Julia and make sure my kids haven’t maimed each other. You’ll be okay on your own?”

  Her eyes opened slowly. “I guess that’s the question of the day, isn’t it?”

  I was glad that Mr. Carter came back right then so I didn’t have to worry about leaving her alone. At the end of the hall, I found a secluded spot near a window where I was able to get decent cell reception.

  Julia didn’t sound too frazzled when she answered, so I asked if she could stay with the kids longer. When she asked why, I gave a vague answer about John being in an accident. I didn’t let her know how serious it was just yet.

  After I hung up, I stayed at the window, staring at the falling snow. I couldn’t go back in that room yet. It was too hard. I felt this need to try to make Glory feel better, meanwhile I didn’t believe anything I was saying. I used to think everything happened for a reason, but that changed when I lost Vic. Now I knew that things just happened. People died.

  Not for the first time, I felt overwhelmingly alone. All I wanted to do was talk to Vic and have her put her arms around me. I didn’t want to be the strong one anymore. I didn’t want to lose another best friend.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Glory

  It took four hours to complete the surgery. I hardly moved the entire time. My body was too numb. When the doctor entered the waiting room to give us an update, it took all of my strength to stand up.

  “He’s still in very serious condition, but the surgery went as well as we could have hoped. They are moving him into Intensive Care. You’ll be able to see him in a little while.” The surgeon delivered the words like lines from a speech. I wondered how many times he had done this exact thing. Did he even notice the people he spoke with or were they all just nameless faces that vanished from his head the second he turned around?

  I took a second to call Kate, getting her number from Jake. She still had Jack and insisted she was fine watching him for as long as I needed. When she asked how Johnny was doing, I nearly broke down as I answered.

  We were escorted to the ICU by a young nurse that didn’t look much older than Julia. She gave me several sympathetic smiles as we walked and I wondered how traumatized I must look to her. If I looked as bad as I felt, I was sorry to be inflicting it upon her.

  “You can go in,” she said when we stopped in front of a small room. “He’s still unconscious, but you should talk to him. It might help.”

  Mr. Carter led us into th
e room and marched straight over to the bed. Jake stood near the foot of the bed, uncertain what to do. I stayed near the door, unable to move forward. I had expected to find Johnny lying under a sterile white sheet, a few bandages here and there. Instead, I found something much more horrifying.

  Johnny lay on the bed, mostly exposed except for thin sheet that covered his lower-half. His torso was covered in bruises and bandages with wires seeming to run in every direction. His head had been covered in thick white gauze and his face was bruised. In fact, it seemed every inch of exposed skin was bruised. If the nurse hadn’t told us it was Johnny, I wouldn’t have recognized him.

  “Glor.” Jake turned to me, waving me forward. “He needs you.”

  That was the moment that it clicked. This accident wasn’t something that had happened to me. I had been sitting around feeling sorry for myself, but it was Johnny that was a whisper away from death. He was the one that was fighting to live and he needed me to be strong. I owed him that.

  Jake stepped aside as I moved forward, taking my place next to the bed. I looked down at Johnny- my best friend and the love of my life. His hand rested on the bed, the only part of his body that seemed to be uninjured. My fingers crept forward slowly until I was touching him. His hand was cold, so I covered it with mine, clutching it like a drowning person would clutch a life preserver.

  “I’m here, Johnny,” I whispered, gently squeezing his fingers. “It’s going to be okay.”

  It didn’t matter that I didn’t believe it. It only mattered that he believed it. If there was any chance that he could hear me, I wasn’t going to let him know that I was afraid.

  After a long time standing that way, Jake retrieved two chairs. I sank into one of them gratefully, surprised that just standing for that long had made me so tired. Mr. Carter sat in the chair next to me and patted my knee.

  “It really does look wonderful on you,” he said, eyeing my hand which was still holding onto Johnny.

  “I’m still getting used to it,” I admitted. “I will look down and see it and be surprised. We never even got a chance to tell people.”