“Was a baby?” Blake asked. He was incredulous.
He and Mike both stood staring at her, obviously confused.
“Blake, dear, it’s not… I know it sounds bad, but it’s not that.”
She reached out to him.
He brushed her away and stepped toward Mike. A moment later Blake took a swing that landed squarely on Mike’s nose. Kitty’s cries disturbed her parents, who were sitting out on their porch swing.
Within minutes Freda was quickly walking Kitty back to the house.
“Mother, I know it looks terrible, but it’s not what it seems.”
Freda looked intently at her daughter. “I believe you, Katherine. So tell me what it is then.”
Kitty erupted into tears. “I can’t!”
“Of course you can, child. You can tell me anything!”
“Blake will never understand.”
Freda reached for her daughter and wrapped Kitty in her arms.
Soon the men were in the house speaking in hushed tones; Isaac raised his voice to Blake. “Impossible!”
Isaac stormed into the living room, where the two distraught women sat on the couch holding hands. “Impossible!” he repeated. “Kitty was not pregnant with that man’s baby.”
Kitty’s mouth dropped. Her father’s disgust was apparent, and her mother was aghast.
“You aren’t pregnant, are you?” Freda laid her hand on Kitty’s shoulder.
“No.” Kitty looked away in shame.
“Because,” Blake tried to explain, “because she…” He looked at the floor but not before glancing at Kitty. The disgust in his eyes said enough.
Freda stood; her voice was calm but stern.
“I don’t know what’s going on here, and Kitty won’t tell me, but my daughter would never be unfaithful to her husband or”— she threw her hands up in confusion—“get rid of her husband’s child! Shame on you both!”
“Then explain what I heard!” Blake demanded, his hands shaking beside him and his face mottled pink with humiliation and rage.
Kitty had to look away from Blake’s pain and her parents’ stares. She couldn’t stop crying, and regret fell over her like a river flooding the bank after heavy rains.
She couldn’t explain.
“It was those walks,” Blake said, his voice catching and sputtering. “Those rides you took with him, wasn’t it?”
Kitty looked up, a pleading look in her eyes. “You wanted me to ride with him. To walk with him. You told me to, even though…”
“I trusted you,” he whispered, his eyes wide with grief.
The house was quiet and dark now, and when she entered the bedroom she and Blake shared, she felt new relief and despair that he was gone. A note on the pillow fluttered slightly in the breeze coming through the open window.
I need to think, she read. Be back in the morning. It was so like Blake, she thought, to be mad at her but want her to know he would return.
He would return! Kitty panicked. There wasn’t much time. She knew Blake had probably left on his motorcycle or was walking and not far away. Maybe he was sleeping in one of the buildings on the estate. But he would be back and quickly.
She couldn’t let him know the worst of what she’d done. She paused for a moment before turning the note over and scribbling a short letter back. She was careful not to make any promises. She’d already broken enough.
Blake,
I’m sorry. Please tell Mother and Daddy I’m sorry. I do not care for Mike Larimer. You will always be my only beloved. There is so much I wish I could explain, but I cannot. I have Ruby. I love you dearly.
Kitty
CROSSING OVER
Kitty
20
Kitty had never planned to be gone for so long, but years passed without writing home to Blake. Her secret was too awful, and as much as she missed her family, she couldn’t let them find out. She would lay awake at night dreaming of Blake and wishing he would come for her. Then she would wake in a sweaty panic, afraid he had.
Ruby cried almost every day from missing her daddy. She could never forget him even though Kitty tried to distract her.
“She seems very tired,” one of Ruby’s homeroom teachers said.
“That’s because sometimes she stays late at the baby-sitter while I work, but she handles it fine.”
“She falls asleep in class,” the teacher persisted.
“She misses you,” the baby-sitter, Janet, said one night. Her wrinkled eyes were kind but serious. “You work too hard.”
“But, Janet, I don’t have a choice.”
“Then give Ruby something that is just hers, Kitty. She needs to be a girl. Right now her life revolves around waiting for you.”
Kitty knew it was true, but there was no way Kitty could do what Janet was suggesting. Taking her to mother-daughter brunches or putting her in ballet lessons was out of the question. Kitty would probably never even get to attend the recitals.
“What about piano?” Janet had asked cheerily.
“We can’t afford it, and we don’t even have a piano.”
“I used to be a teacher,” Janet continued with a grin. “And I have a piano in my living room, see? I just need to dust it off!”
“Oh, Janet. I couldn’t let you.”
“Yes, you could. And you will.”
Sometimes Kitty would daydream about going home as she wiped down the tables around her. But who would want her now?
She observed the daily comings and goings of people in the coffee shop, running off to work, meeting their girlfriends, their husbands, and listened to their conversations. She read and heard about events in the San Francisco Chronicle and on the television sets at the diner. She continued to change with the times; from presidential elections to plane crashes, feeling swept up with the passing years.
The world was reshaped, and she felt she was being pushed farther away from her family.
One evening a young man had wandered into the diner where she worked. He looked around for a moment, baffled at the aging clientele, and with a shrug seated himself in the corner and stayed until closing. He was handsome but looked sad, and Kitty recognized that look in his eyes as grief, the same as hers.
He was waiting for her at the back entrance as she left, and at first she had the good sense to be afraid.
“Coffee?”
Kitty hadn’t answered, but she also didn’t turn around and go back inside.
He held up his hands and grinned at her sideways. He was handsome, dressed casual, like a father might dress if he were taking his kid to a ball game.
“I’ll walk ten feet away.”
“Okay, but I pick the coffee shop.”
And so she led him to the all-night coffee shop where she worked on weekends. They’d talked for hours, and since Kitty was off the next day, she didn’t worry about sleeping.
“Oh my,” she’d said, looking at her watch. “I have to get out of here or the regulars are going to start asking me to get their coffee.”
And somehow his offer to walk her home had turned into walking to his house instead. He’d opened the door for her as she left later.
“I’m sorry,” he said, grabbing her hand. “I can’t see you again. I have a wife and a daughter. At least I did. She took her from me…but I—”
Kitty shushed him.
“I understand. I’m so sorry.”
And she’d left knowing that he would do the right thing by his wife, but she wondered if her husband would have done the right thing had she gone back. The strange man’s pain haunted her always, and having seen it, she knew more of Blake’s pain than she had ever allowed herself to imagine. She only hoped that he wouldn’t make the same mistake as this man had made with her, and for a precarious moment she’d cried at the thought of it.
Bad relationships with men continued for her after that, and they, like Mr. Thompson, were never as nice as that first man had been. In fact, he was the type she avoided. Instead she’d been inexplicably dra
wn to date men who ended up controlling her every move, which convinced her she was insignificant, and took advantage of her insecurities, always leaving her desperate and nearly destitute.
She felt in her heart that Blake wouldn’t be able to love her the way she’d become. To him it would be biblical to divorce her—she was sure of it—if he hadn’t already found a way.
When she allowed herself, she sometimes dreamed of the old days. Not for long but for a while, and that’s what Blake became—a mirage in her dreams that would never be real. Kitty had grown convinced that Blake and her parents were better off not knowing the transgressions she’d found herself participating in. She hoped they could remember the Kitty she once was to them, pure and innocent—except for the one thing that had driven her away. She hoped they would never have to know about the new Kitty, used and worthless.
To make matters worse, this was when Ruby was first diagnosed with asthma, and Kitty found herself wishing more and more that she had her mother to help. She had to carry medicine with her at every moment, never knowing when Ruby would start gasping and run out of breath. So Kitty added the fear of losing Ruby to the pile of worries she carried, and with each desperate asthma attack she witnessed in her daughter, she clung to Ruby even more tightly.
When Ruby was old enough, she decided to move out on her own with some girlfriends. Kitty received the news from Ruby like a brick hitting pavement.
“Most definitely not!” she’d exclaimed.
“Mother! I am a woman now. You cannot stop me!”
“Please, Ruby,” Kitty had implored. “You don’t understand what is out there. It’s not safe.”
“Mother, it will be different for me. I won’t make the same mistakes you have.”
The words had hurt Kitty, but what could she say in response? She had made more mistakes than she could count, and she hoped her daughter had at least learned from her poor example if nothing else. And there was nothing else really. Nothing else she could do to go back and give Ruby what she really needed, a father. Not just any father, but Blake.
Kitty had somehow entertained a fantasy over the years that Ruby would never leave home, but as she packed Ruby’s bags and put them into the trunk of the small beat-up red car she’d bought for Ruby, she realized how silly she’d been to think she could keep Ruby back.
She was too eager, too full of life. She was looking for answers that Kitty had no doubt she would find, whether they should be found or not. Getting away from Kitty was the only way Ruby could search, and Kitty knew this without either of them acknowledging it out loud.
Kitty had run back into the house for Ruby’s box of paints and a few clean canvases and a new easel.
Ruby’s smile was warm, and Kitty knew her gift had been the right one.
“Never stop painting, Ruby. You are so gifted.”
Ruby took everything and set it in the backseat on top of some suitcases.
“Mother, you act as if we’ll never see each other again.”
“Well, we’d better.” Tears welled in Kitty’s eyes.
“It’s okay, Mother.” Ruby stood with a bag over her shoulder. “We’ll see each other on weekends, at least a few weekends a month.”
Ruby looked so pretty, Kitty thought, with her curly brown hair bound in a ponytail; her sun-browned arms bare in a sleeveless red shirt. Her figure was like Kitty’s had once been. Curvy in all the right places in her faded jeans, complete with her favorite beaded sandals. How had she grown so beautiful?
“I should have moved out a long time ago. I’m too old to live with my mommy.”
Kitty had laughed with Ruby, not agreeing with her at all, and held her tears in check until Ruby turned the corner at the end of the street. Then she’d turned and run back into the house. She’d thrown herself into the recliner she’d saved so much money for and cried into the night. She’d woken up the next morning a mess and called in sick to work.
Kitty wanted her own mother and had almost called home, but when she spied a man’s hat tossed on the coatrack where it had been left, she remembered her secret. There were so many now—so many men who had come and gone in the night. The real secret, the most horrific one, was buried beneath all the hats and socks left behind.
It was old grief Kitty felt but lived with every day. It made her dull inside but never failed to bring new tears each time she was reminded of how far that secret had taken her from her family. She could never go back, she knew. She was too messed up, too enmeshed in her mistakes, to ever expect her family to understand.
As days passed without Ruby, Kitty would sit at the piano and peck at the keys wishing for a song from Ruby, and this made her think more about her mother, who had taught her to play the piano as well, although she had never been as good as Ruby was. But her mother had been patient. She would have been proud of Ruby now had she been able to hear her play. Kitty wondered if her own mother felt the same emptiness—this same worry about her absence over the years. Only how much worse had it been for Freda, since Kitty at least knew where Ruby was?
Fortunately, hard work and worries about Ruby often managed to crowd Blake and everything else in La Rosaleda to the back burner, but her heart always filled with more pain during the nights. It weighed on her each morning as she got out of bed. Even as she tossed it away with yesterday’s laundry, it would show up again in the folds of her clothing.
Ruby had always been wrong about Kitty. When she was angry, she would accuse Kitty of not missing Blake at all. In reality Kitty missed him constantly.
His hold on her heart didn’t diminish with distance or time, and the sweetness of her memories was bitter in her mouth every time she thought of La Rosaleda. Her demanding job, where she now lived just outside San Francisco, seemed to be the best way to deal with it since she no longer had Ruby to devote her time to every day. She started working long hours, and her days fused into one empty journey.
The day Kitty was finally jolted out of her carefully constructed wall of lies, she’d gone to San Francisco for the afternoon with a new boyfriend named Stan. The day had gone okay, and they’d just enjoyed (if one could call spending time with Stan enjoyable) a Chinese dinner and were leaving to visit Ruby and her friends at their apartment.
Kitty pushed open the door, and the breeze lifted her highlighted brown hair, now cut in a shorter bob, to float around her face. She tried to brush it away from her eyes as she vaguely heard the chime of the bell above the entryway of the restaurant. She scoffed silently at her date’s rudeness at not holding the door open for her as she struggled to smooth her hair back in place. Struggling with the weight of the door as she tried to step out onto the sidewalk, she bumped softly into another person.
Glancing up, she drew in her breath and held it.
Staring back at her was the man who had become a dream.
She would have known him in a sea of people, but there was no doubt who he was now. Her heart rose up, filling her chest and throat, as she stared straight into Blake Birkirt’s blue eyes.
For a moment she doubted his presence. This was only a man who looked like her beloved, but it couldn’t be him, she thought. Not this way. Not this accident of what…? Fate?
But it was Blake, dressed in slacks and a tailored brown jacket, an ensemble he would only wear if he had important business to do. She knew he normally would be wearing blue jeans and a denim shirt for working, and that’s also what he would have been wearing had he been coming for her. So he was not in San Francisco to look for her. He was on business.
This was an accident.
She became frozen together with him but not touching as people bustled around them and disappeared from focus.
They didn’t need to touch to feel each other. This was her husband. She couldn’t believe he was close enough to reach out to, but she didn’t dare. He was still as handsome as in the years before and in her mind, his ash blond hair combed neatly to the side with only a speck of gray at the roots. She knew by the definition of his arms
and chest, which rose and lowered rapidly beneath his white button-down shirt that he’d stayed working at Frances-DiCamillo. He’d been working the vineyards, and if he’d stayed on with her father, she knew he must still be part of her family.
She wanted dearly to ask about the vineyard and her parents, but she was afraid to open her mouth. She’d dreamed of this moment, of going back to him and begging his forgiveness, of telling him everything she’d kept silent for so long. In her fantasies she’d imagined that he would take her into his arms and say he understood everything. He’d been waiting for her to come.
She could tell now by the look of shock, amazement, and disappointment in his eyes that her fantasy wouldn’t come true. He would never accept her now. She felt this deep within her, and in one way it wasn’t a surprise at all, but the crushing awareness shocked her. Of course he wouldn’t want her, she realized. She was standing in front of him now, still legally married as far as she knew, with another man’s slimy hand resting on her waist, as if this new man owned her. All this right in front of her husband.
Kitty was sure that each detail told Blake everything he needed to know. She risked glancing down and noticed that he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, so even if he hadn’t found a way to legally divorce her, he had probably divorced her in his mind.
How could he not have divorced her? It’s what she deserved, and even if her heart still loved him, had she not already divorced him by her actions?
For an agonizing instant Blake looked long into her eyes, as if searching for an answer. His jaw was clenched, and the place between his eyebrows creased as if in the same pain as the day he’d discovered her talking to Mike Larimer in the vines.
What was he waiting for? What answer could she give him now?
She couldn’t open her mouth to say what she’d dreamed of saying for years. Her heart cried these things silently, but he did not hear them.
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