Home for the Baby's Sake

by Christine Rimmer

  That left Sasha putting a second load in the dishwasher as Hailey wiped down Theo’s high chair tray. When Hailey turned for the sink, Sasha had just shut the dishwasher door. The cycle started with a whooshing sound. Hailey just happened to glance directly at Sasha and saw that there were tears running down her face.

  “Sasha, what...?”

  “Nothing,” Sasha said, sniffing. “It’s nothing at all...”

  Hailey tossed her sponge into the sink and scooted close to Roman’s mom. “Come here...” She pulled the older woman into her arms.

  At first, Sasha stiffened, but then she gave in and let Hailey hug her. They stood there at the counter, holding on to each other as the dishwasher whirred softly beside them.

  Sasha sobbed. “Sorry, so sorry...”

  Hailey rubbed her back and reassured her. “Don’t be. It’s okay.”

  “You’re right, I know you are. It’s going to be okay,” whispered Sasha. “They promised it would...” She lifted her head and they stared at each other. Sasha sniffled and brushed at Hailey’s shoulder. “I’m soaking your shirt.”

  “Don’t worry about that.” Hailey turned enough to grab the cube of Kleenex a few feet down the counter. She whipped a couple of tissues out and passed them to Roman’s mom, who dabbed at her eyes and blotted her wet cheeks. Hailey set down the box and took Sasha gently by arms. “Now, what’s going on?”

  Sasha cast a worried glance toward the arch that led to the front of the house and the stairs leading up to the bedrooms. “I don’t want Roman to see me like this. I’ve been planning how to tell him for the last several days. I don’t want it to be with tears running down my face. He can’t stand it when I cry—which I never do, really. He likes to think he can make anything right, and seeing me or any woman cry makes him feel powerless. Powerlessness is not a good fit on my son.”

  Tell him what? Hailey wanted to demand. But instead, she said gently, “Theo will want a story before he’ll go to sleep. That leaves a few minutes, at least, before Roman comes back downstairs. And whatever it is, you’ve got nothing to worry about. You know Roman. He’ll be right there for you.”

  “I do know, yes. It’s just that I haven’t figured out how to tell him...”

  Hailey didn’t know whether to push for information or just provide reassurance and let it be. She settled for offering encouragement. “You’re amazing, Sasha. Whatever’s happened, you’re going to be fine.”

  Sasha chuckled through her tears. “I do love your can-do spirit.”

  Hailey gave a rueful smile. “That’s me. Keeping it on the sunny side—and I need to know. What can I do? How can I help?”

  They stared at each other. And then Roman’s mom dabbed at her eyes one more time and whispered, “I have breast cancer.”

  Chapter Six

  When Roman entered the kitchen, he found Hailey and his mother huddled together by the dishwasher.

  They both startled and whirled to face him. Hailey pasted on a smile. Sasha had red eyes and a nose to match. She’d been crying.

  And Ma never cried.

  He went right to her. “Ma, what’s the matter?” Hailey stepped back and he took his mother by the shoulders. She looked down at first, but then her gaze rose reluctantly to meet his. “You’ve been crying.” He didn’t mean it as an accusation, but somehow, it kind of sounded that way.

  Ma looked wrecked. It tore something inside him to see her so gutted. She hadn’t had an easy life, and after he made it big, he’d sworn to himself that she was never going to suffer over a damn thing ever again.

  “Oh, Roman...” A sob escaped her and the tears started falling again. She swayed toward him and he wrapped his arms around her. “I’m sorry. It was...such a great day. I think I’m feeling extra emotional, seeing our little boy so happy. I really wasn’t going to cry over this. I most definitely was not going to cry...” She most definitely was crying. He felt completely useless as sobs shook her slim shoulders.

  Hailey, behind him, pushed a box of Kleenex into his line of sight. He pulled some out and gave them to Ma to replace the soggy ball she had clutched in her hand. “Here, Ma. Fresh ones...”

  She took what he offered and dropped the used ones on the counter. Nobody said anything as she blew her nose and wiped at her eyes.

  Finally she drew herself up straight. “We should sit down. I will tell you everything.”

  Behind him, Hailey hesitantly suggested, “Maybe I should—”

  She didn’t get to finish, because he and Ma commanded, “Stay,” in unison. Ma continued, “I want some coffee and then I’m going to explain the situation to both of you.”

  A few minutes later, they sat at the table, the three of them, each with a hot mug of coffee to hold on to. By then, Ma had pulled herself together. She wrapped her hands around her mug and launched into her story.

  “A week and a half ago, I went in for my routine yearly mammogram...”

  Okay, he might be somewhat oblivious to the possible health hazards that befell women, but even he knew what was coming as soon as she said the word mammogram.

  How bad is it? Are you going to be okay? What do you need? What can I do? A thousand questions bounced around inside his head, each one warring for the first chance to come out of his mouth.

  But he said nothing. He waited for her to say all she had to say before demanding to know how he could make everything better.

  “They called me back for an ultrasound. The lump appeared malignant, so I went in for a biopsy, a procedure where they extract some of the tissue from the lump to test.”

  “Wait. How do they do that?”

  His mother looked bewildered. “Do what?”

  “You said they extract some tissue. Using what?”

  “A needle, Roman.”

  “You went to that by yourself?” She should have told him. He should have been there.

  “No, Roman. Matilda went with me.” Matilda Graves was one of the women she used to work for, one of the women she’d become good friends with over the years. He hated that she hadn’t told him sooner. But before he could start in about that, she dabbed at her eyes again. “It’s definitely cancer.”

  “Cancer.” His brain didn’t seem able to process the word.

  “Yes, Roman. I have breast cancer.”

  Suddenly, that Matilda Graves had replaced him at the scary procedure involving a needle didn’t seem all that important.

  Several obscene words scrolled through his brain. He kept them in. “Ma...” He laid his hand on hers and she put her other hand on top of his. They both squeezed at the same time.

  “It’s not all bad.” She stared at him through eyes identical to the ones he saw when he looked in the mirror. Right now, they were pleading, hopeful eyes. “The lump is malignant, but the biopsy results showed it’s not particularly fast-growing. They’re going to do surgery, remove the lump, a margin of surrounding tissue and a few of what they call sentinel lymph nodes to test—those are the ones closest to the tumor, which are the first places the cancer would go if it spread. The doctor seemed confident that I will have a full recovery. I don’t have the gene for breast cancer and the lump is very small. If the lymph nodes are clear, there’s a high likelihood I won’t have a recurrence.”

  “But what about radiation? And chemo?”

  She was nodding. “I will have radiation therapy starting a few weeks after the surgery.”

  “And then?”

  “That will be it. Unless the sentinel lymph nodes are affected. If they are, there will probably be more surgery and either chemo or some other systemic cancer drug, in addition to the radiation.”

  The lymph nodes would be clear, damn it. He wouldn’t have it any other way.

  Hailey said, “So we’re rooting for clear lymph nodes and radiation only.”

  “Yes.” Ma was nodding.

&n
bsp; Roman had to say it. “You should have come to me as soon as you got the results from your mammogram.”

  Eyes defiant now, Sasha stared him straight in the eye. “Pardon me if I wanted to enjoy my grandson’s first birthday without you and everyone else worrying about my health.”

  Now he felt like a jerk. “Sorry, Ma,” he muttered.

  She squeezed his hand again. “You’re a good son, but a very bossy one.”

  Over her shoulder, he saw Hailey’s lips twitch and knew she was suppressing a smug little grin because he often called her bossy.

  “Don’t,” he said flatly to the gorgeous and exasperating woman sitting on the other side of his mother.

  Hailey widened those lavender-blue eyes at him, playing innocent. Which she was not. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Roman,” his mother chided. “Be nice to Hailey. She’s a woman of fine character, with a big heart. It’s your duty and privilege to treat her right.”

  “Thank you, Sasha,” Hailey said with a brilliant smile.

  “It’s only the truth,” Ma replied.

  Just what he needed. The two of them ganging up on him. He wanted to order them to back the hell off. But Ma had cancer and was going to need surgery. It wasn’t a good time to get on her case.

  As for Hailey, he liked having her around, and if he gave her too much grief, she might just leave.

  He took the high road and asked mildly, “When’s the surgery?”

  “I was waiting to schedule it until I talked to you.”

  “The sooner the better,” he said.

  Sasha drew in a slow, steadying breath. “I agree.”

  “And I need to get with your doctor, get all the details.”

  “Of course you do,” his mother said dryly. “You can come to the surgery consult.”

  “I’ll make a list of questions we need to remember to ask.”

  Sasha nodded. “I do feel so much better now that you know.”

  Which is why you should have told me right away, he didn’t let himself say. “Good.”

  Ma gave him a brave little smile. “First thing Monday morning, I’ll call the doctor and say I’m ready for the next step.”

  * * *

  Hailey kept thinking she ought to go, that she ought to leave mother and son alone to speak privately.

  But when she said as much for the second time, Sasha made her position clear. “Don’t go. I want you here and Roman needs you here.”

  Hailey slid a glance at the man in question.

  He met her gaze. “Stay.”

  An hour later, Theo woke from his nap. Hailey and Roman took him for a walk around Treasure Cove Circle. Back at the house, they sat on the floor with him as he played with his toys. Theo yawned a lot. The big day had tired him out. As for Roman, he seemed quiet. Thoughtful. Hailey helped with dinner and then with the cleanup afterward.

  At a little after seven, Sasha took Theo upstairs. “You two have a nice evening,” she said. “I’ve got friends I need to call and a good book to read.”

  Hailey and Roman sat in the family room. Kicking off their shoes, they got comfy on the sofa and pretended to watch a thriller on the big-screen TV.

  About halfway through, Roman pulled her in tight and bit her ear lightly, causing a sweet string of sparks to flare across her skin. “How much do you care about seeing the rest of this?”

  She turned her head enough to kiss him. “Not even a little bit,” she whispered against his parted lips.

  “Well, all right.” He aimed the remote at the screen and it went dark, dropped the device on the coffee table and then guided her down to the pillows until they were stretched out on their sides, face-to-face. With a look of great concentration and a slow glide of his index finger, he traced the curves of her eyebrows and the shape of her chin. “Your skin is like something from an old, sappy poem.”

  “Is that somehow a compliment?”

  He nodded. “Smooth as satin and velvet, cool and pale and perfect.”

  “Perfection is way overrated.”

  “Look at you. Not only perfect, but modest about it.”

  “Roman. I am far from perfect and we both know that.”

  “You should stay the night.” His voice was tender. “I don’t want you to go.”

  “You’re being so sweet and direct.” She threaded her fingers through this thick hair. “You are not okay, are you?”

  He shifted even closer and caught her mouth in a lingering kiss, a kiss that wasn’t really about sex, but more about communication, a conversation without words.

  When he let her mouth go, she said, “Your mom’s going to have a smooth surgery and a quick recovery. I’m sure of it.”

  He pressed his forehead to hers. “It wasn’t easy for her when I was a kid. They didn’t have a lot, my dad and Ma. Just each other and, eventually, me...”

  She stroked the hair at his temples some more, soothing him. “Tell me about your dad.”

  “I really don’t remember him. Ma says he was kind and gentle. He was a groundskeeper for a rich couple, up in Seattle. Ma was the housekeeper and cook.”

  “How did he die?”

  “Fixing a tire. The jack didn’t hold and the whole car came down on top of him.”

  “Oh, my God.” She rested her hand on his broad chest, right over his heart. “That’s awful.”

  “It must’ve been, for Ma. Like I said, I was too young to really get what had happened. Ma kept her job, though, cooking and cleaning in the same house, for the next six years.” Something in the tone of his voice alerted her. She lifted her head enough to watch his eyes. He glanced away and then back. “What?”

  She had a sense that there was more he could have said, about those six years after his father died. But she didn’t want to push him. She wanted him to open up to her in his own way and his own time. “Nothing. So, after your dad died, you stayed in Seattle...”

  “Until I was eight.”

  “And then?”

  “Then we left Seattle, Ma and me, in an old car piled with everything we owned in the world. It wasn’t a whole lot. Ma stopped for the night at the Ocean View Motel.”

  “On the Coast Highway, just as you’re coming into town...”

  “That’s the one. Cheap wood paneling, squeaky box-spring beds in the rooms. The ice maker in the alcove by the office didn’t work.” His eyes were far away, recalling that time. “Ma managed to talk the owner into giving her a job as a maid. We lived there at the motel for a few months, until she’d scraped enough together to get us an apartment—a dump, that apartment, not much better than our ugly room at the Ocean View. Ma was relentless, though, a hard worker with a will of iron. Within a year, she had jobs all over town, taking care of people’s houses. She rented us a little place of our own and here in Valentine Bay we stayed.”

  “Until you left for college...”

  “She stayed, even then. When I made money in Vegas, I convinced her to move there. I always swore that when I grew up, I would take care of her in style. I bought her a nice house, made sure she had plenty of money of her own, everything she could ever need. But all she really wanted was to come back and live in this town. She loves this place.”

  Hailey kissed him. “So what you’re saying is, you’ve given her what she wanted most. You came back here, where she wants to live, and she gets to be with her son and her grandson, too.”

  He stroked a hand down her arm, slowly, and then trailed his fingers back up again. It felt so good—the way he touched her, the absolute focus in those silver-green eyes when he looked at her. “What I want is for her to be happy, to have the best of everything. She deserves that. I guess I just never let myself think that something like cancer would get her. I hate that there’s nothing I can do to make sure she’s going to be all right.”

  “
There’s a lot you can do, and you’re doing it. She’ll get the surgery and the recovery will be quick. And you’ll be right there with her all the way.”

  He moved in even closer. She felt his breath warm across her cheek. And then he nipped her earlobe, a tender little bite that sent a surge of desire arrowing down into the center of her. “You sound so sure...”

  She pushed him back enough to capture his gaze again. “Why wouldn’t I be? She’s caught it early, it’s not an aggressive form of cancer and her doctor seems confident that she’s going to beat it without a lot of debilitating treatment.”

  “But you just never know.”

  She laid her hand on his cheek, loving the feel of him, the rough texture of his beard scruff against her palm, the press of his hard body so close and warm. “Sorry, Roman. You don’t get absolute assurance. But in your mom’s case, you do get about as close as you can to knowing that everything will turn out right.”

  “Not like that guy you were with in college.” He watched her intently.

  Sadness had weight. It pressed on her heart. “No. Your mother’s cancer is not like Nathan’s. His illness was in remission when I met him, but it was stage four leukemia. He was afraid it would come back. And it did.”

  Roman caught a hank of her hair and wrapped it around his fist, tugging it tight. It hurt, a little, in a pleasurable way. His eyes burned into hers. “Stay.”

  Her heart melted—along with her midsection. She kissed him and gave him her answer against those lips of his that were so soft compared with the rest of him. “Yes.”

  For a while, they didn’t stir from the sofa. He held her close. Their kisses started out restrained, tender and exploratory.

  But there was fire between them, and each kiss made it burn just that much hotter. His erection rubbed against the cove of her sex. Even through the barrier of his clothes and hers, she felt him so acutely, wanted him so very much.

  “I can’t wait anymore,” he said on a low groan.