by Mary McNear
“Well, she’s not out of the woods yet,” Caroline reminded him. “There could still be complications.”
“Her doctor said it was possible, but unlikely,” Jack said.
Caroline leaned back against the couch cushions, and Jack watched as a little of her anger, and indignation, ebbed away and was replaced by tiredness.
“Did you get any sleep last night?” he asked.
“Very little,” she said, rubbing her eyes. “Once Jessica’s mother told me Daisy wasn’t spending the night there, I imagined . . . well, I imagined the worst.”
“Caroline, it’s Daisy,” he reminded her. “Even her worst couldn’t be very bad.”
But she didn’t answer him, and Jack was left to wonder how she could be so unprepared for Daisy to grow up, so in denial about the fact that the daughter she’d raised was no longer a child, but instead a young woman. Then another thought occurred to him. Maybe if he’d stuck around and watched Daisy grow up too, the way Caroline had, he wouldn’t be prepared for it either. Still, some facts had to be faced.
“Caroline,” he said now, “you must have known, at some point, that Daisy would spend the night with a boy.”
“Of course I knew that,” she said, a little irritably. “And that’s not what this is about, Jack.”
“Then what is it about?”
“It’s about . . . it’s about something else, something Daisy said recently about Will.”
“What did she say?”
“She said . . . she said he was her dream, Jack. Or something like that, something that made me think she was going to do something crazy. So last night, when she wasn’t at Jessica’s, and she didn’t come home, I thought . . .”
“You thought what?”
“I thought they’d run off together. You know, eloped or something.”
“Eloped? Caroline, that’s crazy. They’re kids, for God’s sake.”
“Oh, so now Daisy’s a kid? Because five minutes ago, you said she was an adult. Which is it, Jack? I’d really like to know.”
“She’s neither, Caroline. Or she’s both. She’s both at the same time, just like you and I were at her age. Nobody’s completely grown-up at twenty-one. They’re not supposed to be,” he said. And then he chuckled a little. “Did you honestly think they’d eloped? I mean, do people even do that anymore? It’s kind of outdated, isn’t it? Kind of like a ‘shotgun wedding.’”
“You mean like our wedding, Jack?” Caroline asked challengingly, turning to look at him.
“Well, yes,” he said, surprised, even though he probably shouldn’t have been. “But I didn’t think of our wedding as a shotgun wedding.”
“Maybe not. But that’s what it was. I can still remember my mom trying to zip up my wedding dress before the ceremony,” she said, with the ghost of a smile. “I think I gained five pounds the week before we were married.”
“That dress fit you perfectly,” Jack said. God, she’d looked beautiful that day. She’d absolutely glowed, the way a pregnant woman was supposed to. He almost told her that now, but he stopped himself. She didn’t really look like she was in the mood for reminiscing. Still, there was one thing he was curious about.
“Does Daisy know . . . ?”
“That I was pregnant when we got married? No. I’ve never told her. And, amazingly enough, even with her natural mathematical ability, she’s never figured it out. It helped, of course, that by the time she was old enough to put two and two together, we weren’t celebrating our anniversary anymore.”
Jack nodded, feeling suddenly depressed, depressed about all the anniversaries they hadn’t celebrated.
“Are you sorry, Caroline?” he asked suddenly, turning to her. “Sorry that you got pregnant?”
“Of course not,” she said automatically. “If I hadn’t, there’d be no Daisy.”
“Well, that is unthinkable,” he agreed. “But what I really mean is, are you sorry about us? Sorry about us ever having gotten married?”
“Sorry?” she said thoughtfully. “No, I don’t feel sorry about it. Not exactly . . . I feel guilty about it maybe, but not sorry.”
“Guilty?”
She nodded. “Guilty about making you marry me.”
“You didn’t make me marry you,” he objected. “I was in love with you, Caroline.” I still am.
She shrugged. “Maybe. But that’s not why you asked me to marry you. You asked me to marry you because you were trying to do the right thing, Jack. You didn’t ask me to marry you because you wanted to be a husband or a father.”
“I don’t think I knew what I wanted, Caroline,” he said honestly. “I think, to the extent that I wanted anything, I wanted you.”
She smiled, a little sadly. “But you really were just a kid, Jack, weren’t you? At twenty-one you weren’t ready for any of it, were you?”
I’m ready now, he wanted to say. But he didn’t.
“I’ve often thought since then that I should have said no when you proposed to me,” Caroline continued, in the same musing tone. “You know, just to let you off the hook altogether.”
“And what would you have done, Caroline?”
“Oh, gone it alone, I guess.”
“Well, you basically did that anyway,” he said, feeling about as low as it was possible for a person to feel. He looked away from her and examined an especially ugly painting hanging on the wall of the visitors’ lounge.
“Hey, don’t beat yourself up, Jack,” Caroline said, noticing his expression. “You did your best.”
“My best wasn’t very good.”
She shrugged. “You sent me money.”
“It was never enough.”
“Well, you weren’t exactly rich yourself, were you?”
But Jack didn’t answer. She could defend his actions. He wasn’t going to. Instead, he thought about Daisy, whose hospital room was only about one hundred feet down the hallway from the visitors’ lounge. He hadn’t been kidding when he’d told Caroline that what had happened to Daisy that morning had scared him. It had scared the hell out of him. And it had been a huge relief to see her, just a little while ago, sitting up in her hospital bed, talking, smiling, and even teasing Jack about having gotten an unexpected day off from working on the cabin.
“Don’t be too hard on Daisy about what happened,” he said now, turning to Caroline. “Especially since you can still remember what it’s like to be that age. I mean, it’s the same age you were when you married me.”
“That’s what I’m afraid of, Jack,” Caroline said, rubbing her eyes tiredly. And suddenly, sitting there beside her, Jack finally understood why Caroline disliked Will. All summer, he’d puzzled over it, especially since the one time he’d met Will in passing, he’d seemed like a perfectly nice guy. But now it all made sense. Caroline didn’t see Will when she looked at Will, she saw Jack. And she wasn’t afraid Daisy would make any mistake. She was afraid Daisy would make her mistake, getting involved with, and maybe even getting married to, someone like Jack. Someone who would be, as he had been, directionless, irresponsible, unfaithful . . . You could take your pick of adjectives. They all added up to the same thing. She didn’t want Daisy wasting her time, her life, really, on someone who had as little to offer to her as Jack had had to offer Caroline.
“Jack, what’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” Jack said, sinking a few more inches into the couch.
“Have you eaten yet today?” Caroline said, frowning.
“Not really,” he said. Not at all.
“Neither have I. We should get something in the cafeteria. It’ll be terrible, of course, the usual selection of cardboard sandwiches. But if we go down there, it’ll give Daisy time to take a nap. Besides, we can’t stay here all day without some kind of sustenance.”
“I’m not hungry.”
“Well, you’re not going to starve on my watch, Jack Keegan,” she said briskly. “Let’s go.”
Ten minutes later, they were sitting at a table in the almost empty hospital cafe
teria. Caroline was picking at a salad and Jack was trying, valiantly, to eat a particularly uninspired-looking turkey and cheese sandwich.
“Honestly, I don’t see how they can charge money for this food,” Caroline said, putting her fork down. “If I served this at Pearl’s, I’d never have a repeat customer.”
Jack nodded, but Caroline could tell he wasn’t really paying attention to her. Finally, he gave up on his lunch too. “Caroline, I want you to promise me something,” he said, pushing his tray aside.
“What?”
“I want you to promise me that when Daisy comes home from the hospital, you won’t be too hard on her.”
“Well, not hard on her, maybe, but—”
“But you might deliver a few well-placed lectures?”
“I might,” she said, faintly irritated that once again Jack was casting her in the bad cop role.
“All right, look, lecture her if you want to,” he said. “But remember, she’s going to make mistakes. Fortunately for her, and for us, she’s been blessed with good judgment. She won’t make that many of them, and the ones she does make won’t be irreversible. But you need to let her make them, Caroline. That’s how people learn.”
“Well, Daisy will have to find some other way to learn, Jack,” she said stubbornly. “She can’t afford to make mistakes.”
“Of course she can,” he said, exasperated. “They’re a part of life, Caroline. Everyone makes mistakes. You can’t hold her to a higher standard than everyone else.”
But Caroline shook her head. “You don’t get it, Jack. You just don’t get it; you don’t know how much is at stake here.”
“You’re right, I don’t,” he said bluntly. “Enlighten me.”
She looked at him speculatively, trying to weigh what his response would be if she told him what she hadn’t been able to bring herself to tell anyone but Frankie.
“All right, Jack,” she said finally, “I’ll enlighten you. But now you have to promise me something.”
“Anything,” he said automatically.
“You have to promise me you won’t judge me.”
Jack’s eyes widened. “Me, judge you?” he said, amused. “Caroline, I think we both know I’m not in a position to judge anyone.”
“Well, that may be, but . . .” She paused and looked away, torn between her desire to finally unburden herself of this and her equally strong desire to protect her pride, or rather, what was left of her pride. But even if she didn’t tell him, she reasoned, he would know soon enough. The whole town would know soon enough . . .
“Caroline, I’m not going to judge you,” Jack said, leaning his elbows on the table between them. “But I’m also not leaving here until you tell me what this is about.”
She sighed and picked at her lifeless salad again. “The reason there’s so much at stake for Daisy is because . . . because she’s so close, Jack,” she said. “Only two semesters away from graduating.”
“I understand that,” he said patiently.
“And if something were to go wrong now for her now, Jack, if something were to derail her plans for her future, she wouldn’t have anything to fall back on, not even waitressing at Pearl’s.”
He looked at her questioningly.
“And I wouldn’t be able to help her either. Financially, I mean.”
“I . . . don’t get it.”
“Oh, Jack . . .” she said, and all at once she felt the fatigue, not just of the past day, but of the past several years, settle over her. “Jack, I’m about to lose it all.” She raised her chin fractionally and met his eyes. “The building, the apartment, the coffee shop. Everything.”
He stared at her wordlessly. But she nodded her head and went on. “It’s true. I borrowed money from the bank, and now I can’t pay it back.”
“Wait, back up,” he said. “When did you borrow money from the bank?”
“Seven years ago. I’d decided to take out a second mortgage with a balloon payment due at the end of the seven years. Business was good at the time, and I’d put some money aside for Daisy’s college education. And I thought, ‘Here’s my chance.’ You know that old adage, you have to spend money to make money? Well, my parents never had any money to spend on the business, so I figured I could borrow the money and do all the things they’d put off doing: replace the roof and the air-conditioning system, upgrade all the appliances, expand the seating area, buy new tables and chairs. You know, nothing crazy, just commonsense stuff. It was a solid plan, Jack. The bank loan officers thought so, too, and they gave me the loan.”
“So what happened?”
“The recession happened, Jack. And it . . . it was bad.”
“How bad?” he asked quietly.
“Plenty bad. It turns out that when people cut their budgets, they cut blueberry pancakes first,” she added, with a little laugh. But that laugh sounded bitter, even to her. “I replaced the roof, but put most of the other improvements I’d planned I had to put on hold,” she continued. “Which turned out to be a good thing, because by the time I’d emptied out my savings account to pay for taxes and insurance and the payments for my first mortgage, that second mortgage was the only thing keeping the business afloat. During the bottom of the recession, things were so bad, I even thought about laying Frankie off. But I couldn’t bring myself to do it. It’s hard enough for an ex-con to find work in good times, and here . . . well, things weren’t good. Bill Phipps was laying people off at the mill, and summer tourism was way down. Anyway, before I knew it, I’d used up the whole loan and . . .” She shrugged.
“How much was the loan for?” Jack asked, his brow furrowed.
“Fifty thousand dollars,” Caroline said. Fifty thousand dollars; it might as well have been fifty million dollars.
“Have you missed any payments on it?”
“No, not yet. I’ve been able to keep up with those, so far. But there’s a balloon payment of $44,500 due September twenty-first. And since there was no reset option on the mortgage, and they won’t let me refinance the loan, I have to make that payment.”
“September twenty-first. That’s less than a month away.”
She nodded.
“Do you have the money?”
She shook her head.
“Can you get the money?”
She shook her head again. Jack stared at her in disbelief. “Look,” she said, defensively, “I’ve done the math. Backwards, forwards, and sideways. I’ve added up my worth a hundred times over, meager as it is. I’ve even thought of selling the few things of value I own, like Grandma Pearl’s wedding china.” And my wedding ring, she thought, but didn’t say. She’d often wondered, over the years, why she’d kept it, in its little black velvet box, in her top dresser drawer. Now, of course, she didn’t want to examine that question too closely.
“Are you sure they won’t let you refinance your mortgages?” Jack asked.
“No, I tried, believe me. But John Quarterman can’t help me. He would, if he could, but three years ago, the bank was bought by another, Chicago-based bank. And they said I’m not a good risk.”
“And you don’t have any other ideas?”
“Well, my employees, I mean my employee, Frankie, would like to help. He’s willing to give me everything he’s got. But everything he’s got still isn’t enough.”
“Did you . . . did you ever tell Buster about any of this?” Jack asked hesitantly.
“No, thank God. Because if Buster had known, he would have loaned me the money. Given me the money, more likely. And then when I ended things with him, I mean, when we ended things with each other,” she corrected herself, quickly, “it would have been . . .”
“Awkward?” Jack supplied.
“Awkward,” Caroline agreed.
“But, Caroline, business has gotten better, hasn’t it?”
She nodded. “It has. But it’s all I can do now to keep up with the monthly payments on the two mortgages.”
“So what happens when you miss the balloon payment?�
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“I’ll try to negotiate an extension with the bank that will give me time to sell the building and pay off the mortgages. After that, I should just about break even, I think.”
Jack massaged his temples now. He looked like he was having trouble taking this all in. “So you’re just going to give up?” he said finally. “You’re just going to let Pearl’s go without a fight?”
“Without a fight?” she echoed, feeling a pulse of anger at her temples. “Jack, I’ve been fighting for Pearl’s my whole life—every single day. But this . . .” She paused. “This has got me beat.”
“But . . . there’s something I don’t understand. I asked Daisy, last year, how the two of you were doing. Financially, I mean. And she said you were doing fine.”
“That’s because we are doing fine, as far as Daisy knows. I’ve never told her about any of this. And you’re not going to either, Jack,” she added warningly.
He shook his head slowly. “So many secrets in one little family,” he said, a bleak smile tugging at the corners of his mouth. “But you can’t keep this from her for much longer, Caroline.”
“I know. She’ll find out about it. But after the fact, after she’s back at college.” Safely back at college, she added to herself.
“Caroline—” Jack started to say, but she waved his objection away.
“No. She’s not going back to Minneapolis with this hanging over her like some dark cloud. I’ll tell her when I have to tell her. But by then, she’ll be almost home free. The first member of my family to graduate from college. And the first member not to be saddled with debt from the get-go. Think about it, Jack. Three generations of us—me, my parents, my grandparents—have spent our whole lives trying to stay one step ahead of the bank. Daisy’s life is going to be different. That’s why she can’t slip up now. She thinks she’s in love with Will, I know. This all seems so wonderful to her, so magical. But it’s not enough.”