“It’s not too soon, if we both want the same thing.”
Maybe they did, but Tandi wasn’t about to let herself be rushed. Silent, she looked steadily at Jared as she eased along the railing, away from him. He got the message and following her, took his time closing the distance between them.
“I should be getting back.”
“I thought you said you weren’t in a hurry.”
“Carline gets off duty soon. I should be there.”
“Why don’t we call the house and ask her to stay a little longer? I’ll pay her overtime.”
“She offered to stay longer, but her day is pretty long as it is. I should get home.”
Now he felt let down. They were so close, but he didn’t want to show his disappointment by sulking. “I heard your father was giving the attendants a hard time.”
“Not Carline Hughes.”
“I met her tonight. She seems nice.”
“The others were nice, too, but my father sent them all packing posthaste.”
“So why is Carline still around? You think he likes her?”
“I doubt it. He doesn’t want any home health aide around him, but he knows I’ll kill him if he acts out again.”
“So he’s been behaving? He must really be scared of you,” Jared teased.
“He better be, but it’s really weird how well-behaved he’s been. He hasn’t talked back to me or Carline. In fact, he doesn’t say anything against Carline at all, and that’s surprising. He usually sees only the bad in everyone.”
“That’s the Glynn Belson I know.”
“Yes, but in her own quiet way, Carline seems to know how to handle him.”
“In other words, she has that outer calm and that inner strength?”
“Touché,” she said. “Maybe that’s why my father doesn’t mess with her.”
“That plus the fact that you threatened to put him in a nursing home.”
“Geez, I’m gonna have to have a talk with Miss Big-Mouth Daina.” She wondered what else Daina might’ve told Jared.
“Daina wants to see us back together.”
Tandi started walking faster. Jared quickly pulled her to a stop.
“Don’t run from us, Tandi.”
“I’m not. Jared, I have to get home.”
“Your father can hold his own for five minutes, it’s me who can’t. What Daina didn’t tell me was whether you still loved me. Do you?”
Tandi looked across the street at the traffic light. It was red. Now that she knew the truth, she couldn’t hold what Evonne did against Jared, and she couldn’t, in good conscience, blame everything that went wrong in their marriage on him. The traffic light flashed bright green.
Jared waited anxiously for Tandi’s answer. He remembered being this anxious when he asked her to marry him.
Tandi felt compelled to say what was in her heart. “Jared, I have never stopped loving you.”
Jared didn’t break into a smile, he didn’t shout out in his glee, and he didn’t grab Tandi and embrace her. What he did was gently lift her hand to his lips and kiss the soft warm center of her palm. The irony of it all was that he felt like he should be thanking the reckless driver who pushed Tandi back into his arms, back into his life.
52
There was something truly romantic about a date coming to an end at the front door. A sweet embrace, a soulful kiss was always expected, which was why Tandi would not let Jared walk her up to the house. Standing at his car, she committed herself to kissing him chastely on the cheek although it was obvious by the way he was looking at her that he wanted more. She didn’t pull away when he parted her lips with his tongue and kissed her deep and long. All the while she was kissing him back, Tandi told herself she could not let Jared’s words of love seduce her into making a hasty decision that she might regret. She ended their kiss long before he wanted it to end, and just in time to stop herself from surrendering to the magnetic pull between their bodies. Every inch of her tingled.
“I better go in,” she said.
“May I call you tomorrow?”
“I’m going into my office tomorrow morning. I’m meeting a client. Call me there.”
“I will,” he said. “Tandi, it was nice.”
“It was,” she said coyly. It had been a whole lot nicer than she expected.
Jared slid behind the wheel of his car a happy man. He waited until Tandi was safely inside the house before driving off. He turned the sound up on his stereo—he felt like singing.
From behind the blinds, Tandi watched Jared leave. She liked that he didn’t pressure her into making a decision about coming back to him, but that was like him, he never pushed. She could appreciate that now. Perhaps she had been overly—
Tandi’s ears perked. She heard a noise. Was it crying? Was someone crying? Releasing the blind, Tandi stood stark still and listened intently, her breath hushed. Someone was crying. Damnit! Sporty had done it again. He had finally said or done something to hurt Carline. Why the hell couldn’t she leave the house one time and come back without there being a problem waiting for her? Sporty’s ass was in trouble for damn sure!
Not bothering to take off her shawl, and with the thin straps of her evening bag gathered and held in her hand like a whip, Tandi marched angrily down the hall to Sporty’s bedroom. The door was closed, which was odd. Since his stroke, the door was never closed all the way. She put her ear to the door. Yep, someone was definitely crying.
Tandi barged into the room. The crying stopped instantly! There was a flurry of disentanglement on the bed between Carline and Sporty. Carline almost fell off the bed in her haste to get up. She had been laying on top of the covers alongside Sporty. Tandi almost didn’t want to know what she had walked in on.
Carline quickly adjusted her skirt and blouse. She looked flustered, yet Tandi could see that Carline was not the one who had been crying.
Lying on his back, Sporty fixed his watery gaze up on the ceiling.
Tandi did not recognize the anguished man before her. Sporty’s cheeks were wet, his lips trembled, and through the wall of water in his red eyes, she saw the pain of a hurting man. Gone was the haughty glare, the angry glint, the accusatory stare.
Tandi watched Carline settle stiffly into the chair that usually sat in the far corner of the room near the window. It was now alongside Sporty’s bed close to the head.
“Someone had better explain what I just walked in on.”
Carline picked up her crochet work. Her fingers began flapping like the wings of a hummingbird.
“Ignoring me won’t work,” Tandi said, speaking to both of them, but it was Carline she was looking at. “What’s going on here?”
“Leave her alone,” Sporty said, barely above a whisper.
Carline glanced up at Sporty but immediately dropped her eyes.
Tandi caught the anxious glance Carline shot at Sporty, just as she also glimpsed the same anxiousness he sent Carline’s way. When Sporty began wiping at his eyes and cheeks with his pajama sleeve, Tandi didn’t know what to think. The whole scene was too bazaar. The two of them in an embrace, and Sporty crying? It just didn’t make sense. She never imagined that she’d ever see a day when Sporty would shed a single tear. She never believed him capable of such a show of emotion. Stranger still, he was still tearing. Something was very, very wrong.
“Daddy, why are you so upset?”
Sporty swiped his sleeve brusquely across his eyes, drying them completely. His lips were a thin line.
That hard, callous look Tandi was accustomed to returned as Sporty stared at an invisible spot on the wall over her head. The silence was earsplitting. She watched them both in their struggle to not look at each other and give anything away. If this was about a patient /caretaker romance, Tandi could accept it, but her intuition told her that this was not what was going on. Sporty would not have been crying. If anything, he would have been scolding her for interrupting his game. No, there was something more.
“Somebody had
better tell me something! What the hell did I walk in on?”
Neither answered her. Neither appeared to have even heard her.
Sporty, Tandi knew, would not answer her, and she wasn’t about to wear herself out trying to make him. “Carline, may I speak with you out in the kitchen?”
Carline’s needle slowly stopped flapping. She lay her crochet work down across the large canvas tote she carried it in alongside her chair. She got up and went, unhurriedly, toward the door. She stopped at the foot of the bed.
“I’m sorry,” she said to Sporty.
Tandi was puzzled. “For what?”
Without responding or looking at Tandi, Carline went on out the room.
Lagging behind, Tandi saw that Sporty was steadfast in looking at that invisible spot on the wall. Dismissing him with a roll of her eyes, she left the room.
Left alone, Sporty pursed his lips tightly to stifle the cry that strained to burst from him. He began to shake as a dam of tears washed over his lids.
53
“Carline, what happened in there? Why was my father crying? Why were you laying on his bed?”
Carline was standing at the open refrigerator door. “Why don’t you take off your shawl and sit down? I’ll get you something to drink.”
Tandi’s hand flew to her hip. “Don’t patronize me. I do not want to sit down, and I do not want anything to drink. What I want is for you to tell me why my father is crying.”
Taking out a bottle of apple juice, Carline closed the refrigerator door. “Depression and tears are common when a patient is recovering from such a debilitating stroke. Patients often cry when they feel that all is lost.”
“I’d believe that if it were someone other than my father. Something else happened. What was it?”
“Nothing,” Carline replied, taking a clean glass from the dish drain. “Little things that you and I take for granted your father can no longer do, like picking up a fork with his right hand or dressing himself or walking, can make a grown man cry like a baby.”
“And I’m supposed to believe he let you comfort him?”
“When a person is feeling that low, comfort from a stranger is sometimes better tolerated than from a loved one.” Carline poured herself a glass of juice.
“Loved one, I am not.”
“Of course you are. Tandi, your father is a man who has a hard time expressing his feelings, but you should never take it personal.”
“Oh, I take it very personal that my father takes to you like I’ve never seen him take to another living soul. Are you having an affair with him?”
“No,” Carline said barely above a whisper.
“If that’s the truth, you’re sending conflicting messages. While you speak very professionally, the position I found you in on my father’s bed was not.”
With her glass to her mouth, Carline took in just enough juice to wet her tongue. “We weren’t doing anything inappropriate. I was comforting him.”
“Do you comfort all of your patients in that manner?”
“Of course not!”
“Well, if you and my father like each other, that’s all well and good, you’re both adults. Just be forewarned, my father has—or rather he used to have—quite a sexual appetite. And that appetite has nothing to do with love. He’s incapable of loving anyone.”
Carline set her glass on the counter. “He loves you.”
“Excuse me?”
“Your father loves you—in his own way.”
“How would you know, and more importantly, why would you care?”
“I’m just trying to help. I’m sure your father had his reasons for whatever he may have done to make you feel unloved.”
Uneasiness had been steadily building inside of Tandi. Something wasn’t right. “Carline, you speak as if you know those reasons.”
“I didn’t say I did,” she said, putting the bottle of juice back in the refrigerator.
Tandi was struck with the realization that Carline seemed right at home. She had become, disconcertingly, familiar with the house and with Sporty from the very first day. She never asked where anything was, nor did she waste time opening cabinet after cabinet looking for anything; she already seemed to know. Which reminded Tandi.
“Carline, have you been up in the attic?”
“Why would I go up to the attic?” Carline asked. “I have no reason to go up there.”
Tandi wasn’t buying that. “Earlier tonight, I went into the attic to get this shawl out of my suitcase. While I was there, I noticed that the old black steamer trunk my father kept locked for years was unlocked.”
Carline carried her glass to the table. She sat. She drank a little more of her juice, yet, she didn’t swallow it right away. Musingly, she let the nectar flow over her tongue, tasting its sweetness before letting it slip down her throat.
“Well?” Tandi hooked the strap of her evening bag over the back of the chair. That feeling of uneasiness was full blown. “Carline, were you up in the attic?”
“I told you—”
“And I’m telling you that that trunk has always been locked. My father is the only one who has the key. Now suddenly it’s open and there’s nothing inside.”
“Perhaps there never was—”
“Don’t even try it,” Tandi said, aggravated with the woman she had thought her own personal angel.
Carline fell silent.
Tandi noticed Carline was avoiding looking at her. “My father can’t climb stairs, so surely he was not up in the attic. In the past month, my brother hasn’t stayed in this house long enough to leave his footprint in the carpet, and he could care less about what’s supposed to be in that trunk. So, I’m asking you for the last time, Mrs. Hughes, were you up in the attic?”
Carline musingly rubbed her fingertips together. They were wet from the tiny beads of sweat on the cold glass of juice.
Tandi slammed her hand down on the table. “I swear to God, I will have you locked up, if—”
“Yes!” Carline said. “Yes, I was in the attic.”
Turning abruptly, Tandi stormed away from the table and just as abruptly, she about-faced and charged at the table, her finger pointing threateningly at Carline. “You’re fired! I want you out of this house. But first you had better return everything you stole or I will call the police.”
Carline was unfazed.
“I trusted you! How dare you go through this house foraging and pillaging like a lowlife thief.”
“I took what was mine,” Carline whispered.
“Why would you steal—” Tandi’s mind had been slow in assimilating what her ears had barely heard. “What did you say?”
“I took what was mine.”
“Yours? What the hell does that mean, yours? What was yours? That makes no damn sense.”
“I claimed what was mine.”
That uneasy feeling was stifling her. What Carline said made no sense. “I didn’t know you had a mental problem, lady. This is my father’s house. You don’t live here. So there’s nothing stored up in this house that belongs to you. So you claim nothing.”
“You were a headstrong little girl,” Carline said, “but you were also a really curious child.”
“What the hell are you talking about? You didn’t know me as a child.”
“I knew you very well.”
“You’re crazy.” Tandi could not fathom what Carline was talking about. She didn’t know her and had never before seen her. Surely she’d remember if Carline had ever been in her life.
“Tandi, what I took from the trunk were my things, things that were symbols of a life I felt, at the time, I had to give up.”
Tandi’s eyes widened.
“I know it makes no sense to you, but—”
“You’re sick!” Tandi felt lightheaded. “I want you out of here. I want you out of my father’s life.”
For Carline, there was no turning back. “I left his house when you were three years old. It was the biggest mistake of my life.”
<
br /> Tandi’s shawl slipped from her shoulders. It slumped to the floor like a bird shot out of the sky. It lay gathered at her feet, no longer graceful and flowing.
“My God. What are you saying?”
“Tandi, I’m your mother.”
54
Carline had said, “I’m your mother,” as casually as if she had said “good morning,” yet the words slammed into Tandi like a ton of bricks, knocking her off her feet. Her legs gave way and her body fell heavily into the chair because her mind’s wires were jumbled and rendered incapable of telling it to do otherwise. Her tongue felt thick and heavy in her mouth. She could only stare at the woman across the table. What Carline claimed was impossible. Tandi’s mother was long ago dead.
“I’m sorry you had to find out like this.”
Struck silent, in total disbelief, Tandi felt like she was waiting, waiting for the punch line, but she could clearly see that there was not the tiniest flicker of a humorous glint in Carline’s eyes, so Carline could not have been joking.
As if waking from a deep sleep, Tandi said, “My mother’s name is Lorraine, Lorraine Belson. She’s been dead more than thirty years. You’re not her.”
Carline began lifting her glass to take another drink. The only sign that she was feeling anything was her shaky hand. She couldn’t steady her hand so she set the glass down, though she continued to hold it in a two-handed grip.
Tandi was unable to continue sitting and was unable to stand still. “I get it,” she said. “You think my father has a lot of money. Is that what you’re after? Well, you’re wasting your time. He’s not a rich man.”
“Carline is my middle name. Hughes is my late husband’s name. If I had walked through the door as Lorraine Belson, you would not have let me in.”
“No matter what your name is, I don’t believe you. I want you out of this house.”
Carline closed her eyes. “You have a crescent-shaped birthmark high up on the inside of your right thigh and a beauty mark about an inch above your belly button.”
Tandi gasped. “My . . . my father could have—”
“Why would your father tell me such a personal thing?”
Distant Lover Page 31