The Mommy Wish

by Pamela Browning

  She arched beneath him, buried her fingernails in his shoulders, gasped. She may have cried out, or maybe it was Eric, but the sound was lost as she muffled her face against his wide shoulder. The taste of his skin ignited her, its heat matched hers and then, it exploded into a thousand molten sunbeams behind her eyes. It was all-consuming, this fire. She collapsed beneath him, her heart pumping wildly, her head dizzy. As reality settled in upon her, she became conscious of Eric caressing her back, whispering sweet compliments, telling her how wonderful she was.

  He was heavy upon her, but she welcomed the weight. When he would have moved away, she held him, wrapped her legs around his waist to bind him more tightly to her while she basked in the waning warmth of their lovemaking. Finally, when she didn’t have the strength to hold him any longer, he settled back against the bedsheets, lazily licked the nipples of her swollen breasts, kissed them one by one.

  She allowed her head to be cradled on his chest, touched his cheek with still-trembling fingers. He rested his face against her damp hair for a long time before he stirred.

  When she shifted in his arms so that she could look up at him inquiringly, he was smiling at her.

  “Oh, Goddess Molly, someday maybe you’ll explain to me why we waited so long to do this,” he said, his eyes lighting with humor, but they soon drifted closed, and so did hers.

  Chapter Eleven

  When Eric woke up, the first thing he smelled was sulfur. Molly’s head was settled comfortably on his shoulder, and after another sniff, he realized that they both reeked of it. Remembering last night and their utter disregard at the time of how it smelled, he began to chuckle.

  “Hmm?” Molly said sleepily, snuggling closer.

  “We smell like rotten eggs,” he said.

  Her eyes flew open. “Excuse me?”

  “From the sulfur at the pool.” He kissed her on the forehead. “How about a shower?”

  Molly squinted at the bedside clock. “What time do you need to pick up Phoebe?”

  “I’ll call in a while and find out.” He curved a hand around her breast, noticed that the nipple puckered at his touch. “That was spectacular last night.”

  “It was, wasn’t it?” Molly said dreamily.

  “You were a wild woman,” he said.

  “I was?”

  “Absolutely. Why, after we got back to the boat, you practically ripped my clothes off.”

  “You carried me to bed,” she said. “That was so romantic.”

  He lowered his lips to her breast. “I’ll show you romantic,” he murmured, kissing the rosy tip. “I’ll teach you about ripping clothes off.”

  “I’m not wearing any,” Molly said.

  “Oh. As if I hadn’t noticed.”

  “You’re lying. And what about that shower?” she asked.

  “Later,” he told her.

  “Later,” she agreed, sighing.

  A LITTLE BEFORE NOON, they borrowed Micki’s kayak and paddled down the Intracoastal past huge homes sheltered by live oaks and bordered by carefully manicured green lawns. A Jet Ski plied the water near Bottlenose Island, where someone was parasailing, the big red-and-blue chute lofting in the wind.

  Molly paddled in the front of the kayak, Eric in the back. She glanced over her shoulder at him as they left the marina. “It’s good of the Farrells to let Phoebe visit at their house all day,” she said.

  “She and the other kids are playing in their pool. Dee asked if she could stay and have hamburgers with them, so I said we’d pick her up after dinner. Look,” he said, pointing at porpoises surfacing nearby.

  They appeared to be a pod of adults with their young. Their streamlined gray bodies arched into the air as they blew feathery spumes of water, and they didn’t seem to care that they were swimming so close to humans. In fact, Molly had the distinct impression that they were racing with the kayak and were amused to be winning. About forty feet from the front of their boat, one porpoise leaped all the way out of the water. It launched itself about eight feet into the air and performed a complete flip before splashing down only a few feet from their bow.

  “Wow,” Eric said. “That was spectacular.”

  After the porpoises went on their way, Molly and Eric continued paddling through the widest part of the river, lined with the docks of private homes. Seabirds circled lazily overhead, and an anhinga swimming nearby slipped slowly underwater, to surface in the distance with a fish skewered on his beak. He tossed it into the air, swallowed it and proceeded to hop inelegantly onto a nearby piling, where he held his silvery wings akimbo to dry in the sunshine.

  After consulting their borrowed chart, Molly and Eric had decided to follow the boat channel until they reached uninhabited mangrove shores immediately south of them. Micki had recommended the area and said that the trip would take several hours, so they’d packed lunch and brought plenty of water.

  They entered the maze of tea-colored streams flowing through the mangroves, and the greenery soon became a dense canopy arching overhead. In some places, the stream was so narrow that they had to pull themselves along by mangrove roots. Once an eight-foot alligator heaved itself off a mud bank in front of them and submerged until only the tip of its nose and eyes were visible.

  They stopped for lunch when they reached a wide canal edged by high sandy banks. It was eerily quiet here, the only sound the occasional click-clack of a scurrying fiddler crab. They pulled the kayak up amid a tangle of reeds, hiked a short distance inland to a clearing and began to unpack their cooler in the shade of a cluster of palmetto trees.

  Today the sky was a bright blue, laced with clouds drifting toward the ocean. “I can’t think of anything better than this,” Molly said, gazing up at a passing airplane, which was so high in the sky that they couldn’t hear its jet engines. She wondered briefly about the weather in Chicago, and in Minneapolis, too. She’d better call Emmett today; they hadn’t spoken for a while.

  “This place is idyllic, isn’t it?” he said.

  “And more. Calming, tranquil. In fact, I wish—” She caught herself up short as she realized what she had been about to say.

  “You wish what, Molly?”

  “I was going to say that I wish I could stay here for a time. Not go back to work. The chances of that happening, I’m afraid, are nil.”

  “What’s stopping you? Wouldn’t there be a place for you at McBryde Industries when you were ready?”

  She sighed. “I suppose so, but I wouldn’t like leaving Frank, my boss, in the lurch for any length of time. Then there’s Grandpa Emmett. He expects a lot of me.”

  “Oh, Molly, you must believe that you’re supposed to make up the shortfall in commitment to the family business.”

  “Shortfall?” She looked at him, puzzled, as he handed her a sandwich.

  “Because your brother and sister didn’t want any part of what Emmett built. You’re worried about disappointing him, so you’re determined to stick with your job, no matter how much you’d rather be doing something else.”

  Molly settled back against a palmetto log, twisted the cap off her water bottle, aimed a long stream of water down her throat and swallowed it. Eric’s words cut too close to be comfortable. “Is loyalty a bad thing?” she asked. The question was supposed to be rhetorical.

  “In some cases, maybe so. In our culture, we’re taught to be loyal to our country, our team, our family, our jobs. Perhaps there are times when we should rethink what our allegiances are accomplishing for us.”

  “You sound like the voice of experience.”

  He shifted slightly against the log. “I don’t mind telling you that I’m glad I didn’t buy into the company line at Carolina Novelties. I’m happier out here on my own, even though I don’t make as much money. Hey, sometimes I’m barely solvent.” He laughed ruefully.

  “That bothers you, doesn’t it?”

  “Only because I can’t give Phoebe what she wants. On the other hand, waiting might make her appreciate a real home more when she gets one
.”

  “Maybe. Believe it or not, Eric, I’ve quit and run a few times in my life,” she told him. “It’s not always an easy decision.”

  “Are you talking about your career or your personal life?” he asked curiously.

  She didn’t want to reveal too much. “Personal,” she said, keeping her answer short in the hope that he wouldn’t want her to elaborate.

  His answer was to lift his eyebrows.

  She only looked at him, but she couldn’t help laughing. His expression was comical, and he was so clearly trying not to be nosy.

  “I—well, I expect you’d like more information,” she said.

  “If you’re willing to give it.”

  “Let’s say that I was in a relationship recently, and it wasn’t working out. I stayed, even though I was sure that I never should have gotten involved with the guy in the first place.”

  “How soon did you figure that?” he asked.

  “Now you are prying,” she told him, but she really didn’t mind.

  “Well, I’m interested,” he said. “I’d like to know all the hows and whys so I’ll understand better what’s going on with us.”

  “That experience was totally different from ours. In hindsight, I’d have to say that Chuck and I gravitated toward each other because neither of us had anything better to do at the time.”

  “Chuck? Isn’t he the man who called you on your cell phone when I answered?”

  “That’s the one. Do we have to talk about it?”

  “No, but I’ve always wondered if you called him back.”

  “In a word, no. What Chuck and I had together—if we had anything—was over a long time ago. Besides, you remember how I said that neither of us had anything better to do? Well, Chuck found something—someone—else, and never bothered to mention it. I learned about it, and that’s why I ended our relationship. Privately, I call him Chuck the Cheese. That pretty much sums up my feelings for him at present.”

  Eric laughed. “This sets my mind at ease. I only hope you never have to come up with a name for me.”

  “I won’t,” she said. “Besides, Phoebe already has one for you.”

  “Oh, right. I’m Mr. Grumpy.”

  Her mouth fell open. “You know about it?”

  “She leaves those messages lying around sometimes before she puts them in bottles. Plus her printing is quite large and I can read it from across the room.”

  “Phoebe has no idea that you’re onto her nickname for you. Please don’t tell her that I slipped and mentioned it.”

  “Strictly speaking, you didn’t.” He made a zipping motion across his mouth. “My lips are sealed.”

  After they finished eating, they continued down a narrow creek that snaked through a large marshy area. They passed large mounds of shells, which Eric looked up on the map Micki had given him.

  “Indian middens,” he told Molly. “There was once a large native American population living around here, and they’d throw oyster shells in one place so that they piled up.”

  At one of the middens they got out to explore, tramping to the top of the mound and using it as a vantage point. A wide lake glimmered in the distance, and, beyond that, a major highway streamed with cars.

  “We don’t have time to paddle to the lake,” Eric said regretfully.

  “Maybe when I’ve come back,” Molly replied, knowing as she spoke that a repeat visit here was unlikely.

  When they headed back toward the marina, it was low tide, and the water level in some of the creeks was mere inches. Propelling the kayak became a heavy workout as the wind picked up on the Intracoastal, and they had to paddle hard to make progress. Considering her lack of strenuous exercise lately, Molly was sure that she’d be sore tomorrow.

  After they returned the kayak to Micki and lay down to rest on the rough sun-warmed boards on a deserted corner of the dock, Eric insisted that she sit up so that he could massage her shoulders, and she did the same for him. Later, they lay down again and watched a flock of pelicans skimming the water in search of dinner. The slanting rays of the waning sun warmed Molly’s face, and she felt completely and utterly relaxed.

  “Happy?” Eric said, taking her hand.

  “Yes,” she said. She would have liked to preserve her recollections of this perfect day in a special place, a kind of memory box of the mind where she could retreat and experience all of it again when times were tough.

  Thinking of tough times reminded her that she needed to phone Emmett before they went to pick up Phoebe. Reluctantly she came to a sitting position and released Eric’s hand. “I’d better call my grandfather,” she said.

  He adjusted his hat to better shade his eyes against the sun and grinned up at her. “Tell him I said hello and that I finally understand why he was bragging about you. I thought he was exaggerating.”

  She smiled, liking the way his blue eyes reflected the color of the water. “And was he?”

  He took her hand and raised it to his lips. “On the contrary, Goddess Molly. He didn’t praise you nearly enough.”

  She was laughing as she headed for Fiona to get her cell phone. But she was also touched.

  “GRANDPA?” MOLLY SAID.

  The man who answered the phone didn’t sound much like Emmett; his voice was gravelly.

  “Depends on who this is,” Emmett blustered. “Molly Kate, is that you?”

  “And who else might it be?” Molly countered with a lilt in her voice. “One of your many girlfriends, maybe?”

  “No, Molly, you’re my one and only at the moment. Though one of the nurses here wants to take me to Fort Lauderdale when I’m through being poked and prodded.”

  “How’s it going?” Molly asked, smiling to herself. Though he may have been feeding the nurses a steady stream of blarney since he arrived, she was sure that none of them would be accompanying Emmett to Florida. He’d fallen in love with her grandmother, Fiona, when she was nineteen years old and had adored her until the day she died. There had been no other woman for him since.

  “These doctors ask impossible questions. ‘When did you have measles? When did you have chicken pox?’ How do I know about any of that? It was more than seventy years ago.”

  “Don’t give them a rough time, Grandpa. They’re only trying to help.”

  “Humph. If they really wanted to help, they’d piggyback a couple of shots of Tullamore Dew into my IV. Some good Irish whiskey would go a long way toward making this whole process less painful.”

  “You have an IV?” Molly asked, alarmed.

  “Did I say that? I didn’t mean to. Molly Kate, when will Fiona arrive in Fort Lauderdale?”

  “I’m not sure, Grandpa. Maybe you should ask Eric. What’s your doctor’s name?” She reached for a pencil and paper in the chart room and sat down at the big table in the lounge.

  “Which one? I have so many. Don’t get any ideas about talking to them behind my back. They won’t tell you any more than they tell me.”

  “Grandpa,” she said, her patience wearing thin, “I want the name of your head doctor.”

  “Head doctor? You think I need a psychiatrist?” His tone was mock indignant.

  “Very funny. What’s his name?”

  “It’s Talwani. Or Shupta. Or something like that.”

  “What do you mean, ‘something like that’? Can’t you give me a straight answer?”

  “Only if you tell me what’s going on between you and Eric,” her grandfather said slyly.

  Molly’s mouth dropped open, and she quickly shut it again. “How do you know anything is going on? If it is, I mean.”

  This brought forth a hearty cackle. “Like you said, I talk to Eric once in a while,” he retorted. “He keeps me posted with bulletins about Fiona.”

  Eric couldn’t have told Emmett anything personal. There was nothing to tell. Until last night, of course, but she was sure that Eric hadn’t spoken to Emmett since then.

  “I can figure things out for myself,” Emmett said, then began to co
ugh.

  “Grandpa? Are you all right?”

  “Sure, I am that. Say, Molly Kate, what do you hear from your brother and sister?”

  “Patrick intends to stay in County Sligo until he’s finished researching leprechauns, and Brianne is on her way back to the U.S. They’re concerned about you, Grandpa. We all are.”

  Emmett ignored this. “Leprechauns! That boy needs to hurry home from Ireland and get down to earth. As for your sister, don’t get me started. I told her she ought to practice photographing gears and switches. How she can find kangaroos and koalas more fascinating than plastic parts for industrial components is beyond me. Patrick and Brianne should be working at McBryde Industries. Like you, Molly Kate.”

  “I’m not sure Patrick and Brianne don’t have the right idea,” she said.

  “Bite your tongue! For shame,” and he began to cough again.

  “Grandpa, maybe you’d better call a nurse,” Molly said uneasily when the coughing stopped.

  “And here comes a cute little colleen to check on me right this minute, wouldn’t you guess.”

  Molly heard voices, and Emmett quickly covered the phone.

  “She says I’ve got to hang up. Says there are things she wants to do to me. They wouldn’t be anything indecent, now would they, darlin’?”

  “Maybe you should let me talk to her,” Molly said firmly.

  “Goodbye, Molly dear. You’re in good hands if you’re with Eric. No, I mean Fiona’s in good hands. Oh, I don’t know what I mean,” he said, sounding vague and distracted.

  “I’ll call your doctor tomorrow,” Molly said, but she didn’t think Emmett heard her before the connection was broken.

  WHEN ERIC AND MOLLY ARRIVED at the Farrells’ house, Phoebe ran up and hugged them both. She had a backpack slung over her shoulder.

  “Oh, Dad, we’ve been having so much fun! Corduroy gave me his old backpack. Isn’t it wonderful? That’s a picture of a dinosaur on it. Lexie and I played Barbies—and can I have a Barbie? And a Ken? And Corduroy showed me this hut he made in the woods out of scrap boards and palmetto fronds. It’s soooo cool! And guess what? Jada said ‘Mama.’ I heard her. She’s never said it before, Lexie says. Can we invite Lexie and Corduroy to the boat? Can we? Huh?”