She tried. He had to admit she gave it her best shot, but she could still be heard in three counties.
“You slept with Ellen!”
He neither affirmed her statement nor disavowed it. “I take it you saw her car in my driveway.”
“Everybody in town saw her car in your driveway. I saw it there last night when we were driving home from Annie’s, and Ma saw it there this morning on her way to six o’clock mass.”
“She had car trouble.”
Susan was his oldest friend and confidante, but she didn’t suffer fools gladly, if at all. “Save that crap for the rest of the world, Talbot. This is me you’re talking to, the woman who held your hand through both of Annie’s weddings.”
That was the trouble with living in one town all of your life. Your secrets were public knowledge and you were never allowed to forget them. “I don’t have time to get into this with you right now. I have to prep for a C-section.”
“Right,” said Susan. “Every time I try to say something you don’t want to hear, you conveniently have a C-section planned.”
“Don’t push it, Galloway.”
“What? You mean there’s no population explosion in Shelter Rock?”
“You know damn well Jamie McIntyre was scheduled for her C-section. I saw you talking to her at the party yesterday.”
“Apparently it slipped my mind.”
“Good thing it didn’t slip mine. That baby’s ready to see what he’s been missing. Looks like Jamie’s going to pop an eight-pounder.”
Hall wasn’t a fool. Mention a newborn to Susan and she turned to mush. “I’ll let you go deliver Jamie’s son,” she said with obvious reluctance, “but don’t think this is the last you’ll hear about this. You screwed up big time, friend, and you’d better be prepared to take the heat for Ellen. The least you could’ve done is park her car in your garage.”
He disconnected without saying goodbye. He was Shelter Rock Cove born and bred. The rhythm of the small town was in his bones, a part of who he was and how he saw the world, but there were times, like today, when he wished he lived in Boston, where nobody knew his name.
“Hey, Doc, how’s it going?” Marie at the reception desk waggled her fingers at him as he crossed the small lobby. He had delivered her twin daughters nearly three years ago.
“Not bad for a Monday, Marie.” He smiled at her desk mate, Leandra, who was manning the phones. Leandra was one of Ellen’s patients, a high-risk prima gravida who required careful observation and a gentle hand, two of Ellen’s specialties.
Was he imagining things or did Leandra lean over to Marie as he was passing by and whisper something that sent Marie’s finely plucked brows arching skyward? He felt the heat of embarrassment rising up his neck. He hadn’t reddened since he was fourteen and his voice changed halfway through his recitation of the Gettysburg Address in Assembly.
Get used to it, he thought darkly. If Susan was right, and to his dismay she usually was, he was going to be fielding arched brows and quizzical looks all day. If you think this is bad, try walking in Ellen’s shoes this afternoon. She was closing on her purchase of Claudia Galloway’s house on the hill and would have to face everyone from Claudia to Susan to a battery of attorneys over a conference table. He had the sinking feeling she was going to be fielding a whole lot more than a few raised eyebrows.
Damn that bottle of champagne. Damn the loneliness that filled his nights. Damn the way Ellen had looked with her auburn curls tumbling over her shoulders and those big eyes watching him across the table at the Spruce Goose, the way her own loneliness mirrored his, the way he had wanted her so badly that nothing else seemed to matter.
And damn him for taking advantage of that fact.
* * *
On the other side of town Susan Galloway Aldrin was taking out her aggressions on an innocent pan of scrambled eggs.
“Lighten up, Susie,” Jack said as he poured two mugs of coffee, then set them down on the kitchen table. “Those eggs didn’t do anything to you.”
She turned around, spatula aimed like a semiautomatic. “What was I thinking, Jack? Can you tell me what in holy hell possessed me to tell my mother Ellen spent the night with Hall? I might as well have handed her a loaded gun.”
“At least you called to warn him.”
She leaned against the side of the counter and aimed the spatula right between her eyes. “I swear to you the words popped out before I knew what hit me. I never meant to tell her I saw the car there last night.”
“You’re your mother’s daughter, all right.”
He was trying to be funny and she knew it, but she wasn’t in the mood for levity. “Meaning what? That I’m controlling or nosy or gossipy—feel free to stop me any time, Jack.”
The poor man looked as if he would rather be anywhere else, but, trouper that he was, he didn’t try to escape. “You knew something she didn’t and you couldn’t resist passing it on.”
“After I told her, she asked me if I knew what Ellen was doing there! Can you believe that? The woman’s seventy-six years old. I think she knows what it means when a woman spends the night with a man.”
He poured at least a half cup of sugar into his coffee cup, tasted it, then added a half cup more. “Did you ever think she was trying to protect Hall and Ellen?”
“Oh, please. She was the first one to tell all of her friends that Eileen was pregnant when she got married, and that was her own daughter.”
“You asked my opinion, I gave it to you. I don’t know what else you want from me, Susie.”
“I don’t know how that man made it through med school,” she fumed, moving the terrified eggs around with the business end of the spatula. “Everyone knows you don’t sleep with an employee.”
“She’s not an employee.”
“Oh, yes she is. He owns the practice. She’s just a junior partner.”
“I thought she was a full partner.”
“Nope,” said Susan. “Not yet. At least, I don’t think so.”
“Tell him it’s like getting married. He doesn’t seem to have a whole lot of trouble with that.”
“Not funny,” Susan said. “Maybe I should call him back and—”
“It’s not your business,” Jack warned. “Stay out of it.”
“Then I’ll call Ellen,” she said, lowering the flame beneath the pan. “Maybe we—”
“—can screw things up even more? Great idea.”
She gave him one of the withering looks that had worked much better in the earlier years of their marriage. Over twenty years of cohabitation had dulled the impact considerably. “I want to remind her about the walk-through at Mom’s house this afternoon before the closing.”
“You reminded her three times yesterday at the party.”
“Only once,” she corrected him. “Ellen’s a doctor. She has a busy life. It’s my job to make this easy for her.”
“If you really want to make it easy for her, stay out of whatever’s going on between her and Hall. They’re both adults. Believe it or not, your old high school buddy doesn’t have to run his girlfriends by you for approval.”
Now, that hurt. She and Hall had been best friends since grade school. When it came to his private life, it was all public knowledge as far as Susan was concerned. If she didn’t know about it, it hadn’t happened yet.
“Damn,” she muttered, scraping at the pan with the tip of the spatula. “Stupid eggs.” She hadn’t been paying attention and the moist yellow morsels were turning dry and brown. She pulled cream cheese from the fridge and dropped a good-sized blob of it into the pan, swirling it into a regular cholesterol festival. Welcome to the cardiac care unit.
“You’ve got to quit this matchmaking,” Jack was saying as he slathered blueberry jam on a slice of toast. “The guy’s forty-five years old. He’s been married three times. I don’t even want to speculate about how many women—” He shrugged. “Maybe the white picket fence isn’t in the cards for him.”
She opened
her mouth, expecting a clever retort to fly out, but nothing happened. He was right. She didn’t want him to be right. It hurt her to think her dearest friend might never find the happiness he deserved, the happiness she had spent the last twenty-five years of her life trying to manufacture for him, but she couldn’t deny the truth.
She thought about Hall, about his ex-wives, his former lovers, his kids. He was a wonderful father, and the best ex any woman could possibly ask for. He went into each new relationship determined to make it work, confident that this time he could be everything his partner deserved, but somehow it never turned out that way. Sooner or later the woman involved began to realize there were three people in the marriage and that she would never be number one.
When Hall realized what she had done, he was going to be furious. She should have kept her big mouth shut when Claudia called and let her mother think Ellen was making an early morning visit to think of a way to back out of the house closing that afternoon. Claudia’s leaps of logic had always gotten under Susan’s skin, and this morning, with too little sleep and too much on her schedule, she had been eager to point out the error of Claudia’s ways.
If only it hadn’t been at Hall and Ellen’s expense.
How was she going to face the woman during the walk-through later that morning, knowing that she had helped spread the news far and wide like some kind of town crier on commission?
Not that the gossip would be fatal. Oh, tongues would wag furiously for a while and they just might lose a few patients to other doctors, but when the smoke didn’t turn into a fire, the furor would subside. Unfortunately most of the damage would be to Ellen’s reputation, because this was a small town and she was still, in many ways, an outsider, but it was nothing she couldn’t repair with time.
Give it a month or two and some other hapless couple would be caught slinking out of the Cozy Cottage Motor Court outside of town, and Hall and Ellen would be relegated to the back burner.
It couldn’t happen fast enough for Susan.
* * *
Simon Andrew McIntyre was born at 8:32 A.M. and weighed in at over nine pounds. Hall congratulated both parents, then quickly set about closing up the mother so the McIntyres could embark upon the important business of becoming a family.
“Good job,” he said to his surgical intern as they elbowed out of the delivery room. “You’re catching on quickly.”
She was a wide-eyed brunette with a smile that managed to glow from behind a face mask. “It’s so unbelievable,” she said, stumbling over her words. “I mean, to be there when a new life begins—” She shook her head and he caught the glitter of tears in her eyes. “Tell me it never becomes routine, Dr. Talbot.”
“If it ever does,” he said, “then it’s time for a new specialty.”
He thought about that a little later in his office. That was one of the many things that had made him choose Ellen as his partner. He had seen her dead tired at the end of an exhausting day, so wiped out that she could barely drag herself from the office to her car, and then her pager would go off and she’d find out one of her patients was in labor, and the exhaustion and everything that went with it all fell away right before his eyes. All it took was the thought of being present for one more miracle, being there for that moment when the newborn sees the world and lets out with that first glorious cry—it was all there each time in Ellen’s eyes.
Sometimes the fates weren’t so kind. If he had the power, he would make sure no woman ever endured a stillbirth; that no husband had to hear the words, “I’m sorry but we couldn’t save her.” Every baby would be as perfect as the babies in magazines and on television, plump and rosy with ten of this and ten of that, all in the proper places. But life was inherently unfair and sometimes terrible things happened to the finest people, and it was often his job to carry the news. It took its toll over the years. He whispered a quick prayer before each delivery, for the ease of the mother and the health of the child, for the wisdom to make the right choices. Still the sharp claws of dread clutched his heart every time.
They had fallen into the habit of touching base after every delivery. A quick acknowledgment of the everyday miracle of life. Sometimes a silent moment that marked the passing of hope. It had become a ritual he looked forward to, even counted on to mark the importance of it all.
On any other day, after any other delivery, he would have been on the phone to her with the news. Nine pounds, two ounces, he would say. Twenty-four inches long with lungs to match.
Another day, another miracle, she would say, and they would both laugh softly, then sink back into their daily routines.
All he had to do was pick up the phone and dial her number, same as he had done hundreds of times over the last three years. A few words exchanged between them and everything would be back the way it had been this time yesterday before he made the biggest mistake of his life.
But he didn’t pick up the phone because he couldn’t say the words. The words he needed to say were the ones she didn’t want to hear, the ones that would only make things worse between them than they already were.
“Damn it, Elly,” he said out loud to his empty office. “What the hell have I done?”
Chapter Three
There was little doubt in Ellen’s mind that the day was deteriorating fast. She was afraid to think about what the rest of the morning might have in store for her. The way her luck was going Claudia Galloway was probably sitting at her breakfast table, rethinking the sale of her house. Any minute now she would pick up the phone to tell Susan the deal was off. Or maybe Claudia wouldn’t back out of the deal and instead a giant sinkhole would swallow the entire property thirty seconds after Ellen signed the papers and she would be left paying off a thirty-year mortgage on a hungry hole in the ground.
Mary from next door had accepted her mumbling, bumbling excuse for still being in yesterday’s party dress, but Ellen doubted if the old woman believed a single word of it. And who could blame her? Yes, obstetricians were called into the hospital at all hours of the day and night (it was part of the job description, after all), but you couldn’t fabricate an emergency in a town like Shelter Rock Cove without finding yourself tangled up in your own lie before you reached the end of the sentence. Everyone knew everyone else. They knew who was pregnant, who was trying to become pregnant, who bought enough Midol each month to keep the pharmacist in business. God forgive her, but she had actually invented a tourist with cramps to explain her absence last night, and prayed Mary wouldn’t call her niece Leandra at the hospital and ask for details.
Once in the privacy of her bedroom, Ellen stripped off the party dress and tossed it on the bed. Everything she owned was packed and ready to be loaded onto the moving van that was due to arrive within the hour, and unless she wanted them to catch her in her underwear, she had to get dressed and fast. Her favorite outfit, ivory linen slacks with a hand-knit silk top, was draped over the back of the slipper chair near the window. All she had to do was brush her teeth, don her lucky bra and panties, and she was ready for anything.
Which, of course, was an even bigger lie than the pregnant tourist with cramps.
She noted the time as she fastened on her watch. Jamie McIntyre’s C-section was probably over. If everything had gone according to schedule, she and Don were back in her room with their beautiful baby boy. Jamie and Don had gone through hell trying to conceive their second child. If ever a child was wanted, Baby Boy McIntyre surely fit the bill. Was he a fair-skinned blond like his mother, she wondered, or a ruddy redhead like his dad? Did he let out a yell when he first met the world beyond his mother’s womb, or did he look around quietly as if to say “I’ve been here before”?
Hall should have called by now. Not that she had been expecting him to, not after the way she had walked out on him without listening to his apology, but a part of her had been waiting for the phone to ring just the same. It wasn’t that she wanted to hear his voice. (She had heard his voice loud and clear last night when he murmured Anni
e’s name, thank you very much.) But there was something sacred about their post-delivery ritual, something joyous and life-affirming and beyond the reach of everyday strife. She almost wished—
No matter. She would find out later. Maybe after the closing she would stop by the hospital and peek in at the newborn and wish his parents well. And if she happened to bump into Hall, maybe she would handle the situation a little bit better than she handled it this morning.
It will all work out, she told her reflection as she brushed her teeth. They were adults, weren’t they? Even more important, they were friends, not just business colleagues. Just because their encounter this morning had been more uncomfortable than root canal without novocaine, that didn’t mean it wouldn’t all smooth out between them as soon as they resumed their normal routine. They were never meant to be lovers. They could put that notion aside right now. They were friends who got caught up in the emotion of the moment and took their friendship a step too far.
If she could just manage to forget that moment when he—
See? She could push it aside. Metaphorically stick her fingers in her ears and whistle so loud she couldn’t hear him when he murmured Annie’s name every hour on the hour.
Pretending was easy. She came from a long line of people who turned pretending into performance art. Her parents had pretended they were a normal family, and after a major detour in her teens, she learned how to pretend they were right. No reason it wouldn’t work with Hall. As long as their indiscretion remained their own business, they could simply pretend it had never happened and pick up where they left off. Maybe not tomorrow or the next day, but soon.
That was her inner optimist talking. Her inner pessimist still needed to be convinced that the world as she knew it wasn’t coming to an end.
* * *
Smuggling a one-hundred-fifteen-pound dog into her motel room had been hard, but smuggling the same dog out again was proving to be impossible.
Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2) Page 3