by Nancy Moser
“Once?”
Merry chose her words carefully. She didn’t want to get into the plane crash. This wasn’t about her. “I lost him in an accident. My husband too.”
“Oh my. I’m so sorry.”
Merry nodded. “So there is a chance my feelings for Sim are selfish. She fills a need in me. A need to mother.”
Susan’s face crumpled, but she got it under control. “I understand that need completely. We desperately want a child.”
“A baby. Sim told us.”
Susan drew in a breath, opened her mouth to speak, then covered her forehead with a hand. “We haven’t handled things well. I’ll admit that.” She crossed her hands over her chest. “I have never, ever been as obsessed with anything as I have been with wanting a child.” She glanced at Merry. “A child of my own. A baby.” She lowered her arms. “Sometimes my arms ache for the weight of one, my nose tingles for the smell of one, my cheek longs for the feel of a tiny cheek against…” Her arms returned to her chest, an invisible baby within her embrace. “I’ve had two fertility treatments—that haven’t taken.”
“I’m so sorry.”
Susan nodded. “When Sim came into our lives we—I—was still recovering from the last disappointment. I wasn’t prepared to take care of her, comfort her, when I was still grieving myself.”
Ah. It made sense now. The Kelloggs’ treatment of Sim wasn’t justified, but was understandable. At least on Susan’s part.
“What about your husband?”
Susan glanced toward the living room and cringed. “We handle things differently.”
“He seems…stern.”
She smiled weakly. “That’s one word for it.”
Merry leaned forward. “Does he really want Sim?”
Susan shredded the tissue. “I don’t know the answer to that.”
If Susan didn’t know…
“I want Sim.” Merry’s eyes met Susan’s. “I really do.”
Susan didn’t respond. She pushed her chair back. “I need to get back to my husband.”
Everyone was quiet while Susan took her seat. Uncle Forbes gave Aunt Susan a quick glance, then continued speaking. “Like I said, no court is going to give any stranger in a strange town custody.”
Sim’s insides hurt. They just kept going round and round. There was no hope.
Until…
Merry stood up. “I want to pursue custody.”
Uncle Forbes snorted at her. “You’re single.”
“So?”
Ken raised a hand. “This is going to get complicated, Merry.”
Forbes laughed. “No court is going to give a single woman custody when there’s a couple available—a couple related to the child.”
Sim stepped out from behind Claire’s chair. “They will if I tell them to.” She wasn’t sure if it was true, but it should be.
Her aunt stood. Sim hated to see the hurt on Aunt Susan’s face. “I know things haven’t been great with us, Sim, but we’ll be better. I promise. I’ve let things… I’ve gotten my priorities messed up. But I’m determined to make things right, make things the way they should be.” She took a breath. “We love you.”
Sim bit her lip. She wasn’t at all sure about the we part in her aunt’s statement, but she accepted her aunt’s love as genuine. “And I love you too, Aunt Susan. I really do. But you aren’t being entirely truthful. I know you don’t want me around. You want a baby. All you think about is having a baby.”
Susan shook her head. “It’s more complicated than that.”
“But it’s not. I’m a kid. I want to be a part of a family who wants me around.”
“Oh, Sim. I’m so sorry. We’ve been so wrong. We’ve—”
Her uncle waved his hands. “We nothing. And enough of this ‘rally round the flag’ bit. Enough of kids who don’t appreciate what they’ve got. Enough of meddling strangers who want to run our lives.” He took his wife’s hand and pulled her toward the door. She nearly tripped.
The policeman put a hand on his shoulder. “Ease up on her, Kellogg.”
Uncle Forbes made a big deal of raising her hand and then dropping it. “Better?”
Office Kendall nodded. “Much.”
He glared at Aunt Susan and pointed to the door. “We’re going. Now.”
She looked back at the group, and Sim hated the sadness in her eyes. “Excuse us. We need some time alone. I’ll phone later.”
Uncle Forbes was already on the front step. “Come on!”
No one spoke until the sound of the Kelloggs’ car faded.
Claire took a long, slow breath. “What do we do now?”
Merry moved to the dining room. “We wait, we pray—and we eat coffee cake.”
Forbes stuffed his hands in his pockets. “I don’t know why we have to take a walk.”
Susan slipped her hand through his arm and pulled him close. “Because I’ll go crazy sitting in that motel room a moment longer.”
“The Ritz it ain’t.”
“Our motel is everything it should be for a town this size: clean, comfortable, and homey.”
“Are you sure you don’t mean homely?”
She inhaled deeply and looked up at the pin oaks lining the street. She smelled honeysuckle as they passed a row planted between two houses. She heard the squeal of kids playing in a backyard. “This is a wonderful town, Forbes. I can see why Sim wants to stay here.”
“Kansas City is a wonderful town.”
She shrugged. “Both have their advantages and disadvantages.”
“You bet they do.”
“Then maybe it’s not the town we need to consider.” Maybe we’re the problem, dear husband. Maybe we’ve let ourselves stray from what’s right, what’s important. And it’s more than just Sim. I know I’ve let God slide into the backgr—
Forbes shook his head. “I don’t want to talk about any of this. I’m weary of the whole thing.”
She hated his penchant for shoving difficult decisions to the back of his mind like they were leftovers being shoved to the back of a refrigerator. And just like leftovers, many of those decisions never saw the light of day until it was too late. “The situation is not going away.”
He huffed. “We had the perfect setup.”
She pulled him to a stop. “I cringe at the implications of the term setup. And perfect? Were we living in the same house?”
He started walking again. “Okay, okay. So it wasn’t perfect. But we gave Sim a nice home, her own room—I know it’s not the palace she’s used to, but the little snot can make do like the rest of us.”
Susan stopped again. “Did you hear what you just called your niece?
Forbes shrugged.
She pulled her arm away from him, feeling sick again. But this time it had nothing to do with motion sickness. “Do you love her at all?”
“Sure I do.”
She stared at him. “I’m sure you don’t. You never say anything nice about her. You act like she’s an imposition.” The next bit of truth hit Susan so hard she almost reeled from it. “Sim’s right. All you care about is her money.”
Forbes began to walk. “It never hurts to sweeten the pot.” He stopped when he noticed she wasn’t following him. “What now?”
She shook her head as her own complicity surfaced. “Everyone’s right.”
“About what?”
“We don’t care about Sim. You want things, and I want a baby. She was in the way of both.”
He pegged a finger into his scalp. “Now they’ve brainwashed you. Expose you to a small-town house with cross-stitched samplers on the wall and coffee cake on the table and you turn to mush.”
“But we’ve ignored her and used her—”
“I refuse to feel guilty because I’ve spent a fraction of Sim’s money bettering our life.”
“But is it better?”
“Are you saying we’re not happy?”
Susan’s heart skipped a beat. “Are we?”
He threw his hands in
the air. “Fine. I’ll take everything back. You can have your old car that died every five miles, and I can watch baseball on an eighteen-inch screen.”
Susan had no answer for him. Their crisis of dealing with a runaway Sim had grown multiple arms, multiple facets, multiple implications. She noticed they were approaching a drugstore. “Can we stop in here?”
“Can’t it wait until we get back to Kansas City?”
“Humor me.” She pointed to a bench out front. “You wait here. I’ll only be a minute.”
As Susan went inside, a bell on the door announced her arrival. A clerk smiled from behind the counter. “Morning. Can I help you find anything?”
“Just looking.” It was a lie. She knew exactly what she wanted, and she headed for a section near the pharmacy. There it was. She picked up a box and headed back to the counter to pay. At the last minute, she grabbed a Snickers candy bar for Forbes. Surely chocolate would soothe the savage beast in him.
The clerk took her money. “Good luck.” She pointed to the pregnancy test.
Susan’s heart beat double time. “Thanks. I need it.”
Twenty-five
“Watch—and be utterly amazed.
For I am going to do something in your days
that you would not believe, even if you were told. “
HABAKKUK 1:5
SUSAN SAT ON THE TOILET LID and stared at the test.
I’m pregnant!
There was a knock on the bathroom door. “Come on, Susan. What’re you doing in there? I gotta go!”
Curious to see if she looked different, she stood before the mirror. She smiled at her reflection. She was different. I’m a mother! What miraculous words!
She opened the door but stood in Forbes’s way.
“Move it! Move—” He looked at what she was displaying in her hand. “What’s that?”
“A pregnancy test.”
“Why do you have a—” He looked at her eyes. “You’re not…? You can’t be.”
She nodded, knowing her face was beaming. “I am. I’m pregnant.”
Forbes staggered back into the room, feeling for the bed. He bumped into it, caught himself, and sat down.
“But we can’t…we’ve tried for years.” He put a hand to his mouth. “The treatments worked?” He ran both hands over his head, a gesture she recognized from back when his hair was plentiful. “I don’t believe this is happening.”
A new thought eased into Susan’s mind, and she placed a hand on the door, steadying herself. Oh, dear Lord Jesus. You did this! You!
Please forgive me for ignoring You so long I don’t deserve this. And yet You give it to me anyway. She covered her face with a hand, humbled by the contrast between her disgrace and His grace.
“Susan?”
She gathered her feelings and found her voice. “Claire talked about things not being a coincidence. This is not a coincidence.”
“You bet it’s not. It’s twenty thousand dollars’ worth of fertility treat—”
“No.” She stepped forward and took his hand. “It’s God.”
He pulled away and escaped to the other side of the bed. “You have been brainwashed.”
“Why can’t you admit this pregnancy is a miracle from God?”
“It’s medical science at its best—and most expensive. You got what you wanted.”
“What I wanted? You wanted it too.”
He shrugged. The shrug that spoke a thousand words.
This was all wrong. After trying for years, they were finally pregnant. Had there been a hug? A kiss? Nope. Only a shrug. It was not a good sign.
“I’m not sure I have enough patience for a teenager and a baby.”
She had to blink twice to grab the train of Forbes’s thoughts. He was discarding Sim like an out-of-date computer being replaced by the newest model. “Who said you had any patience at all?”
“That was rude.”
She shook her head, her mouth slack. “This isn’t how I dreamed this moment would be.”
He came to her, and she didn’t have the strength to push him away. “Now, now, Susan. You have to be practical. Two kids…”
A rush of adrenaline gave her the energy to sidle away from his touch. “You don’t love Sim, do you?”
“Huh?”
She put two fists against her forehead and forced herself to calm down. Stress could not be good for the baby.
The baby. Her baby. A life that was joined with her own, now until forever. With each second that passed, she was amazed at how this new love grew upon itself, so that the love that had started as a glimmer when she’d first seen the positive test was now infinitely larger. Her entire life had changed.
Thank God.
Susan lowered her fists and found her thoughts clear and distinct.
“Hey, Susan, I—”
She put a finger to her lips, and he was quiet. She didn’t want his excuses to taint the perfection of the moment. Her resolve was complete and undeniable. She took a deep breath. “This baby is a gift from God. I accept the gift, even though I know I don’t deserve it. And Sim is a gift from God too, though we didn’t take the time to realize it.”
“You’re going overboard. You’re—”
She raised a finger, not wanting to hear any more. “So much has been revealed to me in the past few minutes. I have seen my future as a mother presented to me on a platter covered with gold. And I have seen our marriage as a cracked and broken plate in dire need of mending.”
His mouth dropped open, closed, then opened again. He huffed. “Just because I didn’t jump up and down…that’s not fair.”
Susan hesitated. “Perhaps not. But it is the truth.” She walked past him to the door of their room. She opened it and stood in the sunlight. “I will be a mother to our baby—the best mother I know how to be, because I want this baby. And I want Sim.”
He shrugged. “Fine. I suppose—”
“No, you don’t understand, I want Sim. And I will take care of Sim. Alone.”
He stared at her. “What are you saying?”
She felt utter calm as she took a step outside the door. “I’ll be taking a bus home, Forbes. If it’s good enough for Sim, it’s good enough for me.”
She shut the door, blocking her view of his face.
Since her purse and car keys were in the room, Susan begged a ride to Merry’s house from the wife of the motel owner. She rang Merry’s doorbell. Sim answered the door.
“Aunt Susan.”
“Hi.” Silence. “Can I come in?”
Merry appeared from the back of the house. Claire was behind her. “Susan, come in. Sim, let her in.”
Sim held the door open but stepped back as if she didn’t want to risk physical contact.
Merry gestured toward the love seat. “Have a seat.”
Susan sat at one end while Merry sat at the other. Sim took refuge in the doorway leading to the kitchen, Claire’s arm around her shoulders. Her hands were in the pockets of her shorts. Her face was wary.
Don’t worry, Sim, I’ve come to make everything better.
“Can I offer you some coffee? A glass of iced tea?”
“Nothing, thanks.” A moment of awkward silence passed, and Susan found herself praying for strength. She hoped the God she’d ignored for so long would take pity and listen to her prayers. “I’ve come to tell you about a decision I’ve made.”
“You’ve made?” Claire studied her. “What about your husband?”
“I’m afraid I’ve given him no choice.”
Sim straightened. Susan had planned to tell them about the pregnancy first but decided not to torture the girl any longer. “I am not willing to give up custody of Sim—”
“But you have to! I don’t want to go back with you and Uncle Forbes.”
“You won’t be going back with your uncle and me.”
“Huh?”
“You’ll be staying with me. Me alone.”
Claire stepped to the love seat. “You’re leaving h
im?”
“For now.” She caught Sim’s gaze and held it. “Things haven’t been good for a long, long time, and it’s not fair to either of us—any of us—to live in a bitter, angry world.”
“What does Uncle Forbes think of all this?”
Susan tried not to think of the sight of him in the motel room, arguing, not even pretending to be happy about the pregnancy. “If he wants to work on things, I’m willing, but until then, I have to think of you.” She smiled. It was the moment she’d been waiting for her entire life. “I have to think of you—and the baby.”
It took a moment for their faces to register her news. “You’re pregnant?” Sim sounded as incredulous as if her aunt had just told her that she had become a brain surgeon.
Merry leaned over and grasped Susan’s hand. “But this morning…
“This morning I didn’t know. I suspected, hoped, and prayed, but I didn’t know. I just took a test.”
“Congratulations.” Claire sounded sincere.
Sim began to pace, her face showing a bevy of conflicting emotions. “I’m going to be a…have a…?”
Susan finished the sentence properly. “A brother or sister.”
Sim stopped moving. “But I’m…it’s my cousin, isn’t it?”
“Technically, cousin. But you’ll be a big sister, won’t you? I’ll need your help like a big sister.”
Sim shuffled her shoulders. “I’m going to be a big sister.”
Merry’s voice cracked. “You’ll be a good one.”
Susan turned to her. “I appreciate—we appreciate—your offer to take care of Sim. I know she would have been fine here in Steadfast. It’s a lovely town and—”
“Oh!” With an excited flip of her hands, Sim took a seat on the edge of the coffee table facing them. “Let’s move here!”
Susan paused. “Move to Steadfast?”
“Sure. If Uncle Forbes isn’t going to live with us, then we can move anywhere, can’t we?”
“I…” Susan looked to Merry and Claire, searching for the correct answer.
“You could move here,” Claire said.