Brody's Redemption

by Kay Lyons

  Mrs. Hilliard’s accounting of Joe’s life was definitely interesting, especially when she got to the part about Joe dating Melissa York.

  “Oh, dear, listen to me. I’ve gone on and on. Poor Max is tired and so am I, dear. Perhaps you can come visit me again soon. Maybe you’ll run into Joe yourself.” Her gaze turned speculative. “Unless you’d like me to introduce you now?”

  Ashley managed a smile at the woman’s matchmaking, aghast she’d suggest such a thing when she had to know of Joe’s prison term given everything else she knew about him. And torn because Mrs. Hilliard had suggested it as though she recognized Joe as a nice guy and not the hardened, dangerous man the chief had made him out to be. Which was true?

  She wanted to press for more answers, more insight, but couldn’t, not without giving herself away. So instead she’d arranged to come back to visit the next week and said her goodbyes. Now she drove up behind the house and saw Joe leave the back porch and walk toward the shed. He had to have heard her car coming up the drive, seen her lights, but he didn’t look back.

  Guilt nagged and she shook it off. No, she had to stand firm. The chief had come right out and said he’d do whatever was necessary to keep Max safe from Joe if she wouldn’t. No way would she test Hal York to see if he’d follow through with his threat.

  A part of her said it was none of his business, but the other part of her knew of too many children who wouldn’t have survived their home life if not for the involvement of law enforcement and case workers.

  Joe sleeping in the shed was the best compromise she could offer, and she hoped the police would accept that as her doing her part as Max’s parent, since Joe had no contact with Max and no reason now that they weren’t…whatever.

  Rubbing her temples, she got out of the car and carried a sleeping Max into the house, painfully aware of the emptiness within the walls. Joe wasn’t there raiding the fridge alongside Wilson, wasn’t sitting on the couch watching her while she played with Max. Wasn’t there ready to discuss her dreams and goals, acting as though they were important to him as well.

  Ashley sighed, then twisted the latch on the door, locking Joe out of her house.

  If only she could’ve locked him out of her heart so easily.

  * * *

  FOUR DAYS LATER Ashley was ready to pull her hair out.

  The morning after kicking Joe out of her house and into the shed, he’d shown up for breakfast looking as tired as she felt. She’d tossed and turned all night, her thoughts consumed by all Mrs. Hilliard had said. Now days had passed and she still wasn’t any closer to a solution.

  She wet her dry lips and murmured a good morning, but other than returning the greeting and shaking off the rain that had started coming down outside, Joe said nothing else.

  Wilson gave her a baleful glare at the obvious tension between them, but she ignored the old man and the three of them sat around the table in uncomfortable silence like they’d done the past few mornings. Only the scrape of forks and the crunch of bacon could be heard in between Max’s jabbers and squeals.

  Joe practically inhaled his breakfast and stood. “I’ll go sand the ceiling upstairs, then move the furniture out of the foyer. I thought you might want to get started on that while I paint the ceiling.”

  Which would keep them on separate floors of the house and Joe far away from Max.

  You told him to stay away, remember?

  Yes, but now she felt guilty. Torn because Joe had tried talking to her several times over the last couple of days and she’d simply cut him off, unwilling to listen to a word he said in defense.

  “Fine.”

  “Fine.”

  “Fools.”

  Joe ignored Wilson and walked out of the room, but she couldn’t let his comment pass. “Don’t,” she said immediately. “Things are bad enough without you calling us names.”

  Wilson grumbled to himself but Ashley didn’t care. She stood and gathered up her plate, ready to get to work and concentrate on something else.

  Concentrate? Yeah, right.

  “I’m going out today. Don’t make lunch for me.”

  Ashley turned to Wilson. “I—I was kind of hoping you’d give me a hand with Max since you’ve been gone and in your room so much.”

  “Nope.”

  “Wilson, if this is about Joe—”

  “’Course it’s about Joe. You’re on your own, missy. ’Til you realize Joe wouldn’t harm a hair on that boy’s head, I ain’t babysittin’ so you can forget it.”

  So much for gratitude.

  “And if the chief calls children’s services?”

  “If he this, if he that. Who cares?”

  “I do!”

  “Hal wouldn’t take a baby away from his mama unless he’s bein’ neglected or abused.”

  “I’m not willing to chance you’re wrong. He obviously hates Joe.”

  “That man’s blind and so are you. You’ve let other people dictate and rule your life, tell you how to feel about yourself. It’s about time you stood up for what you want.” Wilson turned on his slippered heel and hurried from the room as fast as the walker could take him.

  Ashley looked down at Max and found his big eyes staring at her in question. “Don’t you look at me that way, too. I’m doing this for you.”

  Was she? Or was she doing what Wilson said and protecting herself from Joe? Things had moved fast. Was she using Joe’s past as a barrier?

  It is a barrier.

  So go talk to him. Find out what happened. Hear him out and then decide now that you’ve calmed down.

  Her head pounded out a protest even as her feet propelled her forward.

  * * *

  JOE STARED AT THE BACK of Ashley’s head. “What?”

  “Tell me about your daughter,” she repeated softly, her back to him while she spread moss-green paint on the opposite wall to where he was finishing up the second coat of paint on the ceiling.

  Max was positioned in the doorway of the room, technically in the hall out of the way of the fumes. He pounded away with a rattle, his concentration intense.

  Ashley had put the boy in a stationary car, so he was able to turn and play with toys lining the attached shelf, but unable to get out or into mischief.

  “Well? You’ve tried to talk to me a couple of times and I wouldn’t listen, but now…I’m ready.”

  “What changed?”

  “Are you going to tell me about her or not?”

  Joe rewet his roller and went back to work. Silence stretched between them. Finally he decided to take the tentative peace offering. At least she’d hear his side this way.

  “Her name was Josie,” he murmured. “Anna Josephine, but we called her Josie.”

  “Pretty name.”

  He didn’t comment. “She was tiny, a preemie. Melissa had just lost her mom and was having a hard time dealing with it so her blood pressure was all over the place. She went into premature labor.

  “Even though she was a preemie, Josie looked like an angel. She wasn’t red or cone-headed or anything. She was small, barely three pounds. Thirteen inches long.” Joe paused, his thoughts in the past, so proud when Mel had placed Josie in his arms. “I could hold her in my hand with her head on my fingers and her feet only came to my wrist.”

  “But she was okay?”

  Ashley’s voice prodded him on. Looking down at the paint-spattered plastic, he nodded. “Yeah, everybody was afraid her lungs weren’t developed enough, but the doc said they were fine.”

  “Dr. Booker?”

  He shook his head. “No, he’s new. This was one of the old docs, Peters. Don’t know where he’s at now. He was the old Doc Booker’s competition.”

  “Did you like being a dad?”

  Joe glanced at Ashley, expecting to find some sort of criticism in her expression, but instead he found curiosity, concern. “I loved it.” He went back to work because it was easier to talk about Josie when he didn’t just stand there and think.

  “Mel and I, w
ith everything going on with her mom’s passing, she decided to break up with me. I’d asked her to marry me when we found out about the pregnancy, but she refused.”

  “That must have been hard.”

  Joe nodded. “It was, but now I see her side of things. She was overwhelmed, confused. We’d dated for a while, made out, but never gone all the way until her mom was on the brink. She passed away and now I see that’s why Mel slept with me. The fact she got pregnant only made things worse for her.”

  He tossed the roller into the pan and stalked over to the open window. Rain continued to pour outside and the walls were closing in on him.

  “A day hasn’t passed that I haven’t asked myself what went wrong.” He shrugged. “But once the docs said it was shaken baby syndrome, and almost always the father, that was it. The thing is, other than the brain damage the autopsy showed, Josie had no bruises, no marks at all. Nothing to judge the size of a person’s fingers. Everything was perfect and matched the exam she’d had at the doctor’s office a few days earlier. Josie was completely healthy until—” He broke off, cursed softly then regretted the word. He glanced at Max before turning back to the window and scrubbing a hand over his face to wipe away the tears burning his lids.

  Ashley touched his arm and turned him to face her. Shaking, she raised a hand to his cheek.

  “Mel asked me to come over,” he murmured, inhaling the sweet scent of Ashley’s hair and drawing strength from it. “She said Josie had cried off and on all day and she couldn’t take it anymore. That she needed a break and thought I’d like to see her.”

  “Didn’t she call the doctor?”

  “She said she couldn’t call every time she cried, and that she thought Josie had picked up on her frustration. She asked me to come over and watch her so she could get out of the house for a while.”

  He pulled away, needing some distance to get it all out. “I went. Mel and I had been fighting a lot because she said since we’d broken up I shouldn’t be hanging out there all the time. She said it looked bad and people would talk even more.” His laugh was rough. “I thought I was doing the right thing. That if I went over as much as I could, I could help with Josie and maybe get Mel to see she didn’t have to do things on her own. That I wanted to be a part of Josie’s life.”

  Joe forced himself to turn and stalk across the room to the other window, away from Ashley. Farther away from Max. “Josie was asleep when I got there and even though the timing was lousy, I asked Mel to marry me. She turned me down again and left. Josie woke up crying. She didn’t have a temperature, wouldn’t eat, nothing. So I walked her, rubbed her back, her belly. Nothing worked.”

  He smiled sadly. “Part of the prosecution’s so-called proof was that I was angry with Mel because she’d turned me down. They said I took my upset out on my little girl.” He stared at the floor. No matter how many times he’d told the story, to his dad, to Mel, to Hal and the judge, it never got any easier.

  “Then she just... stopped crying.” He shook his head but couldn’t get the image out of his mind, the feel of her in his arms. He leaned his head against the cool glass. “She opened her eyes, looked at me, then closed her eyes again like she’d gone to sleep.” The lump in his throat grew larger. “She stopped breathing, shook. She died and I just sat there and watched it happen. I didn’t know what to do…I couldn’t save her.”

  “Joe—”

  He turned bleak eyes toward her and Ashley felt his pain, his overwhelming heartache. Felt it dig deep into her mother’s soul.

  “I didn’t know what to do. I wasted precious seconds thinking I’d missed something, waiting on her to breathe again. Finally, I realized she wasn’t and called the ambulance but it was too late. She died in my arms.”

  Ashley didn’t know what to say. What could you say to someone who’d experienced what he had? The chief had been adamant that Joe had killed his granddaughter, but now after hearing Joe’s side of things, after witnessing for herself the horror and the pain Joe had endured—

  She wasn’t so sure. But neither was she convinced, considering he’d spent ten years behind bars for Josie’s death. She was so confused.

  “You’d better go take care of him.”

  Only then did Max’s fussy whimpers reach her ears. She turned toward Max, hoping he’d hush so they could still talk. “Joe—”

  “Take care of your son, Ashley. I’ll finish things up here.”

  * * *

  TWO DAYS LATER it was still raining, Ashley was beyond exhausted, and she was getting more frustrated by the second. Wilson got up and left every morning with one excuse or another, which severely limited her time and focus on the house.

  Joe continued to avoid Max. When they did happen to cross paths, Joe circled around him or exited the room, didn’t talk to him or acknowledge him even though Max stared at Joe more often than not during his nonstop gibberish sessions. Max wasn’t used to being ignored, and he got upset by the fact Joe didn’t pay him any attention.

  Upset enough that now every time Max got tired of his exercise ring and she placed him on the floor, he was off like a shot, crawling across the room as though setting out to find Joe and figure out why he wanted nothing to do with him.

  She usually caught Max in plenty of time before Joe noticed, but now she looked up from what she was doing to find Joe staring at Max with an expression nothing short of heartbreaking.

  All because Max had used Joe’s leg to pull himself up and now stood with his head tilted all the way back as he stared up at Joe’s face. Max wobbled and held on, wrinkled his little nose and grinned, proudly displaying the tooth that had finally managed to break through. But just when Joe started to smile he caught himself and turned back to his work.

  Ashley hurried over and plucked Max from the floor. “Sorry.”

  “No problem.”

  “Da.”

  Ashley froze and stared at Max. No way. “Did he just say— Max, did you just say—”

  “Da-da-da-da-da-da.”

  Ashley laughed, amazed that her baby had said his first word—words!—and looked up to share her excitement only to see Joe stalk from the room.

  She stared down at her son, her smile fading fast. “Oh, Max,” she murmured, hugging him close. “He didn’t do it, did he?” She kissed his cheek and sighed, smoothed a hand over his fine hair and kissed him again. “What happened to Josie?”

  Chapter 15

  JOE CURSED AS HIS eyes opened and he realized a shadow loomed over him. Of all times for his senses to fail him.

  He lunged up off the lounge chair where he’d slept, grabbed the person and twisted so that he’d land with him on top, belatedly recognizing the person was Ashley. He shifted again but it was too late, half his body crashed down on top of her.

  “Oof!”

  He shoved himself to an elbow and pushed the hair off her face. “What are you— Don’t ever sneak up on me like that.”

  Wide eyes stared up at him and each breath that panted out of her chest hit his mouth with the scent of mint and woman. “I’m sorry. I didn’t think—”

  He closed his thoughts off from where her nearness led them. “What are you doing here?”

  Her expression firmed at his tone. After Max used his leg for a pulley, he supposed she had every right to be angry with him since he hadn’t managed to stay away from her son, but he’d done the next best thing and stayed away from both of them the rest of the day. Now she was here?

  “Stupid man, don’t you know enough to come in out of danger?”

  He stared.

  “The rain! The pond’s overflowing and the shed is built over the water!”

  Joe leaned over the side of the lounge to look at the floor and did indeed see water just beginning to come through the cracks. “So you came down here to—”

  “Tell you to come to the house.”

  He shoved himself to his feet. “I’ll be fine.”

  “You’re not staying here.”

  “The pond has a
spillway on the other side, it won’t get any higher than it is now.”

  “Says who?”

  “Me.”

  Somehow they’d wound up shouting at each other. Joe stared down at her sprawled form, all too conscious of her long bare legs stretched out before him.

  “Go back to the house.” He reluctantly held out a hand to help her up.

  “Not without you,” she challenged. Ashley ignored him and pushed herself to her elbows, onto her feet. “Come on, this is stupid.”

  “What about children’s services?”

  “This is an emergency—and we can talk inside. Come on!” She pressed her hands to his bare chest and shoved firmly.

  Joe reached for his jeans and pulled them on over his boxers. She waited, watched while he grabbed his duffel and followed her out to the hill leading up to the house. Ashley’s feet slipped and he grasped her elbow to steady her on the incline.

  At the top they ran, slipped and slid across the wet grass to the front porch. Finally, they made it and Ashley laughed as she ran up the steps. Joe looked up in time to see her nicely rounded rump at eye level, and that’s when he noticed she wore a T-shirt as a nightshirt.

  A wet T-shirt.

  He groaned.

  “I know. How can it be so hot and the rain be so cold?” She swung around to face him and her mouth parted with a gasp.

  Joe tried to hide his thoughts but he figured at this point, why bother. She knew all there was to know about him.

  “Oh, Joe.”

  That was all she said before she stepped close and pressed her body to his. Her hands cupped his face and since she was a step above him, she stared straight into his eyes, searching.

  He knew what she searched for.

  “Ashley, I’d trade my life for hers in a heartbeat if I could. I didn’t hurt her. I didn’t kill her.”

  She nodded once before she kissed him. Joe dropped his duffel to the porch floor and filled his hands with cold, wet material and soft, accepting woman.

  He stared at her in dawning wonder, Wilson’s words about second chances flickering through his mind.