Author: Robyn Carr

“Me?” Lou asked.

“You! I hate you,” Ray Anne said. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t love you!”

Lou laughed at her. “You steal my boyfriends.”

“I haven’t done that in years,” Ray Anne said. She lifted her hand to Cliff for another glass of wine. “Your boyfriends are too old for me.”

“You’re such a slut,” Lou said, but she laughed.

“Oh, I’m not. I’m just flexible.” Then she smiled. “And open-minded.”

Lou’s phone chimed and she picked up to read a text. It said, The coast is clear.

“That was Mac. She must be gone already. Oh, that doesn’t seem like a good sign.”

“Listen, if there’s anything I can do to help, please let me know. Tell Mac I talked to her and I’d be glad to tell him anything he wants to know about our meeting.”

“That’s nice of you, Ray Anne,” Lou said while she fished a ten-dollar bill out of her wallet. “I’ll tell him.”

Ray Anne covered Lou’s hand that held the bill. “Let me,” she said. “I probably owe you a drink.” She shook her head and tsked. “I just can’t imagine a woman leaving her children and not having any contact with them for ten years,” she said. “I never wanted anything so much as to have a family. If I’d had a family, I would’ve been so happy.”

Lou was stunned. Ray Anne had never acted like a woman who wanted a family. She behaved like a woman who wanted a man, and another man, and another and another.... “Is that so?” she asked.

“Of course. I was married three times.”

“I know, but...”

“They didn’t work out,” Ray Anne said a little wistfully. “But it wasn’t all my fault.”

“Hmm. Well, I’ll tell Mac you’ve seen Cee Jay, talked to her. Listen, I’d better run—I have no idea what I’m walking in to.”

“Sure. Good luck.”

Lou started to leave. She turned back, looked at her watch and said, “Next time we can go more than an hour on the truce. If you can behave yourself.”

* * *

Mac checked on his kids, all tucked into their individual bedrooms, starting with Dee Dee. “Doing okay?” he asked her.

She nodded. “Do you think she’s coming back?”

“I don’t know, honey. Do you want her to?”

She shrugged. “It’s okay. But she has to let Aunt Lou be here because Aunt Lou lives here.”

He smiled. Can’t get anything past kids. “I’ll be sure to pass that on if I’m ever asked.”

“Can I watch TV? For a half hour?”

“Homework done?” She nodded again. “Okay, then.”

He went to Ryan’s door and opened it. Ryan was laying on his bed, his hands behind his head, staring at the ceiling. “How are you doing, Ryan?” Mac asked.

Ryan sat up. “Why’d she come here again?”

“To see you, she said. To see all three of you. And for you to see her, since you haven’t seen her in a long time.”

“Are we done with seeing her now?” he asked.

“I don’t know. I guess we’ll find out if she calls again.”

“Probably in ten years,” Ryan said. “Can I get on the computer?”

“Homework done?”

“I did it at school. Can I?”

“Okay. Let’s not talk about this visit on Facebook or anything. Family business, right?”

“I don’t want to tell about it,” Ryan said. “It’s too weird.”

Finally, he approached his eldest daughter’s room knowing this discussion would be a lot more complicated than the ones he’d just had. He gave two knocks on Eve’s bedroom door and then entered without an invitation. She was sitting cross-legged on her bed, her phone in her hands, texting. There was no question in his mind, she would be checking in with both Ashley and Landon. She looked up at him and he could tell all the wind had gone out of her sails.

“You okay?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “Are you?”

“I hated that,” he said. “Hated watching that.”

“I’m sorry.”

He sat on the edge of her bed. “I’m not mad at you, Eve. It was so uncomfortable. Something tells me your mother really wants a relationship with you kids. And I’m terrified.”

“Why? Because she’s lying?”

“I don’t know if she’s lying. I think our perspectives are completely different, as they are between divorced couples. She really believes I failed her. I really believe I did everything I could. How do you change that? The only thing I really want you to know—it was never your fault. Maybe mine, maybe hers, but never yours.”

“I know,” she said weakly. “But I don’t care whose fault it was! I just want to know how you can love your children and not even send a birthday card!”

“Maybe no one ever sent her one when she was a kid,” he said. “I don’t know too much about your mother’s childhood—she was in a foster home when I met her in high school. I never questioned that experience back then—seventeen-year-old boys usually don’t ask those kinds of questions. Maybe she was ignored, maybe she had a real bad time growing up or something. A lot of the way we act as adults has to do with how we were treated as children. I might’ve had no idea what I was getting myself into, married at nineteen, but I know that once you arrived, you were like the center of my world. You and your brother and sister were always wanted. I wish I could fix it so you don’t have any pain over this—you’re innocent.”

A tear rolled down her cheek. “I don’t want to be like her—I don’t want to run out on my children.”

“Then you won’t. Listen, I know it’s not easy, but I think you have to just accept people as they are. That’s the best Cee Jay’s got, Eve. You don’t have to spend time with her unless you want to, but you also don’t have to carry her burdens. She’s the one who wasn’t here for ten years, no one pushed her away.”

“I know.”

“But it doesn’t mean she doesn’t love you.”

“I know. It’s just hard.”

“It is that,” he said. “Hard for everyone, I think.”

“I don’t want to spend time with her. But I wouldn’t mind if she sent a birthday card or something.”

“If she ever asks, I’ll tell her,” he said.

“And I might let her take me shopping some time,” she said, smiling sheepishly.

Mac laughed. “She should probably take us all shopping.”

Eve shook her head. “I was kidding, you know.”

“I know,” he said with a smile. “Have I told you lately how proud you make me?”

“But I was rude,” she said. “You asked me to just be polite and I was rude. And I knew it.”

He squeezed her hand. “You can work on that, but I’m not mad. What have I always told you? We all have our personal boundaries. You have your boundaries and I understand that. It always works best if you defend your boundaries by being firm but without losing your temper, but hey—sometimes if we feel threatened, we lash out.”

“You think I was feeling threatened?”

He lifted an eyebrow. “Do you think you were?”

She thought for a while. “I don’t want her coming around acting like she always missed us because if she missed us, she would have let us know that before now. I don’t like it when someone just lies in my face and acts like it’s the truth. She did not miss us. She came back, but she didn’t tell the truth about why. I guess that’s my boundary. The truth.”

“Possibly we just don’t have the whole story,” he suggested.

“Then that’s my other boundary. The whole story. Don’t just come around acting like it was all a little mistake and hey, we’re all over it now, so let’s party. That isn’t going to cut it.”

He tried not to smile. One corner of his mouth lifted. “Like I said, we all have our boundaries. They’re personal and they’re ours. I respect that.”

“What about your boundaries?” she persisted.

“Well, my personal boundaries are my business but, in this case, I had to think about the whole family, about all of us, and I did the best I could to be fair about that.”

“You were fair,” she acknowledged. “I should call Ashley. She’s dying to hear about it.”

He stood up. That was his cue to give her some privacy to do an emotional postmortem with her best friend. “If you need to talk about this anymore...”

“I’m fine, Dad. Sorry I was rude.”

Eleven

For the first time since Sarah had known Cooper, his temperament was unreadable. He came back from San Antonio in a very quiet, distracted mood. He was so happy to see her, so grateful for her help in the bar while he was away, yet nothing she could say would get his disposition to brighten.

“It must have been so hard seeing Bridget like that,” Sarah said.

“It was the saddest thing I’ve ever seen. Her family had a tough time letting her go. I hope to never see anything that sad again.”

“I think you brought a lot of that sadness home with you,” she said.

And he pulled her close, kissed her temple and said, “I’m sorry, baby. I don’t want to burden you. We have a lot to be thankful for.”

He wasn’t done with it, apparently. Maybe he just needed a little time to process it all. Sarah was happy to have a full week of work to occupy her and keep her from worrying about Cooper every second of the day. By the following weekend, when they had a little more time together, she decided to pursue the subject again. They sat out on his deck under a very starry sky and bright moon, watching over a couple of fires on the beach, listening to the waves break on the shore. He had his evening beer, she had her wine. There were a couple of other people on the deck, also enjoying the spring evening, so they were mostly alone. At least alone enough to have a private conversation. “Did you ever figure out why Bridget wanted you to come to San Antonio?”

Again he pulled her closer as he did every time the subject came up, as if afraid she might slip away from him. “There were a lot of reasons—lots of talk about the past, making sure I never for a moment thought she was less than honest with me. But while it probably relieved her and allowed her to move on, it did something bigger for me. I failed her, Sarah. I was a poor excuse for a fiancé. I was a disappointment as a boyfriend. I wanted to marry her without making any real compromises in my own life. I was leaving the country for weeks at a time, and all she wanted from me was my promise to find a more stable lifestyle.”

Sarah felt a lump in her throat. “Lots of regrets, huh?”

“Lots, but let’s see if I can explain—it’s better for both of us that it didn’t work out. She married a good man and I’m so happy with you, here, now. This is the way it should be. But, damn, I don’t ever want to be that kind of disappointment to anyone again. If I thought I let you down like that, it would just kill me. The whole thing—it’s made me think real hard about the man I want to be.”

“I want to ask you something. Try to be honest, okay?”

“I always tell you the truth. Not something I’ve always done, but always with you.”

“You were engaged twice. Was the other woman before or after Bridget?”

“After. And it might’ve been a rebound thing—it was Patti, and I was never so relieved as when it didn’t work out.”