Chances Are (50 page)

“Hey, I drove around for ten minutes looking for a trash basket. Don’t you people believe in garbage?” Corin returned the teasing with the same kind of easy charm that had endeared his sister to everyone in town.

“Don’t be a stranger,” Mel Perry had boomed as Corin got ready to leave for Newark Liberty. “Remember, you’ve got family here.”

After he left, she found one last yellow rose propped up near the old cash register.

She couldn’t remember the last time she had looked forward to spring with a sense of renewal and—was it possible? —passion, but suddenly she was flooded with hope. Better than hope. She was flooded with the certainty that at long last life was going to treat her right.

She wasn’t exactly afraid of the dark, but the parking lot at night wasn’t her favorite place. She was about to turn around and return to the front when a voice reached out to her from the shadows.

“Hi, Claire.”

She peered into the darkness and saw Maddy sitting on the trunk of Kelly’s car. “What are you doing out here?”

“Kelly’s got me pinned in. I’m waiting for her to come out and move her car so I can go home.”

“Is she off somewhere with Seth?”

“She’s in the kitchen talking to Aidan.”

“So go in and ask her to move it.”

She shook her head. “Not a good idea right now.”

A deep silence fell between them, and Claire shivered as someone walked across her grave. “Is there a problem?”

“Yes, there is.” Maddy reached out and touched her forearm. “Kelly is pregnant.”

Her mind went blank. She could actually hear wind rushing through her brain, bits and pieces of memory, words and images all jumbled together in one giant sensory mass.

I wish your cousins were like you, Kelly . . . you’re the one we don’t have to worry about . . . this is Kelly, the O’Malley who is going to really go places . . . you know what your father always says: all he ever had to do was point you in the right direction, and you did the rest.
All said with love and admiration and more than a touch of awe, but it was so much—too much—for any young woman to live up to.

She tried to concentrate as Maddy told her the story, ending up with a chance encounter at a mall drugstore and a trip to the women’s health center.

“Why didn’t you tell Aidan?” she asked as she tried to make sense of it all. “He’s her father.”

“She said she would drive up to an abortion clinic in Manhattan if I did. All I could think of was Hannah in the same position and how terrified she would be all alone in the city. If anything had happened to Kelly—” She shook her head. “So I made a bargain with her. I would respect her decision if she would let me be there with her.”

Claire felt the stirrings of admiration building up inside her.

“So what made Kelly change her mind?”

“A snapshot Rose found in the attic.” Maddy’s smile was wistful. “A little three-by-five of Sandy and Kelly on the day of her baptism.”

“I remember that day. They drove in from Pennsylvania with the baby, and the way Irene fussed over her you would’ve thought she was the new Messiah.” Had they ever been that young, that happy? She wanted to think so, that it hadn’t all been smoke and mirrors.

Maddy’s eyes grew soft with memories of her own. “You know how it is when you first hold your baby daughter in your arms and you see your mother and grandmother and aunts and your sisters in that tiny little face, and then you blink and she’s holding a baby daughter of her own.”

Claire nodded, unable to speak.

“That’s exactly how it happened,” Maddy continued. “She realized that this baby wasn’t just part of her and Seth, it was part of her mother, too, and suddenly there was only one thing she could do.”

They looked at each other, and just like that their differences disappeared. Kelly was all that mattered. She was one of them now, part of their tribe, and the child she was carrying would propel their dreams forward into another generation.

Claire gestured toward the brightly lit kitchen behind the bar. “You should be in there with the two of them, working things out.”

A week ago she would have fought loud and hard to be there in the middle of everything, hungry for the future but too afraid to let go of the past to reach out and grab for it. She wouldn’t have missed these years with Kelly and Aidan for anything, but it was Maddy’s turn now. She had earned that right when she risked her future with Aidan to keep his daughter safe from harm.

Maddy slid off the car and brushed off the back of her jeans. “Can I borrow your keys? I need to get home.”

“You can’t leave.”

“Yeah,” she said. “I can. I need to see Hannah.”

“Go in there and talk to him.”

“It won’t change anything. He’s right. I should have gone to him the second I found out Kelly was pregnant.”

“This isn’t 1953,” Claire shot back. “I know my niece. If she said she would head to a clinic in New York if you told Aidan, then that’s exactly what she would do.” The thought of Kelly alone in some impersonal clinic in God knows what kind of neighborhood made her feel physically ill. “You did the right thing. I hope I would have had the guts to do the same.”

“Thanks,” Maddy said, “but that doesn’t change things. I’ll come back for my car in the morning.”

“Don’t go,” Claire pleaded. “He can be a jackass sometimes, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love you.”

Aidan’s voice cut through the soft spring air. “She’s right.”

If there ever was a time to call in a favor from God, this was it.

 
CLAIRE QUICKLY EXCUSED herself and disappeared into the kitchen, leaving Maddy alone in the parking lot. Maddy was exhausted in every atom of her body. The simple act of standing upright was almost beyond her ability.

“It’s been a long day,” she said as Aidan made his way slowly across the rutted ground toward her. “I’m going home.”

“This can’t wait.”

“It will have to,” she said. “I want to go home and see my daughter.”

He wasn’t using his cane, and her breath caught as he maneuvered his way around the potholes and branches that littered the ground like land mines.

“Where’s your cane?” she asked. “You shouldn’t be out here without it.”

“Fuck the cane,” he said. “This is more important.”

“I’ll come back tomorrow for my car,” she said over her shoulder as she turned to leave. “Tell Kelly I’ll call her.”

“She’s asleep at the kitchen table. If you wait a few minutes, you can tell her yourself.”

“Nice try, but I already told you I’m out of here.” Two steps, three, five, the distance between them grew, but he kept walking toward her.

His voice cut through the sounds of music and laughter that spilled from O’Malley’s. “Kelly told me everything.”

“So did I, but you weren’t listening.”

“I wasn’t listening to anything at that moment, Maddy. I had just found out my daughter was pregnant.”

He was right. Of course he was right. But she was too exhausted and angry and scared to admit it. “I betrayed your trust, Aidan. I didn’t think about you at all.” She flung the words at him like a challenge. “I was only thinking of how to protect Kelly.”

“I know,” he said. “You were thinking like her mother.”

The truth of his words struck her like a blow and her throat tightened. “Occupational hazard, I guess.”

“But it’s more than that, isn’t it?” He sounded hopeful, scared, everything in between.

“I love her,” she said simply. “I don’t know exactly how or when it happened, but I love her the way I love Hannah. All I could think about was making sure she wasn’t alone.”

“Thank you,” he said, and in his words she heard seventeen years of love and worry and bittersweet triumph.

She lowered her head and started to cry softly. She wasn’t sure if she was happy, sad, exhausted, relieved, or some potent combination of all those emotions and more, but it didn’t matter. The tears spilled down her cheeks and left wet splotches on her cotton sweater just the same.

“I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“I know,” she said, but she cried anyway, as he closed the distance between them. She had always been a sucker for big men, for broad chests and wide shoulders, for powerful arms and muscular thighs . . . for stubborn, imperfect men with big imperfect hearts who knew how to love. She had recognized his goodness the first moment they met, recognized her future in his eyes even if that future wasn’t turning out exactly the way she had imagined it.

“I know I should have told you everything right away,” she said, “but I was terrified we might lose her if I did. She would have gone up to New York, Aidan, I know she would have, and if anything—”

The thought was more than either one of them could handle.

He pulled her close, and she settled into the familiar thrill of his embrace. His smell, his warmth, his love. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” he said, his mouth warm against the side of her throat. “We won’t be your normal everyday newlyweds.”

“Hannah would have made sure we never had a chance to be normal everyday newlyweds.”

“I want you to know what you’re getting into. Anything’s possible. We could end up raising Kelly’s baby.”

She dropped her guard and let him see into her soul. “I know what I’m getting into,” she said, as well as anyone could possibly know what the future held for them. “If Kelly needs us, we’ll be there for her.”

“This is a hell of a lot more than you were bargaining on when you said you’d marry me.”

“You’re right. It is.”

“If you want to postpone the wedding until we see—”

She raised up on her toes and kissed him. “No.”

“What was that?”

She kissed him again. “That was a no.”

“Last chance to change your mind.”

“Not now,” she said. “Not ever.”

“This is a hell of a lot to ask of you,” he said. “We were supposed to be talking about our own babies, not grandbabies.”

“Is there a law that says we can’t do both?”

The look in his eyes made her heart soar.

“We’ll find out soon enough,” he said, and then he kissed her and sealed their fate.

Whatever happened, they were in this together.

They were family.

 
“THIS IS A VERY important job,” Kelly said as she fastened the last tiny hook on Hannah’s dress. “The flower girl brings all of the magic to the wedding.”

Hannah eyed her reflection in the full-length mirror. “I know,” she said, lifting up her skirts so she could admire her ruffled petticoat. “Mommy told me.”

She looked like an angel in her cotton candy-pink dress, and Kelly had to blink back sentimental tears as the little girl twirled around the room with Priscilla yapping at her heels. It seemed all she did these days was cry. Happy tears, sentimental tears, tears for no reason at all. Morning sickness had been replaced by an excess of emotion that had kept her in a constant state of hormonal weepiness.

There had been a July wedding after all, but not her Dad’s and Maddy’s. She and Seth had planned to marry eventually, but Mother Nature had her own ideas, and they were both old-fashioned enough to want to be married before the baby was born. Everyone said they were too young, that they should wait a little longer, see where their lives took them, but they had held fast to their plan and finally won their families over. Life didn’t come with guarantees. It didn’t care if you were seventeen or forty-five. Sometimes you just had to follow your heart and trust God would send an extra blessing or two your way.

She had made the right decision, the only decision possible for her and Seth, and she knew they would find a way to make it work. She believed in them. She had believed in them from the first moment she met him all those years ago in first grade. When you had love on your side, you were already halfway there.

Aunt Claire had asked Olivia if she and Maddy could hold the reception at Cuppa, and Olivia had not only let them open the doors wide to family and friends, she had found a house-sit for them near Columbia, a tiny studio apartment that had become the center of their universe. Seth worked nights in a Harlem bakery and attended classes during the day, while Kelly tutored and typed between classes for extra money. Her academic adviser was an understanding woman who promised her they would find a way for her to keep up her grades and maintain her scholarship after the baby arrived, and Kelly hoped she was right.

If she wasn’t, she would just have to find another way to make those dreams come true.

Her life didn’t look anything like she had thought it would, but that was okay. It was bigger, scarier, more wonderful, more precious than she had ever imagined.

Aunt Claire knocked on the doorjamb and poked her head inside. “How are we doing, girls?”

Kelly grinned at her aunt as Hannah did a lopsided pirouette and tumbled onto the bed, giggling. “I think Hannah’s going to be a spectacular flower girl.”

“I think so, too,” her aunt said as Hannah giggled even louder. “I think she’s going to be the best flower girl ever.”

“Can I see Mommy now?” Hannah asked. “I want to show her my new shoes.”

Aunt Claire made a show of admiring the little girl’s satin ballet flats. “That’s why I’m here, Miss Lawler. It’s time for us to have our pictures taken with the bride.”

“No pictures of me,” Kelly said as they walked down the hall to Maddy’s room. “I look like a blimp.”