One Mountain Away (8 page)

Samantha’s medical training made it so easy to talk to her. Taylor was always grateful not to have to mince words. “Maybe it was an anomaly,” she said.

Samantha nodded. “It’s hard to know.”

Normally Taylor might have treated herself to a glass of wine after a long day, but Samantha didn’t drink, and the two women were such old friends that if Samantha had wanted anything else, she would have gotten it.

“She seemed okay?” Taylor probed.

“A little disoriented. I don’t think she got much homework done.”

“I’ll have to call her teacher. They try not to give homework over the weekend. Maybe Maddie can make up whatever she didn’t do on Saturday.”

Samantha was half lying, half sitting, with her dark hair spread against the back of the old sofa. She was of mixed ancestry, as if the continents of the world had huddled together at her creation. Her father had been half Korean, half African-American. Her mother’s heritage was unknown but likely European. Samantha’s face was long and elegant, her huge eyes slightly tilted, her hair wild, her complexion the color of almonds. She wasn’t classically beautiful, and
exotic
was too charged a word to describe her. She was distinctive, extraordinary. At twenty-nine, she’d already lived harder and faster than most people twice her age.

“Maddie told me she talked to Jeremy,” she said.

“Did she tell you what they talked about?” Taylor didn’t even try to mask a grimace.

“She told him about the seizure. She said he asked a lot of questions.”

“He’s good at questions. It makes him feel involved, like he’s actually participating in her life.”

“By my standards, sweet pea, he’s Father of the Year. He pays child support, and puts money aside for her college.”

There was something to be said for that. Samantha refused to even discuss Edna’s father, who she claimed was completely out of the picture. In contrast, last year, after one of his songs had sold to a recording company, Jeremy had sent Taylor an unexpected bonus check to sock away for emergencies. Taylor had to give the man some credit.

“Getting checks is great,” she said. “But he’s around just enough to remind Maddie that she has a father, and gone just enough to make her yearn for a real one.”

“What would you do if he was around all the time?” Samantha asked. “Would you really like that better?”

Taylor shrugged that off. “Not worth worrying about, since it’s never going to happen. He’s got Nashville in his blood, and that’s where the money is for the band. I’d better hope he doesn’t move here, or he’ll be writing ballads about being too broke to support his baby girl.”

The phone rang just in time to prevent Samantha from answering. She got up and ambled into the kitchen to give Taylor privacy. “I’d love some tea,” Taylor called after her, before she picked up the telephone.

The male voice was unmistakable, but he identified himself, just in case. “Taylor, Jeremy.”

It might be relatively early, but she was tired, and she wondered if he knew it. Jeremy wasn’t a bully, but he was a master at figuring out how to get what he wanted. He called that talent the ability to size up a situation, something that had helped him wedge open the door of the country music scene. It hadn’t helped him enough to make him a star, but his band, the Black Balsam Drifters, was now opening for big-name acts, and the songs he wrote and sang were being heard by significant players in the business.

“It’s been a long day,” she said, hoping honesty would throw him off his game. “I just got home, and I’m beat. Can we make this short?”

“Maddie and I had a nice talk.”

“Sam told me.”

“How is Sam?”

“Waiting in the kitchen while we
finish
this,” she said.

“Maddie said she had a whopper of a seizure this afternoon.”

“That’s how she said it?”

“She described how she was feeling at the moment, and I guessed the rest. Maybe I’m wrong?”

“No.” She sighed. “She’d been doing really well. I hoped the new meds…” Her voice trailed off.

“How bad was it?”

“Bad enough.”

“You called the doctor?”

“No, I sent her out to play in traffic.” She could have kicked herself the moment the words came out of her mouth. “I’m sorry. It really has been a long day.”

“What did he say?”

Jeremy was almost always rational, and he rarely engaged in sniping. Usually she was at least polite. She attempted to continue that tradition.

“He told me to keep an eye on her and bring her in on Monday. If anything significant comes of the visit, I’ll let you know, I promise.”

“Taylor, I know this is a bad time to bring this up. You’ve made it clear you’re whupped. But I think we can do better than Dr. Hilliard. I know you like him—”

“Like him? Before Dr. Hilliard, Maddie was just a name on a chart. Half the time I don’t think the doctor of the moment even read her case history. If I have a problem, he calls me back. He’s doing everything he can to get the medication adjusted, so we don’t have more events like the one we had at dinnertime.”

“But it’s not working.”

“This is not a sinus infection. If epilepsy were simple to treat, I could go to the drugstore and grab something over the counter.”

The silence went on so long, she began to wonder if they had been disconnected. Then he spoke.

“Not the right time for this. And it’s not a criticism, Taylor. But I worry. You’re right there, you can watch and make decisions based on what you see. I don’t have that…”

“What? Luxury? Is that what you were going to say? You think it’s a
luxury
to be right here watching her go through this?”

“I don’t have that
information,
” he said. “I need more time with her.”

“You know where we live. You send her support check to this address every month.”

“I want her to come to Nashville this summer.”

This time the silence was on Taylor’s end. “Did I hear that right?” she asked at last. “You want her to come to
Nashville?
And then what? You get a gig out of town, drag her along and stow her backstage? Or what, she stays at your apartment with a babysitter who doesn’t know jack about how to help her if she needs it?”

“None of the above. Look, there’s no casual way to tell you this. I’m engaged. Her name’s Willow, and she was our promoter on the last tour. She loves kids. I want her to get to know Maddie before we get married.”

Taylor took a moment to recover. “Well, that’s completely out of the blue. Does Maddie know?”

“Willow and I have been together awhile, but I didn’t see any point in telling Maddie if it wasn’t going to work out.”

“Thanks for that.”

“I do think about what’s good for her.”

“Why don’t you just bring Willow to Asheville to meet Maddie?”

“I don’t want her to
meet
Maddie. I want her to
spend time
with Maddie. Real time, two weeks at the beginning of summer. And Maddie’s been asking to come to Nashville. Willow has a little house with some land outside the city, and it’s a great place for a kid, so we’ll stay there. The band’s going to hunker down and put together our next CD, so there’s no chance we’ll be out on the road. I want to introduce them here, where there’s no pressure from anybody else.”

“Nobody here’s going to pressure you, Jeremy. But I think it would be better if you introduce the two of them where Maddie feels comfortable and safe. Her doctor’s here.”

“She needs to be here with me, without
you,
” he said pointedly. “She needs to be away from Asheville to give Willow a real chance. We have good doctors in Nashville, and I’ll get copies of her records. Our custody agreement allows for this.”

There was no threat in his tone, but the threat was in the words. Custody agreement. Papers they had signed. Choices they had made when they were still teenagers.

“We have time to talk this over,” she said at last.

“We have time to make the arrangements,” he countered. “I’m not going to change my mind. I didn’t mention it to Maddie, because I wanted to warn you first, but I
will
tell her the next time we talk.”

Warn, not consult. She heard the difference.

“Anything else?” she asked. “New and better bombshells?”

He spoke slowly and with surprising feeling, as if he had rehearsed what came next. “We’ve done surprisingly well through all this, you and me and the kiddo. Not the best start, not the best circumstances, but we’ve muddled through and grown up along the way. I know you’ve had the major burden, while I got to go out into the world and live my dreams. But it’s time for me to take some of the day-to-day stuff on my shoulders, and time for you to have a little flexibility and freedom. This isn’t going to be a one-time thing, Taylor. It’s the beginning of a new phase for all of us. Let’s make it work for Maddie, okay?”

“I always want what’s best for her.”

“Then we’re on the same page.” He said good-night and hung up.

Taylor stared at the wall until Samantha came back in, carrying two bright red mugs of tea.

As she handed a mug to Taylor, peppermint and chamomile scented the air. “It can’t be that bad.”

Taylor told her just how bad it was.

Samantha flopped down on the sofa beside her. “Well, what do you know about that?”

“Very little, as a matter of fact. He hasn’t given me a single hint this was coming.”

“The two of you never talk about anything personal. Why should he?”

“Because he’s giving my daughter a stepmother. Doesn’t that seem like something he’d mention?”

Samantha waved her free hand in emphasis. “In your eyes Jeremy can’t do anything right. You do see that, correct? I mean, a few minutes ago you were dissing him for not spending more time with Maddie, and now you’re after him for wanting to spend a couple of weeks of quality time with her while he introduces somebody who’s going to be important in her life.”

Taylor considered that, but not for long. “See, there was this day, oh, eleven years ago, give or take a month or two. I went to him, sobbing, and told him I was pregnant with his baby. And you know what he said to me?”

“Something stupid? Like any seventeen-year-old boy with a noose around his neck?”

“Maddie is not a noose.”

“You know that, and so does he.
Now
. But his whole life changed in that moment, and he was still just a kid. Both of you were.”

“Eleven years ago he told me my baby wasn’t his problem, that I was the one who was pregnant, and I’d better leave him out of it.”

“And you’ve never forgiven him.”

Taylor hadn’t. At times she’d come close. She realized that nobody should be judged by something he said when the world as he knew it was collapsing. Later, when confronted by his parents, Jeremy had not denied that the baby was his. Of course, denial would have been futile, since a paternity test would have proved him a liar.

“You remember how it went,” she said. “We’d broken up. He was already dating somebody else when I realized I was going to have his baby. Later he told me he thought I was just making up a pregnancy to get even with him.”

“I can see that.”

“Really? I can’t. He knew me better than that.”

“Maybe not. He was the class bad boy. Your mother wouldn’t let you date him, right? Whenever you saw him you were sneaking behind her back. How well could you know him? How much time could you spend together? “

“Enough to make a baby.” Taylor shook her head. “I guess we’ve worked things out well enough, considering our start. There’s no love lost between us, but both of us love Maddie. Now, everything’s going to change.”

“Particularly if you don’t lose the attitude.”

Samantha had been her friend for so long that Taylor couldn’t be offended. She just reached over and socked her on the arm.

“I don’t think it’s Jeremy,” Samantha said, unperturbed. “I don’t think you want to share Maddie. And you’re wondering what you’ll do without her for two weeks. Part of you wants her to have a closer relationship to her daddy, and part of you probably hopes she’ll get along with her new stepmother. But another part of you hopes the whole thing will blow up, and she’ll never want to leave you again.”

“If that’s true it sounds pretty squirrely.”

“No, it sounds pretty natural. I don’t have that problem, since Edna’s father was never in the picture. But if he showed up tomorrow and said he’d been searching for us all this time, I’d probably feel the same way you do. Like he was the enemy clambering over my castle walls, an invader trying to stake a claim to a piece of
my
daughter.”

“And people think the hard part of being a single parent is not having anybody to share childrearing with.”

“The hard part of being a mother is knowing when to let go and when to hang on.”

For no good reason, Taylor thought of her own mother. As always, she was sorry she had.

Chapter Seven

First Day Journal: April 29

I’ve spent most of my adult life trying to forget my past. Maybe I thought if I changed myself into someone else, the past would fade away with my Appalachian accent and one day a country girl named Lottie Lou Hale would cease to exist.

Now I know how much time I wasted. No matter how hard we try to lock memories away, they break free, sometimes taking on new life because we witness others with the same struggles, like the young woman sleeping in my guest room this morning. Just like Harmony Stoddard, I was once nearly homeless, with no one to help me and nothing to fall back on.

It’s not a memory I recall with fondness. But this morning, while I wait for my guest to wake up, I’ll take it out again and examine it here.

Almost exactly seven years after Hearty’s Sunday morning appearance at the Trust Independent Baptist Church, I am sitting beside him on a bench in front of the pulpit, and this time no one is trying to persuade him to leave.

In the past year someone has donated screens, and someone else convinced the county to run an electric line so that now floor fans blow channels of steamy air over the mourners lucky enough to be sitting close to them.