Promise Me (11 page)

“How did you know that?”

He shrugged. “I must have heard someone call you that.”

“No one calls me Bethany except my mother. And she passed away ten years ago.”

He just looked at me. “Then it's a mystery.”

I said, “I really need to go.”

“Wait, please. I just want to ask you out. I won't take no for an answer.”

“Take it or not, that's still the answer.” I walked away. He followed me out to the parking lot.

When I was unlocking my car, he said, “Why won't you give me a chance?”

I opened my car door. “I told you why. Besides, now you've set off all my internal warning bells. Bye.”

“I'm not giving up,” he said.

“Bye.” I climbed inside my car.

I started my car and backed out. He stood there, his hands in his pockets, watching me.
What did he want?
Roxanne would have smacked me over the top of the head for turning him down.

“Alas, another year.”

Beth Cardall's Diary

New Year's Eve was even quieter than usual—which, for me, is saying something. Marc and I had never really been big on New Year's celebrations. For the first few years of our marriage we went to his company's New Year's Eve party, until one year Marc's boss, Dean, had had too much to drink and hit on me while Marc was talking to one of the other salesmen. He told me the only reason he'd hired Marc was to get to me. I was mortified. “It's never happening,” I said, “and if you ever tell my husband that, I'm telling your wife.” I went and found Marc and asked him to take me home.

After that we never went to the company party again. I never told Marc about what had happened, I feared it would have broken his all-too-fragile ego. I just told him that I didn't want to go again. He acted angry with me but didn't put up much of a fight.

Since then, New Year's had become consequential only in that I bought a new calendar and we could sleep in the next morning.

Charlotte had spent the day playing at the home of a neighbor, her best friend Katie. Katie's mother, Margaret Wirthlin, was a sweet, matronly woman with eight children. She was
always happy to have Charlotte around, and frankly, with that many children, I don't think she even noticed an extra one.

I picked up Charlotte on the way home from work. Again, she wasn't feeling well. Once we were home she just lay on the couch as I made the enchiladas and fell asleep before I finished. I considered just letting her sleep, but I was so worried about her losing weight that I woke her for dinner. She took only two bites of her enchilada, then laid her head on the table. I carried her to my bed, where she had slept since Marc's passing.

I went back out to the kitchen and did the dishes, then lay down on the couch to read a book.

This was it, the utter excitement of my life. As I thought of the new year, my heart was filled with dread. I don't know when I had ever felt so vulnerable or hopeless. It seemed that I was assailed on every side. I was lonely, physically and mentally exhausted, spiritually numb, and financially I was walking a shaky tightrope that a small, well-timed breeze could knock me off of. My salary wasn't enough to pay the mortgage and our expenses. Without Marc's income, I knew that I needed to get a job that paid more, but doing what? I had no “marketable” skills, no résumé, and with all the missed days because of Charlotte's health, who would keep me?

In spite of my fears, in the back of my mind I harbored a far greater one—one I pushed down to the deepest recesses of my mind.
What if Charlotte was fighting something bigger than anyone had guessed?
She wasn't getting worse,
at least she didn't seem to be, but she also wasn't getting any better. What if it was something chronic?
What if it was something terminal?
I immediately pushed the thought from my mind. I couldn't take that.
Anything but that
.

It would be nice, as both Charlotte and Roxanne had wished for me, to have someone to take care of me. But I might as well be wishing for a fairy godmother. It wasn't going to happen. I had built walls around my life and heart not because I liked the solitude, I didn't; I built them to protect Charlotte and me. In spite of my claims to the contrary, I am one of those women who hates being alone. Even after the betrayals I had suffered by Marc, I still missed him. At least I thought I did, until it occurred to me that I didn't miss
him
, I missed the delusion of him—the delusion of our love and family. Like everyone else, I wanted to be loved. I wanted to belong to someone. I wanted to be wanted. But at what cost? I feared that my emotional state was as precarious as my financial one—just one misstep away from disaster.

My eyes filled with tears. When had life gotten so mean? Better question, when hadn't it been? I'd been alone since I was eighteen, when my mother passed away during a routine gallbladder operation. My aunt stepped in for a while, but it was obvious to me that it was out of obligation, not desire. At eighteen you're pretty much on your own anyway. I met Marc my sophomore year in college and jumped when he popped the question. I'm not saying I didn't love him. I just didn't love him as much as I hated being alone. And I paid for it.

Was there someone else out there for me? My thoughts
drifted to the man at the store. Matthew. Was I pushing away exactly what I was hoping for? Would it have killed me to let him in, just a little? To put my toe in the water? He seemed sincere. He seemed nice enough.

Nice.
I grimaced at the thought.
Another nice guy. Like Marc
. Maybe it's the nice guys who aren't to be trusted. Maybe it was the very façade of “nice” one should avoid; sheep's clothing, right?
Better the devil we know
.

The bottom line was, I didn't know. I didn't know whom, if anyone, I could trust. The only thing I knew for certain was whom I couldn't trust: me. Or at least my sense of discernment. For seven years I had lived a charade. For seven years my husband, my best friend, my soul mate, had moved through a succession of women while I minded the home fires oblivious to it all. What a fool I was. I mean, really, how stupid could a woman be?

I suppose that all I knew for certain was that I couldn't be drained again. There was too little left—my heart too close to empty.

At midnight I could hear the pop of firecrackers and Roman candles from across the street and the ruckus of Margaret's clan beating pans together in their front yard. I looked out the window. “Happy New Year,” I said to no one. And I said it without hope. Happiness was a dark horse.

This man just keeps coming back like a flesh-covered boomerang. I hope he's not crooked too.

Beth Cardall's Diary

I was glad for the holidays to be over and for things to get back to normal, whatever that was these days. I was pressing suit coats when Teresa minced her way back to my station. Teresa was Prompt's token bombshell, a stunningly beautiful nineteen-year-old blonde—former homecoming queen, head cheerleader, you know the type. Roxanne opined that Teresa's main purpose for existence was to remind her of how old and undesirable she'd become.

Teresa had pulled her Walkman's earphones down around her neck, and her face was bent in a wide smile. “Beth, someone sent you flowers.”

I looked up from the press. “Me?” I couldn't guess who would be sending me flowers.

“Yes, you. They're beautiful. And, by the way, you can keep the flowers, I'll keep the deliveryman. He's hot. I told him he could just leave the flowers with me, but he said he needed to deliver them personally.”

The dry cleaner had a two-way mirror behind the front counter so that when we were shorthanded we could work in back and keep an eye on the lobby. I looked around my rack of coats to see this deliveryman she was talking about.
Matthew was standing at the counter holding a vase of sunflowers. I went back to the suit coat I was working on, lightly sighing. “I'll be there in a minute.”

Teresa looked at me in astonishment. “Aren't you dying to find out who sent them?”

“I know who sent them. They're from the man holding them.”

She looked at me incredulously. “You've got to be kidding.”