Saint and Scholar (21 page)

Ashley lurched forward, but Sharon held her hand palm-out to halt him. “Ashley, you’re not helping. I know more about this part of Carla’s life than you. I think she’s gotten a lot of bad advice from all of us in the past few years, so we need to be mindful of that. I bet
she
doesn’t even know what she wants.” She turned back to face Grant again. “Since we’re here, will you show us what she came here to see? Maybe by the time we’re done, she’ll check in.”

He looked at Ashley, who shrugged. Sharon fiddled with her diamond again. It must have been new, or else she wouldn’t be so mindful of it. “Okay. We can take my car. I’m trying to break it in.”

“Slick ride for a professor,” Ashley mumbled as they walked toward the shiny new crossover.

“I thought Carla would like it,” Grant said with a shrug. “I’ll probably bike to work if I can find a house close enough.”

* * * *

“Why are you making that face, Sharon?” Carla asked before staring again into her orange juice. She didn’t really want it. She didn’t want
anything
. It had been a few weeks since she’d run home from Ireland and Sharon was still on her case about how she’d left Grant dangling.

“You know, Ashley has been talking to Grant a lot lately and he says you’re still not taking his calls. Why?”

“Why should she?” Meg asked. She’d returned from the dance club’s bar with yet another giant soda. She was wearing a button-up shirt that didn’t quite meet at the midsection as it was supposed to, but if she didn’t want to address the elephant in the room, neither would Carla. “He did exactly what I said he would, am I right?”

“Oh, come the hell off it,” Sharon said, rolling her big brown eyes. “He ruined your major GPA. You can’t assess his character based on the fact that he graded you fairly for your shitty work.”

Meg gaped. “What’s this crap? Since when are you and Ashley in the Dr. Brogue Fan Club? Ashley went from hating his guts to being his BFF overnight.
Why?
Maybe you guys are deluded, too. I don’t see the allure.”

“No,” Sharon said. “I believe in love, and I believe that man loves Carla. That’s all it is. I want my friend to be happy, as should
you,
Meg.”

“Of course I want Carla to be happy! She’s been sweeping up my metaphorical messes for nearly eight years. She’s like the sister I don’t have.”

“Thanks, Meg,” Carla murmured into her glass.

“So why are you so averse to her finding her Prince Charming, huh?”

“God, Sharon, you’ve turned into such a sap since you came out of the closet about Ashley.”

Sharon shrugged. “Yeah, might as well be. My family kind of wants to disown me over it, so I’m looking on the bright side. Daddy’s already cut me off. I was supposed to marry a good Jewish boy, you know? Here I am engaged to this cranky Irish-Italian-American guy. He’s a doctor, so at least my mother is grasping at
that
. Being your sister better be worth it,” she said to Carla with a nudge.

“I can’t promise that.”

Glad she stopped wearing that perfume. What the hell was Ashley thinking? He couldn’t ask someone younger for a suggestion?

“Oh, honey, it’ll be fine. Hey, do you want to dance? Music’s getting better. They finally turned that techno dreck off.”

Carla shook her head. “No, I’m sorry to abandon home base tonight, but I think I’m going to head to my apartment. I’ve been up since six and did three sketches today. Witnesses were all over the place. My head hurts.”

Meg shrugged. “Don’t worry about it. I’ll probably bounce soon, too. My back is killing me for some reason.”

“It’s because you’re pregnant, Meg,” Carla said with a sigh as she pushed back from the table and stood. She didn’t turn around when Meg started stuttering like a motorboat.

The last thing she heard before she got too deep into the crowd was Sharon saying, “Well, if you feel the need to hide it, maybe you should examine your own relationship, because baby, that ain’t right.”

Carla went home to find yet another email from Grant she wouldn’t respond to. He’d made a daily habit of writing to her. The messages had been very much like journal entries detailing his day at work and chronicling what, if anything, he’d found out about her pedigree. He had taken his promise to heart and was still searching out information about Phillip’s deep ancestry. He’d even started researching some of Adam’s
maternal
lineage. They’d been in America for far less time than the other branch, only since the potato blight. She settled onto her bed with her computer on her lap and opened the message

Hey, love.

How are you? Ashley says you’re fine. I hope he’s being honest.

Dad’s still in his holding pattern. He swore all last week we could start picking through some of the mess at the house over the weekend, but after waking up and getting dressed he had his usual change of heart. Fortunately, I won’t be living here in the towers of trash much longer. I may have found a place near the university. It’s old and needs a lot upgrading I’m not keen on, but the location is perfect and the rooms aren’t so cramped.

She scoffed, thinking the house must have been built for a family with herd of children. She imagined the kitchen was oversize–perfect for lining the little rug rats up and dispensing their daily gruel.

She felt like shit for even thinking it.
I don’t really hate big families…do I? Or is it just mine?

With a sigh, she turned her focus back to the message to read his usual sign-off:
I love you
. Like every time before, it destroyed a little piece of her. She could have told him to stop, and she wanted to. For that matter, she could have deleted his messages unread, but some part of her refused to ignore him. It was like all those years when she’d kept her father’s contact information in her phones. She felt like she was
prescribed
to flog herself just for being so damned naive. More so after learning what Ashley and Tony knew about their father. Which she’d never known until she returned from Ireland.

They’d colluded to keep all the bad things from her. Tony and Ashley had known their father had an echocardiogram the year before he died. They all knew he had a weak heart. They’d kept her in the dark so she wouldn’t worry, because little Carla worried about
everything
.

So, she forced herself to open the messages, read them with tears burning unshed behind her eyes, and stared at his closing for minutes, meditating on the pixels forming those three little words. She wondered how long it would take for him to grow bored as he had with Francesca, and find some other woman to fixate on. She hoped it would be soon–that he’d find some woman willing to be submissive to him and leave her alone. Her heart would break if he kept on loving her. She couldn’t be the woman he wanted. She was scared to be.

Chapter 14

Carla sat in the administration office at one of the private schools where she taught classes, hearing, but not listening, to the principal as she rambled on and on about the employee benefits package. She’d offered Carla a full-time teaching job upon hearing word that the other school Carla taught at was considering doing the same. With the public schools in the system in a constant state of flux, more and more parents were opting to enroll their children in private schools. As the enrollments swelled, so did the schools’ needs for qualified enrichment teachers.

When the principal’s lips stopped moving, Carla waited a few respectable moments and said, as was surely expected, “I hope you don’t mind if I take a few days to think about it. I’ve become very used to freelancing, but having a regular schedule has a certain appeal.”

“Yes, yes, of course,” the principal said. “We’re very lucky to have you. The parents love that you put so much emphasis on technique with the older kids. Many say the students wouldn’t have gotten nearly as good instruction with private lessons. And between you and me, my daughter doesn’t have a creative bone in her body but you seemed to spark something in her this spring.”

“Uh…your
daughter
?”

“Yes, Lindsay Smith? Cranky little blonde with a cowlick?”

It took a minute for realization to dawn on Carla. Lindsay’s tree project the last day of the art clinic certainly hadn’t been the most artistic of the bunch, but the drawing did say a lot about who Lindsay was. It was black and white, had few soft edges and a few mysteriously placed branches bore square-shaped fruits. “Oh! Well, they’re good kids.” She picked up her purse and hoped the action would be enough of a signal for the principal to get the hint the discussion was over for the time being.

“So, when can I expect your call? Friday?”

Carla nodded. “Yes, certainly by Friday. I won’t leave you on the lurch for long.”

She drove home to her lonely apartment and sat at her kitchen table to work on the same graphite drawing she’d been obsessing over for the past two weeks. While at Allen’s house, she’d spotted through all the clutter a photograph of his young wife holding an infant Grant against her shoulder out in the garden. The photograph had reminded her of a Sassoferrato painting of
The Madonna
she’d studied during her very first art history class. She’d never quite forgotten it. When she got home from Ireland, she’d dug her old textbook out of the plastic storage tote in her walk-in closet. She found the dog-eared page and examined the photograph of the painting she’d meditated on for so many hours as a young student.

She’d started drawing that day, not intending for the woman in the drawing to be
The Madonna
or Grant’s mother, or anyone for that matter. She just needed to get the subconscious thoughts of maternity out of her system. She couldn’t get away from it. It seemed like
everyone
was pregnant. Even Sharon. Sharon had been keeping
lots
of secrets, yet hadn’t been able to clam up about Carla’s trip to Ireland. Two out of the three, pregnant at once. One more and they’d have suite-mate Bingo.

When there was nothing else to do on the paper, no more lines to smudge, no more mistakes to erase, she put down her pencil, stared at the woman in the picture with the heart-shaped face and hair that reached midback and had a good sob. When the tears refused to abate, she didn’t know what else to do but call her mother.

“Hey, we’ve missed ya. You coming over for dinner?” Mom asked in lieu of saying hello. Did she
ever
say hello?

“Um. Maybe.” Carla opened the lid of her laptop and woke up her operating system. She hadn’t heard from Grant in a couple of days.

“You should! Ashley and Tony are here with the girls, you know? Nobody planned it. They just showed up at the same time. It’s turned into a bit of a party. We’re playing
Monopoly
.”

Shit
.

“Hey, did you know Ashley’s been doing research on your dad’s tree? You working together?”

“Um, sort of. Listen, Mom, I need to talk you about something in private.”

“What’s up? Hey–have you been crying? Your voice is a bit thick. What’s going on?”

“This is really…Mom, I don’t know what to do. I’m pregnant.”

Mom was silent for a few tense moments. Carla could hear the sound of her heels clacking against the hardwood at the house and doors slamming as she moved away from the party in her kitchen. “You get over here
right
now
and I’ll tell you what to do, you hear me? What the hell is wrong with you? I knew you were a shitty Catholic but I never thought–”

“Mom! No.
No
. It’s not that. That was never an option. I knew the risks when I did it, but figured I had statistics in my favor. All that time with Otto and there wasn’t so much as a scare. I know what to do, but…I just don’t know what to
do
.”

Mom let out a breath. “It’s no big deal, baby. Come on over. We’ll send the boys away and we’ll talk it out.”

* * * *

Grant’s mother had always had a special fondness for roses. When she was alive, his dad added a new bush to the fence every year. He’d let her pick out which hybrid she liked best from the catalogs and they’d plant it together. When Mum died, he’d let the roses take over and grow wild for a couple of years. Eventually, he reached a point where he couldn’t stand looking at them anymore, so he’d cut them all back to the ground and salted it from spite. After visiting the ruined garden, Grant knew his dad would never completely move on. He really believed some people only had one shot in life at falling in love, and Dad’s time had come and gone. Grant knew he was the same way. If Carla wouldn’t have him, he wouldn’t have anyone else. As a result, he was nearing the point of compromise. “Shut up and wait” wasn’t working.