Marriage, Interrupted

“So tell me something…Cassie and Shaun have been living here for more than a year. How come this is the first time I’ve seen you?”

The swallow of coffee in his mouth turned acrid. “It seemed the more prudent course of action, considering Cass was married to another man and all.”

“Yeah, but your son wasn’t.” Before he could figure out what, if anything, to say to that, she said, “Which would lead to one of two conclusions. A, that you’re a slimeball. Or B, that you didn’t want to risk seeing her. So which is it?”

“You forgot C. All of the above.”

She batted at the air. “Nah. Believe me, I know from slime-balls. You don’t even come close. So I’m going with B. Okay, next subject—I suppose you’re wondering why I don’t seem more broken up over my son’s death.”

Blake doubted he had enough caffeine in his system to keep up with the woman, but as she didn’t appear interested in slowing down, the best he could do was hobble along behind. “I hadn’t… It isn’t my place to…”

But she wasn’t listening. Now kneeling on a bright yellow foam pad, she gouged the soil with probably more vehemence than necessary. “You bring a baby into the world,” she muttered to the dirt, “you think nothing can go wrong…”

She jerked her head up to Blake, several strata of makeup insufficient to mask the mixture of bafflement, anger and profound sorrow etched in what had once been, he decided, a beautiful face. “Why am I telling you this? A stranger? Except, maybe, who else can I tell?” she went on without waiting for a reply. “To keep all this locked inside…” She pressed one fist to her sternum, wagging her head. “Maybe this is why you’re here, so an old lady can vent her spleen.”

Blake leaned forward, gently removing the sunglasses to see turquoise-lidded green eyes shimmering with tears. “Vent away.”

She removed a tissue from a pocket tucked into the sweatshirt, then dabbed with extreme care at her eyes. “You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

Lucille let out a great sigh, then said, more to the pansies than to Blake, “Before Cassie, Alan had never married. Dated, yes, but never married. When he hadn’t settled down by thirty-five, his father and I, we figured maybe he was…well, you know.”

She lowered her voice, as if the neighbors might hear. “It was a disappointment, but what could we say? A person’s gotta follow his own path, right? Anyway, after Alan’s father died—we’d been out here ten years already, we couldn’t take those awful winters back east anymore—Alan asks me if I’d like to move in with him, so I wouldn’t be alone. So I figure, why not? I mean, Wanda came in to do for me, sure—I’ve got a bunch of medical problems, you don’t want to know, Wanda’s a practical nurse but she doesn’t like telling people ’cause then they all start asking her for medical advice—but being by myself at night didn’t sit so well, it was true.

“But then, once I move in? He barely talks to me. Acts like I’m invisible or something. Always too busy, always away on some trip or something, especially once he sold his dry cleaning business, four, five years ago. So I ask you, what was the point of my being here, since I was alone at night, anyway? Or worse, when he was around…” Her lips pursed. “He’d get this look in his eyes, like I was some kind of huge embarrassment to him, like he couldn’t figure out how I was his mother. Nothing but criticisms, every time he saw me. I didn’t talk right, dress right, think right. All I was, was some stupid old woman.…”

Her sentence left hanging in midair, she dug in her sleeve for a tissue, then blew her nose, while Blake felt as though someone had stepped on his chest. “And it finally dawns on me,” she continued, “this is why my meshugah son never married. Never in my life did I see a man more wrapped up in himself! So I figure, the hell with this—I’m outta here, as the young people say.”

Blake couldn’t hold back a smile. “And?” he prodded.

“So I make up my mind to move out into one of those whaddyacallits, those gated communities—except it’s criminal how much they want for rent in those places, so I wasn’t going anywhere—when suddenly Alan brings home this lovely young woman and announces they’re getting married. Out of the blue, just like that, with him pushing fifty, already. Me, I’m thrilled, thinking maybe my son’s finally got his head on straight, that this woman’s performed some kind of miracle. So now, maybe, things will be better.” She hunched her shoulders in a helpless gesture. “I should have known, right?”

A frown pinched Blake’s brow, waiting for her explanation. To his chagrin, however, she veered off on one of her tangents, leaving her thought in the dust.

“That Cassie is a keeper, let me tell you,” she said instead. “Always treated me like gold. And at my age, listen—a daughter-in-law I could get along with…what more could I ask? Oh, sure, it would have been nice if she’d been Jewish, but you can’t have everything, right? But you know something, I love that girl from the bottom of my heart, like she was my own.” She went back to stabbing the dirt. “If anybody deserves good things, it’s her.”

A draft of cold air wriggled up Blake’s jacket, making him shiver.

“Lucille,” he said, “I don’t mean to push, but…what do you mean, you should have known? About Alan?”

It took her a second to find the dropped thread, but then she said, “Oh. That it couldn’t last. That Alan could no more be a real husband than I could fly to the moon.”

“You mean, he was—?”

“No, no. Not that. I told you. Alan only loved himself.” Her lips drew into a tight line, like a vivid, fresh scratch across her face. “But he did want a child. And Cassie, for reasons known only to her, God bless her, agreed.”

Several moments passed before the pieces fell into place. “Are you saying…this was a marriage of convenience?”

“On my son’s side, at least,” Lucille said, rearranging a pansy she’d just planted. “I frankly don’t know…well, Cassie and I never discussed things, exactly…” She hesitated, while Blake’s heart played racquetball inside his chest.

“What?”

Lucille got to her feet again, then clomped closer, perching on the arm of the chair across from his, near enough to lay her hand on his wrist. “Cassie doesn’t know that I know this, so don’t say anything, but, see, I had figured out a couple months ago that things weren’t exactly hunky-dory between them. So I wasn’t all that surprised when Cassie seemed more stunned than grief stricken when Alan died. But then, the day after he dies, after the lawyer leaves the house…” One eye squinted shut as she wagged a gardening-gloved finger. “Then she’s upset. Like someone had yanked the rug out from under her. So I call the lawyer myself, only he starts giving me this song and dance about how there’s nothing to worry about. As if I wouldn’t know telling me there’s nothing to worry about is always the first clue that there is. So I told him to cut the bull, already, and tell me what the hell was going on.” She shrugged. “So he did.”

Maddeningly, she chose that moment to have a sneezing fit that ate up the better part of two minutes. Finally, after another minute of indelicate nose blowing, amid profuse apologies about it being pollen season, she turned to Blake. “To cut a long story short, my son decides, a month after his marriage, to liquidate almost his entire estate and invest in some little up-and-coming computer technology company that, unfortunately, up and went.” She sneezed again, then sighed. “On top of that, there were credit cards. Had he lived, maybe he would’ve landed on his feet. But he didn’t. Which means his estate is worth, as that little Mercedes would say, nada—”

“Lucille!”

They both spun around—Blake snagging Lucille’s spindly arm before she fell off the arm of the chair—to catch Cass standing at the French door, her face ashen but her eyes sparking with embarrassed fury. Every instinct he possessed told him to get his butt out of there and let the two women duke it out. But one look from Cass told him if he so much as moved an eyelash, she’d knock him clear to the Arizona border.

* * *

Her cheeks stung with humiliation. This was her problem. Hers. The only thing in this whole stinkin’ mess she’d been able to control had been who knew and who didn’t. Now, thanks to her mother-in-law, she didn’t even have that.

“Cille, how could you?” Huddled into herself against the morning chill, Cass crossed to the older woman, refusing to look at Blake, to see the pity in his eyes. The baby was kicking her mercilessly this morning, so hard she felt bruised in spots. “How could you go behind my back, discussing family business—” She pressed her hand to her mouth, then lowered it enough to push out, “This was personal, for God’s sake. Is that so hard to understand?”

“And if Blake isn’t family, I’d like to know who is.” Never easily buffaloed, Lucille wagged the trowel at her. “He’s Shaun’s father. Anything that affects Shaun will ultimately affect him. So I thought he should know. And God knows we’d all be taking vacations to Mars before you got around to it.”

The lack of even a hint of remorse in her mother-in-law’s eyes made Cass’s voice—and undoubtedly, her blood pressure as well—rise several notches. “Well, I’m Shaun’s mother, and what and who I tell is my decision. Not yours.”

“Bubelah, calm down. It’s not good for the baby…”

“She’s right, Cass. You’re getting yourself in a state—”

“You stay out of this!” She hurled this in Blake’s direction quickly, so she didn’t really see him, then back at her mother-in-law. “Oh, for pity’s sake, Cille. I’m pregnant, my husband just died, and, as most of Bernalillo County probably knows by now, I am, as they say, financially embarrassed. A little hissy fit isn’t going to raise my blood pressure any more than it already is.” She looked around, saw the flowers. For some reason, that nearly took her over the edge. “And why are you planting flowers? It’s still freezing at night.”

“They’re just pansies, Cass,” Blake said in that even, reasonable tone of voice used on people who live in padded rooms. “They can live through cold weather, remember? We used to plant them in March all the time. So they’ll be fine. Which is more than I can say for you.”

“I am fine, Blake,” she retorted, wrapping her sweater more tightly around her protruding midsection. Her teeth were chattering, the baby was kicking, and right now life was about as far from good as she ever wanted it to get. “B-back off.”

“No, Cass. I’m not going to back off.” Stunned, she met an expression in those deep brown eyes she knew only too well. The this-is-for-your-own-good look. “You just admitted how much stress you’re under—”

“That doesn’t mean I can’t handle it.”

“Why are you being so hardheaded, woman?”

Because my very survival depends on it. “Because I didn’t ask for your interference, Blake,” she said, thinking that only a crazy person would attempt to reason with one being so unreasonable. Except, at the moment she wasn’t too sure which one of them was which. “Besides, after all this time, why are you suddenly so hot to stick your nose in my business?”

“Because maybe I can help, for crying out loud!”

“I don’t need or want your help! So you can tell that idea to go take a hike!”

Inside, the phone rang. After a moment Towanda stuck her head out the door. “It’s for you, Miss Lucille. Your sister in Florida.”

With a sigh, Lucille took off her gloves and tossed them onto the tempered glass table, along with the trowel, which landed with an overloud clatter. “Well. The comments I could make about what I just heard.… All I can say is you should be grateful I’m the kind of woman who knows when to keep her thoughts to herself.” She started into the house, then hesitated, looking from one to the other. “You think you two could manage not to do each other in while I’m gone?”

After a moment they both nodded. Curtly.

For a full minute after Lucille’s departure, neither spoke. Still seething, Cass walked over to the edge of the deck, unsuccessfully ignoring the buzz of energy behind her. She grasped the railing, wincing at the sting of cold metal against her palms as she sucked in several deep breaths, trying to calm down. Trying to think, to ready herself for Blake’s attempt to take charge, to play macho man coming to the rescue. It would be just like him to try to exploit her current situation as a means to appease his own guilt for giving up when she’d really needed him. Wanted him.

Well, too damn bad, she thought sourly. A day late and a penny short, as they say.

And dammit, she thought on another tidal wave of emotion, why was it always all or nothing with this man? Why hadn’t he ever been able to find that middle ground between suffocating her with his protectiveness or ditching her completely?

Brother. Could she get herself in deep, or what?

The house. She would think about the house. Under other circumstances, she might have loved it, with its sweeping views of the city, the way the rooms seemed to endlessly flow into each other. But it was huge and a pain to keep up, and the idea of a baby toddling around with all these stairs scared the hell out of her. Selling it wouldn’t be such a horrible thing. As long as she could unload it before the bank foreclosed on the loan.…

Her fingers found their way to the crease between her brows. Almost immediately, she felt Blake’s arm slip around her shoulders.

Not good. Especially for someone whose grip on her emotions was as precarious as a car hanging off the edge of a cliff in some action movie, the seagull perched on its end the only thing that kept it from going over. With Blake’s touch, the seagull flew away.

And she crashed.

With a soft sob, she turned into the chest that had sheltered her when she was young, that she’d believed would always shelter her. Her bad, most definitely. Still, he smelled the same, felt the same, stroked her back as he always had, his fingertips massaging that spot between her shoulder blades that always tensed up. Like magic, the baby quieted as Blake stroked and soothed and gently rocked her.

It felt too familiar, too right and, consequently, all wrong. She dug into her sweater pocket for a tissue, pulling away to blow her nose.

“Sorry,” she mumbled, looking back out toward the city, shoving her hair out of her face. A nagging wind blew it right back.

“For?”

“Acting like a weepy broad.”

His arm possessed her shoulders again as he nuzzled the top of her head, his chuckle in her hair as soft and seductive as a summer breeze. “Broad seems apt at the moment,” he murmured, gently patting her belly.

She couldn’t back up quickly enough from the flashfire his touch ignited, spitting out the only words guaranteed to make him retreat. “I loved Alan!”

A long second passed, during which his features seemed to ossify, his normally luminous brown eyes turn the color of dried mud. “I’m sure you did.”

Once again she turned away. That Blake was enough of a gentleman not to point out that the man she loved had just screwed her to the wall, only made her angrier. And more confused.

“Cass.” When she refused to turn toward him, he touched her again, this time gently hooking two fingers underneath her chin. “Cass, look at me.” Finally, as if facing a painfully bright light, she glanced up, blinking, and saw the remnants of all the hope and promise of so many years ago, tattered and battered and bruised beyond recognition. Was she seeing what was in his eyes, though, or a reflection of what was in hers?

“Whatever’s happening here goes way beyond the wreck we made of our marriage,” he said. “I never stopped caring about you. No, it’s true,” he added at her snort of disbelief. “About what happens to you. Even now, if there’s anything I can do—”

“There isn’t,” she said flatly. Even less than his pity, the last thing she wanted was insincere lip service about how much he cared about her. Please. Maybe he had, at one point, on some level. But instead of facing their problems, working with her to figure out how to solve them, he’d run. That she’d repeated her mistake with Alan…

Not once, but twice, she’d placed her trust in rainbows. She’d really be an idiot to let it happen again.

“I’ve already got it all figured out,” she said. “I’ll sell the house, and we’ll get a smaller place. Lucille has some income of her own, and I’ve got the shop.” She lifted her chin. “God knows I’ve had a lot less, Blake. This was a shock, true, but it’s not a disaster.”

“You are Woman, you are Strong, you can handle it, right?” he said with a slanted smile that, a lifetime ago, had repeatedly hoodwinked her into bed and out of facing reality. For Shaun’s sake she’d regretted, even been angry, that Blake hadn’t been around more since their divorce; for her own, she’d been immensely grateful he’d stayed away. Because, rather than their strengths complementing each other, their weaknesses had only dragged each other down. Even letting him touch her—especially letting him touch her—was like doing a jig on the edge of a snake pit. Blindfolded.

“Something like that, yes,” she agreed, then started back inside, needing to tear herself away from the insane yearning to seek comfort in Blake’s embrace. After all, there was more to Woman than being strong enough to field all the crap life flung your way.

“What about the charge cards?” she heard behind her.

Turning back, she managed a smile. “Lucille probably made things sound worse than they are. It’s only two or three. I can manage the payments. No problem.” His eyes snagged hers, just long enough for her to realize what she had to say. To do.

“Okay, look, you’re welcome to hang around, for Shaun’s sake. But I really think it’s best if we…well, if we stay out of each other’s way as much as possible. I’ve simply got too much garbage swimming around in my head to deal with anything more.”

A breeze blew a strand of inky hair across his knotted brow. “I thought we were still friends, Sunshine.”

She bit back a curse. He hadn’t called her that since the early days of their marriage, when some group or other had resurrected the old song. Blake used to sing it to her—really, really badly—usually while dancing around the apartment with her. He was a really, really bad dancer, too, she recalled, the memory like a bittersweet poison.

“Be real, Blake—our friendship died with our marriage, and you know it.”

The frown turned into a full-blown scowl. “My fault?”

“No. No, Blake. Nobody’s fault.” That much she did believe. “But the only reason you’re here is for Shaun. Not for me, remember? There is nothing between us. Not anymore. And there’s not going to be. If you really want to help me, you’ll remember that and respect my wish to be left alone.”

With that she quickly went into the house, before Blake could see how badly she was shaking. It would be so easy to accept whatever he had to offer—his friendship, his help, even his concern. But “easy” came with a price, one she’d already paid too many times. With this last time, she was going to pay enough for a thousand women.

She stopped just inside the door until a contraction passed, then continued into the granite-and-chrome kitchen and poured herself a glass of orange juice. Towanda said something to her, but Cass only vaguely responded, and the woman went on about her business without further hassle.

She eased herself up onto a bar stool and palmed her forehead, her bangs spiked between her fingers. Lucille didn’t know the whole truth, thank God. Cass had threatened the lawyer within an inch of his life if he ever let on the extent of Alan’s—and now Cass’s—debt, let alone the nature of it. There had been no bad investment in some start-up company. True, the insurance had been borrowed against, his portfolio trashed, the equity in the house virtually tapped out. But there were more than three charge cards—each with a maxed-out credit limit greater than some people paid for their cars. Luxury cars. The truth was, no matter how hard she worked, she had no idea how she’d ever pay it all off.

Nor was she about to tell an eighty-year-old woman with a dicey heart that her son—her quiet, unassuming, ultraconservative son—had had a wee problem with gambling. That on his business trips, ostensibly to check out potential investments, he went instead to gambling meccas around the country. A string of good luck a few years back had made him far wealthier than his dry cleaning chain ever had, with the unfortunate effect of convincing Alan he was invincible. What Cass hadn’t known when they’d started dating was that his luck had begun a downward spiral—until he met her. He’d told her—after they were married, of course—that he liked to “dabble” in the market, and that since they’d started dating, he’d been doing very well. He called her his good luck charm; she hadn’t taken it seriously.

He must’ve thought she was one helluva rabbit’s foot.

And she must’ve been more worn-out than she’d thought to have taken him at face value, to have missed the signs of his sickness. Not to mention his true personality. He’d been a damn good actor, she’d give him that. Still, weren’t people who wore masks of their own supposed to be more adept at seeing through others’? In her case, apparently not.

The lies, the empty promises to get help, that came later, however—those, she couldn’t have missed if she’d been in a coma. If it hadn’t been for Lucille…

Cass kicked back the rest of her juice and slipped off the stool, then perambulated over to the sink where Towanda snatched it out of her hand and washed the glass, before hustling back to the other side of the kitchen. When Cass turned around, her heart somersaulted into her throat.

Blake blocked the kitchen doorway, his forearms bracing the frame. His right foot was thrust forward, the knee bent, accentuating the way his soft, worn jeans clung to thighs as muscled as they were during his college-track-team days. She forced her attention north, past his trim hips and waist, his chest, his shoulders, to a face locked in a determined grimace. The eyes fastened to hers glinted with anger and concern but not, she realized, pity.

She opened her mouth to say—Well, actually, she had no idea what she was going to say. Not that Blake was about to give her the chance.

“Now, you listen to me for a moment, Sunshine,” he started in, quietly, unaware of Towanda’s presence not ten feet away. “I know we’ve had our problems. And, God knows, we still do. But I’ve spent far too long taking out our differences on our son, staying away from him so I wouldn’t have to deal with you. I know what you’re going to say, so you can save your breath and let me fill in the blanks—yes, I took my sweet time figuring this out. And yes, I know I’ve screwed up big-time, especially with our son. No sense calling a skunk anything else. But I figure I can either let things go on the way they have been—and risk losing him altogether—or see if Shaun will give me a shot at coming up from behind. And since you’re Shaun’s mother, my trying to fix things with him and ignore you isn’t going to work. Which means you and I are both gonna have to finally grow up, decide exactly where we stand with each other and go from there.”

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