A Very Special Delivery (12 page)

Molly was on her knees in a flower bed, a trowel in one gloved hand. “What are you doing? I thought you were going to church.”

“Don’t you ever look at a clock? It’s way past noon.” He crossed the grass and handed her the pizza. “Take this inside while I get the baby.”

She sniffed appreciatively. “Health food. What’s the occasion?”

Grinning, he jogged back to the truck and carried Laney inside where Molly was busy setting out plates and soda pop. A stream of afternoon sun shone through the double windows and warmed the kitchen with a golden glow. The scent of pizza made his belly grumble.

“It feels good to be here again,” he said. And it did. Funny, how this place had the feel of a family home even though Molly lived here alone.

“I’m glad to be back here myself,” Molly answered.

The fireplace lay dormant and all vestiges of the week without power were gone. Otherwise nothing had changed.

Two boxes, packed and ready for the UPS man, waited by the door.

“Business for me?” He perused the addresses, noted they were headed for an orphanage in Colombia. “How do you afford to do this so often?”

She opened a drawer, lifted two forks, saw him shake his head and pushed them back inside. “I buy a little out of each paycheck. Bargain hunt.”

“And do without things yourself?”

She lifted her shoulders. “A gift without sacrifice is not much of a gift.”

He was glad she thought so. Because he was going to ask her for a gift. And it would definitely require sacrifice on her part.

Molly came around the table and removed a blanket from Laney’s carrier, spread it on the floor, and held out her hands. “Hello, beautiful angel.”

Laney practically leaped into Molly’s arms. Joy, like a sunburst, went off inside Ethan as he watched the woman who had come to mean so much to him, kiss his child and settle her on the blanket with a colorful toy. It was a simple action, one that normally would draw no attention at all, but given Molly’s anxiety around his child, Ethan was ecstatic to see this much progress.

“I can’t believe she’s already sitting up.” As she pulled out a chair to sit down, Molly beamed at Laney. “Next thing you know, she’ll be crawling everywhere.”

“She’s already trying to.” Ethan joined her at the table. “And she gets furious because her bottom won’t follow her arms.”

With fond looks at the infant the two adults dug into the fragrant pizza.

“So,” Molly said as she peeled a chunk of melted mozzarella off the wax paper. “I thought you were running errands this afternoon. Why are you here, plying me with hundreds of my favorite fat grams?”

“I missed you.” That much was true. Being away from her all day was starting to be a problem. “Didn’t you miss me, too?”

She propped her elbows on the table, pizza slice drooping from one hand. “Hellooo. I saw you last night. Remember? Buttered popcorn and Junior Mints at Mena’s movie theater.”

“Seems longer than that.”

“Yeah.” She grew serious for a second, studied her pizza as if the black olives were fly specks. Ethan wondered what was going on inside that complicated head of hers.

“I actually do have an ulterior motive for being here,” he said, placing his half-eaten pizza on a plate. “Finish your food first.”

She paused in midbite. “I don’t like the sound of that.”

“No, you won’t like this conversation, but we have to have it. I talked to James today after church.”

The pizza slice plopped onto her plate. One hand reached reflexively for her throat. “My brother-in-law?”

“Yes. He told me something that might help.”

Her eyes grew as large as the flowered plate. “Help with what? Nothing can change the fact that my sister hates me, if that’s what you mean.”

“I don’t think she does, Molly. I think she’s angry at God and is afraid of admitting that so she blames you. Did you know she and James haven’t been able to conceive another child?”

She closed her eyes, stricken. Her small body seemed to draw into itself. “Oh, that’s awful.”

“I didn’t tell you to make you feel bad. I thought knowing would help you to understand that you aren’t the cause of her unhappiness.”

“Ethan, her son is dead and now she can’t have another child. That makes me feel ten times worse. Not better.”

“Look, Molly, you and Chloe have to resolve this issue. It’s killing you both.”

“I want to. More than anything. But she won’t let me.”

“Then take steps to change that. Start going to church again. Make her face you, and by doing so, face the problem.”

“I can’t.” Molly’s skin paled, and she pushed the pizza plate away. One hand stroked the column of her throat over and over again. “I wish I could, but I just can’t.”

Torn between exasperation and compassion, Ethan rounded the table and knelt beside her chair. He hated to see her upset. “Hey. It’s okay. I understand.”

“Do you?”

“Not completely,” he answered honestly. “But in a way I do. You feel guilty. And responsible. I know something about that kind of thing myself.”

Molly studied him for moment, and then her voice grew gentle. “You’re talking about Laney’s mother, aren’t you?”

His gut knotted. Would she think less of him if she knew the truth?

“Yeah, I am.”

His failure with Twila was nothing compared to losing a child, but the two situations related in a way. They both changed the directions of lives and caused a great deal of heartache. He’d wrestled with his own culpability enough to understand how difficult it could be to forgive oneself. In truth, he was still working on it.

Laney’s toy banged repeatedly against the floor while Ethan debated the wisdom of telling Molly about his past.

His partying days seemed like another life. Someone else’s life. Reliving that time, even in memory, pained and shamed him. But maybe sharing his own struggle would help Molly through hers.

Finally, when the silence between them grew long, Molly brought her hand to rest lightly, comfortingly next to his temple and said, “You can tell me anything, Ethan. I’ve told you plenty of painful things.”

But she had been innocent. He hadn’t been.

He drew in a strengthening breath and exhaled in one rushing gust. “I didn’t become a Christian until shortly before Laney was born.” He grasped her hand and pressed it against his cheek. “That’s not an excuse for bad behavior, but I want you to understand that Christ changed me.”

“Nobody’s life is perfect, Ethan. Even after we accept the Lord.”

“True, but I wanted you to know that I’ve changed. I’m not the kind of man I was back then.” He didn’t know how much to tell, what to leave out, so finally, he said, “In my family if a guy gets a girl pregnant, he marries her.”

To her credit, she didn’t pull away, and he understood that she must have long ago guessed this much about Laney’s birth. “Some people call that old-fashioned,” she said.

“Do you?”

She gazed down at him with gentle eyes. “I call it honorable.”

“Twila didn’t.”

“Did you love her?”

He stifled a smile. Leave it to Molly to go straight to the important stuff.

“I hope you won’t think less of me for this, but I doubt if I ever did love her. I never want Laney to know that. She’ll never know that. I want her to feel special and wanted every day of her life.”

“She will.” Molly glanced at the happily babbling baby. “She already does. But what about Twila? Did she love you?”

He shook his head and rose, pulling a chair around so that they sat knee to knee, facing one another.

“Not even close. She was furious when she found out she was pregnant. We had a huge fight.” He rubbed at the scar over his eye, remembering the ugliness. “She screamed and cried, said she wasn’t going to be saddled with a kid.”

“Sad.” They both looked at the beautiful child playing on the patchwork quilt. “She threw away the best thing that ever happened to her.”

“Laney? Or me?”

Molly turned her head, met his eyes. The corner of her mouth tilted. “Both.”

Liking the sound of that, Ethan allowed a smile but quickly sobered again. The subject was far too serious. “Twila didn’t agree, and if I hadn’t threatened her with every lawsuit known to man—some that don’t even exist—Laney would never have been born.”

“It must have been a very bad time.”

“The worst. But good, too. Getting into that predicament, having to fight for nine long, frightening months to save my child, made me examine my own life. I didn’t like what I discovered.”

“So you turned to God?”

“Eventually. One of my paramedic co-workers was a Christian. He helped me a lot during those months. I noticed a peace in him that I didn’t have. I wanted that. Needed it.” He propped an elbow on the table and rubbed at his chin. “Boy, did I need it.”

Molly took up a slice of pizza again, turned it around in her fingers and picked disinterestedly at an olive. “What happened to Twila?”

Her eyes flickered to his and then back to the pizza. He could tell she wasn’t thinking about food.

“The day after Laney was born she signed over all parental rights, told me I was the world’s biggest loser, and went back to her life without me or my baby.” He tapped a knuckle against his chin, readied himself for the wave of guilt that was sure to come. “She died in a car wreck five weeks later. Under the influence.”

Molly’s head snapped up. The pizza thudded to the tabletop. “Ethan!”

“Yeah. She’d been out with our old party gang. The same crowd I had been running with only a few months before.”

“You weren’t with her?”

“No.” He frowned, surprised at the question. Hadn’t he just told her that Twila had walked away from him and Laney without a backward glance? “Why would you think that?”

“The scar. A car accident. I just thought…”

He reached up, touched the long white line above his eye.

“No, not then.” But he could understand why she would think a car accident had caused such a long, ugly scar. “This was her reaction when I went to her apartment with a court order.”

“She cut you?” Molly’s eyes grew wide with horror. “On purpose?”

He tried to make a joke of it, though the memory of a knife blade slashing within inches of his eye was anything but funny. “Never make a woman mad when she’s slicing tomatoes.”

Molly didn’t see the humor. “That’s hideous. How could she do such a thing?”

“Twila had a lot problems I didn’t know anything about at the time. We hadn’t dated all that long.” Another fact that shamed him. He hadn’t really known her as a person, only as a beautiful face and body. “She wasn’t a terrible person. Just terribly…lost.”

“You did the best you could, Ethan.”

“Did I?”

“Under the circumstances, what else could you have done? You couldn’t let her abort Laney.”

“No. But I wonder if things would have been different if I had been a Christian then. Maybe I could have been a better influence. Maybe I could have helped her instead of making things worse.” He sighed, lifting his shoulders in a gesture of helplessness. “But by the time I had started to turn my life around, she was six months along with Laney and would no longer speak to me except to cuss and scream that I was ruining her life.”

He heard the regret in his voice and knew that Molly heard it, too. She took one of his hands in hers and rubbed a thumb across the calloused palm. Her need to comfort him brought a smile.

“You’re good for me.”

“How so?”

“I’ve been afraid to tell you all this. Afraid you’d think less of me.”

Molly returned the smile as she linked her fingers with his. “Everybody has regrets, but you’ve taken a bad situation and worked hard to make it right.”

“And that’s what I’m asking you to do, Molly.”

“I don’t understand.” Her face registered confusion.

“Come to the church league basketball game Tuesday night. Take a step toward reconciliation.”

She pulled her hand away. “I can’t. People at the church don’t want me there.”

“Sure they do.”

She shook her head. “No. They think I did something terrible. They whisper and stare.”

“You don’t have a problem with the Bible study group. What’s the difference?”

“Bible group is four other people. And my sister isn’t there to remind everyone of what happened.”

“According to Aunt Patsy you haven’t been to the chapel since Zack died. Naturally, people were whispering then, but, Molly, no one is talking about you now except to say they miss you.”

“Do they really say that?”

“Yeah. Lindsey Slater wants to invite you to Easter brunch. She told me so today.”

Fear, longing, indecision all flickered over her face. “I don’t know.”

Why wouldn’t she try? She wanted to. What made her back away every time the issue tried to come to a head?

“Tell you what.” He stood and held out both hands to pull her up with him. “Go with me to the ball game. If you feel uncomfortable at all at any point, I’ll bring you straight home. Immediately. Just say the word and we’re out of there.”

Her amber eyes clouded with indecision. She wanted to so badly, he was certain of it, but fear paralyzed her.

“Chloe hates sports. She won’t be there,” she said, more to herself than to him.

He grasped her chin and tilted her face upward, longing to wipe away the anxiety, to protect her against the demons that tormented her.

“Please. Try. If not for yourself, for me. I’ll take care of you.”

“Why are you so sweet to me?”

“Why?” He blinked at her, as bewildered by the question as he was by the obvious answer. “I think you know why.”

In the next instant, he lowered his lips to hers and kissed her.

She sighed against his mouth, and he tightened his embrace, drawing her as close as he dared. She was fragile, pure and special, and he cherished that about her.

When the kiss ended, she looked at him with eyes now shining instead of troubled. “You cheat.”

He leaned his forehead against hers and laughed softly. “Did it work?”

“Promise you’ll bring me right home if anything happens?”

He studied the smooth curve of her cheek, the tiny smattering of golden freckles across her nose, and the full tilt of her lips, troublingly aware that he wanted more than a basketball game from Molly McCreight.