When he answered the door the following morning, Wes’s eyes were tired and red and filled with an undisguised contempt Laney feared she would always see there. His brown hair was tousled, as if he hadn’t yet thought to brush it, and his shirttail hung out over his jeans. Without greeting her, he stepped back and let her into the quiet house.
Laney smoothed her French braid with a trembling hand and stepped inside. Amy sat on the couch, staring down at her hands clasped in her lap like a little girl about to be taken to reform school for having done nothing wrong.
“Hi, Amy,” she said cautiously.
Amy didn’t answer.
Laney turned back to Wes. “Please,” she mouthed, pleading for him to act civil, “for Amy’s sake.”
Wes took a deep breath and looked at his daughter. He wet his lips, as if he were about to speak, but nothing came out. After another visual entreaty from Laney, he sat down beside Amy.
“Your hair looks nice,” he told Laney in a poor attempt at sounding friendly. “Maybe you can do that to Amy’s hair. I’m not too good with things like that.”
“Of course I can do hers,” Laney said.
When Amy didn’t respond, Laney returned her troubled eyes to Wes. Even through his dislike she saw his vulnerability, his plea for her to tread lightly, and the silent repetition of his wish of weeks ago: I hope you’re a decent person. She reached out and touched his arm to reassure him. Amazingly he didn’t pull away, and he didn’t tense up. And for a fleeting moment Laney thought she would rather do anything in the world than hurt him.
“Will …” Her voice caught, and she cleared her throat and tried again. “Will you be coming for supper?”
Amy looked up at that, her big eyes pleading.
“Yes, I’ll come,” he said finally. Then, forcing a smile, he said, “I never miss a good home-cooked meal.”
Laney arranged her smile so that Amy wouldn’t see the turmoil within her. “Amy, did you pack your bathing suit?”
The child shook her head negatively.
“She doesn’t have one,” Wes said. “She’s outgrown last year’s, and we haven’t gotten her another one.”
“No problem,” Laney said. “We’ll go shopping and buy you one. I’ve always wanted to take you shopping.”
Amy shrugged indifferently.
“Well, we’d better get going,” Laney said. “Your dad probably has a lot of things to do.”
“Yeah,” he said miserably.
Amy stood up and got her small overnight case, then followed Laney to the front door. Wes walked behind them and opened the door. Amy headed for the car before Laney was out of the house.
Laney turned back to Wes, his arm propped on the doorjamb as he stared wistfully after Amy, his eyes wide and misty.
“You should get some sleep,” Laney told him quietly. “She’ll be fine.”
His throat convulsed, and he nodded.
“Supper’s at six,” she added.
He couldn’t answer. Somehow, Laney understood why. Turning, she followed her daughter to the car, hoping that things would take a turn for the better.
But they didn’t. The shopping spree proved to be disastrous. Amy, who still refused to speak to her, showed no preference for anything and even declined to try on a swimming suit. Taking a guess at her size, Laney took a chance and bought one anyway.
Before they left the mall, which was busy with chattering Saturday shoppers, Laney led Amy to Baskin-Robbins for ice cream. But Amy found nothing to interest her. Even McDonald’s had no appeal to the child, so Laney finally gave up and took Amy home.
The room would do it, she thought. When Amy saw that bedroom she would flip. It was every little girl’s dream, and it had been custom decorated just for Amy. But when she led Amy through the big house and to her room, Amy didn’t bat an eye.
“It was the way I wanted my room to look when I was little,” Laney said. “I thought you would like it too.”
Nothing.
“Well … you can get used to it later. What do you say we have sandwiches out by the pool?”
With a weary lift of her shoulders, Amy indicated she didn’t care.
The sandwiches went untouched, and though Laney had convinced Amy to put on her new swimming suit, which proved to be a little tight, she couldn’t get Amy to even stick her foot in the water. Finally giving up trying to pretend that they were getting along well, Laney pulled a chair up to face Amy. Amy seemed preoccupied with the hedges surrounding the yard.
“Amy, I know this is hard for you. Finding out I’m your mother and—”
“My mother died,” the girl interrupted.
Laney paused. A warm breeze flitted through Amy’s hair, and a strand reached across her lips. Laney reached out to push it back, but Amy recoiled from her touch. Laney’s hand hovered in the air between them, and she told herself not to cry. Amy wasn’t trying to hurt her. She was just trying to protect herself the best way she knew how. Controlling the ache of tears behind her eyes, Laney tried again. “I know how you feel. Believe it or not, I do. I lost my mom when I was nine. And things were never the same after that.”
She got no reaction, but she went on. “Amy, I’m not trying to take the place of your mother or your father. It’s just that I love you, too, and I want to know you. I want to be your friend.”
“What time is it?” Amy asked coldly.
Failure, Laney thought. She was failing at the only thing that was important to her. Laney made herself breathe. “It’s about four-thirty. Why?”
“I wish my daddy was here.”
Laney accepted the child’s verbal blow without letting the pain show on her face. “He isn’t coming until six. But we could go ahead and start supper. I was going to make hamburgers and French fries. If you want, you can make the patties.”
“No, thank you,” Amy whispered.
A lump the size of her heart rose in Laney’s throat, not to be swallowed down. “All right.” She cleared her throat, but her voice still vibrated. “Let’s go inside, then, and you can change back into your clothes and watch TV while I cook. I’ve been taping Sesame Street for the last few days. We could put the tape in.”
“I’m too big for Sesame Street,” Amy said indignantly.
The last remnants of Laney’s confidence dissolved. “We’ll find something else, then.”
Quietly she led Amy back into the house and flipped around for something on the television. When she drew no response from Amy, she withdrew to the kitchen.
She collapsed against the refrigerator as tears rolled down her cheeks. It’s wrong, she thought miserably. All wrong. She had ruined everything! Laney ground her fist against her mouth to muffle her sobs. It wasn’t working. Amy hated her. What was she going to do?
Methodically, she started to make the patties, pounding them into circles. She didn’t even know if Amy liked hamburgers. When she’d planned it she’d been certain that every child liked them. But Amy’s reaction had been so … indifferent.
Slapping a patty onto the wax paper, she wiped at her tears with the back of her hand. Amy’s reaction to everything had been that way. Especially to her. Laney knew they couldn’t go on this way. But today Amy was stronger than she was.
She had originally intended to cook the hamburgers on the grill, but that was when she’d planned for Amy to be enjoying herself in the pool. Fool of fools, she had even had visions of the three of them tossing a Frisbee while the smell of grilled burgers wafted across the yard. Now she set out a frying pan and dropped the patties in. When they and the French fries were under control, she went back to the den.
Amy was wiping her eyes, as if her tears were a weakness she needed desperately to hide. With a tiny sniffle, she turned her face away from Laney.
It was no use, Laney told herself. All the child wanted was to go home. Maybe sending her home would finally mean doing something right. Maybe they could try again tomorrow.
Stooping down in front of her, Laney set her hands on her daughter’s knees. “Amy, I’m not going to make you stay here tonight if you don’t want to. When your dad comes, you can go home with him if you want.”
Amy wiped her eyes with the heels of her hand. “OK,” she whispered.
OK, Laney thought. The least hostile word Amy had uttered all day. She had finally given Amy something she wanted.
Pulling herself together, she went back to the kitchen. The fries were popping, the burgers were sizzling, but Laney only stared at them. There was no need to slice tomatoes, wash lettuce, or chop onions. She had the dismal feeling that none of it would be eaten.
The doorbell rang, and she looked at her watch. It was a quarter to six, but she knew it was Wes, who had probably counted the minutes until he could see his daughter and make sure she was all right. If only she could open the door and let him see Amy giggling and playing, dragging him to her room to show him how beautiful it was, coaxing him into taking a swim. Instead, she would have to let him see that he’d been right all along.
Before Laney made it to the door, Amy had let her father in and had thrown her arms around his neck. She was clinging to him as if she couldn’t bear the thought of him letting her go. His eyes met Laney’s with alarm at the desperate embrace, but she had no reassurance to offer him.
“Daddy, can we go home?”
“Well, honey—”
“It’s OK,” Laney cut in, her lips trembling. “I told her that she could leave when you got here. She hasn’t eaten all day, and she’s hardly said anything …” Her voice trailed off, and she turned her face away. “I have supper ready, but if she doesn’t want to—”
“I want to go home,” Amy whispered.
Wes gave Laney a look that was half apology, half thanks. “She didn’t sleep very well last night,” he offered.
“None of us did,” Laney said.
“No.” Wes noted the red rims of Laney’s eyes for the first time. He had been trying to see her as some shrew who manipulated life to make it suit her. What he saw now was a broken woman trying desperately to hold herself together until he left, the way he had done for her this morning. Love was a miserable thing, he thought suddenly. Their love for a child was destroying them, little by little. And it was destroying Amy.
Laney handed him Amy’s overnight case, and tears brimmed in her eyes. “We’ll try again, maybe tomorrow, huh, Amy?” she asked in a quivering voice.
Amy just buried her face in her father’s neck.
Wes backed out of the doorway. “We’ll talk after I get her settled down,” he promised. “I’ll call and we’ll talk.” There has to be a better way, his eyes said.
“I’ll be here,” she managed to say.
And as she watched him carry Amy to the car, she thought how ironic her last remark had been. Where else on earth would she go? She had no one except that little girl who had shattered her dreams in one day.
But as devastated as she was, Laney was still determined to make things work out. She was not going to say good-bye to her daughter again.
How were they all going to get through this? Wes asked himself later that night. Amy had cried her heart out all the way home, and she had collapsed in exhaustion before she’d even had a chance to eat.
It was just like a year ago when Patrice had died. He had been beside himself with his own grief, and yet his worry for Amy had forced him to keep it all in check. Why couldn’t he keep her from hurting? Why couldn’t he shelter her from more pain? What kind of father was he?
And what kind of woman was Laney? Couldn’t she see what this was doing to Amy? How could she honestly suggest that they try again the next day?
He had promised to call. But what in the world would he say? Tomorrow was too soon. Next year was too soon. Never was too soon.
He sat on the couch and leaned his throbbing head back. The moment his eyes closed he was haunted with the image of a beautiful young woman with hair the color of raven’s wings and hurting black eyes that begged for a chance. Life had been rough on her. But it had been rough on him too.
There were two kinds of people in this world, he had decided when Patrice first learned about her cancer. The ones who pranced through with hangnails and shallow dreams and the ones, like him, who dragged themselves through—praying for endurance, while sometimes wishing that they weren’t strong enough to endure. Maybe then God would stop testing his faith.
What could he do? Run away? That in itself was a form of survival. But if he did that, uprooted Amy from the only home she’d ever known, wasn’t he, in effect, doing the same thing that he had cursed Laney for? Wouldn’t he be acting selfishly, cruelly? Wouldn’t it instill a further sense of insecurity in his daughter?
And what would it do to Laney?
“I don’t care what it does to her,” he mumbled aloud. She was his last consideration. And yet …
The doorbell rang, and Wes looked at the front door grudgingly. So she couldn’t wait for the phone call, he thought. She had to badger him some more in person.
His temper rose like mercury in a thermometer. Maybe it was time he spelled it out to her once and for all, he thought. Maybe he should explain exactly how she was destroying his and his daughter’s lives. Maybe he could convince her that forcing Amy to acknowledge her could be psychologically devastating.
He opened the door, leaned against it, and stared down coldly at the woman who was ruining his life. But the fear shimmering in her eyes was the last offensive he expected, and the sad way she slumped against the casing pulled at every instinct to comfort that he possessed. That instinct made him angry, more at himself than at her. Silently, he stepped back from the door and let her in.
Laney had cried for hours after they left, realizing the hopelessness of what she was trying to do. When she had finally wept to the point of being physically ill, she had taken a shower and tried to calm herself down. She was not going to give up her daughter again. Maybe the plan they had worked out wasn’t the best way. But there had to be other ways. And she was going to figure them out.
It had finally come to her, miraculously renewing that fragile bubble of hope that should have deflated long ago. She had dressed carefully, set ice cubes on her eyes to make the swelling go down, and applied her makeup. And then she had gone to see Wes.
He stood staring at her in the tiny foyer, his tired, angry eyes boring into her, telling her without words that she was the last person who was welcome in this house.
“I told you I’d call you,” he said, abandoning the door and heading for the kitchen.
“I wanted to talk to you in person,” she replied, following behind him. “Where’s Amy?”
“In bed,” he said. “She cried herself to sleep.” He got a sponge and wiped the counters that were sticky from the dinner that had gone uneaten, then stared down at it with the slumped disillusionment of a man whose world teetered on the edge of a cliff.
“I’m not surprised,” Laney said. “She was miserable.”
He gave a mirthless laugh at her admission.
“What did you expect?” he asked, propping a shoulder against the wall as he watched her. “Did you think she’d just bubble over with joy that she was going to be living in two different places, one with a woman who popped into her life only a few months ago? A woman who used her money to make the court system disrupt her life?”
Laney tried to shield herself against the blows. “I don’t know what I expected.”
“I’ll tell you what you expected.” His voice was gravelly, its control only accenting the emotion that lurked beneath the surface. “You expected me to be such a lousy father that Amy would jump at the chance to have some real parenting for a change.”
“I didn’t think that,” she said, finally aware that Wes was probably much more capable than she was.
He sighed and tossed the damp rag on the counter. “You told me a few weeks ago that your father wasn’t equipped to raise a little girl. You thought I was—no, you thought all men were just like your father, that we couldn’t feel and love and hurt. You thought a little girl couldn’t really be happy being raised by a man because you were so miserable as a child. That’s the whole reason for the lawsuit.”
Laney swallowed back a new well of tears. “Wes, that’s not true.”
His eyes were brightening with his angry indictments, and he straightened and stepped tauntingly closer. “And since you were so miserable, you came back here determined to force everyone to make it up to you. You thought you could do it by taking Amy and manipulating her to be with you, so you could change things and make them right. You thought—”
“I thought wrong!” she exclaimed in a stage whisper. Her body wavered with the strength of her defenses, and she brought her glistening eyes to Wes’s. “I was wrong. It can’t really work that way.”
For the first time since she’d walked in, Wes’s mind went blank. For the love of God, he hadn’t expected her to admit it. Was she giving up and going on her way, just like that? “You admit it?”
“Yes,” she replied, closing her eyes against the tears. “I admit it. I admit it.”
The defeated way she uttered the words reminded him of a wounded child cowering and pleading not to be hurt anymore. Suddenly he felt very small.
He stood looking down at her pained face, damming the surge of sympathy that rose inside him.
“Then … you don’t plan to see her anymore?” he ventured. “You’re giving up on this?”
Her chin came up, and she shook her head. “No, Wes. I’m not giving up. But I need your help.”
“My help?” he asked, astounded.
“Yes,” she said. “I need some ideas. Some support. You know Amy better than I do. What will make her open up? What will get through to her?”
He sank down onto the couch with a dry, mirthless laugh and stared incredulously at her. “You’re kidding. You’re really asking me to help you take her away from me?”
“That’s not what I’m doing! I’m her mother, Wes, and the court said that we had a right to get to know each other. I’m asking you to make it easier for her! Have I asked for anything unreasonable? All I want is to keep her while you’re at work, instead of some baby-sitter who doesn’t have any stake in this. I want to take her shopping and fix her hair and teach her to cook … I want to give her the things that Patrice can’t give her anymore. All I’m asking is for you, as her father, to help.” “She doesn’t want to be with you, Laney. I can’t force her to want that.”
“She liked me before she knew who I was,” Laney pointed out. “It’s not me she hates. It’s that feeling that I’m going to take her away from you. Maybe if you came, too, when I have her for the weekend, she wouldn’t feel like we were enemies. She’d feel more secure.”
He couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You’re out of your mind. You take me to court and force me to share my daughter with you, and then you ask me to come along and give you moral support while you play mom with her?”
“Don’t you see, Wes? She feels disloyal to Patrice and to you if she likes me. You have to make her understand that it’s not a betrayal. I’m adding something to her life, not taking it away. If you could just pretend you didn’t hate me …”
“I don’t hate you.”
“Of course you do.” She wiped at the tears on her face. “Maybe I would hate me, too, if I were in your shoes. But that’s because you don’t understand. If I thought for a minute that Amy would be better off without me, I’d leave town and never come back. But in my heart I know all that I can give her, Wes.”
Wes’s eyes settled on a spot on the wall as he tried not to feel the truth in what she was saying. She wasn’t demanding to rip Amy out of her home, uproot her, and force her to get used to the joint custody arrangement. She really was thinking of the child. Maybe more than he was.
“If I say no?”
She looked even more crushed than before. “Then … then it only hurts Amy. Her confusion, her worry … it won’t be relieved. She’ll stay in pain.”
“And you think that our playing this as a team will end her pain?”
“I think it’ll help.”
He set his elbows on his knees and stared down at the floor between his feet. “I don’t want to spend time with you, Laney. I don’t want to pretend we’re pals. I don’t want my daughter to like you.”
“I know you don’t,” she whispered. “But will you do it anyway? You might find out that I’m not the monster you think I am.”
He looked up at her again and thought that he had never considered her a monster. She was pretty and sad and even when he was most angry with her, he’d never been able to work up enough contempt against her to hate her. A big part of him understood why she was doing what she was doing.
It just didn’t make it easier.
“All right,” he said finally. “Tomorrow. We’ll hang out like we’re great friends, and I’ll put on an Oscar-winning performance. But I have one condition.”
“What?”
“I want to take her to church first.”
She hesitated for a moment. “Why church?”
“Because I want my daughter in church on Sundays.”
The idea seemed to disturb her. “Well, I don’t think I would feel comfortable going to your church. Your friends all probably know about the lawsuit. The idea of sitting there with people judging me doesn’t really appeal to me at all.”
“Then I’ll take her alone, and we’ll come to your house afterward.”
“It’s not that I don’t want to go, you understand. I mean, I don’t have anything against church. I haven’t been in years … My father didn’t worship anything that didn’t first worship him. But I’m glad you take Amy. The values they learn there are good. I realize that.”
“It’s not about values to us. It’s about worship. Amy doesn’t like to miss it.”
“OK, then,” she said. “I’ll cook lunch. You can come over afterward. We can swim, go to the park, maybe take in a movie …”
“All in one afternoon?” he asked.
She swallowed. “I have a lot of catching up to do, Wes.” He followed her to the door and watched as she pulled out of his driveway. Tomorrow they would be pals, he thought. Or they would pretend to. Was it the right thing, or was he just selling out?
Lord, I don’t want to be her friend.
But that wasn’t an option, he realized. He had to be her friend. Amy needed him to. And maybe, deep in his heart, he needed it as well.