Sophie Littlefield - A Bad Day for Sorry

“Oh, mama,” Noelle said. “You look just awful. You had me so scared. When the sheriff called me I—”

“Sheriff Jones?”

“Yes, he called this morning when I was getting ready to go to the shop. He said you were trying to rescue a kidnapped baby and got all shot up.”

“Did they find him?” Stella asked quickly. “The baby?”

Noelle’s pretty, worried face flashed confusion and she shook her head. “There wasn’t any baby, Mama. Nobody found anything like that, the sheriff said. He seemed mighty concerned about that part.”

Stella’s heart, which had been thrumming along with renewed vigor to see Noelle, gave a lurch. So: after all this, poor Tucker was still missing.

They’d failed.

If it hadn’t been for her daughter, warm and real and close enough to touch, Stella might have rolled over and prayed her way back to numb unconscious. Instead, she forced a ghost of a smile onto her lips and told a mother’s lie: “That’s all right, sweetheart.”

“Sheriff offered to send somebody over to get me,” Noelle said, “but I just jumped in the car and came straight here. Mama, I been here for hours, waitin’ on you to wake up. And now all’s I did was go get a cup of coffee, and I wasn’t gone but a minute and look at you, wakin’ up when I was out of the room.”

This brought a fresh onslaught of tears, and Stella reached to brush them off Noelle’s cheek. Her daughter’s skin was soft and creamy, as beautiful as it had always been, and Stella let her fingers linger there, her heart swelling with the knowledge that one thing she’d done, anyway, had turned out better than she ever could have dreamed.

“How long have I been out, anyway?” she asked. It was hard to tell if the light in the room signaled morning or afternoon. “What time is it?”

“It’s almost three. They took you to surgery as soon as they got you in here, but time I got over here, you were in recovery.”

Stella thought of the thick dressing on her stomach, the pain in her shoulder. “How bad am I?” she asked.

“Oh, Mama, they said you were just incredibly lucky,” Noelle exclaimed. “It was small-caliber bullets, and the one in your shoulder just chipped your clavicle. The bullet came out the other side, so they didn’t have to hunt for it, but they had to dig around in there for the little bone pieces. But they did it arther—arther—”

“Arthroscopically?”

“Right, I just can’t seem to get that out. So you just got a few stitches there. And the one in your stomach, why, all’s it did was kind of bounce off your spleen, is what the doctor told me. They had to take out the bullet and repair some blood vessels, but they say your spleen’ll fix itself right back up. You’re just going to be mighty tender there for a while.”

“Yeah, I can tell,” Stella said, grimacing. “Do I have to stay here much longer?”

“Just a few days, Mama, and then I’m going to take you home and take care of you and make sure you don’t go jumping up trying to do too much before the doctor says it’s okay.”

Noelle’s declaration was so lovely and so unexpected that Stella couldn’t think of any kind of response. Noelle coming home, even if it was just for a while, was a gift she’d stopped hoping for long ago.

“That’s some hairdo you got there, baby girl,” she said instead.

The last time she’d seen Noelle, at the Sawyer county fair last September, her daughter had a yellow-blond bob with long pieces coming down past her chin and the back trimmed up short to the nape of her neck. In Stella’s view, her daughter would be gorgeous even shaved bald, but Noelle did manage to come up with unusual things to do to her hair.

That day at the fair, Stella stopped in the middle of the throng of people, unable to move forward, her friend Dotty Edwards chattering on about how she’d been robbed in the jam competition, and Noelle had turned in the bright early autumn sun and caught sight of her mother. For a fraction of a second the two women had stared at each other across the crowd of fairgoers, amid the screeches from the midway and the sweet-hay smell from the animal barns, and then Noelle had dashed off , looking stricken, and Stella had made her excuses to Dotty and gone home with a headache.

All those months ago, months that had gone by without seeing her daughter, without talking to her, without having a chance to hug her and hold her. The loss of it seized up in Stella’s throat, and she realized that no matter what, she was going to do whatever it took to stay in her girl’s life.

Noelle touched the spiky top of her head self-consciously. “I got an award, Mama,” she said shyly. “I did this competition up in Kansas City, with this new amino glycine color process? And I got the Judge’s Choice. I mean, it didn’t come with any cash or anything, but I got two hundred dollars in product and my picture’s going to be in Midwest Salon magazine.”

“Oh, that’s wonderful, sweetie,” Stella said, pride swelling up in her battered chest. “Could I—when it comes out—do you think I could have a copy?”

The leaky tears Noelle had already produced were nothing compared to the torrent she unleashed then. Her face crumpled, and she buried it into the crook of Stella’s elbow and sobbed.

“Mama… I’ve been so terrible to you… and I just missed you so much and I don’t know why I was that way… just everything that happened, you know, and I—I—”

She finally pulled away, her face damp and splotchy and smeared with mascara, and went for the tissue box and snuffled and wiped at herself until she had most of her composure back. Stella waited patiently, choking back a tear or two herself.

“I’m sorry, Noelle,” she said. “You haven’t had an easy go of it. And I haven’t been, you know, Mother of the Year.”

Noelle shook her head. “Don’t, Mama. Let’s not even talk about the past, okay? It’s just—I mean…”

Stella reached for the girl’s hand and squeezed it. Noelle picked at the blanket for a minute, frowning.

“Mama,” she said. “I’m not seeing Gerald anymore. That guy, you know, my boyfriend.”

Relief and surprise flooded Stella, but she was careful not to react. She’d made the mistake of throwing in her two cents a few times too often to risk doing it now.

“Are you all right with that, sugar?” she asked.

Noelle snorted in disgust. “More than okay. Just—I just wanted you to know. I mean, I don’t know if I’m even going to date at all anymore, you know? It’s all so…”

She made a helpless gesture and glanced at her mother tentatively. Stella’s heart contracted. She knew all too well how it felt when you realized that the man who shared your bed wasn’t who you thought he was, how it felt when your hopes and illusions slowly shriveled and died. All that trust, all that hard work going into the hopeless project of making a broken relationship keep rolling along on sprung wheels.

Rejecting the whole mess might be a sign of sanity. But still, the thought of Noelle, barely a grown woman, shutting herself off from love hurt Stella to the core.

“Maybe don’t give up completely,” she suggested.

“Oh! I forgot. The sheriff ’s out in the waiting room, Mama. He wanted me to come get him the minute you woke up.”

“He is?”

“Yeah, he’s been here almost the whole time. He had to go on some call or something, and he’s been in to see that other girl a bunch of times, but—”

“Wait,” Stella said, grabbing Noelle’s arm. “What other girl?”

“That got shot with you, you know, that Lardner girl—”

“Chrissy’s alive?” Stella’s heart did a somersault, her throat dry. She didn’t dare hope, but—