Susan Mallery - Lip Service

“Fiddle says you’re getting more medals. She says you’ve saved our country.”

He glanced at the older woman. “I had help,” he said dryly.

“But you’re very brave. You’re a hero.”

He frowned. “I’m not a hero.”

Erin’s eyes widened. “But you are. Everyone knows that.”

He started to argue, then shrugged. Let the kid think what she wanted. Life would teach her hard lessons soon enough.

Fidela slid a plate of pancakes in front of each of them.

Erin picked up her fork. “I told Mom there would be pancakes, but she didn’t want to get up. She said she was tired.”

He wondered if Skye hadn’t slept well. Had she been haunted, as he had? Had she relived their time together? Had his harsh words wounded her?

He ignored any stirrings of guilt, telling himself she deserved what she got.

The pancakes were better than he remembered. He’d finished three when Erin asked, “Can you ride a horse without your leg? I hope you can because then we could go riding together. Does it hurt? You have a new leg, right? Fiddle told me about it. Can I see?”

Mitch froze, not sure what to say. No one outside the hospital and rehab center had been so open in discussing the amputation. He wasn’t sure if he appreciated Erin’s attitude or if he wanted her to shut up.

Fidela walked over and touched Erin’s shoulder. “Maybe less questions on the first day.”

Erin sighed. “I talk too much. Everyone tells me that. Sometimes I don’t want to talk about stuff, either.”

“We can talk about it later,” Mitch said, surprising himself.

Erin brightened. “Okay. And it’s my birthday soon. I’m having a party. You can come. You don’t even have to bring a present. There’s cake. You like cake, don’t you?”

A kid’s birthday party? “I, ah-”

“It’s at my house, which is right next door. You can find it easy.” She looked hopeful.

He found himself not wanting to hurt her feelings, but there was no way he wanted to go. “Erin, I-”

“I’m going to be eight and that’s a big deal. Mom keeps telling me that. Eight means I’m getting big and everything.”

She might have kept talking, but he wasn’t sure. The words became a hum that buzzed in the back of his mind.

Eight? Erin was turning eight?

The math was easy. Beyond easy. He knew the exact date of the last time he and Skye had made love. He knew when and where and how they’d held on to each other. They’d been planning on getting married. Laughter had shared space with the moans and cries. There had been so much anticipation.

He looked at Erin, studying the shape of her mouth, the way she held her head. He saw it in her fingers and her movements.

The pancakes he’d eaten sat in his stomach like a rock. He felt both sick and stunned. Reality stared back at him in the form of a nearly eight-year-old girl.

Erin was his. Skye’d had his child and hadn’t bothered to tell him.

S KYE FINISHEDher speech to the women’s group in Austin. She’d started with a few funny stories and had ended with a couple of case studies about specific children to bring the point home. In the middle, she’d carefully layered in the painful statistics about the over twelve million children who lived in food-insecure households. A statistic her foundation wanted to change.

“I have a few minutes for questions,” she said from behind the podium.

One young woman in a red power suit stood. “Why did you pick this issue? You’re a Titan. You probably never even knew anyone who went to bed hungry.”

Skye had been asked this before and it always annoyed her. Did she have to have cancer to want to donate to that cause? She’d never been in a natural disaster, either. Did that mean the Red Cross was out of luck?

Then she reminded herself of the greater good, that the person asking the question was probably curious. Cynical, but curious.

“When my daughter was a year old,” Skye began, “she fell down the stairs and hit her head on a table. There was blood everywhere and being a good mother, I completely panicked.”

The women in the audience laughed.

Skye leaned forward. “We went to the emergency room where she was treated. While we were waiting to fill out the insurance info, I bought a box of animal crackers in the vending machine. A girl about seven or eight walked over and asked me if I was going to eat them.”

The audience faded and Skye was back to that moment in the emergency waiting room. The girl had been blond and painfully thin. Her clothes hung on her.

“I gave her the crackers and asked who she was with. She said her mother had been brought in. They lived on the street and she hadn’t eaten in three days. I asked my sister to take my daughter home and I took the girl to the cafeteria for dinner. When the social worker arrived, she wasn’t surprised by the girl’s condition. It happens far too often, in neighborhoods very close to where we live.”

Skye drew in a breath. “I went home and took care of my daughter but I couldn’t forget about that other little girl. I called the social worker and made an appointment. I wanted to talk about being a foster parent. I knew I had to do something to make a difference. But when I got to the appointment, the woman was tired and busy and told me she didn’t have any time for rich people who wanted to play at making a difference. I was a Titan. Why didn’t I do something that mattered?”

She shrugged. “I was angry and insulted, but I also thought she might be right. I had an inheritance from my mother, which became the seed money for the foundation. We feed over a million children a year. When I say feed, I don’t mean a lunch here or a Christmas dinner there. We provide one to three meals a day to over a million children right here, in this country. Our goal is to make sure no child ever goes hungry again. It’s ambitious but I believe it can be done. We can make a difference, one box of animal crackers at a time.”

She leaned toward the microphone. “What are you doing to make a difference?”

The woman in the red power suit sat down.

Questions continued for a few minutes. Afterward, Skye chatted with several of the women, took a few checks for contributions before driving to the airport where she caught the shuttle to Dallas. An hour later, she was back in at the foundation.

“You did good,” Elsa, her secretary, said as Skye walked into her office. “We’ve already had three calls from people wanting to be silver-level sponsors. I’m sending out packages today.”

Skye passed over the checks. “We’re growing,” she said. “That’s what we want. The more people interested in the problem, the more chance we have to fix it.” She shrugged out of her suit jacket and kicked off her heels. Most days she did the business casual thing, but when she was speaking, she wanted to look the part. “What did I miss?”

“Glenna wants to see you,” Elsa said. “She says it’s important. I cleared you for the next hour. Then you have a phone interview with the LA Times .”

While the foundation had an excellent PR department, nothing seemed quite so interesting to the press as speaking to an actual Titan. When she wanted to complain about the drain on her time, Skye reminded herself that she was on a mission. So what if she was inconvenienced or tired or pulled in too many directions? She was feeding hungry children. What could matter more?

“Do we have prep answers?” Skye asked.

Elsa produced a folder that would contain all the current statistics on hunger in America, information on how the foundation squeezed every penny until it screamed for mercy, their success at fund-raising and a list of ways the average person could make a difference.