Liz Flaherty - Every Time We Say Goodbye

She crossed her eyes at him. “It’s so little. I’ll bet it’s too young to be away from its mother. Where’s your baby basket, Caruso?” Arlie went into the laundry room, scrabbling through the cupboard above the dryer until she found the old Easter basket Caruso had slept in until she figured out how to climb onto Arlie’s bed.

“He’s cold.” Jack cuddled the puppy between his hands. “Do you want me to go get him some formula?”

“I made it when I found Caruso. It should be the same for a puppy, shouldn’t it?” Arlie scrounged out the cloth diapers she’d used to keep Caruso warm when she was a kitten. “I’m afraid I’m going to be a hoarder—I seem to keep way too many things.” She wrapped the diaper around a rice bag, microwaved it and tucked it into the basket.

“You have room.” Jack laid the whimpering puppy on the soft flannel bed and stroked his little fuzzy head with his index finger.

She foraged for the ingredients for homemade puppy formula. “Caruso was only a few weeks old when we found her,” she explained, opening a can of evaporated milk and pouring some of it into a glass measuring cup. “Jesse taught me to do this stuff. He’s a great vet.” She added thick corn syrup and an egg yolk and poured in some distilled water, then whipped the mixture with a whisk. “You want to feed him while I brush the cobwebs out of my hair and finish getting dinner on the table?”

“Sure.”

She handed him the cup of warmed formula along with an eyedropper and wondered for a heartbeat how Chris would have responded to that question. He was a good person—funny and smart and generous—but nurturing was so far down his list of attributes she thought it probably wasn’t there.

Of course, she didn’t think Chris had any secret children he hadn’t mentioned, either.

A short time later, they put the snoozing puppy in the basket on the brick hearth in the living room. Freshly showered—the cobwebs had made her feel sticky all over—and with her hair once more in a towel, Arlie lit the gas fire, petted a curious Caruso and joined Jack at the table.

“So, what are you doing at Llewellyn’s Lures?” she asked, laying a napkin across the lap of her favorite brown sweatpants.

“Getting ready to sell it.”

She looked up in dismay. “Really?”

He shrugged. “Neither Tucker nor I are interested in running it. Most of my business concerns are in Vermont and his are in Tennessee.”

“Llewellyn’s has been here for a hundred years.” Wasn’t it enough that he walked away from things so easily? Did he have to be so cavalier about the nearly sixty employees whose jobs he was selling off?

“And I hope it stays. I truly do,” he replied quickly. “We’ll do everything we can to keep the status quo, to pass Llewellyn’s on to someone who wants to keep it in business and run it the way it has been. After all, it’s a profitable company.” His expression didn’t change, but his eyes did. They looked distant. Sad. And conflicted. “The truth—for me—is that Charlie lives in Vermont most of the time. I don’t have custody. I don’t even see him nearly as much as I should. But he’s there, and I need to be there, too.”

She couldn’t argue that, though she’d have liked to. She’d have liked to throw things and shout at the top of her voice, What about our baby? She’d be fifteen now.

But he didn’t know. Other than Gianna and Holly and herself, the only ones who knew were the medical staff who had attended her the night of the accident, the ones who told her the trauma was too much for the fragile life she’d carried.

Gianna had wanted her to tell Jack about the pregnancy, but Arlie had refused. It had been over nearly as soon as it began, one more loss added to a night already too full of them. He’d had enough on his plate, she thought, losing his father and dealing with the knowledge that Victor Llewellyn had caused the accident. She would tell him later, she’d promised her stepmother, when life was calmer. He would share her grief and make it easier to bear.

But by the time “later” came, Jack was gone from her life. Only in her heart did she know the lost baby had been a girl. Only in her heart had she nursed her, dressed her and taught her to sing. Only in her heart had she named her Sarah Angelina after her grandmother and the woman who’d been the only mother who mattered.

Most of the time, it was easy. As the nurses in the hospital had promised, time had healed the wounds of the accident—even the emotional ones. Grief had settled and smoothed and memories had dimmed. Delivering babies had provided healing and joy beyond what she’d been able to imagine even when she was training in midwifery.

“You’re right.” She felt as though she was speaking from the end of a tunnel, and she cleared her throat. “You need to be with him.” She smiled, thinking of the boy with the beautiful eyes and shiny dark brown hair. “He’s a sweet kid. Ornery. More like Tuck than you, I think.”

“He is.” Jack sounded surprised. “He looks like his mother and biological father, and he definitely got his mother’s brain, but he does have a lot of Tuck in him.”

Arlie frowned, not understanding. “Is he adopted?”

“Not exactly.” He gestured with his spoon. “This is really good.”

“Thank you.” Arlie was glad he liked the chili, but wouldn’t be diverted. “Would you want to explain ‘not exactly’? I don’t remember the term from my nursing or midwifery classes.”

“Tracy was my study partner at Notre Dame from the beginning of freshman year. We dated some,” he said. “Kind of like you in high school, she was good at things I wasn’t and I needed all the help I could get. Her parents lived right there in South Bend—still do—but she lived in the dorm because she had an unbelievable course load. She also had an ex-boyfriend her parents hated. He drank, doped and gambled. When Tracy came up pregnant, she found out he had a wife at home.”

“Oh, man.” Arlie shook her head and offered him a half smile. “Her folks were upset?”

“She was afraid to tell them. Not that they were bad parents or mean or any of that, but they were older and very conservative. Bottom line was, she didn’t want to hurt them. An abortion wasn’t even a consideration. She was out of her mind with not knowing what to do. One night, it was really late and she still wasn’t in from the library, which wasn’t like her at all. I went looking and found her standing on the bridge over the St. Joe River. She swore she wasn’t going to jump or do anything stupid, but she was feeling pretty desperate.” He shrugged. “Scared the bejesus out of me.”

It would have. His mother had taken her own life when he was a toddler. He had no memory of her, but Arlie knew Janice Taylor’s mental illness haunted him—it always had.

“What did you do?”

“We talked about it. She was just so scared, and, you know—” He stopped for a moment, taking a drink and looking past her into the kitchen. She wondered where he’d gone, what memory was adding to the sadness in his eyes.

He set down his glass and took another bit of chili. “I felt like my life was a waste anyway. I’d survived the accident with no visible scars. I’d walked away from you. I’d even walked away from Tucker. I hated that my father went through life tossing other people’s pain around like so many dry leaves, and yet I’d done the same thing. I thought if I helped her, it wouldn’t cost me anything and maybe it would mean I wasn’t a complete waste of space. So I offered to marry her and take care of her until the baby came. She wouldn’t have to come clean with her parents and it wouldn’t be a shock if a marriage between an eighteen-year-old genius and a nineteen-year-old loser didn’t work out.”