Linda Lael - Ragged Rainbows

The script. If Shay hadn’t had a pounding headache, she would have laughed. “I say my line and then read off this week’s special used-car deals. That isn’t too tough, Richard.”

“I thought we might have a rehearsal tonight.”

Shay shook her head. “No chance. My mother is in bad shape and I have to go straight to the convalescent home as soon as I leave here.”

“After that—”

“My son is leaving on a camping trip with his uncle, Richard, and he’ll be gone a month. I want to spend the evening with him.”

“Shay—”

Now Shay held up her hands. “No more, Richard. You and Marvin insisted that I take this assignment and I agreed. But it will be done on my terms or not at all.”

A look of annoyance flickered behind Richard’s glasses. “Temperament rears its ugly head. I was mistaken about you, Shay. You’re more like your mother than I thought.”

The telephone began to jangle, and Ivy wasn’t out front to screen the calls. Shay dismissed Richard with a hurried wave of one hand and snapped “Hello?”

A customer began listing, in irate and very voluble terms, all the things that were wrong with the used car he’d bought the week before. While Shay tried to address the complaint, the other lines on her telephone lit up, all blinking at once.

It was nearly seven o’clock when Shay finally got home, and she had such a headache that she gave Hank an emergency TV dinner for supper, swallowed two aspirin and collapsed into bed.

Bright and early on Saturday morning, Garrett and his family arrived in a motor home more luxuriously appointed than many houses. While Maggie stayed behind with her own children and Hank, Shay and Garrett drove to Seaview to visit Rosamond.

Because the doll had been recovered, Rosamond was no longer curled up in her bed weeping piteously for her “baby.” Still, Garrett’s shock at seeing a woman he undoubtedly remembered as glamorous and flippant staring vacantly off into space showed in his darkly handsome face and the widening of his steel-gray eyes.

“My God,” he whispered.

Rosamond lifted her chin—she was sitting, as always, in the chair beside the window, the rag doll in her lap—at the sound of his voice. Her once-magical violet eyes widened and she surprised both her visitors by muttering, “Riley?”

Shay sank back against the wall beside the door. “No, Mother. This is—”

Garrett silenced her with a gesture of one hand, approached Rosamond and crouched before her chair. Shay realized then how much he actually resembled his father, the Riley Thompson Rosamond would remember and recognize. He stretched to kiss a faded alabaster forehead and smiled. “Hello, Roz,” he said.

The bewildered joy in Rosamond’s face made Shay ache inside. “Riley,” she said again.

Garrett nodded and caught both his former stepmother’s hands in his own strong, sun-browned ones. “How are you?” he asked softly.

Tears were stinging Shay’s eyes, half blinding her. Through them, she saw Rosamond hold out the doll for Garrett to see and touch. “Baby,” she said proudly.

As Garrett acknowledged the doll with a nod and a smile, Shay whirled away, unable to bear the scene any longer. She fled the room for the small bathroom adjoining it and stood there, trembling and pale, battling the false hopes that Rosamond’s rare moments of lucidity always stirred in her.

When she was composed enough to come out, Rosamond had retreated back into herself; she was rocking in her chair, her lips curved into a secretive smile, the doll in her arms. Garrett wrapped a supportive arm around Shay’s waist and led her out of the room into the hallway, where he gave her a brotherly kiss on the forehead.

“Poor baby,” he said, and then he held Shay close and rocked her back and forth in his arms. She didn’t notice the man standing at the reception desk, watching with a frown on his face.

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