Tara Quinn - Where the Road Ends

Then she escorted Kathy into Charles’s playroom, where the little boy was painstakingly drawing a picture with a big purple crayon clutched in his left hand. Left-handed like his father. The picture was for “Daddy’s grave to leave when they had the annivers’y day” the following week.

As they filed slowly into the room, Charles looked up from his child-size wooden table, pushing his glasses up his nose with the side of the hand still holding the crayon.

He didn’t say a word, but Amelia’s heart lurched at the expression on her son’s face as he saw the two of them together. He knew something was up.

What was she doing?

Charles had already lost so much. Far too much.

She couldn’t meet Kathy’s eyes as the woman hesitated at the door.

“Charles…” Both women spoke at once.

Kathy approached the little table, kneeling down until she was nose to nose with Amelia’s son.

“Charles,” she said, a forced smile stretching her unnaturally taut lips, “I just came in to say goodbye.”

His feet stopped swinging beneath the table. “Where ya’ goin’?”

“To my mother’s,” Kathy said. “I spoke to her a little while ago and she asked me to come for a visit.”

Charles wrinkled his nose. “I thought you said she’s not good at games.”

Kathy shrugged. “So I’ll teach her.” She ran a finger lightly down his nose. “Before I go, though, I want you to promise me you’ll be a good boy.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You know it’s what your daddy would want.”

Amelia didn’t miss the nanny’s lack of reference to her.

Charles nodded, picked up his picture of four square-bodied people standing in the air above what could have been a grove of purple trees or a crowd of very sunburned people at a baseball game. “You think he’ll like my picture?” he asked Kathy, the need for his nanny’s approval evident.

“Oh, yeah, buddy, he’s gonna love it,” she said, real warmth in her voice.

Charles sat up a little straighter, grinning at Kathy. His denim-clad legs were swinging again. “I know he will.”

Throat tight, Amelia was tempted just to call it off. Kathy’s love for Charles was so obvious—as obvious as Charles’s was for her. How could Amelia rob them of something so precious? What kind of mother did that make her?

Just as she was about to change her mind, a mental flashback to the scene in her living room half an hour ago held Amelia rigid. There’d never been any doubt that Kathy loved Charles. The doubt lay in whether or not that love was healthy.

Charles grew still again, his brows drawn together beneath those black frames that made him look too serious sometimes. His dark hair skimmed the collar of his polo shirt when he tilted his head back slightly to peer at Kathy. “Will you be done visiting to come home for the annivers’y party? That’s what Daddy would want, right?”

“My mom’s pretty lonely, Charles,” Kathy said. “I’m going to be living with her for now and then probably getting a little house of my own.”

“You don’t like our house?”

“Of course I do!” Kathy said, moving a little closer to the boy. “I love your house! But I’ve been here a long time and everybody needs a house of their own when they’re grown up.”

“Is that why Daddy went to live in heaven? To have a house of his own?”

“I don’t think so, Charles,” Kathy said. “This is your daddy’s house. He didn’t choose to go away from you. It was an accident.”

Feeling completely ineffective, Amelia simply stood there. Kathy was handling things so well—and deserved the chance to handle them.

Kathy knew exactly what to say to Charles. How to say it. And she was, even now, putting all her effort into making her departure something Charles could accept.

She had been a remarkable nurturer from the very beginning. It was one of the qualities that had made her such a great addition to their home.

Still frowning, so serious for his five years, Charles asked, “But you’re choosing to go away from me?”

“Oh, sweetie, no!” Kathy shot Amelia a half gloating, half lethal glance. “I don’t really have a choice, either, just in a different way.” Amelia was poised and ready to discontinue the conversation before anything damaging was said. Only the loving tone of Kathy’s voice as she spoke to Charles gave her pause.

“I’m a daughter,” the nanny said softly, “just like you’re a son. And as a daughter, I don’t have any choice but to mind my mother, who told me this morning that I should come home.”

“Like we do what Daddy would want?”

“Just like that.” And then, with another glance over her shoulder, “and what Mommy wants, too.”

Charles was silent, his legs swinging slowly, as he seemed to ponder his nanny’s words. At last he spoke.

“But if you go make your mom not lonely, doesn’t that make me be lonely?”

Tears sprang to Amelia’s eyes.

“Oh, buddy, come here,” Kathy said, pulling Charles onto her lap. She hugged him tightly, rocking back and forth slowly. “No matter where I go, I’ll always be loving you,” she said. Charles’s chubby little face was visible over the nanny’s shoulder. His eyes were squeezed shut.

“You only have to think of me and you’ll be able to feel me loving you, okay?”

“’Kay.”

Amelia started to panic. Wondering what had ever made her think she could cope without Kathy’s help.

Kathy set Charles back enough to gaze into his eyes. “Promise me you’ll remember that? That you’ll think of me?”

The little boy hesitated and then slowly nodded. “I promise.”

Amelia might as well not have been in the room.

She cleared her throat.

Kathy slowly set Charles back in his chair, straightening. “And besides,” she added, “I won’t be far away. My mom lives right here in Chicago. I can still visit you.”

Amelia had already established that much. She had no intention of robbing them of the right to care about each other, to see each other.

The visits would be supervised, of course, but Charles didn’t have to know that.

Charles was staring down at the table. “Will you come back to see my pictures when you’re visiting your mom’s? And take me to swimming lessons?”

Kathy’s shoulders stiffened. “I don’t think your mom—”

“It’s Kathy’s turn to be busy with other things in her life right now, Charles, just like Mommy’s been busy at work,” Amelia interjected quickly. “And now I’m through with that.” She crossed the room, kneeling to put an arm around Charles’s shoulders. “I’m going to be here from now on to take you to all your lessons and play ball with you and everything else. But I’ve invited Kathy to have dinner with us as soon as she can.”

She let go of a very tightly held breath when Charles’s face cleared. “Just don’t come on the meat night when it’s hard to chew and gets stuck in your teeth,” he said to Kathy before returning his attention to the box people he was coloring red.

“He doesn’t like roast tenderloin,” Kathy told Amelia.

Amelia nodded. She knew that.

“Okay, well, I’ll see you soon, buddy,” Kathy said, heading toward the door.

The little boy looked up briefly and then resumed coloring. “’Kay. Bye.”

Kathy turned for one last glance at that bent head before she left.

Her eyes clouded with pain.

Trying perhaps a little too hard, Amelia filled the days immediately following Kathy’s departure with far more activity than Charles was used to.

She broke the rules she and Johnny had established together during those long hours late at night when they’d lain awake in bed, her head on his chest, his hand on her belly, and planned how it would be once their baby was born. She knowingly spoiled Charles. Despite her certainty about the rightness of what she’d done, she overcompensated in her attempt to divert his affection away from the young woman with whom he’d spent most of his waking hours.