Tara Quinn - Somebody's Baby

He was right about that.

And he talked about her friends. All women who were resigned, most of them happily, to living out the lives that had been mapped for them in Grainville since the day they were born. The girls she’d gone to school with who’d stayed in town after graduation were married, with high-school-aged children.

Her son reminded her how unsafe it was for a woman to travel alone these days. Since Randy was killed when the tractor he was riding had exploded last summer, Jesse had taken to warning her about everything. Mostly she only half listened—just in case he said something she needed to hear, although that wasn’t usually the case. Who did he think had been taking care of her—and him—all his life?

“I can’t believe you aren’t listening to me!”

Taking off a mitten, she glanced at her nails. They’d need to be fixed before she dared leave this town. “I’m listening, Jess.”

“No, you aren’t.” His tone was filled with disgust. “I’m just gonna have to come home.”

“No, you aren’t.” She didn’t raise her voice as she repeated his words back to him. She didn’t need to; Jesse knew the tone.

At seventeen, Jesse Randall Prater, one of the youngest freshmen at Harvard, was intelligent beyond his years, and also emotionally young. She’d been living with his outbursts of frustration most of his life. And giving them the credibility they deserved—which was none.

He huffed. And then again.

As she stared down at the peeling wood floor of the porch, a strand of auburn hair fell forward over her shoulder. It was clean. And that was about all she could say for it. Panic filtered down from her throat to her stomach. She couldn’t afford some fancy hair salon.

And she was never going to pass for anything other than what she was—an uneducated country bumpkin—if she showed up in Shelter Valley looking like this. Her clothes were all wrong. Old jeans. Homemade shirts. Her makeup, which she’d worn maybe three times in the past year, had come from the grocery store in town. And she didn’t own a single pair of shoes that hadn’t, at some time or other, been in contact with cow manure.

“I don’t get it, Ma. There’s something you aren’t telling me, isn’t there?”

Caroline tensed. Her smart boy was back. It was the moment she’d been waiting for. And dreading.

I’m prepared, she reminded herself. Just do it like you practiced it last night. And the night before that. And the night before…

“Yes, my new cell number, for one.” She rattled it off. “If you need me for anything in the next week, until I get settled and perhaps have a more permanent number, you can reach me on that.”

He repeated the number. “I’m glad you got a cell,” he added. “You’re there all by yourself, driving back and forth to town with no one at home to know if you made it okay. You need a cell phone. And with the extra field we planted last year, you can afford it.”

“Jess, I’m moving.”

He swore again. And in the space of a second switched from maturing young man to little boy. “You can’t move, Ma! Grainville’s our home!”

Perhaps, but she couldn’t dwell on that. Not if she was going to be able to leave.

“It’s a town with a house. A mostly empty house.”

He was quiet again. Caroline, desperately needing to fill the silence, to tell him the rest of why she’d called, didn’t know what to say. She’d forgotten all her well-rehearsed lines. Her little boy was hurting and she was trapped by life’s circumstances and couldn’t help him.

More trapped than anyone knew.

“So, what is it you aren’t telling me?” His words, when they finally came, were soft, compassionate.

Caroline’s recently rehearsed lines popped into her chaotic brain. “You know I’m adopted.”

“Yeah. So?”

The phone wasn’t the right way to do this. It was, however, her best shot at getting through while standing her ground. An uneducated country woman, Caroline understood her role—to be accommodating and obedient. And fell into it all too easily.

“Jess? Hear me out, okay? Without judgment or commentary?”

A pause. Then he said, “Sorry—yeah, I’ll listen.”

“Remember when I told you last fall about going through all the boxes in the cellar?” That first month after he’d left for school she’d thought she was going to die. Had prayed to die. Newly widowed with her only child gone, she’d never felt so alone. Her life seemed pointless, as if it might as well be over. Burying herself in memories, sorting them, preserving them, had been her only way to stay alive.

“Yeah. You sent me that comic Dad drew in high school.” Randy had only been dead a couple of months before Jesse left for college. But the rift between him and the boy who looked so much like him had been in place long before that. They’d just been so completely different….

“I took some things to Gram one day, too, some old pictures. And after seeing them, she brought up a box from her cellar and gave it to me.”

“What was in it?”

Caroline gave a shove against the ground, scraped the almost threadbare fabric of her jeans with one finger, willing her queasy stomach to calm. “She wouldn’t tell me, wouldn’t let me look until I got home, wouldn’t talk about it at all. It was little—an old stationery box.” It had pink roses all over it. Caroline couldn’t imagine her mother ever having written a letter on a piece of paper covered with pink roses.

“So what was in it?” Jesse’s voice was quiet now. But it still sounded as though he was waiting to take charge.

“A letter. And a ring.”

Glancing at the bare hand growing pink with cold, Caroline studied the ring she’d worn since that day—although normally, when she was with other people, it was on a chain around her neck.

“It’s the most beautiful piece of jewelry I’ve ever seen,” she told her son. “A sapphire. Set in gold.”

“Where’d it come from?” Jesse asked. And then, before she could answer, he burst out, “If it’s so great, why did Gram have it stuffed away in some old box in the basement?”

“The letter—and ring—were from my birth mother.” Caroline blinked as her eyes blurred, still staring at that ring. Jesse was going to think her a fool. Her father—and Randy’s—would surely agree with him. And maybe she was.

Still…

“Who was she? Some teenager who got knocked up?”

“Jesse Randall Prater!” Caroline’s cold cheeks burned, every nerve beneath her skin tensing. Did her son think of her with that same disrespect?

And if so, God help her, what would he think of her now?

“Well, isn’t that why you had me, Ma? Because you knew what it felt like to be given away and you couldn’t bear to do that to anyone else?”

She’d forgotten he knew that. It wasn’t a part of her life that she talked about—it wasn’t part of the reason she normally gave. But once, when Jesse had been about fourteen, and his father had taken his own insecurities out on his son, leaving the child feeling insignificant and unwanted, she’d told him her secret. That she hadn’t just kept him because she’d loved his father and wanted to get married. Or because his maternal grandparents, who’d never been able to have children of their own, were fully supportive of their sixteen-year-old pregnant daughter, offering to help wherever they could to make it possible for her to keep her child. She’d kept him because she didn’t ever want him to feel unworthy of life’s basic necessities—food, shelter and unconditional love.

She’d never, for one second, regretted the decision. But there were times when being Jesse’s mother hurt. A lot.

“I’m sorry, Ma.” The apology came after only a minute of silence. She’d have waited ten if that was what it took. “You’re just freaking me out with all this going-away stuff.”