SUSAN MEIER - Bringing Up Babies

“I’m sorry.”

Chas nodded his acceptance of her condolence. “It was pretty bad. We all took it very hard. Grant was the worst. He drank himself silly and in general made a nuisance of himself in town. We were all so concerned about him that we hardly paid any attention to my father. The only thing I can clearly remember him saying was that life was short, and he felt he had wasted his.”

“That’s a fairly normal reaction,” Lily confirmed gently, leaning forward, listening to him.

Chas drew in a long breath, awkwardly aware of how good it felt to discuss the situation openly and objectively with someone. He hadn’t realized how much he’d needed to talk about this, and he suspected part of the reason everything seemed to want to tumble out of him was because he didn’t know Lily. She had no preconceived notions and didn’t seem judgmental. He also didn’t have to worry that things he said would come back to haunt him two years from now, because two years from now she might not be here. Whatever the reason for being able to talk to her, he was just glad to have the opportunity to get some of this off his chest.

“In our own grief,” Chas said, though he knew he was rationalizing, “we more or less ignored Dad. One day he came home with a spectacular-looking woman. A tall redhead with sad brown eyes. And we all suspected that he was going to try to set her up with Grant.”

“But he had married her,” Lily put in quietly when Chas fell silent.

He nodded.

“And they had the triplets….”

“No, we had a big fight, raised hell in the local bars for about a week, then stormed out of town as if we had every right to punish Dad.”

“Are you sure you didn’t?”

Chas smiled somberly when she seemingly took his side. “We’ll never know. We didn’t stay around long enough to hear the whole story. My brothers and I got together in Philadelphia, where I was going to school, and made a pact that none of us would ever go home. After a week or so, Grant ran into a family friend who had left Brewster County a few years before. Hunter had started a construction company but he had too much work and couldn’t handle it all, so Grant threw in his lot with him and moved to Georgia. Evan took his life savings and invested it in a company that buys and manages fast-food franchises. Because his entire future was on the line, Evan poured his heart and soul and all his time into that company.”

“And you?”

“And I made a mess of my life.”

“But you were already in law school.”

“Yeah,” Chas said, but in such a self-condemning tone he knew he had to explain himself. “Unfortunately, I also got married twice, divorced twice, was thrown in jail because my wife wrote bad checks and nearly went bankrupt.”

“You did all that in two years?”

“A little over one year. I work fast.”

Lily couldn’t help it, she laughed. “I’ll say you do. You make me feel lazy and slow for only having one relationship in six years.”

“Consider yourself lucky and smart for only having one relationship in six years.”

Lily sighed heavily. “I do, some days. Other days I just feel like an idiot because I didn’t see that Everett had completely lost interest.”

“You think that’s what happened?” Chas asked skeptically.

She shrugged. “I don’t know. All I know is that one day I was planning to spend the rest of my life with the man I loved and the next I was alone and didn’t have a future.”

“Trust me,” Chas said. “You’re better off.”

“You think so?”

“I know so. You don’t want to be in a relationship with someone who isn’t committed. I’ve been there and done that.” He shook his head.

Lily giggled.

“I’ve felt stupid, looked stupid and gone broke because of it,” Chas said, then he laughed. He laughed long and hard, for the first time seeing the humor in it. “I must have seemed like a real dope to the rest of the world,” he said, then suddenly he stopped laughing and looked at Lily. “Oh, I’ll bet my brothers thought I was absolutely crazy.”

“Or distraught,” Lily suggested kindly.

He grabbed her rationale like a drowning man grabs a life preserver. “Really?”

“Sure,” Lily said encouragingly. “For heaven’s sake, you’d lost your mother, then your father. You left your home, but your brothers deserted you. You were looking for company, companionship, maybe even a sense of the future. You weren’t crazy. You weren’t even so much lonely as you probably were grasping at straws.”

Juggling Annie on his lap, Chas considered that. “I spent most of the time I was away trying to figure out where I’d be twenty years from now. I wanted a plan. No, what I really wanted was a crystal ball. I wanted someone to show me that everything was going to turn out okay. And nobody could.”

Lily stayed silent for so long that eventually Chas glanced at her. He understood that she’d waited until she had his attention before she very gently said, “Nobody can. And nobody ever will.”

“I know,” he said. But after she’d left the room, Chas leaned back on his father’s old office chair and sighed. He wondered if she would be so sweet to him if she knew he wanted nothing more than to sleep with her. He’d deliberately told his story to the bitter end, because in a sense that’s truly what it was. A bitter end. He would never marry again. Not because he didn’t want all the things he believed marriage offered, and not because he was too busy setting up his practice, but because he absolutely refused to be a three-time loser. The first time he’d married and divorced he blamed fate and stupidity for his mistake, but the second he hadn’t been quite the idiot he let his brothers believe. He’d loved Charlene. She’d loved him. In the end love wasn’t enough. He would never trust it again, so he would never fall again. It was that simple.

So he had indirectly warned Lily and hoped she was smart enough to heed his admonition, because now that he knew she was as sweet as she was beautiful, he wasn’t exactly sure how much longer he was going to be able to hide his attraction to her.

Though Lily hadn’t wanted it to, Chas’s explanation of his past had made him more attractive because it showed he was a sensitive, honest man. But, thankfully, it also opened her mind to all kinds of new vantage points on the situation.

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