Robyn Carr - Never Too Late

They came slowly to earth and suddenly she was stunned. Mortified. She gasped in horror and said, “Oh my God!”

“Clare, I—”

But she couldn’t listen. What had she done? To Mike? To Pete? To herself? She fled from that apartment couch into her bedroom, slammed the door and was racked with sobs of remorse through the night. All the while she was thinking that if she felt that terrible, he must hate her for what she’d encouraged him to do to his brother. After all, she had begged him! In the morning when she got up she found a note under the aspirin bottle. “Let’s never talk about it. It didn’t happen. Pete.”

She didn’t talk about it, that was for sure, because she was thoroughly ashamed. Clare froze up inside. She had trouble putting together the wedding guest list, couldn’t stand to talk about the reception, didn’t register her gifts and when she went for a bridal gown fitting, she burst into tears. She was completely miserable and a long way from getting over it. Of course she didn’t hear a word from Pete—and she didn’t know if that made things better or worse. And if he didn’t hate her, at the very least, he would have lost all respect for her.

Mike seemed not to pick up on the trouble during their phone conversations, either because he had so much going on at flight school that he was preoccupied or maybe she was becoming the master of deception. Either way it hardly mattered because just a couple of months later his F-16 went down and he went with it.

Clare was plummeted from despair into a deep well of grief and regret. It was the blackest time of her life. She wondered if she would die of it. She never once met Pete’s eyes during the memorial services, not even when she embraced him and they sobbed on each other’s shoulders. It was a long, long while before she stopped feeling she had killed Mike with what she had done.

It was two years before she could even manage a girls’ night out with her friends, and she adamantly refused any fixing up. There was such an ache in her heart. She wouldn’t consider letting herself be that vulnerable again. When she ran into Pete, she could barely talk to him, and he ducked his head away from her eyes. It was obvious to her that his pain was equal to her own.

And then she met Roger; smooth, good-looking Roger. She was lifted up out of the darkness, laughed, looked forward to events and dates. He was such a clever flirt; he could charm the paint off an old Buick. He pursued her with such gusto. She didn’t even know she had it in her to be seduced and she felt alive for the first time since Mike’s death. When she realized that days passed without her thoughts turning to Mike or her sin against him, she saw in Roger a chance to start her life over. More than that, she fell for him, hard and fast. That was the Roger she had always had trouble leaving—the sweet, sensitive, fun-loving man who pulled her up out of the darkness and into the light. Clare would be forever grateful to him for that. Her friends and family were so relieved to see her smile again, they wholeheartedly encouraged them. They loved Roger, and so did she. She accepted his proposal, which came a little too soon into their relationship, but he had always moved fast. Jason arrived immediately.

Then came the late-night meetings, the trips out of town, being unable to reach him during the day because he was tied up with a client. Once he was home, he could smooth things over with ease—he had this way about him. Irresistible and always so desirable, he banished her edginess in no time.

But it was not how she thought it would be, not how it had been with Mike who was far less charming and fun loving but more reliable. There were lonely times in the dark of night when she rocked her baby—often waiting for Roger to come home hours later than she expected him—that she would fantasize she was waiting for Mike and that she rocked their child. Because of that dirty little secret, because of what she had done before, she worked as hard as humanly possible at being a good wife.

Clare felt guilty about fantasizing Jason was Mike’s, until years later when she learned that Roger had first been unfaithful while she was in her pregnancy. There had been a reason why he was always unavailable and late, and her name was Jill. As far as Clare knew, Jill was the first one.

Instead of being her knight in shining armor, Roger became her cross to bear. Her penance.

Much of her adult life had been manipulated around the mere fact that she had made love to her fiancé’s brother. Every time she ran into Pete she remained aloof and cool and he looked at her with the saddest eyes—it appeared neither of them would ever recover from what they’d done. She even tried counseling and was honest as a heart attack during her sessions, but still she floundered on in a marriage that wasn’t true.

That was another reason she kept taking Roger back—because if she couldn’t be forgiving, she couldn’t be forgiven. That, and she wanted her life to be worth something. She wanted the family she’d made to survive. And of course there was the fact of Roger, a seductive and charming flirt to the end—and it had worked on her for years.

But then she woke up in a hospital in Reno with every inch of her body throbbing in pain and for the first time in almost twenty years, she realized her marriage had gone on long enough.

It was time to move on.

If there was anything on par with being dragged half-dead out of mangled car, it was physical therapy. Every step shot through Clare like dynamite, every stretch came with the agony of the rack. The first thought she had upon waking in the morning was that she was going to suffer the torture of the truly damned. All this was administered by a devilish little creature no bigger than a wood sprite. Her name was Gilda and one should not be fooled by the fact that she was a mere slip of a thing. She had a black heart and the strength of a herd of dragons.

“One more step, come on, one more. Good! Good! Okay, one more…”

“I…hate…you…so…much….”

“Ah, yes—sweet talk. You’ll thank me when you’re up dancing the rumba again.”

“I’m…taking…out…a…contract…on…you….”

“One more, no whining. Good! Good! Okay, how about just one more.”

“You’re going to suffer. I swear to God!”

Gilda kissed her cheek. “You’re tough stuff, Clare. Good thing you were in such great shape when you got hit—it’s paying off.”

“You are a mean-spirited witch.”

“Yes, so they tell me.”

The payoff was that after being abused by Gilda she could have a pain shot, a sponge bath and a nap. Then the company would start to arrive. And with them always the same dilemma—she was bored and lonely in addition to wretchedly uncomfortable, and she was too tired to endure too much visiting. Still, she wanted them to come.

Her younger sister, Sarah, dropped by daily and Maggie came for a little while most afternoons, often bringing Jason with her. Her brother-in-law, Bob, usually made a quick swing by in the evenings—he spent a lot of his workday in Carson City, the capitol of Nevada. And her dad, George, still went to his neighborhood hardware store every day, retirement not even a part of his agenda despite the fact that he was in his sixties. One thing had changed in his schedule—he was now taking a lunch hour, which he spent at the hospital. And he would sometimes stop by later in the evening on his way home from work. And George’s cleaning lady, Dotty, made it a point to come to the hospital most days with some kind of sweet treat meant mainly for the hospital staff. “Soften them up,” Dotty said. “They’ll go easier on you if you feed them.”

Clare’s mom, Fran, fell ill with cancer when Jason was only three. It took her quickly. Sarah was devastated by the loss and at twenty-one, moved back into her dad’s house, but she proved to be no help at all. Both of them grew thin and messy, so Maggie and Clare pooled their resources and hired Dotty to clean twice a week and stock the refrigerator with nutritious meals. George protested, but soon he gained some weight and his stained clothes were clean and pressed. Sarah, so lost there for a while, had a maternal figure to watch over her.