Allison Leigh – A Child Under His Tree (страница 2)
Someone better. That’s what her mom had said at the time.
Kelly pushed away the hurtful memory and put the width of the twin bed between them. “Exactly.” She didn’t throw herself on the bed. She wasn’t a teenager anymore. She was an adult. With a baby inside her. “He found someone else. A brilliant premed student just like him.” She left out the part that Caleb had also broken up with that woman. “Why on earth would you think this baby is his, anyway?”
“He was home here in Weaver for Christmas. If not his, then whose? God knows you’re not much of a catch. Only boy who ever came sniffing around for you was that Buchanan kid.”
“Ever think that’s because I didn’t want boys coming around here to meet you?” She couldn’t believe the words came out, even if they were true.
“All right, then,” Georgette challenged. “Whose baby is it?”
Kelly’s eyes stung. She wasn’t a liar by nature.
But she lied. She lied because she wasn’t going to get foisted on Caleb Buchanan just because he and his people took care of their own. She wasn’t going to end up a wife out of his sense of responsibility. Not when she’d been raised by a mother who’d only acted out of responsibility instead of love.
Caleb might have wanted her once, but he’d cast her aside.
Until one night thirty-four days ago when he’d wanted her enough to get naked in the front seat of her pickup truck, just like they’d done back when they were in high school. Back before he’d left her and gone off to college. Back before he’d chosen another woman.
“It was just a guy, Mama. Nobody you know at all.”
The determined brightness in her mother’s eyes dimmed, and she got the same disappointed, dissatisfied, discontented look she’d had all of Kelly’s life. She sank down on the foot of the twin bed as if she couldn’t stand the weight of her own body. “The only chance you had of making something of yourself—snagging a fancy, educated surgeon like that Buchanan—and you take up with some guy just passing through town?”
Her mother was editorializing. Adding details that Kelly had not. Embellishing the story with her own experiences. It wasn’t the first time, nor would it be the last. “Caleb has years to go before he’ll be a surgeon! And I don’t need to make someone like him marry me in order to make something of myself, Mama. I’ve got a good job working with Doc Cobb!”
“Sure, answering his phones and putting out the trash. You think that old coot is gonna want his receptionist parading around with a pregnant belly and no ring on her finger? Times may have changed since you were born, but people in this town still expect mamas to be with the daddies. All you’re gonna earn is a lot of gossip and speculation. You ought to have been smarter than to ruin your life the same way I did!”
Kelly stared at her mother and vowed right then and there that she’d make sure her child never heard such hateful words. “I’m sorry you feel that way.”
Georgette just snorted, not seeming to notice Kelly pulling out her ancient suitcase from the closet until it lay open on the bed. “What fool thing are you doing now?”
“Packing.” Kelly kept moving, pulling open her top drawer and dumping the contents into the suitcase, quickly followed by the second drawer, and the third and last. She had to push down hard on the suitcase when she closed it to get the lock latched, but she managed.
Georgette was watching her with an annoyed look. “Gonna go chase after the guy, I suppose. Fat lot of good that’ll do.”
Kelly didn’t have a second suitcase. But she had an oversize beach bag that managed to hold several pairs of shoes and her favorite pair of boots. “Why? Is that what you did?” She propped the bulging canvas bag against the faded pink suitcase and went back to the closet again. “Fruitlessly chase after my father?” She snatched two handfuls of hanging clothes from the single wooden bar in her closet. “Is that why you’ve always hated me?”
Her mother answered with a huff. “I’ve always said you had a crazy imagination.”
“Yes.” Kelly draped the clothes over her arm. She was leaving behind stuff, but she was beyond caring. “It’s my imagination that I can count on one hand the times you’ve ever shown a lick of caring for me.”
Georgette’s frown deepened. She’d never welcomed other people’s opinions, and Kelly’s was no different. “Kept a roof over your ungrateful head, didn’t I?”
“Yes, you did, Mama.” She awkwardly looped the beach bag strap over her shoulder and wrapped her fingers around the suitcase handle, dragging it off the mattress. It bumped hard against her knee. “You did your duty, that’s for sure.” Tears glazed her eyes. “But I’m not going to raise my baby like that.” She shuffled toward the door with her heavy load precariously balanced.
Georgette followed, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “Go ahead and think you’re not just like your mama. Was a time I thought I wasn’t just like my mama, too. But here you are. Knocked up by some walk-away joe. Just who do you think is going to take you in when they learn you got yourself pregnant?”
Kelly blinked hard and kept going, carefully navigating the creaking steps that she’d pounded up and down all of her life. “I can take care of myself.” She wasn’t going to allow herself to think otherwise. If she did, she’d want to curl up and disappear. And she wouldn’t do that now, not when she had a fledgling life inside her.
Behind her, Georgette gave that I-told-you-so huff of hers. “Guess you proved that, all right.” She followed Kelly right out to the front porch of the small two-story house Georgette had inherited from her mother.
There was a deep ache inside Kelly’s chest. She blamed it on the weight of carrying all of her belongings in one single trip and quickened her pace down the porch steps. The suitcase banged against her leg, and a few hangers slid out of her grasp. “I guess that’s my problem, isn’t it?”
She stepped over the dresses lying in the dirt, aiming blindly for the pickup truck that had been old even when she’d bought it five years earlier with the money she’d earned working at the grocery store. She set down the suitcase long enough to open the door and shove her hangers and beach bag across the threadbare bench seat.
“When you learn you can’t handle your problem, don’t come crawling back to me,” Georgette yelled.
“Don’t worry, Mama.” Her voice was choked. She hefted the suitcase into the truck bed. It landed with a terrible bang, but at least the latches stayed closed. “I won’t be back.”
Georgette wasn’t listening, though. “You’d be better off at least trying to pass off that kid as Buchanan’s baby! Least you’d get some money outta your mistake!”
Kelly’s chest ached even more.
She got behind the wheel, turned the key with a shaking hand until the engine cranked and drove away. When she dared a glance in the rearview mirror, all she saw was the plume of dust kicked up from her tires.
She swiped a hand over her wet cheek. “I won’t be back,” she said through her teeth.
She didn’t know where she was going.
She just knew that anywhere was better than her mother’s house.
But where could she go? She’d been working at Doc Cobb’s for a year now since leaving the grocery store and had saved up some money, but with a baby on the way, she would need to conserve every penny she could.
She braked when she reached the highway and stared down the empty road toward Weaver.
She could find a place to live in town. Keep working for Doc Cobb. He was a pediatrician. Nobody liked babies and children more than her genial boss. But whether Kelly wanted to admit it or not, her mother was right about one thing. Gossip was going to dog her every footstep when it became obvious that she was pregnant and there was no daddy standing by her side. More important than that, though, was the baby. And that same gossip was going to follow her child the same way it had always followed her.
She was not going to repeat her mother’s mistakes.
And she damn sure was not going to beg Caleb Buchanan for one single thing.
She exhaled, wiped her cheeks again, looked down the empty highway one more time and hit the gas.
“Dr. C shouldn’t be too long.” The nurse—a young blonde Kelly didn’t know—smiled as she ushered them into an empty examining room. She winked at Tyler. “Be thinking about what color cast you want this time.” She slid the medical chart she’d started for them into the metal sleeve on the door that she closed as she left them alone.
The door had barely latched before Kelly’s son gave her a plaintive look. “How come I gotta get another cast?”
She dumped her purse and their jackets on the chair wedged in one corner of the room. “Because your wrist still hasn’t healed all the way and you cracked the cast you already have.”
“But—”
“Be glad that you didn’t hurt yourself even more.” She’d seen the X-rays herself on the computer screen just a few minutes ago. Not only had Doc Cobb hired several new faces since Kelly’d last been there, but he’d gotten himself some state-of-the-art equipment, as well. She patted the top of the examining room table. The thin paper covering it crinkled. “Want me to lift you up here, or—”