Chapter 3
For Katie, her relationship with Mark had not been a conscious choice. It had simply happened. He was younger than she was by six years, an outsider to their small community who had moved to Lincoln the year before to fill a vacancy in the business department at the high school where she taught. Perhaps it had been this more than anything that had attracted her to him. Quite simply, he was different. Mark loved adventure. He loved to socialize. He knew every restaurant and bar within a one hundred mile radius and was never happier than when he was with a group of people, laughing, telling jokes and stories. He represented the polar opposite of the quiet life she had shared with David and so stirred no sense of loss or sadness.
And he was handsome, tall, lean and muscular with dark hair and dark eyes. Katie saw how other women looked at him, and she was aware of his reputation. She had no illusions about being his one true love any more than he was hers, but she continued to see him anyway – a fact that bewildered her parents and her sisters who knew her for the romantic that she was. Her mother disapproved of Mark’s reputation as ‘a good time Charlie,’ but she did her best to keep her opinion quiet as she disliked conflict in the family even more than Katie’s choice of a male companion.
Oddly enough, Lucy was noncommittal on the subject of her mother’s relationship. “Whatever you want, Mom,” she said, changing the subject. Mark and Lucy were cordial on the rare occasions that they spent time together, but it was obvious that Mark’s focus was his relationship with Katie. He had no desire to be a father figure and Lucy seemed just fine with that. She had her grandfather and Uncle Wes, her sister’s husband, and Kade who had done his best to help fill the gaps that David’s death had left. A closer relationship with Mark interested Lucy very little, and she had even less to say regarding his place in Katie’s life.
Mark had already grabbed a booth when Katie walked into Frankie’s, a small pizza place owned by a local family. She stopped at the counter to talk to a former student before joining her companion. He looked like something out of an ad in a fashion magazine in a black sweater and faded jeans with his dark silky hair fashionably disheveled. As usual, his careless good looks made her incredibly conscious of her age and imperfections. She tossed her bag on to the seat and slid into the booth across the table from him.
“I was beginning to wonder if I was being stood up,” he said with a smile.
“Sorry I’m late,” Katie replied. “Kade stopped by after school and then the chores took a little longer than I expected.”
“Ahhh, your knight in a rusty pickup. What did Galahad want this evening?” Mark said.
The two men had made no secret of their animosity for one another. Mark felt intellectually superior to Kade, who had never pursued a college education, content to work on the family farm after he returned from a tour of duty in the Marine Corps. Kade resented the condescension and to make bad matters worse, seemed to know plenty about the less attractive aspects of Mark’s reputation. He made no secret of the fact that he thought Katie could do much better. On the rare occasions that they wound up near one another, they bristled like two dogs with their eye on the same bone.
“Let it rest, Mark,” Katie said, unwilling to engage in yet another discussion on her best friend’s shortcomings. “I don’t know what he wanted. He just stopped by the house, and we ended up sitting on the porch talking. Don’t make a big deal out of it.”
“No big deal,” Mark replied, taking a cue from her voice. He reached across to take her hand and look into her eyes. A mischievous smile tugged as his full mouth as he asked, “So what do you think? The usual or are you feeling adventurous?” His suggestive tone caught Katie off guard and made her blush to the roots of her hair.
“Good grief, Mark, our students make up half the wait staff. Let’s just order a pizza,” she said withdrawing her hand and trying to regain her composure. She was completely unprepared for the sudden shift in Mark’s mood.
Mark laughed and leaned back in the booth. “Sure, sure,” he said, perusing the menu.
“You know,” he said after a short, tense silence, “I wonder sometimes what keeps us together. We obviously have different agendas.” Mark motioned at the waitress. “Hey, Stacie, can you get Ms. Glenn and me a large special and a pitcher of soda?”
“Sure thing, Mr. Wainwright,” Stacie said. Her flushed cheeks and the eagerness in her voice made it obvious that the teenager had a crush on her handsome teacher, but then so did half the girls at Lincoln High. “I’ll put in your order and bring your drinks.”
Katie waited until Stacie had moved out of earshot before she spoke. “What exactly is that supposed to mean, ‘different agendas’? I wasn’t aware that I had an agenda.”
Mark’s usually playful expression became serious. “I think you know exactly what I mean. I’m interested in an adult relationship, Katie. Every time I even hint about sex, you act like a Catholic schoolgirl. I mean, come on. You’re a grown woman. You have a kid so you’ve had sex at some point. We’ve been seeing each other for at least a couple of months, and I thought you were attracted to me. What’s the problem?” he asked, his voice laced with frustration. “I’m not exactly used to this response from women, you know?”
“Since when are you Mr. Commitment?” Katie laughed, trying to defuse the situation.
“I’m serious,” he said. “Don’t blow this off.”
“I’m not…” she began.
“Maybe this is a mistake. Maybe you just aren’t ready for another relationship,” Mark said.
Katie was at a loss for words. He was right. She was attracted to him and yet she had stalled, postponed, changed the subject and dodged the issue more times than she could count. She didn’t have an answer other than she was scared to death. Things seemed to be moving so quickly.
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what’s wrong with me,” Katie stammered.
“So where do we go from here?” Mark pressed.
“Please, Mark, I’m just not comfortable having this conversation here,” Katie said. “Can’t we talk somewhere more private?”
Mark leaned back in the booth and shook his head. “Whatever. You know what. Just forget I said anything. Let’s just eat and get out of here.”
Katie hung her head, stung by his tone. She wasn’t in love with Mark, but she didn’t want to lose his companionship either. He was the first man she had dated since David died, the first glimmer of hope that perhaps she wouldn’t spend the rest of her life alone. Maybe she was being ridiculous. Her heart raced as she tried to reason through her hesitation, but logical thought was being drowned in a tide of conflicting emotions. Maybe Mark was right. Maybe it was time to take their relationship to a more physical level. She gathered her courage and said, “You know what? I’ve got a better idea. Let’s have Stacie box up the pizza and take it back to your place.”
Mark leaned forward and took her hand again. “Really?” he said eagerly.
“Really,” she replied with a confidence she did not feel.
Chapter 4
It was nearly midnight when Katie pulled her SUV into the drive and parked it in front of the garage. Lucy had left the back porch light on for her, a detail that suffused her with guilt. Why hadn’t she just let Lucy stay the night with Kendra? At least she wouldn’t have come home to an empty house.
As she walked to the house, Katie felt as if a lead weight was resting in her chest. What was wrong with her? Even though it hadn’t been her intent when she left home that evening, she had found that after the initial awkwardness the sex had been good, but as soon as left his bed, she had been overcome with the same overwhelming emptiness with which she had begun the day.
“What a wreck I am,” she thought.
She dropped her keys in the basket by the back door and made her way quietly through the house, turning off lights and checking doors. She wanted to sleep. Perhaps she could think things through more rationally in the morning. But as was often the case when she was troubled, she couldn’t relax and fall asleep.
Lying in bed, Katie thought about her romantic history. She had dated several boys in high school, including Kade, but unlike many of her friends, she had avoided having sex with any of them. Even though her parents had come of age during the sexual revolution, they were old-fashioned. They had taken her to church regularly and embraced Biblical views of sexuality. Mainly out of respect and partially out of fear of their disapproval, she had remained a virgin until college, until she met David.
David’s views on everything had been much more liberal than her own. Raised in the city by upper-middle class parents who viewed church more as a social organization than a spiritual one, David was amused and challenged by her resistance to his advances. She smiled a little as she remembered the early days of their relationship. Barely older than her daughter was now, she had fallen madly in love with the handsome, popular boy who seemed so worldly and rebellious compared to her. How malleable she had been. She adopted David’s friends, listened to the music that David liked, even took up the hobbies he enjoyed, and was happy to do it as long as she could stay in the warm sunshine of his presence. He had proposed to her during the spring of her junior year, and they had married that summer. Two years later, they had returned to Lincoln, she to teach and he to work as an engineer for the state highway department.
Their lives had been like something out of a storybook until a bridge had collapsed in far away Minneapolis, prompting inspections all over the United States. David and his crew had been evaluating a narrow, rural bridge two counties to the west when a young driver had spilled a drink in her lap on her way home from school. According to the statement she gave police, she had only taken her eyes off the road for a second, but in that second Katie’s life had changed forever. The doctor said David had died on impact, that he had not suffered, but that knowledge had done little to stem the tide of despair that had overtaken her in the days and weeks that followed.
It had taken well over two years for her to even think about seeing another man socially, and it had take all Mark’s persistence and charm to convince her to go out with him the first time. She hadn’t foreseen that their relationship would ever be more than casual, but tonight had forced her to look at their relationship in a new light.
“David’s gone, and I’m a grown woman. I’ve no reason to protect my virtue and wait for another Mr. Right. I had that, but it’s over. There’s nothing wrong with looking for some companionship. I deserve that much at least,” Katie thought angrily, pushing her memories aside.
But as she tossed and turned, the clock ticking into the early hours of the morning, a long forgotten voice in her head seemed to ask who she was trying to convince.
Chapter 5
When the alarm went off at 5:30 the next morning, Katie jerked fully awake only to collapse back onto the bed as a wave of nausea washed over her.
With eyes shut tight against the light, she reached blindly for the cell phone on the nightstand. She wished for her students’ ability to operate the phone without looking, but in its absence, opened her eyes a tiny slit in order to look up the number for her assistant principal and dial it. She explained as quietly as possible that she had a migraine and would not be in to work. Every sound, every movement drove spikes of pain through her head. She needed her medicine from the bathroom medicine cabinet.
She rolled out of bed, fighting the urge to vomit and edged her way along the wall of her room and down the short hall to the bathroom. She opened the door and fumbled among the bottles in the dark, feeling more than looking for the right one. Just as she found it, she lost her battle with nausea and threw up in the sink, dropping the pill bottle and clutching her temples against the shooting pains that each retch caused. When she was through, she turned on the water to rinse the sink. She scooped a little water into her mouth, rinsed, and turned off the tap. As she leaned weakly against the bathroom vanity, she heard Lucy call quietly from the living room, “Mom? Are you OK?”
Lucy was familiar with her mother’s headaches. If she didn’t get a response she would come and check on her. Katie had been plagued by migraines since she was in junior high although they had gotten more frequent and more intense since David’s death. Her doctor blamed stress and her poor sleep patterns.
“Let me help you back to bed,” Lucy said, wrapping Katie’s arm around her shoulder. “Close your eyes. I’ll lead you.”
Gratefully, Katie allowed her daughter to lead her back to her room. Lucy drew the blinds, left and reappeared with a glass of lemon-lime soda and her mother’s medicine. “Here,” she said quietly, “try to get your meds down. I’ll go get a wash cloth.”
Katie did as she was told, steeling herself against a new wave of nausea as she swallowed the pills. It would be all right, now. She would sleep and when she woke up again the headache would be gone, but she had to send lesson plans for her kids, just one more thing to do before she could lapse into oblivion.
Lucy came back with the washcloth and sat gently on her mother’s bed.
“Do you need anything else?” she asked softly.
“Lesson plans,” Katie whispered. “In my bag on the couch. Can you give them to Sadie? She will take care of it from there.”
“Sure. No problem. You rest. I’ll eat dinner with Nan and Pop after the meet. You should feel better by tonight. I’ll come home and make you some tea and toast, okay?”
“Sounds great,” Katie whispered and smiled weakly. “Luc, I’m sorry I wasn’t home last night…”
“Just rest. We can talk about it later,” Lucy said, pulling the quilt up around her mother’s shoulders and brushing her cheek with her fingertips. “I love you.”
Katie’s eyes were getting heavy. She could feel herself slipping into the drug-induced sleep that provided her only relief from the headache. Her heart ached with love for her daughter as she drifted off to sleep.
When she awoke, she was still groggy from her medication, but she could hear her cell phone chirping intermittently to indicate a waiting text message. Cautiously, she opened one eye to test her sensitivity to the light. Nothing. Her alarm clock said 3:15. She opened the other eye and reached for the phone, which seemed to weigh ten pounds as she lifted it from the bedside table. She hated the after effects of the medication, but she hated the pain more. A quick look at her phone showed not one message but six. One from Sadie confirmed that Lucy had dropped off the lesson plan book and that Sadie had passed the instructions on to the sub. Katie felt a rush of gratitude for her young friend. It was good to have someone she could rely on in an emergency. The second was from her older sister, Leigha. Evidently her mother, who had no idea how to text, had called about her headache, and Leigha was texting to make sure she was okay and to tell her that Lucy was eating at their parents. The other four were from Mark.
Memories of the previous evening rushed into her consciousness. Now what. She opened the first. “Hey, babe. Just wanted to say thanks again for a great evening.” The second asked if she was all right. The third let her know that he had stopped by her room and found the substitute teacher and asked her to call him later. The fourth was a second request for a call. Katie sighed and put the phone back on the nightstand. Later. She would reply later she thought as she slipped back into unconsciousness.
The next time Katie awoke it was to the gentle weight of Lucy perching on the side of her bed. “Better?” she asked quietly.
“Yeah, thanks,” Katie replied sleepily. “How were Pop and Nan?”
“Fine. Nan said for you to call her when you feel up to it. She fried me some chicken and sent a plate. You feel like eating?”
“Sounds good, but I better hold off,” Katie said, squeamish at the very thought. “How about that tea and toast you promised me?”
Lucy grinned. “Already started the water. You want it in here or do you feel like getting up?”
“I think I’ll try sitting up for a while. You go ahead. I’ll be in there in a minute,” Katie said.
Lucy nodded and headed off to the kitchen and Katie sat up slowly, testing for after effects of the headache. She was a little dizzy, but it quickly subsided. She reached for her robe, slipped it on, and made her way to the bathroom. After washing her face and running a brush through her hair, she felt well enough to make it to the family room where she curled up in her overstuffed gingham armchair and watched Lucy make her tea and toast through the wide doorway that connected the two rooms.
“So how did you do today? Did you beat that girl from South County?” Katie asked.
“Oh yeah!” Lucy said with a grin. “She can’t beat me here. Their course is flatter than ours. She did better than last time though. Took everything I had to stay ahead on the last hill. She always finishes so strong. I think that’s why she beats me on the flat courses.”
“I’m sorry I missed it,” Katie said. “And I’m sorry you came home to an empty house last night, too. I…”
“It’s OK, Mom,” Lucy said, interrupting the explanation. “I’m not a baby. I can put myself to bed at night.” She set the tea and toast on the table next to Katie’s chair, picked up her book bag from the floor where she had left it and sat down on the loveseat.
“I know,” Katie replied quietly. “Thanks for taking care of me.”
She sipped her tea, wrestling with what to say next. She still felt guilty, even though Lucy had dismissed her concerns. She watched her daughter, her brow furrowed as she concentrated on her homework, and tried to figure out what to say but came up empty and so turned her attention to the window beside her chair. The moon was full, painting the fields behind the house in cool blue light.
“Luc, did you feed the horses?” Katie asked.
“Mmmm…between the meet and supper,” Lucy replied, still concentrating on her physics book. “You might want to swing by Farm Supply and pick up some feed tomorrow if you’re feeling better. We’re getting kind of low.”
“Sure,” Katie replied absently. She sipped the steaming tea and nibbled at the toast as she gazed out the window. The stand of pines at the edge of the pasture stood in silhouette against the moonlit sky. She wished it were still summer so she could open the windows and listen to sound of the wind blowing softly through the treetops, carrying a hint of their fragrance into the house. Perhaps tomorrow she would take a walk and sit beside the creek for a while. The warm days were getting fewer and the fresh air might help clear her head.
Katie sat looking out the window for a little while longer, searching for a thread to start a conversation, but Lucy remained immersed in her books. Maybe tomorrow she would find a way to start a conversation that would clear the air.
“I think I’ll go back to bed. I’m still so tired. Do you have plans tomorrow?” Katie said, setting her empty cup on the table beside her chair.
Lucy looked up from her homework. “ I’m eating lunch with Miss Georgia at eleven and Evan’s home from college so I think we’re going to go riding tomorrow afternoon if Uncle Wes doesn’t need him for anything. Is that OK? And I almost forgot, Nan said she wants everyone to come over for dinner Sunday afternoon. You’re supposed to call Aunt Lei for the details.”
“Yeah, that’s fine. I’ll call her in the morning. G’night, Luc,” she said, kissing her daughter on top of the head.
“Goodnight. You know, you’re welcome to come to lunch with us. Miss Georgia always asks about you,” Lucy said hesitantly.
Katie paused. Miss Georgia Sadler was Lucy’s Senior Sister from church. The frail, white-haired woman had been the librarian at Lincoln High when Katie was in school. Back then she had been a no nonsense sort that believed that the library should be a haven of silence and study. Lunch with Miss Georgia would mean questions, lots of questions, and she really didn’t feel like being subjected to the third degree, no matter how much Lucy loved the older lady. She felt a momentary surge of irritation as she imagined the condemnation she would hear in Miss Georgia’s voice as she gave comment on Katie’s recent life choices. No, she wasn’t up to that. “I don’t think so, Luc,” Katie replied. “I need to run over to the school and see what kind of havoc they wreaked on my classroom today and call Leigha about Sunday. Rain check?”
Lucy sighed. She had been trying to convince Katie to join the two of them for at least six months. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll talk to you in the morning” and she went back to her book.
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