The Good Father. Diane Chamberlain

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СКАЧАТЬ I said. “That must’ve been scary.” My mother fell? I remembered Ridley saying she was in the hospital. I looked at the EMT again. She was checking some monitor on the wall above the stretcher. “My mother,” I said. “Is she okay?”

      The EMT glanced toward the open doors and I didn’t miss the relief in her face when she saw Ridley climbing into the ambulance. He put a hand on my shoulder. “Need to see you a sec, Trav,” he said.

      “What?” I didn’t look up from Bella, who was clutching my hand like she’d never let it go.

      “Come outside with me,” he said.

      Mom. I didn’t want to go with him. I didn’t want to hear whatever he was going to tell me.

      “Go ahead,” the EMT said. “I’ll be here with Bella.”

      “Daddy!” Bella clung harder to my hand as I stood up, knocking the monitor off her finger. “Don’t go away!” She tried to scramble off the stretcher, but I held her by the shoulders and looked into her gray eyes.

      “You have to stay here and I’ll be right back,” I said. I knew she’d stay. She always did what I told her. Nearly always, anyway.

      “How many minutes?” she asked.

      “Five at the most,” I promised, glancing at my watch. I’d never once broken a promise to her. My father’d never broken a promise to me, and I remembered how that felt, knowing I could always trust him no matter what.

      I leaned down to hug her, kissing the top of her head. The smell of smoke just about seared my lungs.

      Outside the ambulance, Ridley led me to the corner of the lot next door, away from the fire trucks and all the tourists who’d gathered to watch somebody else’s disaster.

      “It’s about your mom,” he said. “Neighbor said she was outside hanging laundry when the fire started and it went up like a … just real fast. Your mom ran in for Bella and she was either overcome by smoke or maybe had a heart attack. Either way, she fell and—”

      “Is she okay?” I wanted him to get to the point.

      He shook his head. “I’m sorry, Trav. She didn’t make it.”

      “Didn’t make it?” I asked. The words weren’t getting through to me.

      “She died on the way to the hospital.” Ridley reached a hand toward my arm but didn’t touch me. Like he was just holding his hand there in case I started to keel over.

      “I don’t get it,” I said. “Bella’s fine. How can Bella be fine and my mother’s dead?” My voice was getting loud and people turned to look at me.

      “Your mom saved her. They think she fell and Bella knew enough to get out of the house, but your mom was—”

      “Shit!” I pulled away from him. Looked at my watch. Four minutes. I headed back to the ambulance and climbed inside.

      “Daddy!” Bella said. “I want to go home!”

      I bit the inside of my cheek to keep from crying. “One thing at a time, Bell,” I said. “First we make sure your lungs are okay.” And then what? Then what? Where would we go? One look at the house and you knew everything we owned was gone. I closed my eyes, picturing my mother running into the house through smoke and flames to find Bella. Thank God she had, but God had done a half-assed job this time. I hoped my mother had been unconscious when she fell. I hoped she never had a clue she was dying. Please, God, no clue.

      “I want to go home!” Bella wailed again, her voice loud in the tiny space of the ambulance.

      I held her by the shoulders and looked her straight in the eye. “Our house burned down, Bella,” I said. “We can’t go back. But we’ll go to another house. We have plenty of friends, right? Our friends will help us.”

      “Tyler?” she asked. Tyler was the five-year-old boy who lived a few houses down from us. Her innocence slayed me.

      “All our friends,” I said, hoping I wasn’t lying. We were going to need everyone.

      I saw something in her face I’d never seen before. How had it happened? She was two weeks shy of her fourth birthday, and overnight she seemed to have grown from my baby daughter to a miniature adult. In her face, I saw the girl she’d become. I saw Robin. There’d always been hints of her mother in her face—the way her eyes crinkled up when she laughed. The upturn at the edges of her lips so that she always looked happy. The rosy circles on her cheeks. But now, suddenly, there was more than a hint and it shook me up. I pulled her against my chest, full of love for the mother I’d lost that afternoon and for the little girl I would hold on to forever—and maybe, buried deep inside me where my anger couldn’t reach, for the teenage girl who’d long ago shut me out of her life.

       3 Robin

       Beaufort, North Carolina

      JAMES AND I STOOD UP WHEN DALE WALKED into the waiting room. Dale always seemed to have a gravitational field around him and sure enough, the seven other people sitting in the room turned to look at him as he walked toward us. They would sail right through the air toward him if they hadn’t clutched the arms of their chairs. That was the sort of pull he had on people. He’d had it on me from the first moment I met him.

      Now, he smiled at me and gave me a quick kiss on the cheek, then shook his father’s hand as if he hadn’t seen him at home only a few short hours ago. “How’s she doing?” he asked quietly, looking from me to his father and back again.

      “Eight centimeters,” I said. “Your mom’s with her. Alissa’s miserable, but the nurse said she’s doing really well.”

      “Poor kid,” Dale said. He took my hand and the three of us sat down again in the row of chairs. Across from us, an older woman and man whispered to one another and pointed in our direction, and I knew they’d recognized us. I had only a second to wonder if they’d approach us before the woman got to her feet, ran her hand over her flawlessly styled silver hair and headed toward us.

      Her eyes were on James. “Mayor Hendricks.” She smiled, and James immediately stood up and took her hand in his.

      “Yes,” he said, “and you are …?”

      “Mary Wiley, just one of your constituents. We—” she looked over her shoulder at the man, most likely her husband “—we have such mixed feelings about your retirement,” she said. “The only good thing about it is that your son will take over.”

      Dale was already on his feet, already smiling that smile that made you feel special. I once thought that smile was only for me but soon came to realize it was for every single person he met. “Well, I hope that’s the case,” he said modestly. “Sounds like I can count on your vote.”

      “And the vote of everyone I know,” she said. “Really, it’s a given, isn’t it? I mean, Dina Pingry? She’s completely wrong.” She gave a little eye roll at the thought of Dale’s opposition, a woman who was a powerhouse Realtor in Beaufort. Of course, the people we hung out with were all Hendricks supporters, so it was sometimes easy to forget that Dina Pingry had her own fans and they СКАЧАТЬ