RITA KNOCKED ON the door of Norma’s high-end condo, then turned and leaned over the railing to see the ocean just beyond. She loved the sight and sound of pounding waves.
For a moment, she let herself envy her friend. An insurance settlement from a company Norma had worked for long ago meant that Norma had all the money she needed. She could afford to live in a luxury, oceanfront condo, the same complex where Cash lived, and yeah, the place was nice.
But, she reminded herself, Norma’s life was far from perfect; the envy went both ways. Rita had it good. She lived in a small rental, yes, but she had friends and a good man to keep her company. Money couldn’t buy that.
Norma’s front door had a painted sign as a Christmas decoration: Be Naughty. Save Santa the Trip. Knowing Norma, it was in defiance of everyone else’s classy Christmas wreaths. Her friend loved a lot of things about this condominium complex, but she railed against the slightly snobbish attitude held by some of the residents.
Like her neighbor, affectionately known to the two of them as the Silver Fox.
Norma opened the door and, even though Rita hadn’t called in advance, gave her a big smile and opened her arms for a hug.
It was wonderful to have a close, drop-in-anytime type of friend nearby.
“I’m so glad you moved to Safe Haven,” Rita said as they walked inside, where the smell of something baking pervaded the air. “Muffins? Coffee cake? It smells fabulous.”
“Blueberry muffins.” Norma opened her built-in, stainless-steel oven and pulled out a tin of golden brown muffins, their rounded tops rising high. She opened a canister of sugar, the fancy crystalized kind, and sprinkled some on top. “You want one?”
Rita’s mouth watered, but she patted her belly regretfully. “I’d better not. At least, not unless we take a walk first to preburn the calories.”
“Can’t,” Norma said. “I promised Cash that I’d wait for his wireless guy. He’s supposed to come sometime this morning.”
Rita’s heart gave a painful twist. Why would Cash ask Norma for help when Rita was his own mother and perfectly willing? Was it an on-purpose slap in the face, or just a general lack of trust?
She was too embarrassed by her son’s coldness toward her to say anything about it. “Is he having problems with his wireless?”
“He’s setting up an office here,” Norma explained. “Got an okay from the condo association and everything.”
Oh. Rita swallowed. Something else she hadn’t known about.
Norma paused in the midst of turning the muffins out onto a plate. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing!” Rita made a show of studying Norma’s salt and pepper shakers, then gave up and met her friend’s eyes. “It’s that obvious?”
“Yep. You don’t exactly have a poker face.”
Rita sighed. No keeping anything from her therapist/friend. “Cash runs hot and cold on me. Mostly cold. Hurts that he’d ask for your help, but not mine.”
“Well,” Norma said, leaning back against the counter, “to be fair, I live in this complex and you don’t. Maybe he didn’t want you to have to drive over here and wait. Maybe he was just being thoughtful.”
“He wasn’t being thoughtful. He won’t ask me for help moving into his new place, either, even though I’m just two doors down.” She pulled out a kitchen chair and sat, looking out the sliding glass doors at the tossing waves. “Let’s face it, I was a bad mother. The other two have let me off the hook about that, but Cash won’t. He’s the tough one.”
Without asking, Norma brought a mug of black coffee over to Rita, and another one for herself. She sank into the chair across from Rita. “Did you have a choice?”
“How would I know?” Rita bit her lip when she heard the bitterness in her own voice.
“You know what happened to you,” Norma said, her voice patient, “because your boys and other people told you what happened. The boys’ father abducted you and beat you nearly to death. When you came to, you didn’t remember anything. Right?”
“Right,” Rita said. Put so baldly, it sounded horrible. She would have felt great sympathy for such a thing happening to someone else. But the fact that she had no memory of the events somehow rendered them hard to believe.
“So,” Norma continued, “how could you know that you even had kids, let alone neglected them?”
They’d been through all this before. Rita had gotten to know Norma because Norma had been her counselor at the Maine clinic where she’d ended up after being rescued by T-Bone, the man who’d become her husband, and was now deceased. Norma had to be kind and understanding about issues like this, because she was a trained counselor.
Cash wasn’t. He wasn’t letting her off the hook. Which Rita totally understood. Although Cash acted easygoing, he was anything but. Not only that, but from what she’d been able to glean from her other sons, Cash’s foster parents, with whom he’d landed after the Orin disaster, had also been cold. Wealthy, but cold.
She still couldn’t believe she’d let it happen. What kind of a person had she been, anyway, that she’d hooked up with a man so evil, then stayed with him to have not one, but three children? Had she been stupid or just passive? Why hadn’t she sought the resources of a shelter or domestic-abuse hotline sooner, in order to save her boys, if not herself?
She had the feeling that, if her current self met her earlier self, she wouldn’t have liked her. Because what kind of mother let things get that bad for her children?
The whole thing swirled painfully in her mind. She shook her head a little bit, sipped coffee and met Norma’s eyes. “I’m not here to talk about me and my problems. I wanted to ask a favor of you. Actually, I have a proposition for you.”
“Don’t get a whole lot of those anymore,” Norma joked. “What’s up?”
“This request actually comes from Yasmin over at the women’s center,” Rita said, “and you’ve heard it before—they need help. They have a parenting class starting up soon, and their normal instructor got a new job and can’t do it. Could you step in?”
Before Rita finished speaking, Norma was shaking her head. “I don’t really want to work,” she said. “I know I told Yasmin I’d consider it when she asked a while back, but I’m not really up for it.”
“Hear me out,” Rita said. “It’s a class for parents who need help with their special-needs children, or their kids are having discipline problems, or they’ve been somehow neglected because of whatever it was that brought them to the women’s center. Right up your alley. The kind of stuff that you worked on for your whole career, so when Yasmin told me they needed an instructor for that particular course, I thought of you right away.”
“Yeah, but standing up in front of a bunch of people and talking? I hate that kind of thing. I do better one-on-one.”
“But you turned down that volunteer job of offering counseling to kids in trouble,” Rita reminded her.
“Didn’t suit my schedule,” Norma said, her tone offhanded.
Rita didn’t get it. “Are you going to just sit here and rot? You’re too young to retire.”
Norma glared. “I’m not rotting, I’m baking muffins and helping out your son.”
Ouch. “Don’t rub it in. I would love to be the one helping him, but he doesn’t want anything to do with me, I already told you that.”
“Are you sure you’re not being oversensitive? Taking offense where there’s none meant?”
“I thought a therapist was supposed to let you be oversensitive.” Rita wasn’t really mad, that was the kind of relationship she and Norma had, but she wasn’t going to let herself get sidetracked. “Just like a therapist is supposed to want to help people. As in, teach that class.”
“I told you, I’m off duty. I don’t want to work anymore, and that goes for acting sympathetic when someone just might need a kick in the pants!”
“I need a kick in the pants? Why did I even come over here?” Rita took one of the muffins and broke a piece off it.
Norma slapped her hand and went to the sink to wash the mixing bowl and muffin tin.
Rita turned away. Outside the windows, the November sun was finally high enough to heat up the day. There was no noise outside, though, not like at Rita’s apartment complex. This place was dead. She was glad she didn’t live here. Especially since living here would mean living closer to her impossible best friend.
“What are you doing for Thanksgiving?” Norma asked, her voice gruff. “If you’re alone, you can come with me to the meal the civic association is putting on.” She gestured at the muffins. “That’s what these are for. We’re serving breakfast while the main meal’s being prepared. Could always use another helping hand.”
It was Norma’s way of apologizing for her sharp words, and it also made Rita feel guilty. As the person who’d been in town longer, she should have thought to make sure Norma had something to do for the holiday. “Jimmy and I are going to Sean’s place,” she said. “And I’m one hundred percent sure there’s plenty of food and space for another person, if you’d like to stop by after you help with the civic group’s meal.”
“Thanks, maybe I will.” Norma reached out and gave Rita a half hug. “You know I love you, kiddo, right? If I mess with you, it’s for your own good.”
“Yeah, because you know it all.” But she hugged Norma back.
The tap-tap-tap at the door broke into their lovefest. Norma went to the door, and Rita couldn’t resist looking over her shoulder to see who was there. Maybe it was Cash.
But instead, it was the Silver Fox, whose name was actually Stephen. Norma spoke with him at the entrance. When the exchange got longer, Rita cleared her throat, and Norma looked back at her. “Invite the man in!” she said in a stage whisper.
“That would be...much appreciated,” Stephen said.
“Fine, come in.” Norma held open the door and beckoned him toward the kitchen. “I suppose you want a blueberry muffin, too.”
Rita stared at her friend. Norma was a tough cookie who didn’t put up with nonsense, but she wasn’t usually this ungracious.
She soon understood the reason, at least the superficial one: this was a conversation about Christmas decorations, and the rules that governed them, in this complex. “I’d be happy to cover the cost,” he said. “I just thought it would look better if we coordinated my outdoor display with yours, since we’re next-door neighbors.”
Norma cackled. “You just don’t want me to do something tacky,” she said.
Color suffused Stephen’s face. Looking at him, Rita wasn’t sure whether he had really not wanted Norma to decorate, or whether he was looking for an excuse to come by. She couldn’t get over the notion that he was drawn to Norma, although two more different people could hardly be imagined.
She also thought that Norma’s testy attitude might have everything to do with her own feeling of attraction for Stephen. She was so insistent that she didn’t want to get involved with a man again, but Rita knew for sure that was mostly fear talking—fear of what a man would think of her mastectomy scars.
“If you’re too busy, I can do the decorating,” he said, sounding uncomfortable. “I didn’t think you worked.”
Norma looked at him with head tilted to one side, frowning. Then she looked at Rita. “When does the gig at the women’s center start?”
Score one for me and the Silver Fox, Rita thought. “I think it starts the last week of November. Are you in?”
“I’m in.”
But as she let herself out, leaving Norma and Stephen to their bickering, she had to wonder. Norma was growing, albeit against her will. But what about Rita? Was she growing, or stagnating? Maybe she was the one who was rotting.
Her ringing phone offered relief from her thoughts. She pulled out her phone, but the caller was unknown.
She clicked on the call, and to her surprise, it was Holly. “Hey, you know how you offered to help out?” she asked. In the background was a baby crying and a dog barking.
“Whatever you need,” Rita said promptly. “Where are you?”
“I’m taking home the worst-behaved dog in the history of dogs,” Holly said. “And I’m afraid his owner’s going to put him out on the street. Any interest in adopting him?”
A dog. She hadn’t thought about a pet, not lately, but she was surprisingly intrigued. “Doubtful, but I’m willing to meet him,” she said, and immediately, inexplicably, felt a whole lot better.
HOLLY LOOKED AROUND at the low-hanging Spanish moss and overarching oak trees that made the road they were traveling seem more like a dark tunnel, the sunny day more like twilight. “I’m not sure this is a good idea,” she said.
Cash looked over at her from the driver’s seat. They were in the SUV again, due, Cash had said, to the rutted road that led to Ma Dixie’s place.
Ma Dixie. Even the name sounded completely obscure to Holly, like a character in a TV show about the South.
“It won’t be bad. It’s not her big Friday-night supper. It’s just...” He trailed off, looking embarrassed or maybe shy.
That roused her curiosity. “It’s just what?”
“I want Ma to meet Penny and vice versa.”
Holly tilted her head to one side, studying him. “Was she your foster mom?” She hadn’t gotten that impression.
“Not exactly, but kind of.” He navigated around an especially big dip in the dirt road. “She was Sean’s foster mom, but she made me and Liam feel welcome. When we were kids, and after we’d grown up, too.”
She nodded, looking out at the deep shadows of the bayou. “Screws you up, doesn’t it? Not having a regular mom.”
He looked at her sharply. “You and Tiff?”
“We had a mom, just not... Not someone who wanted to be a mom.”
“Ouch.” He looked thoughtful. “Rita, she wanted to be our mom, I guess. She just couldn’t. The right was taken away from her.”
“You don’t hold that against her, do you?”
“I shouldn’t. I try not to.”
Sudden anxiety squeezed her stomach. “Do you think Penny will blame Tiff, when she grows up? That she wasn’t here?”
“Let alone blame me for all the mistakes I’m likely to make.” Cash heaved a sigh as they turned down an even narrower road. There, in a clearing, was a rustic-looking cabin on stilts. A porch wrapped around it, and a green lawn sloped down to a narrow, muddy river.
Cash was lifting Penny out of the car before Holly could grab her purse and climb down from the passenger side. He shouldered the diaper bag and waved off her offer to carry it. “This way,” he said, then went up the porch steps and pounded on the door. “Ma! Pudge! You’ve got company!”
After a few seconds with no answer, he pounded again, then led the way around the house to the back door. But there was no response there, either.
“Did you call?” she asked.
He shook his head. “No. They’re always here.” His voice sounded bleak, and she caught a fleeting glimpse of the lonely, forsaken teen he must have been at one time. But he shook it off almost instantly. “Let’s hang out on the porch for a few, at least. Get Penny used to the marsh air.”
They sat on an old-fashioned glider, shoulder-to-shoulder, knee-to-knee. Cash held Penny, who looked at everything, wide-eyed, and let out a shriek of excitement when a blue jay landed on the porch railing and cawed at them.
Holly drew in deep breaths and tried to focus on the scent of the flowers growing around the porch rather than on the warmth of Cash’s leg beside hers.
She couldn’t help the way her breathing quickened, though, and when their fingers brushed as he passed her a packet of crackers to open for Penny, she sucked in a breath. She’d never been one to get all keyed up about a man. She’d always shrugged it off when a girlfriend talked about how hot and sexy a particular guy was.
Now, all of a sudden, she got it.
The overly loud sound of a car with muffler problems broke the mood. Good.
A big old sedan pulled up directly in front of the house. An enormous man opened the passenger door and started out, then looked back at a sharply spoken word from the driver. A moment later, a woman who must be Ma Dixie bustled around the car and braced herself.
“Okay, on three,” she said.
“Wait, Ma!” Cash thrust Penny into Holly’s arms and hurried down the porch steps. He spoke to the woman and then stepped in front of her to help the man hoist himself out of the car. Cash walked slowly to the porch, the man clinging to his arm, breathing hard. The steps, only four of them, were a challenge, but with Cash’s help the man made it up, and they both disappeared into the house.
When Holly realized that Ma Dixie was collecting bags from the back seat, she shifted Penny to one hip and went down to the car. “I’m Cash’s friend, Holly,” she said. “Let me help you with that.”
“Thank you, honey. I’m Ma, but I expect you know that. And the big one’s my man, Pudge.” She waved a hand toward the house.
Between the two of them, they got several bags of what smelled like barbeque into the house. In the kitchen, Ma directed her to put the bags on the counter and then gestured toward the table. “Have a seat. Would you like some sweet tea?”
“Yes, thank you.” Holly wanted to offer to get them drinks herself, because the other woman looked tired. But Holly was the guest and she didn’t know if Ma would welcome the assistance or be offended by the offer.
Ma brought ice-filled glasses and a pitcher to the table. “If you could pour, I’d surely appreciate it,” she said, holding out her arms for Penny. “And who’s this little lady?”
“Her name’s Penny,” Holly said as she poured tea. She didn’t know how much Cash had told Ma. “She’s a year old.”
“Such a pretty little peanut,” she said. “Yours?”
Holly opened her mouth and then closed it again. Was Penny hers? Yes, in every way that mattered, she decided, and nodded her head.
She was pretty sure Ma had caught the hesitation, but she didn’t push it. “I’m right glad the two of you showed up today,” she said. “I told Pudge we’d better get enough barbeque to feed a few more mouths than just ours.”
Cash came in, followed by Pudge, and they poured more tea and settled down around the table. “First he’s eaten all day,” Ma Dixie said, nodding at Pudge.
“Why’s that?” Cash asked.
Ma and Pudge exchanged glances. “Some medical tests. Nothing to worry about.”
“What kind of tests?” Cash crossed his forearms on the table and looked from Ma to Pudge.
“Like she said, nothing to worry about.” Pudge smiled at Penny, his broad face creasing. “What’s more interesting is this little lady.” He looked at Cash. “Anything you want to tell us?”
“Pudge, mind your manners. He’ll tell us in his own good time.”
“That she’s his?”
Ma slapped his hand. “Just for that, I’m serving you last,” she said and then stood to dish up barbequed ribs onto four plates. “Cash, if you could dip out the potato salad and string beans, I’d be obliged.”
Cash did as instructed, a sheepish look on his face. Once they’d prayed over the food and started to dig in—and man, was it good—Cash put down his fork and looked from Pudge to Ma and back again. “It’s true. She’s my child. I only just learned about her myself. Now the question is, how did you find out?”
“Your doings are news in this town.” Ma smiled at Cash, then at Holly. “We’re glad to welcome you and Penny to the family.”
Holly’s chest tugged with a mixture of longing and apprehension. She didn’t belong to any family, not really. Didn’t know how to be in a family.
“Holly’s raising Penny, but her sister, Tiff, is the one who...was Penny’s biological mother.” Cash looked a little embarrassed, but determined, as if he wanted to set the record straight.
Was that to save Holly’s reputation, or because he didn’t want to be associated with her romantically?
“So I heard,” Pudge said, smiling at Holly. “Good for you, taking in your sister’s child. You’ll fit right in here in Safe Haven.”
“You know,” Ma said, “I could take care of this little one. Babysit, I mean.”
The offer startled Holly so much that she didn’t know what to say. What kind of place was Safe Haven, that a stranger would offer to take care of your kid?
Cash wiped his mouth and looked at Holly. “She did it for Anna, when she moved to town with her twins and needed day care for them. In fact,” he added, turning to Ma, “I’m surprised you don’t have any foster kids here now.”
“Oh, well, we will again soon. I hope.” She glanced at Pudge. “Which is why it’s the perfect time for me to take care of little Penny, here. I miss having a little one around.”
Near panic rose in Holly. She didn’t even know this woman; she wasn’t about to become obligated to her, or to trust her with precious Penny. “It’s a lovely offer,” she said, “but I’ve got it covered for now.”
Cash frowned. “You’re carrying Penny around while you walk dogs. It’s got to be exhausting to you and her both.”
“Cash was telling me about your business,” Pudge said. “Good idea, that. Around here, at least out in the country, people have tended to leave their dogs tied up outside while they’re at work. Or else they’re cooped up in the house all day.”
Holly’s shoulders relaxed. “That’s what I like about my job,” she said. “It’s a chance to spring the pups out of jail and give them some attention and fun and exercise.”
“I could connect you with some of my clients,” Pudge said. “And I hope you’re walking Liam’s dog, Rio. He’s full of beans.”
“Yes, Rio was one of my first clients.” Cash’s doing, she suspected. Holly smiled to think of the big Lab-rottweiler mix. “And he is a handful, but he’s a great dog. I’m glad I can help Liam and Yasmin out. They’re pretty busy, it seems.”
“Still,” Ma said, “it must be tough to walk dogs with a baby strapped on.”
“You should really think about Ma’s offer,” Cash said.
Holly’s ease with the group around the table dissolved, and she pushed away her plate. “We’re fine,” she said, only keeping her voice level with effort.
Just because she was receiving child support from Cash, did she have to dive into his family as if she’d known them all her life?
She glanced at the wall clock and wondered how long until they could leave this overly friendly, threatening place.