His Surprise Son (9 page)

The storm that crossed his face seemed to turn the entire afternoon dark and dangerous. “If that’s what you believe, then you don’t know me. You don’t know me at all. Even worse, I apparently didn’t know you.”

He waited, staring, glaring at her, but she remained stubbornly mute. Her mind, however, was busy.

Was it possible that Nate was telling the truth about not dating and that his mother had misrepresented the situation to her, just as she’d skewed the facts when relaying them to Nate? All Izzy knew for sure from that photo was that Nate had attended some kind of formal event and posed for a snapshot with a pretty girl. If he hadn’t been dating anyone else—

It doesn’t matter. He didn’t want to raise a baby. He didn’t want a family. And you did. There was no future.
Now, ironically, they had come full circle: intuitively she knew that when she told him about Eli, their complicated relationship would have to be put aside to address their son’s needs.

While her brain spun a tangled web, Nate, it appeared, had had enough.

“Fine,” he said between gritted teeth. Stalking around her, he headed for the kayak. “Let’s get back.”

Chapter Nine

“G
eorge Eliot’s
The Mill on the Floss
, 1860 first edition. Oh. My. Gosh. Your wife had fabulous taste in books, Henry.” Reverently, Holliday stroked the brown cloth cover of the small volume she had plucked from the cramped bookshelves in Henry Bernstein’s living room. “
Northanger Abbey
, circa 1930,” she murmured, reading more of the titles. “
Buddenbrooks
—another first edition. Be still, my heart.” She turned toward the man seated on the couch. “Are you sure you want to donate these to the library? You have some really coveted editions here, and they’re all in good condition. You could get a pretty penny.”

Seated on the carpeted floor as she rummaged through a box of china she’d brought up from the basement, Izzy watched Henry nod and wasn’t surprised when he said, “Elaine loved the library. She was one of its best customers. With her books displayed in a case, a little part of her will always be there, watching over everything.”

Though she’d never met Elaine, Izzy had heard enough about her through the years to feel as if she’d known Henry’s wife. It was obvious that her passing had not ended their relationship.

Holliday shook her head slowly, hugging
The Mill on the Floss
to her chest. “That’s lovely. Whenever you’ve talked about Elaine, it’s obvious how much you two loved each other.”

Izzy’s head popped up. The indulgent, wishful tone sounded nothing like her friend. Holliday was perhaps the least romantic person Izzy knew. That was one of the things Izzy liked best about her. Holliday had lived exclusively in large cities and had traveled the world before settling in Thunder Ridge. She said she took Mae West and Diane Keaton as her role models.

Henry’s hands were folded over his little tummy. His soft brown eyes smiled. “It was a good marriage. Forty years. I was a child groom, of course.” He winked.

Holliday laughed, then said, “Tell us your secret for staying in love.”

Izzy nearly dropped the antique chocolate pot she was unwrapping. She wasn’t sure she wanted to hear this conversation today.

Swimming in a sea of uncomfortable emotions since their silent paddle back to the kayak rental place, she’d been popping antacids since last night. Last month, Henry and Sam had announced they wanted to participate in the annual Thunder Ridge yard sale. Izzy had tapped Holliday and planned to spend several hours this weekend sorting and pricing the belongings with which they were ready to part. After a sleepless night, she’d hoped that helping the brothers would distract her, but so far, no such luck.

“Lemonade and cinnamon
mandelbrodt
,” Sam announced, entering the room before Henry could respond. He balanced a tray laden with four glasses of iced lemonade and a plate of the wedge-shaped cookies he baked once a week.

Jumping up, Izzy took the tray, setting it on the coffee table while Sam lowered himself to the couch beside his brother. “What were you talking about?” he asked.

“Who wants a lemonade?” she countered, hoping to derail the topic. No such luck.

“Did I hear someone say ‘love’?” Sam looked as eager as a puppy with a rawhide.

It was no secret that keeping track of romances both local and global was Sam’s favorite pastime. At age seventy-five, he had never married, but he had fallen madly in love at age nineteen with a girl he’d met while serving a stint in the navy. The relationship hadn’t worked out, but Sam had never forgotten her and remained convinced that she was his soul mate. Every time he brought up the fact that he had lost his one true love—and he brought it up fairly often—Izzy got an uncomfortable squeeze in her stomach.

“I was asking Henry to tell us how he managed to stay in a relationship for forty years,” Holliday said, accepting the glass of lemonade Izzy handed her but missing—or ignoring—Izzy’s pleading stare.

She’d told Holliday all about her meeting with Nate. Confusion, anger, guilt and a pervasive sadness she could identify only as grief had dogged her since yesterday afternoon. So much so that she felt as if she had an emotional hangover today.

“True love,” Sam said in answer to Holliday’s query. “That’s how you stay together. You find your one true love, and you never leave and you never give up.” Sam considered himself an expert about relationships. “Isn’t that right, Hank?” he deferred to his brother.

“That’s a good start, Sammy, a good start. But, no, I don’t think that’s what sustains you for forty years. The question was wrong.”

“What do you mean? My question was wrong?” Holliday asked.

Henry nodded. “I’m afraid so. You’re assuming Elaine and I stayed in love for forty years.”

Holliday, Izzy and even Sam stared at Henry in surprise.

“What are you talking about?” Sam looked horrified. “You and Elaine were
bashert
.”

“What?” Still holding Elaine’s book, Holliday walked over and sat in one of the chairs opposite the couch. “What does that word mean? Besh...what?”

“Bashert,”
Izzy murmured. She’d heard the Yiddish word often enough since coming to work for the brothers. “It means ‘meant to be.’”

Sam nodded. “And you only get one. One
bashert
per customer.”

“So you think we’re fated to meet that one right person, or not?” Holliday seemed truly interested. That same question had plagued Izzy for years until she’d decided that true love was either a myth or something that struck rarely, like lightning.

Sam, however, nodded decisively. “That’s exactly what it is. Destiny.”

Reaching across the sofa cushions, Henry patted his brother’s knobby hand, a gesture so sweet that Izzy felt her eyes sting. “Maybe not exactly,” Henry said, a gentle curve to his lips. “The way you put it, Holliday—to meet one right person or not—implies a certain fatalism. The meeting will or will not happen despite anything we do. And if we meet our fated one, we will be together and stay together, also despite anything we do or do not do. But to be a
bashert
is not so easy, I’m afraid.”

Leaning forward, he picked up a glass of lemonade and a
mandelbrodt
and took a bite of the cookie. Nodding as he chewed, he winked at his brother. “Your best batch yet.” Henry issued the same compliment every time and seemed to mean it.

“So, a
bashert
,” he continued, “depends on the philosophy that before our lives begin, we are given certain abilities and a mission that only we can fulfill in this world. As a gift, we are given a special person, a partnership to help us become the best ‘us’ we can be. But it’s difficult, this business of being someone’s
bashert
, because as another gift, we’re given free will.” With the hand holding the lemonade glass, he gestured. “Izzy knows this.”

Izzy’s heart began to thump hard and fast. Surely, he wasn’t talking about—

“I’m quite certain she considers that Eli was meant to be her son. That she and only she was meant to be his mother.”

Her heart calmed down.

“But it was her choice to have this
bashert
son of hers,” Henry said. “And it is a choice to raise him, to love him through good times and less good ones. To believe so much in this special partnership that she keeps going...kept going even when he was twelve and—” he bobbed his head from side to side “—maybe not so lovable all the time. But Izzy made a choice, an agreement to stay in the mother-son relationship, because she believes in it. Being someone’s meant-to-be takes great patience and perseverance. To be a witness for another’s life is a sacred trust. It’s easier, I assume, to maintain this commitment with one’s child than with a spouse.”

“But you did it?” Holliday’s expression and the hesitancy in her voice mirrored Izzy’s reaction. Was Henry saying that he and Elaine were not the love affair everyone had assumed? “You maintained the commitment?”

“Elaine was my witness for as long as she was alive. I was hers. Sometimes we loved what we saw, sometimes—” he shook his head “—no. But it didn’t matter. We made an agreement. We kept going.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” Holliday muttered.

“Finding your
bashert
doesn’t necessarily make life easier,” Henry agreed. “It makes it better. The next question I see in your eyes, dear Holliday, is whether we kept loving each other, and the answer to that is yes. When we looked for the love, we found it. Over and over. In forty years, we lost it many times and found it again.” His eyes filled with a wistful expression that made him appear years younger. “Always better than it was before. One day of marriage to Elaine was better than a lifetime of looking for happiness someplace else.”

The room went so silent Izzy could hear the others breathing. Henry and Sam were each immersed in their own memories, and Holliday quietly rose to resume her study of the bookshelves.

Izzy reached into the box of china again, but her hands shook. The newspaper-wrapped cups and saucers actually seemed to be moving, swirling together as if they were being tumbled in a dryer. She was so, so dizzy. Her heart beat so hard and so quickly, she began to fear she was having a heart attack.

I have to go. I have to go.

“Where?”

Holliday’s question made Izzy realize she’d spoken out loud. Holly’s eyes were huge as she stared at Izzy in concern.

“What’s wrong? Do you feel sick? You look gray.”

What
was
wrong with her? She felt as if she needed to run—right now and very fast. One word thrummed through her mind:
escape.

“I need to get some air. I just... I’ll be right back.” Pushing to her feet, she moved as steadily as she could toward the door.

* * *

The night Nate had insisted on driving Izzy right up to her door was the night she had known they would never last.

Now, standing in front of the decrepit trailer she had called home until she was seventeen, Izzy took several deep breaths. It had finally occurred to her that she’d been having a panic attack at Henry and Sam’s earlier in the day.

For the past several years, she’d addressed fear by reminding herself how far she had come in her life. Nowhere was that more clear than amid the morass of dry weeds, rusted metal and dark memories that comprised her childhood home.

She’d once believed she was no better than where she’d come from.

The day after he’d met her mother for the first time and had witnessed the way Izzy lived, Nate had come to the deli to see her. Certain he was going to break up with her, she had prepared a goodbye speech of her own, thinking that if she beat him to the punch, there would be less chance of breaking down completely.

When Nate heard her stilted goodbye monologue, delivered in the alley behind the restaurant, he hadn’t exhibited a bit of surprise. He’d simply listened, then told her he’d arranged with Henry and Sam for her to take off early. Despite her insistence that they were officially broken up, he’d persuaded her to get in his truck and had taken her to Trillium Lake, where he’d already set up a cloth-covered folding table and chairs, candles and actual china, which, it had turned out, he’d borrowed from his mother’s wedding set without asking. He’d set up a CD player, tucked flowers into the needles of a pine tree and made the whole scene look magical.

“Why did you do this?” she’d asked.

He’d held her face in his hands and had said, “Because you shouldn’t have to ask why when someone does something special for you.” His voice had dropped to a whisper, his face moving so close to hers she could no longer see his lips. “You should understand—” he’d kissed her, and her bones had begun to melt “—that it’s because
you’re
special.”

A decade and a half later, Izzy forced herself to walk to the front door of the broken trailer she used to call home. “Come on, Latke.”

Looking like linen that refused to iron out, the Shar-Pei hauled herself up from where she’d plopped down the moment they’d arrived and followed her mommy to the cockeyed aluminum steps. Izzy stopped there. Close enough.

Felicia had not lived there—as far as Izzy knew, nobody had—for years and years. Izzy had been in Portland, having her baby, when her mother had met yet another man and, this time, had followed him to God only knew where. She hadn’t left a forwarding address; nor had she ever tried to get in touch with her daughter again. When Izzy had returned to Thunder Ridge, she’d contacted their old landlord, who had been one of Felicia’s drinking buddies. He hadn’t had a clue as to Felicia’s whereabouts but had told Izzy she could do whatever she wanted with the trailer; for years he’d been meaning to sell it for scrap but hadn’t gotten around to it.

“We don’t have to go in this time, Latke.”

Sometimes, like when she’d been getting her business degree online and had felt too tired to study for finals, she would go inside just to remind herself why she worked so hard. She was building a future for her son that would be the polar opposite of her own past. She was strong, she had values, she was not a quitter...

Today she had come simply because the pull to do so had been overwhelming. As gloomy as her memories of the years in this trailer could be, they often illuminated her present.

Crouching beside her dog, she cuddled Latke’s comforting heavy folds. “You should have seen the flowers Nate put in the trees. Peonies and pink roses. It looked like a scene from
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
.” Latke turned her head to swipe her broad tongue across Izzy’s chin.

“I love you so much, too,” Izzy murmured. She rubbed Latke’s ears in the way that made the dog stretch her neck forward in ecstasy. “I know why I had the panic attack at Henry and Sam’s,” she told her loyal companion. “It’s because that night on the lake with Nate, I understood what
bashert
felt like. For the first time in my life. It was like finding out you can fly without wings.”

When she was very young, she’d tried so hard to gain every ounce of affection that she could, to find someone to belong to. Before she’d had Eli, the best Thanksgiving she could remember was the one year Felicia had a boyfriend named Rick, who drove a Schwan food truck. He was a nice man, one of the few who had hung around awhile, and he’d brought over a complete Thanksgiving meal for the three of them to share, with pumpkin ice cream he’d said was especially for Izzy. The food had been completely prepared and only needed to be reheated, but Felicia had complained that staying home was “a drag” and had begun to drink. She’d managed to burn the stuffing and potatoes while Izzy and Rick had played checkers. In the end, Felicia had threatened to go out and “have some adult fun
on my own
” if Rick didn’t join her. So Izzy had stayed home alone, cleaned up the mess and scooped pumpkin ice cream straight from the container while watching TV. She’d made turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce and mayonnaise to share with her mother when she returned, but Felicia hadn’t come home until two days later, and she’d scoffed at the plastic-wrapped sandwiches Izzy had pulled from the fridge. “Throw that garbage out. I broke up with Rick. What a loser.”