I go to playschool if I put on clothes?” Calvin asked, looking so woeful that Julie mussed his hair and ducked out of her floury apron.
“Sure,” she said. “Let’s run home so you can change.” She turned to Libby. “I put the first batch of scones in the oven a couple of minutes ago,” she added. “When you hear the timer ding, take them out.”
“Are you coming back?” Libby asked, as equally invested in a “no” as she was in a “yes.” Once she and her sister were alone again, between customers, Julie would grill her about Tate. If Julie didn’t return, the first batch of scones would sell out in a heartbeat, as always, and there wouldn’t be any more for the rest of the day, because Libby always burned everything she baked, no matter how careful she was.
“Only if you promise to take my turn babysitting Marva so I can—” Julie paused, cleared her throat “—leave town for a few days.”
“We’re going somewhere?” Calvin asked, immediately excited. On a teacher’s salary, with the child support going into a college account, he and Julie didn’t take vacations.
“Yes,” Julie answered, passing Libby an arch look. “If your aunt Libby will agree to look after Gramma while we’re gone, that is.”
Calvin sagged with disappointment. “Nobody,” he said, “wants to spend any more time with Gramma than they have to.”
“Calvin Remington,” Julie replied, without much sternness to her tone, “that was a terrible thing to say.”
“You say it all the time.”
“It’s still terrible, all right?” Julie turned to Libby. “Deal or no deal?”
Agreeing would mean two weeks in a row on Marva-watch. But Libby needed those scones, if she didn’t want all her customers heading for Starbucks. “Deal,” she said, in dismal resignation.
Julie grinned. “Great. See you in twenty minutes.”
“Crap,” Libby muttered, when her sister and nephew had reached the sidewalk and she knew Calvin wouldn’t hear.
Julie took half an hour to get back, not twenty minutes, and in the meantime there was a run on iced coffee, so Libby nearly missed the “ding” of the timer on the oven. She rescued the scones in the nick of time and sold the last one just as Julie waltzed in, all pleased with herself.
“You’re going, aren’t you?” she asked, as soon as the customer and the scone were gone. “If Tate asks you out to dinner again, you’ll say ‘yes,’ not ‘maybe’?”
“Maybe,” Libby said, annoyed. “And thanks a heap for sticking me with Marva for an extra week. I covered for you last month, remember, when you wanted to take your twelfth-grade drama class on that field trip to Dallas.”
“They learned so much about Shakespeare,” Julie said.
“And I came to understand the mysteries of matricide,” Libby said, cleaning the spigots on the espresso machine with a paper towel. “Are you seriously planning to leave town so you can avoid Gordon and the new bride?”
“Yes,” Julie answered. “According to his e-mail, he sold his boat, or it sank or both and it went for salvage—I forget. That means good old Gordon is thinking of settling down, and I don’t want him asking for joint custody or something, just because he’s got a wife now.”
“I understand where you’re coming from, Julie,” Libby said, after taking a few moments to prepare, “but you won’t be able to hide from Gordon forever—if he really wants to be part of Calvin’s life, he’ll find a way. And he has a right to at least see the little guy once in a while.”
“Gordon Pruett is the most irresponsible man on the planet,” Julie reminded Libby, her eyes suspiciously bright and her voice shaking a little. “I can’t turn Calvin over to him every other weekend, or for whole summers or for holidays. For one thing, there’s the asthma.”
A silence fell between them.
Libby hadn’t witnessed one of Calvin’s asthma attacks recently, but when they happened, they were terrifying. Once, when he was still in diapers, he’d all but stopped breathing. Libby’s youngest sister, Paige, an RN, had jumped up and made sure he wasn’t choking, then grabbed him from his high chair at the Thanksgiving dinner table at a neighbor’s house, yelled for someone to call 911 and rushed to the shower, where she’d thrust the by-then-blue baby under an icy spray, drenching herself in the process, holding him there until his lungs were shocked into action.
Libby could still hear his affronted, frightened shrieks, see him soaked and struggling to get to Julie, who bundled him in a towel and held him close, once he’d gotten his breath again, whispering to him, singing softly, desperate to calm him down.
Paige had calmly turned on the hot water spigot in the shower then, and filled the bathroom with steam, and Julie had sat on the lid of the toilet, rocking a whimpering Calvin in her arms until the paramedics arrived.
The toddler had spent nearly a week in the pediatric ward of a San Antonio hospital, Julie at his bedside around the clock, and it had taken Paige months to win back his trust. He was simply too little to understand that she’d saved his life.
Now, he used an inhaler and Julie kept oxygen on hand, in their small cottage two blocks from the high school. Paige, living across the street from them in an old mansion converted to apartments, was on call 24/7 in case Calvin needed emergency intubation. Given that she usually worked four ten-hour shifts at a private clinic fifty miles from Blue River and the fire department EMTs were all volunteers, with little formal training, Paige had tried to show both Julie and Libby how to insert an oxygen tube, using a borrowed dummy.
While Libby supposed she could do it if Calvin’s life were hanging in the balance, she was far from confident. It was the same with Julie.
In frustration, Paige had finally recruited one of Blue River’s EMTs, a former Marine medic named Dennis Evans, and instructed her sisters to call him if Calvin had a serious asthma attack while she was too far away to help.
Julie kept Dennis’s number on the front of her refrigerator, seven bright red, six-inch plastic digits with magnets on the back.
So far, Calvin’s medications kept his condition under control, but Libby could certainly understand Julie’s vigilance. Whenever he went through a bad spell, Julie didn’t sleep, and dark circles formed under her eyes.
“So,” Julie said now, returning to the main part of the shop after another batch of scones had been baked, and another rush of business had whisked the goodies out the door before they’d even cooled, “let’s talk about Tate.”
“Let’s not,” Libby replied. She’d been a codependent fool to even think about accepting a date with him, considering that he’d probably begun the process of forgetting all about her as soon as she’d been forced to leave the university and come home to help look after her ailing father. She’d taken what courses she could at Blue River Junior College, which was really just a satellite of another school in San Antonio and had since closed due to lack of funding, but she’d only been marking time, and she knew it.
“You really loved him, Lib,” Julie said gently, taking Calvin’s stool at the counter and studying Libby with thoughtful eyes.
“That’s
