sooner had she spoken than she looked up and spotted Caleb standing on the other side of the screen door. He looked as if someone had just delivered devastating news.
“Caleb?” Amanda asked, regarding him with concern. “Are you okay?”
He smiled, but she knew him well enough now to recognize that it was forced.
“I’m great. Just loaded down with all this food,” he said, juggling several bags. “Can somebody get the door for me?”
Nadine sprang up to do it. Maggie and Dinah immediately began poking in the bags to see what he’d brought for lunch, pulling out huge containers of coleslaw and barbecue and potato salad.
“Pickles?” Dinah queried. “Where are the pickles?”
“Right here, little mother-to-be,” Maggie responded, retrieving a plastic container of dill pickles. “I imagine you think they’re all for you.”
“Of course,” Dinah said, reaching for them.
During the exchange Amanda kept her gaze on Caleb. She’d never seen him looking quite so out of his depth before. She crossed the room. “Can I get you something to drink? A soda, maybe? Or the guys have beer in a cooler outside.”
“No, I’m fine,” he said with another of those halfhearted smiles.
“Do you want to tell me what’s going on?” she pressed, keeping her voice low while Maggie, Nadine and Dinah chattered on.
“Nothing’s going on,” he said more tersely than he’d ever spoken to her before. He immediately winced. “Sorry. Bad morning, I guess. I’ll go outside and take out my foul mood on some wood. Hammering a few nails should make me feel better.”
Amanda reluctantly let him go. How could he claim that the two of them were friends when it was apparently so one-sided? He was always there for her, but the one time he looked as if he needed a friend, he shut her out.
She might not have a lot of experience with friendship, but she knew that wasn’t the way it was supposed to work, which meant that the minute this crowd dispersed, she and Caleb were going to have a chat. She was going to get to the bottom of whatever had put that lost and devastated look on his face.
Caleb wanted to kick himself for betraying even a hint of his reaction to Amanda’s comments about having another baby. Thankfully she’d only picked up on the fact that there was something wrong, not what had triggered his mood. He had a hunch, though, that he hadn’t heard the last of it. She was going to get in his face the very first chance she had.
Which meant, of course, that he needed to be away from her house one step ahead of everyone else. The minute the food had been served and the kids had gone inside for their naps, he made his excuses and started around the side of the house. Even though it made him feel like the worst sort of coward, he did it while Amanda was inside.
Unfortunately, the woman apparently had radar. She met him the second he turned the corner into the front yard.
“Going somewhere?” she inquired sweetly, her expression knowing.
“I have an appointment,” he said. It was only a slight stretch of the truth. He was going over to Mary Louise’s later to talk to her parents about the baby. She’d called that morning and asked him to be there when she broke the news. She’d sounded so nervous and uncertain, he’d agreed immediately.
There it was again. The whole baby thing. It seemed like everywhere he turned these days people were talking about babies. It was beginning to take a toll.
“Oh?” Amanda said, her expression skeptical. “Anything you’d care to talk about?”
“Sorry, it’s confidential,” he said evasively. “And I really do need to get going.”
She studied him with apparent disappointment. “I thought you trusted me more than this.”
“I told you, this appointment is confidential.”
“I’m not talking about that,” she said impatiently. “I’m talking about the fact that you’re obviously upset and you’re trying to hide the reason from me.”
“I can’t talk about it, Amanda. I really can’t.” He’d never discussed it with anyone, and Amanda was the last person with whom he’d share it. He hated the idea that it might change the way she looked at him.
“Then it’s all part of this confidential meeting you’re going to?” she asked.
For the first time since he’d known her, Caleb lied. “Yes,” he said. He could live with the lie far more easily than he could live with Amanda ever knowing the truth.
She regarded him sadly. “I wish I believed you.”
She turned and walked away, leaving him standing there knowing that he’d just lost something that really mattered. He’d lost her trust, something he’d spent months and months trying to earn. He couldn’t help wondering if, once all the truths started coming out, he would ever get it back again.
Mary Louise wished her mom and dad weren’t looking at her like that, as if she were such a terrible disappointment to them. The minute she’d told them about the baby, her mom’s eyes had filled with tears and her dad had looked as if someone had punched him in the stomach.
“Where the hell’s Danny?” her father asked furiously. “Why isn’t he sitting here beside you? What kind of coward leaves his girl to break this kind of news alone?”
“I didn’t want him here,” Mary Louise said, looking to Reverend Webb for support. He gave her an encouraging smile. “Danny and I talked about this and we’ve met twice with Reverend Webb. We know what we’re going to do, or I guess I should say what we’re not going to do.”
Her mother’s hand covered a gasp. “Please don’t say he’s not going to marry you, Mary Louise.”
“Mom, it’s for the best,” she said urgently. “Getting married now would ruin all of Danny’s plans for the future, and sooner or later he’d come to hate me and the baby. That’s the last thing I want.”
Her father rose to his feet, his face red. “You’re going to sit here and tell me that boy is not willing to make an honest woman of you? We’ll see about that. I have a shotgun in the other room that says otherwise.”
“That’s not an answer, Chet,” Reverend Webb said mildly. “Forcing two kids to get married when they recognize all the pitfalls won’t help anyone, least of all your grandchild.”
Her dad scowled at Reverend Webb. “At least my grandchild would have its daddy’s name.”
“And now it will have mine…and yours,” Mary Louise stressed with a touch of defiance. “And that’s okay. I’ve made my peace with raising this baby on my own.” She gave her father a hard, unyielding look. “And I can do it completely on my own, if that’s the way it has to be.”
“Oh, Mary Louise,” her mother whispered, her voice thick with tears. “Are you sure you want to do this? You could…” Her voice faltered.
“What?
