LITMIR.BIZ

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up her silverware, Marcie reached for Juliet’s plate and put it on top of her own. “So why don’t you want to be like these other kids?”

      “They’re splits!”

      “Splits?”

      “Their parents are divorced,” Juliet translated.

      “Yeah and they have to go part of the time to one house and part of the time to the other and their stuff is always getting left in the wrong place. And there’s the holidays.” Mary Jane’s forceful tone made it sound as though those would explain themselves.

      “The holidays?”

      “One at one house and one at another and everyone’s constantly fighting about it.”

      “Oh, honey, it’s not always that way,” Marcie said.

      “Mostly it is, and anyway, how would you like to open your Christmas presents and then have to leave them right away and go someplace else?”

      “To get more presents? That might be cool.”

      “Who needs more presents if you don’t get to play with them?”

      With one raised eyebrow, Juliet asked her sister if she’d had enough.

      “How about needing more love?” Marcie asked softly, sending a stab to Juliet’s stomach.

      “You guys love me.” Mary Jane didn’t miss a beat. “More than most kids in my class are loved, I’ll bet, even those with two parents married. Some houses are good with dads. This one is good without one.”

      “You sure about that, honey?” Juliet didn’t know where the question came from. She’d been very open with Mary Jane from the beginning, telling the child that she would contact her father anytime she wanted her to.

      Getting up, Mary Jane dropped her plate on top of her aunt’s. “Positive.” She picked up all three plates and carried them over to the sink. “Now, would you two just go on talking about Mom and quit worrying about me?”

      Juliet loved her daughter, but how in the hell she’d ever produced such a precocious and outspoken one was beyond her.

      With her chin on her hand and her elbow on the table, Marcie looked at her. “So?”

      “So what?” Juliet fingered the edge of her tweed place mat.

      “How does Mom feel about seeing Blake Ramsden again?”

      Shrugging, she looked at her daughter getting water all over the counter and floor as she sprayed the three plates and put them in the open dishwasher beside her.

      “He never contacted me after that one time together. Never followed up on the event to find out if there’d been any consequences. You know, hurt feelings, disease, and—even though we’d started out taking precautions—a baby…”

      “I know.”

      “He should have.”

      “I agree.”

      Marcie always had. Juliet would never be able to repay her sister for all the support she’d offered, then and now. She remembered the nights Marcie had sat on the bathroom floor with her, helping her study for her bar exam. Juliet had fought an almost constant battle between mind and body in those days. She’d often thought she could have made it into the Guinness Book of World Records for the length of time she’d suffered from a morning sickness that had never been limited to mornings.

      “Besides, he was out of reach,” she added, sitting back to give Mary Jane access to the table she was attempting to wipe down with a sopping-wet cloth. The place mats would soak up the extra moisture when the child put them back. “For years. He’d mentioned that he was leaving for one, but it was closer to four.”

      “I know.”

      Of course Marcie knew. Her sister’s patience was unending when she was listening to Juliet agonize over a decision made so many years before. Would she ever be completely free from guilt?

      “I might’ve been able to reach him through his father,” she continued, watching the little girl whose face was so serious as she folded the dishcloth and hung it on the rack inside the cupboard door. Mary Jane had a lot of energy, yet she concentrated fiercely on even the smallest tasks. “But he’d been so adamant about the fact that he had to have that time away from his father. I respected that.”

      “And you didn’t want him to know you were pregnant,” Marcie added.

      With a quick kiss to her mother’s cheek, Mary Jane ran off toward the bedrooms in the back of the house.

      “I didn’t want the entanglement of a relationship with him,” Juliet agreed, only slightly defensive. “Do you think I was wrong?”

      “No.” That opinion had never changed.

      “I just couldn’t do it.” The words were torn from her as she remembered back, felt the crushing weight that had been a constant burden during those months of tormenting herself with a decision she hadn’t been prepared to make. “The only thing I knew about life back then was that I couldn’t, at any cost, repeat Mom’s mistakes. Because, really, who did she help, Marce? Us? Dad? Herself? Dad never wanted us. We’d have been better off not knowing that. He never wanted her, either. She lost every dream she’d ever had. And we paid for that, too. I couldn’t do that. Not to me, or to my baby.”

      Marcie’s hand, as it covered Juliet’s, was warm and soft. Grounding. “It’s okay, Jules, you don’t have to tell me. I get it. We both saw what Mom went through marrying Daddy just because she was pregnant with us, everything she gave up. And Lord knows, we learned from everything that came after that. Why do you think I’m thirty-four years old and still living alone?”

      “Because Hank hasn’t asked you to marry him.”

      “Well,” Marcie looked away—and then back. “There is that.”

      “Move to San Diego, Marce. You’ve said so many times that you want to. Mary Jane and I have room here.”

      “I’m half-owner of…a salon that—”

      “Can be sold,” Juliet interrupted. She turned her hand over, grabbing her sister’s. “That place has been running for fifty years and just like you bought it when Miss Molly had her stroke, so will someone else when you leave. If you loved it, that would be one thing, but you talk about it like it’s a lead ball around your neck.”

      “Maybe…”

      “We hated what the divorce did to Mom, having no money, no way to support us. We hated that town, the way life just stopped there. The way Mom slowly gave up. And sometimes it seems like, instead of doing the opposite of what she did, you’re letting the lure of security snag you, too. It scares me to death when I think of you there in Maple Grove, living in a trailer—albeit much nicer than Mom’s—watching television every night. I can’t bear the thought of seeing the same thing that happened to her happen to you…”

      Marcie met her gaze head-on, eyes moist with emotion. “That’s not going to happen, Jules. I’m not Mom.”

      She’d love to be convinced. But what if Marcie was just too close to the situation to see the similarities? Their mother certainly hadn’t seemed to be aware that she’d needed help.

      “You’re more of an artist than a hairdresser, Marce. You’ve already had an offer from a Hollywood studio at that hair show, who knows what else could turn up if you looked. And you’d probably make three times the money you’re making.”

      “Maybe.”

      For the first time, as she watched the thoughts play across her sister’s face, Juliet allowed herself to hope. “Will you at least think about it?”

      “Yeah.” A couple of tears slid down Marcie’s face. And then she smiled. “Yeah, I’ll think about it.”

      “Okay.”

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