Because of Joe Read online

  "Sure," he said agreeably, turning to go. He looked back over his shoulder. "See you later, Clarissa."

  Tell sniffled over onions while Joe sliced potatoes. "There's definitely something wrong with this picture," Tell muttered.

  "Which one, Dad?" Joe smiled beatifically at him. "I thought they were all pretty good. Isn't Ben's girlfriend a beauty?"

  Carrying her bowl of cornbread batter, Rags came to look over Tell's shoulder at the photograph of Ben with a pretty girl at his side. Tell turned his head to look at her, then back at the picture.

  "She reminds me of your mama," he said to Joe, "the summer we met. We were both working with VISTA in Alabama, sure we could change the world. Remember, old lady?"

  Oh, she remembered. She'd been trying to get out of a sagging hammock with buttered corn in one hand and a glass of sweet tea in the other when the tall boy with the sunlight weaving through his hair had walked across the churchyard. He'd come directly to her and helped her out of the hammock.

  "Would you," he asked, "consider marrying me and having my children? Boys, I think, and maybe one girl to keep you company while I'm working and the boys are wearing out the knees of their Levis."

  "Do I have to wear clothes as fancy as yours and high heels even if I'm not going to church?"

  "Never."

  "Then I'll marry you."

  "You'll never be sorry."

  But she had been sorry. A hundred-no, a thousand times.

  It wasn't until this very moment, standing in his kitchen in her bare feet with a bowl of cornbread batter held football-like in her arm, that she realized how many more times she'd been glad.

  ~*~

  "And where do you think you're going?" Sam stood with a stack of dinner plates in his hands and glared impartially at Joyce and Rags.

  "Clarissa and I" -Joyce grinned- "are going walking on the beach. That Yankee food is downright fattening, and Clarissa needs a break from all this overbearing male company. She's not on sleeping pills like Miss Ellis Ann, so she has no escape."

  Rags came to join her at the French doors that led to the lower deck. "Just about one more Clarissa from anyone and I'll have to resort to violence." She cast a narrow gaze at Sam. "And it won't be pretty."

  "Do you walk at home?" asked Joyce, as they drifted down the moonlit sand in the direction of the hotels.

  "Uh-huh." Rags lifted her face to the omnipresent breeze and breathed in the scent of the sea. "But it's not like this. Tell always said I was going to wear my legs down to the knees walking in the sand."

  "Yet you left it."

  "I left it."

  And in a few days, after the funeral, she would leave it again. She would return whenever Ellis Ann needed her, but not for long, not when it seemed that every grain of sand held a piece of her heart.

  Why? The business is sold, you have no family ties left in Indiana, no commitment to David. You don't even think about him when you're here. Why not move back home?

  But she couldn't think about that now. It wasn't important now. What mattered was-

  "Joyce?"

  "Hmmm?"

  "What's wrong with Joe?"

  Joyce's steps faltered, then stopped altogether. "I'm not his doctor, Rags. I can't talk to you about his condition, especially without his permission."

  "Then don't. I respect that." Rags faced her, holding her gaze. "But if you had a patient like Joe, what would you tell his mother?"

  A battle raged in the other woman's eyes. Under normal circumstances, Rags would have acquiesced to Joyce's need for professionalism. But these weren't normal circumstances. This was Joe, whose piece of her heart was bigger than all the grains of sand and then some.

  "Please." she said quietly.

  "I would tell his mother-" Joyce hesitated and swung her gaze to where she stared out at the water "-I would tell his mother that I'm so sorry, but her son needs a kidney. Soon."

  Chapter Five

  "Men in movies would kill to have their hair just fall into place like yours does and what do you do but cut it all off?" Rags looked in dismay at Joe's shaven head. "You'll be mistaken for a member of one of those hate groups and someone will take a pot shot at you."

  "It's just for the job, Mama. It's so damn hot out there, you can't breathe, and I'm not as tropically oriented as Ben and Micah. The heat just kills me."

  It was the summer after Joe's sophomore year at Florida State, and he was spending it as part of the mowing crew on the Hamilton County, Indiana, Highway Department. Ben, who was mowing behind Joe every day, and Micah, who was a lifeguard at the community pool, had also shaved their heads in a show of fraternal support. Rags was grateful Marley's sun-kissed brown curls were still intact.

  "I got it from my mother, I think," said Joe absently. He leaned over the kitchen sink and ran cold water over his head. "This thing with not being able to take the heat, I mean. And the stupid cowlick-she had that, too."

  Rags fell silent. She often forgot that she hadn't always had Joe. Whenever he talked about the woman who had given birth to him, she felt an unreasonable dread that the day would come when she would not have him again.

  ~*~

  "We tend to forget that its complications contributed to my mother's death, even though the drug overdose caused it. She nearly died having me. I've always been so healthy that if it wasn't for the sugar tests all the damn time and insulin shots, I could have forgotten I was diabetic." Joe reached for his juice. "I got sick when I was on a shoot in Malaysia a year or so ago, and I figured it was a bug I picked up there. Come to find out, it was the same thing I'd always had, and it was shutting my kidneys down."

  "What about dialysis?" asked Tell.

  "I have that-I'll need some help with that, too, while I'm here. It's portable, I'm portable, but I still have some trouble with it. This" -he circled his hand over the array of prescription bottles on the table- "along with the dialysis, keeps me fairly comfortable, but it's getting worse." He met Rags' eyes and his mouth lifted in a smile that made her long to draw him to her and weep. "Joyce is right, Mama. I need a new kidney."

  "Why did you wait so long to tell us?" Tell's voice sounded raw. Beneath the table, Rags reached for his hand.

  "You had enough to deal with here, Dad, with your father and all. Mama, I knew you'd run screaming down to IU Medical Center insisting they rip out one of your kidneys right now and send it to wherever I was in a cooler with a bowl of pinto beans and a glass of iced tea with Sweet and Low stuck in at the side."

  Rags laughed because she knew he wanted her to, and swallowed hard against tears because she knew he didn't want her to cry, and gripped Tell's hand so tightly her fingers began to throb.

  "I don't want that," Joe went on. "I have, since that day I know you call the Bad Day, been like a black cloud over this family. If it weren't for me, you two would still be together, the other kids would have had a decent relationship with their grandfather, and this house would have gingerbread trim and at least one tower. I will not allow any of you-including Marley of the hard head and soft heart-to risk your own health to possibly benefit mine."

  He took a deep breath and held Rags' gaze with his own. "I'm on the donor list. I'll wait."

  ~*~

  "Can he wait?" Rags looked across the table at Joyce, her hands gripping its edge.

  Joyce put down her biscuit with a sigh and gave Rags a reproachful look. "Why do you bother fixing breakfast for me when you're just going to stop me from eating it? I really considered 'damn Yankees' just a silly phrase until you came here."

  Rags waited.

  "I don't know," said Joyce flatly. "You need to contact his doctor and browbeat him into telling you these things."

  "Would you do that for me?"

  "So you can be the heroic mama and offer a kidney?"

  "So I can do whatever it takes to save my son."

  "And what if it takes a kidney from one of your other children?" Joyce's dark eyes, soft with compassion, belied the challenge in her voic
e.

  Rags wasn't going there. Her mind wouldn't grasp the concept. She was, after all, the children's mother. It was up to her to save them all from life's slings and arrows. Of course it was. "Will you contact Joe's doctor for me?"

  "Of course." Joyce sighed again, getting up and heading toward the door. "I was already doing it for Tell; may as well throw your name into the family hat."

  Ellis Ann came into the breakfast room as Joyce left it. She slipped into the seat Joyce had just vacated and looked expectantly at Rags. Taking the hint, Rags poured her a glass of sweet tea and sat across from her.

  Ellis Ann sipped the tea and leaned her elbows on the table, resting her chin on her folded hands. "Did you know that you can love a man with all your heart no matter what kind of a bastard he is?"

  Rags set down her cup with a little thump and stared at Ellis Ann, mildly shocked. "Yes," she said finally, "I knew that, but I didn't know you did."

  "Darling, I'm sixty-six years old. I know everything."

  "I already tried that line on Joe. It didn't work with him and it's not going to work with me, either. You're no more a tough guy than I am, Mama, so you may as well drop the act."

  "It's no act. You have to be tough to be a Maguire."

  "Do you think there's even a remote chance I don't know that, too?" Rags shook her head, holding Ellis Ann's gaze. "I don't have that kind of toughness, Mama; I never did."

  "No." Sudden moisture, as bright as the diamonds that encircled her fingers and dangled from her earlobes, sparkled in the older woman's eyes. "You had the kind that allowed you to walk away." She laughed suddenly, the musical sound at bittersweet variance with the tears. "You thought I was mad at you for hurting Tell, didn't you? I wasn't. I envied you because you had the courage to leave, to build your own life."

  "By taking my kids away from their father and myself away from Joe? I don't know, in retrospect, whether it was courage or idiocy. Mightn't the real courage have been in staying?"

  Ellis Ann grasped her hand. "I know which one it was, but the reason I mentioned the Maguire toughness, is to remind you that Joe has it."

  Rags knew that, had always known it. She had seen him play life as he played poker, with a recklessness belied by the determination that occasionally turned his eyes the color of cold steel. She also knew there were hairline cracks in the layers of his courage, placed there by the betrayal of his body.

  Tell came into the room as they talked. He poured coffee and went to stand at the French doors, saying nothing but looking out at the shimmering sand and the bright sea beyond it.

  His tension relayed itself to Rags as strongly as though they were touching. She felt his pain in her heart and behind her eyes and in the pit of her stomach. What more could be wrong?

  "Dialysis," he said quietly, when his mother had wandered away upstairs, "is not fun." When he continued, his voice was ragged. "He's so sick, Rags."

  ~*~

  Tell had made bargains with God all his life, only now God didn't seem in the mood to haggle. And the Lord wasn't like most CEOs; you couldn't badger him with faxes and phone calls and lunches that would buy a week's groceries for one of their employees. You had to deal with God in other ways, and Tell just wasn't sure what those ways were.

  His coffee cup gripped tightly in one hand, the doorknob in the other, he willed himself not to break down. He'd changed in the years without Rags, but not enough that he could bawl like a newborn in her presence.

  Joe. Oh, Jesus, Joe.

  He remembered the day he'd met the boy as he stood alone in the porte-cochere of the mansion on Glory Ridge Highway. Tell had wished, as the children crowded forward from the back of the van and Rags turned curious eyes on him, that the skinny child with sea-blue eyes would disappear without a sound. He hadn't known who he was, only that his presence was going to change all their lives.

  I wished him gone, Tell thought now, and added the memory to the list of sins he could never forgive his younger self for committing.

  ~*~

  "Mama, don't give her that look over your reading glasses that says you know she's not good enough for your precious son."

  Rags scowled at Joe. "I wouldn't do that."

  "You're doing it right now," said Tell, "and Joe doesn't even have a girl here. It's that look that says all right, you'll go along, but you don't have to like it."

  "Any minute now, you'll lay your glasses on the table and get up and walk away with your back all stiff, and the next time you want to read something, you won't be able to find the glasses and you'll give everyone the look. You know, kind of suspicious, like you really know one of us stole them." Joe held her gaze, not even a hint of a twinkle in his eyes.

  "I don't do that, either," she retorted. "Now, if you'll excuse me, I want to get dressed before they get here."

  She heard their laughter erupt when she was halfway up the back stairs, and realized she'd left her glasses lying on top of the newspapers on the table.

  And she was probably walking like she had a poker up her back.

  When she came back down the stairs in shorts and a tank top, she could tell by the noise level coming from the breakfast room that her remaining three children had arrived. She sent a grateful smile heavenward-Rags expected all planes to drop out of the sky, not just the ones she was on-and stepped into the din.

  "Mom." Ben left Joe's side to come and kiss her, drawing a young woman in his wake. "This is Abby Nightingale. Ab, this is my mother."

  It was there, that new demeanor that men developed to introduce their future wives to their mothers. I still love you, Mom, but I love her, too. If you still want me, you have to take her, too.

  Okay. Rags could do that.

  "Hello, Mrs. Maguire." The girl's handshake was firm, but something close to terror lit her brown eyes. "Ben's talked about you a lot."

  "Don't believe anything he says," said Rags, smiling. She'd been in this girl's shoes once; she remembered it well. At least Harlan Maguire wasn't here to question her about her pedigree, politics, and clothing choices.

  "Oh, it's all good," Abby said quickly.

  "Then you definitely can't believe him. Men have such blind spots where their mothers are concerned."

  Tell smiled at Abby and asked, "What did he say about me?"

  "Let's put it this way," Ben interjected, "men don't have blind spots about their fathers. Good of you, though, Mom, to refer to me as a man in front of Abby, instead of asking me if I've been eating enough."

  She widened her eyes at him. "Why, son, you are a man. Abby, dear, later on I'll show you his naked-baby pictures. He was so adorable."

  "He's a preacher now, Mom." Micah came to his brother's other side. "You can't say naked in front of him any more. Joe said you made him pinto beans. You going to make me any?"

  "You whine-ass, you know I'm her favorite." Joe's voice came from the table.

  Rags listened as the laughter rippled and rolled in the room and wondered when the boys had all become baritones, when Marley's giggle had lost its girlish pitch. Had the twins been grownups when they climbed into their car to return to college or was adulthood something they had acquired in the two days since? Had they picked it up at the bookstore when they bought their books for the first semester?

  And Ben. When had his soft voice gained that extra authoritative tone? Had it come part and parcel with the girl with warm brown eyes? If Rags closed her eyes, she would think it was Tell talking.

  For long moments of utter self-absorption, she feared not only losing Joe, but that she had lost them all. Unable, for the moment at least, to deal with her children as adults, she smiled vaguely and went into the kitchen, allowing the paneled door to swing shut behind her.

  She made fresh coffee, checked the supply of beer and soda in the refrigerator, and got out a two-pound bag of pinto beans. A realization, an epiphany of sorts, was working in the back of her mind, trying to thrust itself forward.

  The window over the kitchen sink opened toward the roa
d and the undeveloped beach on the other side. The Sound side, which the state of Florida protected from builders. Wild ponies still roamed there, and sometimes they crossed the road, causing tourists to stand still and point in fascination while developers cursed their very existence. Sorting beans automatically between her fingers, Rags stared out at the wildness only the width of the road away.

  She had never explored the Sound side of the beach, had been repelled by its barren loneliness. She remembered one time that she had watched Tell and the children cross the road and had had to breathe deeply to still a swell of panic. Old memories and new fears had reduced her to trembling. She couldn't get up and follow them, couldn't call them back, couldn't bear being alone.

  "We'll always come back," Tell had said when she told him about it, "or you can come with us."

  But he hadn't always come back, and she couldn't accompany the children on their journey into adulthood. "Life comes full circle." a shadowy figure in her distant past had once said. Linda's grandmother, perhaps, or one of the women at the orphanage; she couldn't remember, although she recalled shaking her young head and saying, "It can't. I can't be that alone again."

  But she was.

  "I think they want to get married." Tell spoke from behind her. "They have that look about them."

  "They're too young." Rags regretted the sharpness of her voice before the words had even tarnished the air. Wasn't he merely repeating what her heart had known the minute she met Abby Nightingale?

  "Older than we were." Tell poured the coffee into a thermal carafe and brewed a pot of decaf. "And smarter."

  He came to stand beside her, reaching into the colander for a pebble among the beans. He looked down at her, and she met his gaze unwillingly. "What's wrong, old lady?"

  "Their voices," she said. "Listen to them."

  He moved closer to the door, stood silent for a minute, and came back to where she stood. "They're loud, all in the same room, and right now it sounds like they're having a difference of five opinions. Other than Joe being healthy, what more could we ask?"