Under the Southern Sky - Kristy Woodson Harvey Page 0,24
least, he was on the verge of becoming one. He had saved me. He had protected me. We were connected by more than just the gate between our yards and the cigarettes that we’d occasionally shared at high school parties.
I bought Parker and his friends beer all summer. It was a paltry gift in exchange for my life, but it was what I had to give, despite my friends’ insistence that beer was not what Parker wanted from me. I mostly ignored it.
But every time I had seen Parker since, I hugged him a little longer, I mentally thanked him a little more. Because he had truly saved my life. Later, a part of me believed he could save Greer, too, just through sheer force of will. I had hoped he could, had wanted him to. But no such luck.
Fourteen years later, back in Cape Carolina, I looked at him across the marsh, sitting on his dock. Even in the dark, I could see the dimple in his chin that came out when he grinned, the way that, even though he could laugh again now, really laugh, something around his edges seemed to sag a little, sad and defeated and lost.
Talking about those babies made him so happy. Anyone in his right mind would know having those babies was the craziest idea of all time. Some men might be capable of picking a surrogate and being a single dad to their dead wife’s babies. I mean, I didn’t know any of those men, but they did probably exist.
I thought back to the last time I had seen Greer alive, how even that close to death, Parker had made her laugh, how he had kept the trauma he was facing zipped up inside himself and dedicated everything to her, given her his all. Hell, maybe he could do it. Maybe he was that man. Maybe I had stumbled into that clinic and seen that record and made that phone call because Parker was supposed to be a single dad.
I had been thinking for years that I wanted to do something important with my life. I had been thinking for years that I wanted to repay Parker for saving me.
All those years ago, Parker Thaysden had given me life. As his eyes caught mine across the water, I had the odd, tingling sensation that maybe the right thing to do was to give it right back to him.
Elizabeth
SABOTAGE
“I KNEW HE WAS WRONG for her,” Tilley hissed as I handed her dish after dish to dry. I scrubbed them a tad too hard, the dish gloves Olivia had given me for Christmas—the whimsical ones with the long red fingernails and the huge fake diamond painted on—filling with water when I dipped them too far into the bubbles.
“Well, we all knew it, Tilley. But I never thought he’d do this to her.”
Deep down we’d both known this was exactly how this would end. But we were ladies, so we hadn’t said so.
Even in my anger at Thad, my hurt for my daughter, and my physical discomfort at having wet, soapy water sloshing around inside my gloves, I paused to be grateful. My sister was here tonight. She was herself. She was in this world, with me, where she belonged. I couldn’t count the number of people who said I should put her somewhere where “they could take care of her.” How could they even say such a thing? Who could take care of her better than I could?
I prayed every day—every single day—that she’d pass on one day before I did. I couldn’t bear the thought of her being without me. Who would take care of her then? I didn’t want Amelia and Robby to feel burdened. And, really, after everything she had meant to me, everything she had done for me, it was the least I could do. I prayed for other things, too, but that one was the most persistent.
“Well, I blame Mason,” Tilley said, interrupting my thoughts.
I rolled my eyes, pulling the plug inside the sink and taking my gloves off, hanging them inside out over the drying rack. I leaned on the counter’s chipped blue-and-white tiles. Make up your corner of the world neat and tidy and it will be enough. I said this to myself every day. Keeping Dogwood together was like squeezing sand as hard as you could inside your palm and wondering why it slipped through your fingers. But I would worry about that tomorrow.