The Christmas Clock and A Song For My Mother - Kat Martin Page 0,41

girl.

She glanced again at the child sleeping peacefully next to her. The prognosis was good, the doctors said. With luck and time, Katie should recover. Marly clung to those words, refusing to consider any other outcome. She couldn’t imagine a life without Katie. She couldn’t stand that kind of pain.

Still, it was too early to be certain the treatments had succeeded.

Which was the reason she was back in Dreyerville, sitting in front of the little house she had run away from all those years ago.

After what Katie had suffered, the child deserved her most fervent wish: to meet her grandmother, Winifred Maddox, Marly’s mother, one of the few relatives Katie still had. Burly’s mother, already an older woman when she had borne her only child, had died four years ago. Mrs. Hanson had no use for children other than her son and Katie had only seen her once.

Grandmother Hanson was dead and Burly and his good-for-nothing father were both in the wind. Marly had no idea where Burly had gone when he abandoned them and she didn’t care. Burly had served his purpose and saved her. She had escaped her life in Dreyerville and started on a new path that held far more promise.

Distant memories surfaced, the trip east to Detroit, Burly landing a job as a trucker and Marly starting night classes. It took a while since she was working as a waitress to help pay the rent but eventually, she had gotten her GED. By then she was eighteen and handling her new life fairly well—until she had gotten pregnant.

The thought stirred a faint thread of anger. A baby was the last thing Burly had wanted—as he’d told her in no uncertain terms. The bigger her belly grew, the later he came home. He took long-haul jobs that kept him away for weeks and she knew he had begun to see other women. When she came home from night school early, found a pair of red panties on the living room floor and a woman in the bed she and Burly shared, the relationship came crashing to an end.

Marly divorced Burly—which wasn’t difficult, since she had never really loved him—and surprised herself by discovering how capable she was. With her job as a waitress, she managed to take care of her newborn baby without Burly’s income, then put herself through two years of college. A student loan took care of the next two years. With a small grant and a lot of hard work, she had finally graduated with a teaching credential. For a while, she had worked as a substitute teacher, waiting for a chance at a full-time job.

Then Katie had been diagnosed with cancer.

Marly looked up at the old wooden house. For a moment, she just sat there trying to work up the courage to get out of the car, to march across the uneven sidewalk and climb the front porch steps. She tried to imagine knocking on the front door, tried to guess the greeting she would receive.

Her mother knew they were coming. Winnie had cried when Marly had phoned after so many years. Only a few words were exchanged, just the information that Katie was recovering from cancer and that the child’s dearest wish was to meet her grandmother.

Winnie had simply said, “Yes. Oh, yes, please do come home.”

The memory of her mother’s voice on the phone made her chest feel tight. Older, but still as familiar as it had been when Marly was sixteen.

Her father was dead now. Over the years, she had kept in touch with a few of her friends and one of them, a girl from Dreyerville High, had written to tell her that Virgil Maddox had passed away. Marly didn’t send a sympathy card.

The inside of the Ford was beginning to feel airless and warm. Reaching over, she gently shook Katie’s shoulder and the little girl came slowly awake, blinking her big blue eyes as she straightened in her seat.

“Are we there yet?”

Marly smiled at the phrase she had heard a dozen times along the road. “Yes, sweetie, we are.”

Katie stretched and yawned, reached for the soft pink knit cap she had been wearing and pulled it on over her shiny bald head. The doctors had promised the hair would grow back and though Katie had suffered the indignity of her baldness fairly well, she was still self-conscious. And she had always been shy.

“So are you ready?” Marly asked.

Katie nodded but her small hand shook as she reached for