A Promise of Forever (8 page)

Avi’s brow wrinkled. “I think I do remember saying something like that. Maybe what I meant to say was I wish I had cousins.”

“I think you wish you had more family. But when life doesn’t give you enough, you just go out and find more. There doesn’t have to be a blood connection. George and I always considered you a part of our family, and I always will.”

Her voice broke just the tiniest bit on the last sentence, and Avi’s heart twinged. She reached across to clasp Patricia’s hand and drew a breath that hurt so she could force her voice out. “I’m so sorry about George.”

“I know you are, sweetie.” Tears made Patricia’s voice husky, and she blinked them back unashamedly. “The margarita club tell me that the time will come when I can talk about him without tears, but I don’t know. It’s always going to break my heart.”

“Would you rather not…?”

“Oh, no! I don’t want to forget a thing about him, and I don’t want anyone else to, either. When he found out you were in his new command, he was delighted. Twelve years you were in the Army together, and finally you were going to be assigned to the same place. Though he was worried, too.”

“He worried about all his soldiers.”

“His troops were important to him,” Patricia agreed. “He used to say ‘They’re babies, Trish. These kids should be home going out on dates, not patrols. I swear, some of them don’t even shave yet.’”

“Did you remind him that he’d been that young once?”

“Yes, but he just reminded me right back that at eighteen, he’d been safe and sound at West Point.”

Sundance trotted across the yard and flopped onto the grass beside them, tongue hanging out. The first few times Avi had brought her out, she’d thought that meant
Let’s go in
. Now she knew the dog was just catching her breath before starting her wild run all over again.

“Did you ever wish he wasn’t in the Army?”

A semi on one of the main streets blasted its horn, disrupting the quiet of the backyard. The air settled again almost immediately, still and heavy.

Patricia shook her head. “Being a soldier wasn’t a job to him. It was such an ingrained part of him that not being one would have changed who he was.”

“Were you scared about leaving Oklahoma to go to Germany with him?” That part—moving halfway around the world from her kids—was hard to understand. Avi fully intended to marry and have at least a couple babies before she retired, because after thirty-eight, who knew if she’d be able to? But once she had those babies, she wouldn’t be leaving them for anything less than war or an extended deployment.

“I was…unhappy in Oklahoma. I wanted to see someplace else, do something else…be someone else.” Her gaze distant, Patricia seemed for a moment to age before Avi’s eyes. There was such regret, such sorrow, on her face.

It takes an exceptional person to reach the age of fifty without regrets,
George had told Avi during one of their last conversations.

But the only way to avoid regrets is to not take chances,
she’d countered,
and not taking chances is no way to live.

The moment had been interrupted by the ground-shaking explosion of an IED just outside the base and the chaos that followed. That time they’d been fortunate; the injuries suffered by the troops in the vehicle were minor.

A few weeks after that, George had been killed.

“You’re probably wondering how I could have walked away from my kids.”

A flush warmed Avi’s cheeks. She bent to pick up Sundance and snuggled with her to hide it. “I don’t—” After a moment, she gave up the hedging and met Patricia’s gaze. “It doesn’t seem like you. You’ve always been such a mother.”

“It was a mistake—not going with George, but leaving the children. I knew it at the time, but I did it anyway.” She began to speak, then compressed her lips while exhaling loudly. It took another moment for the words to start. “Did your parents ever tell you that I was married to Ben’s father when George and I met?”

Avi kept her brows from raising skyward through sheer will. She had never known the story behind Patricia and George’s relationship. She’d just always thought theirs was a fairy-tale romance, all sweet and wonderful and perfect because it was meant to be. “No, they, uh, they didn’t.”

Grimness darkened Patricia’s gaze. “Then let me tell you the story. It has a lot of heart, and a lot of hurt, and no one got to live the happily-ever-after. I just hope…” She gazed off over the back fence for a moment before summoning a wobbly smile. “I hope it doesn’t make you love us less.”

Never,
Avi knew, but her chest grew tight that Patricia thought it necessary to say such a thing. Maybe this was a story Avi didn’t need to know. After all, Patricia was like a second mother to her, and George…George was her mentor. She’d lived much of her life following his lead, depending on his advice, his expertise, his moral compass, his gut feelings. He was her
hero
. If he’d made a very human mistake twenty years ago, she didn’t need to know. Didn’t
want
to know.

Except for Ben’s sake, maybe she did.

“Ben’s father and I got married right out of high school. We were young and crazy in love, and we were good together for a long time. Rick was happy as a clam right there in the middle of Tulsa. He had no desire to go anywhere else, not even for a couple days, and he never understood how I could want something else. Oklahoma was the be-all, end-all of his existence.”

Avi swallowed hard, swiping her palms on her shorts. So far, she could relate. GrandMir and Popi had been just like that. Their blood ran Red River red, Popi used to say. God had birthed them in Paradise, GrandMir had added. Why would they ever want to leave?

But they’d understood that Avi wanted to see the world. Just as they’d known that someday she would come back to stay—would need to, to calm that red dirt in her veins. Rick Noble, apparently, hadn’t had the same understanding for Patricia.

Sundance wiggled to the ground and dashed off to sniff the tree root and pounce on the flower again. Patricia took a drink of water before wagging one finger in Avi’s direction. “Now, don’t you get the idea that George broke up my marriage. You know what an honorable man he was. If he’d known I had a husband and kids at home, I don’t believe he ever would have agreed to a second meeting.
I
broke up the family all on my own. I doubt Rick ever forgave me, and I don’t know if Ben ever will, but my girls have, and I’ve had a lot of long talks with God, and He has, too.”

Best advice I can give you, grandgirl,
Popi had told her when she started dating.
It takes two to make a relationship, and it takes two to break one.
Then, less solemnly:
However, if you do find yourself stuck with someone you can’t get rid of, you come to me. I’ll break him—I mean, break it off for you.

“I don’t know how much of that visit you remember,” Patricia went on. “You were in school, and your parents were at work. George had all those long hours every day to fill. My kids were at school, and Rick was at work, and I had all that emptiness inside me. And George filled it so well. We both loved art and history and travel.” She smiled self-deprecatingly. “Well,
he
loved travel. I loved the idea of it, since I’d never been able to do it. He was everything Rick wasn’t, everything I wanted, and I fell in love with him before the first week was gone.”

He’d brought her to dinner one evening, Avi recalled. The moment she’d taken her shoes off to play in the yard with Avi while the men grilled steaks and her mother finished dinner in the kitchen, Avi had fallen in love with her. Even though her smitten girl’s plans had involved marrying George herself when she was all grown up, she’d decided Patricia was worthy of him in the meantime and was happy to see them looking pretty smitten themselves.

Her movements restless, Patricia stood and wandered toward the flower beds lining the fence, bending to pluck an occasional spent bud. “I could have handled things better. I should have. I wasn’t some young carefree woman who could fall in love on a whim. I had a husband. Kids. Responsibility. I should have told George the day we met that I was married. I should have gone home to Rick and tried to make things better. But I couldn’t.”

Avi walked barefoot alongside her, savoring the heat of the sun on her shoulders and the sparkle of droplets from this morning’s watering on rich petals and lush leaves and thinking that
could
and
should
were sometimes the hardest things in the world to do.

“Rick didn’t know who I was anymore. Bless his heart, he was the same person in his thirties that he’d been in his teens, with just a few more creaks and aches. It had never once occurred to him that maybe I wasn’t, even though I gave him clues. I wanted to take a trip. I wanted to go to college. I wanted to have an opinion that mattered. I wanted to create something. I wanted to stop feeling so stifled. But those were just words to him. They had nothing to do with his wife and the mother of his children. Why, those two jobs alone were plenty enough for any woman, especially me.”

The anguish in her tone made Avi’s heart ache. In all the years she’d known her, Patricia had always been a vital woman. She loved people and new places and new experiences. She’d gotten a college degree, then two more for good measure. She’d learned crafts and cooking and history and politics, and her every opinion mattered. If she hadn’t taken action, the bright, vibrant woman she was would have withered into a straggly weed without enough joy to share with anyone.

“Before George left for Germany, we agreed I would stay behind, tell Rick I wanted a divorce, move out, find a lawyer, make sure the kids understood what was going on. Finally, when all that was taken care of, two or four or six months down the line, I could join him in Germany. He got on the plane that day believing that was what I was going to do. But I was weak. For the first time in my life, I had a chance to be with a man who loved not just me but the me I wanted to be. He was supportive and encouraging. He listened to me, valued my opinions, and he gave me hope.” Eyes damp, Patricia smiled at Avi. “I hadn’t had hope for a long time. So I went home, told Rick and the kids, and I was on the next flight to Germany that same night.

“I do wish I had found a way to do it without breaking their hearts,” she whispered. “I cried all the way. My kids, my babies…”

Not bothering to be surreptitious, she wiped at the corners of her eyes. “I was selfish. I knew what a shock it would be, what pain it would cause, and I’m still selfish today, because, Avi, I don’t regret one single moment I spent with George. We were together twenty years, and it breaks my heart that we can’t have twenty more. I’m so sorry for all the hurt, but I would do it again in a heartbeat. Besides giving birth to three wonderful children, I do believe that man was the reason I was put here on earth.”

After those heart-wrenching words, she glanced at Avi. “Are you hating me yet?”

“How could I ever hate you, Patricia?” Avi hugged her tightly. “You and George were meant to be together. Time proved that.” She just hoped she had the chance to love a man like that, and be loved in return, for herself.

It was ten after six when Ben took the stairs two at a time from the clinic to the parking lot. With ten minutes to get home, he’d have ten more to take a shower and change into clothes for tonight’s date. He’d bet money that Avi would be on time, if not early. After all, punctuality was a big deal in the Army, wasn’t it?

During his lunch break, Brianne had called to ask where he was taking Avi for dinner. When he told her he hadn’t decided, she’d sighed and muttered a few less-than-complimentary words. She had suggested several places, then groaned when he told her he was thinking about tracking down the food trucks that frequented downtown Tulsa and letting Avi choose.

The last part had been true, at least. He did intend to let Avi choose. Tulsa had hundreds of restaurants, from casual to elegant dining. She was the one who’d spent most of the last year out of the country. Whatever appealed to her was fine with him.

He’d parked in the garage that opened off the alley behind his building and gone inside the lobby to pick up his mail when he stopped abruptly. Avi sat in one of the two easy chairs there, sunglasses pushed back on her head, a tablet in her hands, a smile directed his way. She stood, and as he took in the sight, his mouth went dry and a lump formed in his throat.

She wore a red tank top that clung to her body, ending about an inch before the waistband of her denim skirt started. The skin showing between the two bits of fabric was a few shades lighter than her arms and legs and tempted him to explore it, to see how soft and silky and warm it was. Then he could do the same with her long, lean legs, mostly exposed beneath the very short, snug skirt. His gaze sliding on down, he half expected heels with tiny strips of leather hugging her feet, but she wore flip-flops, dressed up with sparkling stones on the straps. With her hair pulled back in a braid and silver jewelry around her neck, on her ears, and clinking around her wrists, she looked fresh and cool and gorgeous.

And he was in scrubs stained with surprise blood splatter from an injection into a patient’s knee.

“Hi.”

“Hey.” He stepped closer to her, catching the scent of summer—flowers, spices—drifting on the air. Leaning closer, he kissed her cheek, and something tugged down deep in his gut. “I thought you’d be early.”

She smiled. “I thought you’d be late.”

“Let me check my mail, then I’ll be ready in ten minutes.” He unlocked the small box mounted in the wall, took out a handful of envelopes, then gestured to the stairs. Her shoes made flippy noises while his heavier running shoes thudded solidly.

When they stepped inside the loft, he set the mail aside, then watched as Avi looked around. The open floor plan had appealed to him when he’d first seen the place, along with the recycled wood floors, high ceilings, and large windows. The furnishings were sparse—minimalist, the interior designer had called it. Easy to clean, he’d thought.