****
Scott was nearly sick with nerves as he and Angie exited his truck the next afternoon. He followed her into the clean, single-story building of the medical clinic. Angie walked slowly, more of shuffle, with hair swinging down over her face. Why did she have to do that? Couldn’t she pull it back or cut it off? Maybe push her shoulders back and stand up straight?
He checked her in because she would have sat down in the corner letting her hair cover her for the rest of the day, going completely unnoticed, and unseen by anyone. She spent five minutes filling out the patient questionnaires and insurance information, asking him frequently what she needed to know. He was also the source for not only her insurance, but answers for all things practical in her life.
They waited. Scott looked up from the magazine he was nervously flipping through when he sensed Sarah come in. She walked as she lived, with calm, precise movements, but quickly, as if she always knew exactly where she was going and what was coming next. Clearly in control of every body part at all times, he doubted she ever slipped or tripped, so smooth and perfect was her glide. She stood in the doorway, glanced around until she spotted them. She went over to Angie and gently touched her slouched shoulders in a silent and supportive hello. Why the hell couldn’t Vanessa do that? That simple, easy, twenty seconds of energy Sarah had just given to Angie as a show of support with little effort and no negative effects?
Angie smiled with pleasure that Sarah was there. Sarah sat down and met his gaze over Angie’s head. He nodded unsmiling. Was he relieved she was there? He was glad for Angie’s sake because her mother had refused to come. Angie needed a woman there, but this woman?
They waited for a while. The girls talked quietly amongst themselves as he stared with unseeing eyes at pictures in a magazine. Was he really doing this with Angie?
Finally, a nurse came out and called Angie’s name. The three of them stood simultaneously looking like parents surrounding their daughter. He glanced at Sarah to find she had glanced at him, they both looked away completely uncomfortable with performing this role together.
“Will you both come with me?”
He missed a step when Angie spoke. She wanted him coming in
there
? Visions of medieval-looking stirrups filled his head. He somehow restrained the shudder. He’d assumed Angie wouldn’t want him near the inside of the exam room. He now wanted to leave. Run. Cower in the corner, rather than witness a gynecological appointment of his pregnant niece. But he showed none of this and instead nodded, taking Angie’s arm and guiding her back into the bowels of the building.
The nurse weighed Angie. The trio was seated in the small examination room where Angie went through a long list of questions and a litany of her prior history and lifestyle habits. Scott grabbed at the neck of his shirt. Christ, it was hot in the small room.
Finally, needing to distract himself from listening as Angie listed out her premenstrual history, he leaned into Sarah and asked quietly, “Isn’t the doc your ex-boyfriend?”
Sarah’s eyes lifted, big with surprise.
“How did you know that?” Her tone was a shrill hiss.
He flashed a smile. “Small town. You’re the one who doesn’t notice that. Besides John and I played on the same soccer team.”
“You did?”
“We do.”
“And he said something about me?”
“No. You never came up specifically.”
“And now? Are you friends?”
“We’re friendly, sure, as I am with his brother Luke.”
“Well, sorry to burst your bubble but so are John and I. His wife is one of my friends. So don’t think I came here as some kind of ploy to get John or some such juvenile thing. I made an appointment with him because I knew he’d get me in quick if I requested it. Yes, as a result of our pasts, nothing more though.”
“Come off it, you live in a town of a couple of thousand people. You act like it’s a surprise we would know any of the same people.”
“Yes, I was dumped, and I was the subject of the town’s gossip for a while, but that is all in the past.”
She fell silent after her hissed retort. Her ego must have suffered to be dumped so publically by John Tyler, the town doctor, as he then married Kelly’s sister, Cassie, within a few short months. And it still galled him that he knew so much of Sarah’s history when she didn’t even know his name until a few weeks ago.
“So where’s Vanessa?” Sarah asked in the same hissing tone.
His lips tightened. “She couldn’t come.”
“I noticed. Are you still defending her? Angie would have a near stranger and you back here with her. Do you think maybe she could use a mother about now?”
Scott sighed and shifted, leaning back into the chair. Sarah was right. Angie needed all the support she could get. Yet, he knew Vanessa as well as he knew himself, and understanding her, made it easier to forgive her failings. But, of course, Sarah had disapproved of Vanessa from the first time Angie had said her mother called her fat, so there was no hope of explaining any of this.
“You can’t possibly get Vanessa from one meeting.”
“Really? I think I can. And by the way you can’t possibly get me from knowing me from a distance for ten years.”
He opened his mouth, but shut it when John walked in. John was nearly as tall as Scott, dark-haired and quiet. He was a town favorite for his bedside manner. John glanced around the room to take in the entourage following Angie. He took the odd coupling of his soccer friend and ex-girlfriend as attendants for a pregnant teen as if he saw this every day.
He addressed Angie in his kind and serious way, making Angie his total focus. Sarah and Scott stayed until the nurse came in so that John could do the physical exam of Angie. They both jumped up willingly when Angie asked for privacy.
They were now alone in the hallway.
Sarah was tall for a woman, five foot eight or nine. But next to him she just hit his shoulder. He stood unusually tall at six foot five. He wasn’t particularly beefy or strapping, but next to her thin body he felt like he’d suddenly gained ten pounds in muscle. She was a waif. He wondered why she had gotten so thin in the last few years.
For as long as he could remember he’d looked at Sarah from a distance, a long distance. To suddenly be leaning against the same wall as her, side by side, made his heart race weird and his breath come in short, fast rasps. What the hell was wrong with him? Why was he reacting as if he’d never seen or been close to a pretty woman before?
But this woman
? She was his adolescent fantasy.
He just hadn’t anticipated his pregnant, sixteen-year-old niece would be in the next room.
He was unusually aware of Sarah. The shift of her shoulders as she switched the weight of her feet, her perfume that floated in the air space around her, and the way her board-straight hair slid back off her face as she leaned her head back to rest on the wall. What was his fascination with her? She was as annoying as a pretty dog nipping at his heels, she caused little damage, but she was always there and causing a ruckus.
“How can you excuse Vanessa this?”
Scott glanced down at his current nemesis, when her question shook him out of his reverie of studying his strange fascination with her, even though he wasn’t even sure he liked her.
“Vanessa was sixteen when she got pregnant. She kept Angie and has done the best she can with no one’s help other than my old man’s.”
“And you.”
“And me.”
“Still, it doesn’t excuse this.”
“You don’t really get a say.”
“Did you see how scared Angie was, and is? The way she hides in her hair, it’s pretty obvious what all that is about.”
“And what’s that?”
“Your niece feels like she’s disappeared from everyone’s radar, most especially her mother’s. This pregnancy is probably a way to get back on, and yet she’s still invisible.”
“Her mother had to work.”
“She could take the time off. I did.”
“You aren’t supporting a household.”
“You don’t have a clue what I support. Quit thinking you know me.”
“What don’t I get? Before you put on the expensive outfit or after?”
“You haven’t let go of me snubbing you when we were in high school. God, get over it. Notice me now.”
“I notice.”
“You notice everything completely wrong.”
He turned toward her, his arms crossed over his chest. “Do I? Then set me right, as you seem to think you should set Vanessa right.”
“Vanessa’s responsible for a teen, I’m not.”
“Exactly the difference.”
“Are you in love with her?”
His gaze jerked to Sarah’s face. “Why would you say something like that?”
“Because of the way you defend her when she doesn’t deserve it at the expense of someone who does.”
He bristled and leaned his shoulder into the wall. He looked down into her angry glare. “Don’t mistake a few weeks of involvement as a relationship with my niece. I’m not in love with Vanessa. But she has been a part of my life since I was ten years old. I’ve seen her through a lot, as she’s seen me. Not that it’s any of your business, but she’ll come around in her own time. And Angie knows that.”
Her eyebrows jutted into her forehead. “Yeah, you should leave it to the mixed up, scared, pregnant girl, to figure out why her mother can’t get out of herself long enough to put her daughter first.”
He shook his head. “Be careful. You’re here out of a little girl’s sudden fascination with you, not out of genuine love. She thinks you’re a living, breathing fashion doll, nothing more. Certainly not her mother.”
“No, her mother wouldn’t even come.”
Sarah stretched away from the wall. Why did he get into these petty pissing matches with her? He had meant to be calm and cool with her, let her think his indifference toward her was real. He hadn’t counted on his niece getting a serious crush on her. He wouldn’t have guessed Sarah was someone Angie would bond with. Then again, he’d had zero clue Angie had even kissed a guy, and look at where this had gotten him.
He let the silence settle between them before he remembered that their squabbling was second to Angie’s welfare. He glanced at her from the corner of his eye. “Has she told you who the father is?”
Sarah shifted, her hand on her hip bone. “You don’t know? I assumed you guys talked about that.”
“She refuses to tell us.”
“Us?” Raised eyebrows said it all. “Us” was really him.
“A simple no would have sufficed.”
“A simple ‘Who’s the father, Angie?’ would have been a starting point.”
“For your information, I did ask her. She claims it’s someone at her school and that she wasn’t taken advantage of or forced. What was I supposed to do? Lock her in her room until she tells me? It’s not as cut and dried as you think it is.”
“So why would I know?”
“She does nothing but talk
about
you. I thought maybe she was also talking
to
you.”
“I thought I was nothing to her. Now you’re goading me for details?”
He pushed off the wall. “You’re so damn judgmental. Who the hell do you think you are? You know nothing about us, and suddenly you have all the answers?”
She straightened her spine, and threw her shoulders back as she glared at him. She stepped closer and even raised her finger at his chest. “No, I just think you could make the lines of communication a little more friendly for her, and maybe you’d get a little better response from her.”
He pushed her pointing finger away. “I tried. She asked me to give her some space.”
“Well, I would have passed it along if she told me anything.”
He hesitated, drawing a deep breath in, he calmed his tone down. “I didn’t realize that.”
“Of course, you didn’t.”
He sighed at her indignant tone. Why did he continue conversing with this woman? “Why are you even here?”
“Here? I told you because Angie wanted me here.”
“No, I meant here in Seaclusion? It doesn’t seem like your kind of place.”
Her eyebrows furrowed. She shook her head. “Why would you say that? I’ve lived here my entire life. It’s my home.”
“Even in high school you didn’t seem to fit here. You seemed like the type who would graduate and never look back.”
She rolled her eyes. “There again, you thinking you know anything about me.”
“I don’t think I’m that wrong.”
“Yeah, well, why do I still live here if you’re so right about me?”
He frowned, arms crossed, he tapped a finger on his bicep. “Boyfriend?”
“No. No boyfriend. Not the reason I came back. I came back because I love it here. Simple as that.”
He shook his head. Who loved it in Seaclusion? It rained three hundred days a year. It was small and forgotten. There was nothing to do and little to see. A single street of shops and businesses, none over three stories, made up the “town.” The only buildings of any heights were the hotels the tourists stayed in. The only interesting thing that ever happened was usually caused by one of the tourists. It wasn’t the place he planned on spending the rest of his life. He was only here because of Vanessa and Angie. There was no leaving them, so here he was. If not for them, he would be long gone. And his life would be far different. “Okay, put the claws away. I don’t know you, I just know of you. I concede I may have judged you a bit harshly.”
“A bit? Why do you judge me at all?”
He glanced at her sharply. Why did he? She’d done nothing but be kind to Angie, and in fact, help him out. Maybe that was why. She’d noticed things about Angie he was supposed to notice, and he resented her ease with Angie, when it took all of his coping skills getting her to even grunt at him.
“I guess old habits.”
“But why? I haven’t done anything to you.”
“I might have gotten my hackles up when you didn’t have a damn clue who I was.”
“Excuse me for not noticing you ten years ago. I mean, really? That’s what you’re going to use to judge me about?”
“Not anymore,” he said briskly. Realizing he was nothing, not even a shadow to her subconscious, was bruising on the ego.
“Thank you,” she said her tone soft. She turned and leaned back against the wall to wait some more.