Day by Day (9 page)

A
nother school week. Another difficult Monday morning.

Vincent had no idea how important today was going to be for him, but Ginger was not about to spoil the surprise, even though she was sorely tempted. He sat at the kitchen table with his head bowed and his thin shoulders drooped. The plate of silver dollar hotcakes and glass of orange juice in front of him remained untouched, as if the very thought of going to school today had zapped his spirit as well as his appetite.

Instead of hugging her grandson and reassuring him that his mother was coming for him today, she put a plate of hotcakes on the table in front of Tyler. She met his gaze, gave him a smile pleading for him to intervene and tapped the face of her wristwatch to remind him they had little time to spare.

“Try a bite, champ,” Tyler suggested. He poured a little maple syrup on his hotcakes and Vincent’s, too. “Sure is
nice to be home late enough to have breakfast with you for a change.”

No response, other than a shrug.

Tyler started in on his own breakfast and Ginger sat down to join them. She took a sip of orange juice and added more milk to her coffee, but made no comment when Vincent started to push a piece of hotcake onto his fork.

“I can’t go to school today,” Vincent murmured.

“Why is that?” Tyler asked.

The boy chewed on his pancake and tried to talk at the same time. “You’re…gonna get…mad,” he managed.

Tyler frowned. “Chew first, swallow, then talk.”

Vincent chewed on that little hunk of hotcake like a cow chewing its cud.

Tyler set down his fork, watching and waiting without saying another word.

Ginger followed suit.

Finally, Vincent took one big swallow and drank half his orange juice in a single gulp. “I—I lost my backpack.”

She opened her mouth to ask him how he had managed to lose a second backpack in the space of three weeks when Tyler nudged her knee under the table. She locked her lips together.

“Check with your teacher, Mr. Norcross, today. Maybe you left it at school on Friday,” Tyler prompted.

Vincent shook his head. “I brought it home, remember?”

“I remember. We did some math problems together on Saturday morning after we got home from the farmers’ market,” Ginger offered. “When we finished, you put your math homework into your backpack.”

“Then you must have put it in your room,” Tyler suggested.

Vincent took another bite of hotcakes and shrugged while he chewed.

“Not there, I guess?” Tyler asked, his voice calm and steady.

Vincent shook his head.

“Finish your breakfast, you two. I’ll double-check,” Ginger offered and got up from the table. On her way upstairs, she checked the hall closet, did a walk-through of the living room and dining room. No sign of the backpack. Upstairs, she checked Vincent’s room thoroughly, looking under his desk and his bed, on the shelf and floor of the closet. No backpack.

She stopped in the hallway and checked her watch. Five minutes left before Vincent had to leave for school. “Two backpacks can’t just disappear into thin air,” she grumbled and passed the door to Lily’s old room on her way back down to the kitchen. She got to the top of the staircase, stopped dead and turned back. The door to Lily’s old room was ajar.

She peeked inside. Early-morning sunlight filtered into the room through sheer curtains, but nothing seemed amiss. The quilt on the four-poster bed was drawn tight. The closet door was closed. All the bureau drawers were also closed.

Driven by instinct, she slipped into the room. Surrounded by memories of Lily, she caught her breath. What had happened to the sweet, loving child who had knelt by this very bed to say her prayers every night? Or the teenager who had organized a series of fund-raisers for the
church Youth Group to make sure no family went hungry on Thanksgiving?

Tears welled, and Ginger blinked away the echo of Lily’s words announcing her pregnancy, just weeks before graduation from college and her refusal to identify the father or consider adoption as a difficult, but selfless alternative to raising her child as a single parent in Chicago, no less. What happened to that determination to be both mother and father to Ginger’s first and only grandchild? How long had Lily been putting Vincent second in her life and why hadn’t Ginger and Tyler noticed this before now?

Her backbone stiffened. She knew what had happened. The world happened. Without the anchor of faith Lily had embraced as a child to hold her steadfast, she had been swept into a sea of materialism and selfishness while Vincent had been cast adrift.

Ginger crossed the room and opened the closet door. The shelf was empty now, except for a few old sweaters. Most of the hangers were bare. Lily’s favorite scent, however, still clung to the old chenille bathrobe she had worn on her last visit. Ginger saw the robe on the floor in the back corner of the closet and got down on her knees to reach it and put it back onto a hanger. When she lifted the robe and saw the two missing backpacks hidden underneath, she gently tucked the edges of the bathrobe back around them.

Tears fell, and her heart ached for her grandson. With her chin to her chest, she closed her eyes and folded her hands in prayer. “Father, help us. Guide Tyler and me today and give us the words to help our daughter. Touch Lily’s heart so she will once again embrace You as the
source of all love so she may be a good and loving mother.” She paused. Her throat tightened with longing. “Please comfort Vincent. Ease the hurt he’s endured and bring him joy today as he is reunited with his mother. Amen.”

She held very still, loving Him and trusting Him to make this a day of fulfillment, a day when promises would be kept and faith would be renewed and a little boy’s broken heart would begin to heal.

Monday was getting worse by the hour. Vincent was late for school. Repair work on the bridge crossing the Delaware River limited westbound traffic to a single lane instead of three which cost more precious time. A tractor-trailer had jackknifed on I-95, the access road to Philadelphia International Airport, creating a snarl of bumper-to-bumper traffic that had Ginger checking her watch every few minutes.

Tyler finally pulled up to Lily’s airline terminal and stopped at the curb. “If you hop out here, you can still meet Lily when she gets beyond the security checkpoint. I’ll park the car and meet you where we waited for her last time. That way you both won’t have to waste time trying to find me or the car.”

Ginger kissed his cheek and hurried from the car into the terminal. Fortunately, she and Tyler had met each of their three children at the airport so often, she knew her way around pretty well. She avoided the escalator. Too many people. Taking the stairs like a marathon runner, she made it halfway up the flight before she stopped. With her heart pumping furiously and her leg muscles screaming, she bent at the waist and gasped for air. She deliberately
avoided looking at the people passing her on the escalator.

“Slow down. You’re going to kill yourself,” she muttered to herself. When her heart no longer felt as if it was going to rip through her chest and spin into orbit, she made her way, slowly, to the top of the stairs. While most of the crowd headed right to join others already in line to go through security, she veered left to the area where she would wait with others for arriving passengers.

She was almost there when she saw her daughter arrive and stop to scan the area looking for her parents. “Lily! I’m here. Over here!”

Lily turned to face her mother, but instead of rushing forward, she stood in place and waited for Ginger to come to her. As she closed the distance between them, Ginger saw that her daughter had changed a great deal since her marriage. The transplanted, Midwestern, all-American girl had been transformed into a Northeastern blueblood.

Instead of wearing her naturally curly hair long and loose, she had had her hair straightened and added fashionable henna highlights. She wore a Capri pantsuit in pale lemon that fit her as though it had been tailor-made to cling to every curve, and the gold choker necklace lying against her throat was a simple, but elegant and very expensive touch.

When Ginger got close enough for a hug, she noted the makeup that concealed Lily’s freckles was understated, yet almost professionally applied. She held her daughter close and inhaled a new, more sophisticated scent. “Sorry we’re late, sweetie. Traffic was outrageous. Daddy’s still parking the car.” She stepped back and looked at her daughter.
“You’re looking very Boston,” she teased. “What? No tan? I thought you said you’d been in St. Thomas for a week.”

Lily laughed. “No more tanning for me. The sun causes skin cancer, Mom, not to mention wrinkles.”

Ginger shrugged. “Seems like everything we used to do causes all sorts of problems we didn’t anticipate. I told Daddy we’d wait for him in Granny Alley.”

Lily furrowed her brow. “Where?”

Ginger led her away from the crowd to a long corridor that connected the terminal with one of the parking garages. Rows of rocking chairs, separated at intervals by large potted trees and plants, lined either side of the corridor. The secluded area was ideal for travelers who had a lot of time between connecting flights, needed a quiet place to soothe an overtired child or a place to wait for arriving passengers. “Daddy and I call this Granny Alley. I guess it’s the rocking chairs. We’ve spent a lot of hours here,” she explained. “Looks like we almost have the place to ourselves today,” she noted. Other than an elderly gentleman they passed who had fallen asleep in his rocker, the rest of the rocking chairs were empty.

Ginger pointed to two rockers at the end closest to the crossroads where this corridor and others met just before the security area. “If we sit here, Daddy won’t be able to get by us.”

Lily sat down, checked her watch and laid her clutch bag on her lap.

“Did you check any luggage?” Ginger asked as she sat down, too.

“No.”

Lily’s tone of voice suggested she thought the idea was
ludicrous, and Ginger stopped rocking for a moment, then resumed. “We weren’t sure if you were going to stay the night and go back with Vincent tomorrow or…We were hoping you might stay longer….”

With her feet planted flat on the ground and her back rigid, Lily held very still. The rocker never moved an inch. “Mom, I don’t have much time here.”

Relief that Lily was anxious to take Vincent back to Boston helped to ease Ginger’s disappointment. She stopped rocking and put her hand on Lily’s shoulder. “I know, sweetie. It’s all right. We can all get together later, after Vincent’s all settled in with you and Paul. I’ve been so worried about you since we talked, wondering how Paul’s parents reacted when you told them about Vincent and how supportive Paul would be—”

“Mother and Father Taft are wonderful to me,” Lily murmured. She toyed with her wedding ring set and smiled. “Paul is the kind of man I’ve always dreamed about. He’s loving and supportive….” She trembled and drew in a long breath. “This hasn’t been an easy time for me.”

“No, I suppose not,” Ginger said gently. The anguish in her daughter’s voice replenished the hope that the caring daughter she had raised had not totally disappeared and that Lily and Paul would provide a loving home for Vincent, who would also gain another set of doting grandparents. “It hasn’t been easy for Vincent, either,” she offered and bit back the urge to tell her daughter about the sacrifices she and Tyler had had to make over the summer.

“He’s missed you.”

Lily closed her eyes for a moment. “I miss him, too. I—I love him so much. That’s why this is so hard. I loved him
enough to keep him as a baby, and now I…I have to love him enough to let him go.”

Ginger bolted forward in her seat. “‘Let him go’? Did you say ‘let him go’?”

Lily’s dark eyes flashed. “Yes, Mom. I did.”

Ginger’s heart pounded in her ears, and she gripped the arms of the rocker with both hands. “Just exactly what do you mean? Go where?” she demanded. As her mind struggled against all the possibilities, she gave them voice when Lily did not answer. “Vincent is only eight years old. He can’t go anywhere by himself. Is he going to some sort of boarding school? Is that what you mean? Or are you going to let him go to live with his father, not that any of us, including Vincent, know who his father is?”

Breathing hard, she stared at her daughter, but Lily met Ginger’s gaze and held her ground. “I don’t expect you to understand—”

“Understand what?”

“I didn’t tell Paul’s parents about Vincent because as wonderful as they are, they would never accept him…or me. Vincent is illegitimate. I was an unwed mother. That’s not…acceptable. Not in their world.”

Ginger snorted. “And this is the world you’re choosing for yourself as Paul’s wife? A world where there is no forgiveness or understanding? A world where a mother would deny her own flesh and blood? Her own son? For what? Tell me, Lily. Is it the status? The money? Or both?”

Lily’s gaze narrowed. “Frankly, Mom, it’s both. There. Satisfied now? I am. I’m not denying my son. I’m protecting him and his future. Paul and I intend to support him, of course. When he’s older, Vincent will be able to attend
the best of colleges, with no loans to repay or without trying to hold down a couple of part-time jobs just to have enough to get by until he can graduate. He’ll have opportunities and choices I never had until I met Paul,” she snapped, venting such bitterness Ginger could scarcely believe this was her own daughter.

Lily paused to take a deep breath. “I want Vincent to go with you and Dad. Will you let him live with you? Permanently? Or will I have to make…other arrangements for him?”

Ginger had protective instincts of her own, and they rose full force to stiffen her backbone and every muscle in her body. “Don’t bother making other arrangements. Of course I want him to stay with us. He’s our grandson, and I don’t even want to think about where else you might send him. But you have to talk to Daddy, too. This is not a decision I can make without him.”

Lily searched the crowd, checked her watch again and stood up. “Daddy’s nowhere in sight. I wish I could stay longer to wait for him, but I have to leave now or I’ll miss my flight.”