Try - The Complete Romance Series (5 page)

“That all sounds good,” Patrick told me. I
could hear him smiling somehow. “Thank you again for taking the call on your
free time.” I smiled to myself.

“I’m not really up to anything tonight, so
it’s no trouble to answer a quick question,” I told him.

“You must really love your work,” Patrick
said, making it almost a question.

“I do,” I agreed. “I love working with
kids—they’re so resilient, and they’re willing to work hard. When I was doing
my rotations, before I finished the program, I worked with all kinds of
patients…and kids were the ones that appealed to me the most.”

“Did you always know you were going to go
into physical therapy?” I shook my head.

“No, I kind of fell into it,” I told
Patrick. I knew that I should probably get off of the phone—the conversation
was getting a little personal—but I couldn’t help myself. “I was a gymnast in
high school, and I got a really bad torn ACL during a practice, and of course
with that you have to have really aggressive PT.” I licked my lips and finished
off my wine in a quick gulp. “That was how I got interested in it.”

“Not too different from how I got into my
line of work,” Patrick said, sounding almost surprised. “I started off studying
something completely different in college, but I took a summer job at an
information security company and just sort of…stayed put.”

We chatted for a few more minutes, talking
about the people we worked with, about how we’d ended up in our fields, and
then I finally couldn’t ignore the fact that I was having a personal
conversation with a patient’s father. I told Patrick that I had to get my
laundry, but that I’d see him again at Landon’s next session, and he said he
and Landon were both looking forward to it. I ended the call, and in spite of
telling myself that Patrick was probably just one of those guys who liked to
have a listening ear, that he was off-limits to me, I couldn’t help but feel a
warm little tingle all over my body; I hadn’t felt comfortable or excited like
that in months—maybe years. I pushed the thought aside and finally did get to
my laundry to fold it so it wouldn’t wrinkle before I went to bed.

Chapter Six - Patrick

After talking to Mackenzie about how
Landon wanted to go ice-skating, I was glad to take my son to the park over the
weekend. He’d had physical therapy the day before, but when he woke up in the
morning he was so excited I didn’t think he’d miss the trip even if he somehow
managed to break his leg all over again. I made him eat a good breakfast:
oatmeal, scrambled eggs, bacon and toast along with some juice, and we went on
our way to McKinley Park.

I kept in mind what Mackenzie had told me
and before we left I’d convinced Landon to put on a knee brace under his long
johns. It was getting colder and colder, and the forecast called for snow that
night, but the day itself was sunny and bright when we got to the park and made
our way to the rink. We’d gotten there early enough that it wasn’t super
crowded yet—right after the park opened for the day—and I told Landon that as
long as he didn’t try and get away from me, and as long as he was willing to
stop for a while whenever I told him to, we could skate for as long as he
wanted.

I kept an eye on Landon just like
Mackenzie suggested, making sure I took him off to the benches when he started
to get wobbly or looked tired, but he managed to keep it up for at least half
the day, spaced out between his breaks. When he got bored of the skating
rink—or, as I suspected, too tired to keep going, especially with the bigger
kids on the ice zooming around without a care in the world—we wandered around
the park for a little while. I bought him a hot cider and some roasted nuts,
and we munched on our snacks while we wandered around looking at the
decorations.

Finally as it was starting to get dark, I
decided it was time to head for home. “We need to get you in a nice hot bath buddy,
and get a pot of soup in you.” It was coming up on winter break, and the last
thing I wanted was for Landon to get one of the flus going around before it was
even his vacation, especially since that would mean he’d have to stay away from
physical therapy for a week. I could tell he was tired out—the ice-skating had
been tougher than he’d thought—but Landon was trying to pretend like he had as
much energy as ever.

I got him into the car and we started back
for the apartment, navigating the busy weekend traffic. “Dad,” Landon said, his
voice sleepy from the back of the car. “Do you miss mom sometimes?” I felt as
if the kid had kicked me in the stomach—something he hadn’t done intentionally
in years.

“I do shrimp,” I admitted once I had my
voice under control.
It’s a natural
question this time of year, when everyone’s with their families.
“What
brought her to mind?”

“Can you tell me a story about her?”

I clenched my teeth, breathing in slowly.
I had known from the time that Joanne had died that I would have to tell Landon
all about his mother someday; and part of me felt ashamed that I had sort of
let her memory fall by the wayside over the years. I couldn’t even give myself
the excuse that I’d been grieving, not anymore. Joanne had died only months
after Landon had been born, from complications of cancer treatment. She’d been
diagnosed when she was four months pregnant, and had put off getting treatment until
after she delivered; she’d wanted Landon so badly that she was willing to risk
it—though I couldn’t help but think that taking that risk had been exactly what
had killed her.

“Your mom was a great woman,” I told my
son, glancing at each of the mirrors to make sure I wasn’t about to hit
someone. “Before you were born, she used to tell you bedtime stories every
night before she went to sleep.”

“But how did I hear her if I wasn’t born?”
I grinned to myself. It was so easy to picture Joanne, curled up in our bed,
one hand on her big, pregnant belly, the other one holding a book. She had read
to Landon religiously in the womb; even when she was exhausted, even when she
was in pain from the cancer she didn’t want to treat until the baby was out,
she read to him before she finally went to sleep for the night.

“She said she was sure you could hear,” I
told him. “She said you used to kick around inside of her when she would start,
and then you’d slowly calm down until you fell asleep.”

“Is that why you always read to me, Dad?”

I smiled again. “It is shrimp. She asked
me to do that for you when she knew she wasn’t going to be with us much longer.
She wanted to make sure that you had something that she’d always done with you,
for as long as she knew you.”

“What books did she read me?”

I laughed in spite of the pain I could
feel inside of me, remembering the woman I had loved. “She read everything,” I
said. “She loved to read you Dr. Seuss books especially—she said you always
kicked the hardest when she’d start on
The
Cat in the Hat
or
Hop on Pop
. But
if she was really tired she’d read those Peter Rabbit books you like so much now.”

“Do you think I like them because mom used
to read them to me?”

“Well—I think you like them because
they’re good books, mostly,” I said. “But it probably helps that you were
hearing those stories before you were even out in the world.”

“Did Mom look anything like Mackenzie?” I
frowned at the question.

“What makes you say that?” I glanced over
at the rearview mirror; Landon was sprawled out as much as the booster seat
would allow, his head resting against the back of the seat.

“I don’t really remember her,” Landon
said. “You showed me her picture, but I’ve never seen her before.”

“You were really little when she died,
bud. You were just a baby.”

“I know,” Landon said, nodding. “But
there’s this way that Mack talks sometimes and it’s like I almost remember
Mom.”

A shudder worked through my spine. “Does
it make you feel bad or good?” I asked, almost afraid of what his answer would
be.

“It makes me feel good,” Landon said,
nodding a little bit. “I like her.” He went silent for a while and I tried to
pay attention to the world around me instead of thinking about my dead wife; I
had to keep my eyes on the road, I had to keep my son safe. “What was Mom’s
favorite food?”

“She loved a good steak,” I said, smiling
to myself. “When we finally had you, and we knew that she was going to be going
into treatment, so she couldn’t nurse you herself, we went out and got her a
great big, rare steak at her favorite steakhouse to celebrate.”

“Can we have steak for dinner tonight,
Dad?” My throat felt like it might close up on me, like I might suffocate right
there in the car. I turned the heat down a little bit in the front—I kept it on
full blast in the back for Landon—and nodded.

“Yeah, we can have steak for dinner,” I
told my son. He reached into the bag that I kept in the back seat, full of toys
for him to play with, and he was off in a world of his own, talking back and
forth between two action figures. I drove us the rest of the way home from the
park thinking about my wife, missing her, feeling the pain of her absence.

Mackenzie really wasn’t anything like
Joanne—not in the way they looked, anyway. Joanne had had the same dark hair my
son had inherited, and dark eyes to go with it. She was tall and sturdy instead
of being short and curvy and slim. I’d fallen in love with her in college; we’d
both been scholarship students, studying in different areas, but we’d met at a
meeting for the fencing club, and before long we’d spent more time flirting
with each other than actually learning how to fight with a foil.

It had taken us a few years to get
pregnant with Landon; Joanne had been determined that she wanted to have a
baby—a son, and if we could have a son first, she wanted a daughter to follow.
Just when we were about to give up on the idea of conceiving and start looking for
a baby to adopt, Joanne had finally conceived, and we’d been so happy. I’d run
out of the house at all hours of the night to pick up whatever she was
craving—whether it was dressed hot dogs with a strawberry milkshake on the side
or sauerkraut and chocolate. I was glad to see her so happy, glad that
everything seemed to be going so well for her pregnancy.

By the time she was somewhere between four
and five months along, though, things started to go bad. She was tired all the
time, and her back ached more than it should for just the typical pregnancy.
Her OB-GYN sent her to get tests done to make sure she didn’t have something
going on with her spine, and that was when we’d discovered what it was that had
made it so difficult for her to conceive; she’d had a tumor. How they could
have missed it when we’d been tested for everything else under the sun before
Joanne finally got pregnant I would never know, but they said it had been
steadily growing, right along with the baby inside of her, throughout the
pregnancy—that the hormones that had coursed through her had created the
perfect conditions for it to develop faster.

Joanne had done what she could to keep
herself healthy after that, because she had wanted to stay alive long enough to
at least give birth to Landon. When they’d done the C-section to take him out,
they’d gone ahead and removed the tumor too, but it had already metastasized to
different parts of her body. A week after she gave birth to Landon, she’d
started treatment with aggressive chemo, and in spite of the fact that our son
was as healthy as could be, the three of us spent months in and out of the
hospital, until finally she decided that she just couldn’t take anymore. She
went on pain medication and the last night of her life, she’d lain with Landon
in her arms, singing to him as they both fell asleep; she didn’t wake up the
next morning, and there I was, a single parent, all in the span of a few
months.

As I pulled into the garage for our building,
I thought to myself that I’d been neglecting an important part of Landon’s life
for years; I had avoided talking about his mom, and I had avoided seeing anyone
more than once or twice.
He wants a mom.
He needs a mom. A mom would have been good for him a couple of months ago when
he broke his leg.
I pushed aside my guilt; it didn’t do me any good to feel
bad about it now. But it might be nice to start looking for another woman to
share my life with—someone who could love Landon almost as much as I did, who
wouldn’t replace his mother, but who could be
a mother
to him.

Chapter Seven - Mackenzie

“I wish I had time to sit around and drink
coffee,” Amie said, walking up to my desk.

“You have time to come over here and
complain that you don’t have time,” I pointed out, sticking my tongue out at
her. Amie laughed.

“Like fifteen minutes. Next patient called
to say she was going to be ten minutes late—apparently Jocelyn’s piano recital
went over.”

“Because as we all know, piano is a
million times more important than walking properly.” Amie rolled her eyes.

“So what turn of events made it possible
for you to be sitting around drinking coffee?”

I shrugged, sitting back in my chair until
it squeaked.
 
“My two-thirty canceled on
me,” I explained. “So I walked around the corner and grabbed a coffee to get me
through the last few hours.”