Page 43 of Never Fall Again
He rubbed his eyes. “I hadn’t told anybody. But Mo and Meredith were waiting for me when I got off the plane. If they hadn’t been, I don’t know what I would have done.”
“Were you going to go after her?”
“Maybe? I’m not sure. I wasn’t in a good place mentally or emotionally.”
“How did Mo and Meredith find out?”
“Meredith had gone to check on my place. I knew she was going to do that, and I appreciated it. I didn’t realize that Gina had come over before she left town. She’d taken all her stuff and returned all mine. Meredith walked in and found a pile of sweatshirts, some books, a pair of sunglasses, and the jewelry I’d given Gina while we were dating. To say she was furious was an understatement. Meredith is very protective of those she loves.”
“Oh boy.” Meredith Quinn was a very nice lady. But Landry made a mental note to never get on her bad side.
“Yeah. Meredith called Mo. And he did what he does—he was Army intelligence and can find out anything.”
Landry tried to keep her face impassive at that news. If Mo started digging into her past...she pulled her focus back to Cal.
“Mo got the whole story. Then he put a watch on my unit so he’d know when we came home. He and Meredith were ready for me. He’d taken leave, and she’d taken a week off too. They’d gone through my place and put everything away, cleaned it, stocked the fridge, and found a therapist for me.”
“Which is what you meant about them being there for you in the past.”
“Yeah.”
“Did you ever talk to Gina again?” Landry wasn’t sure how she was hoping he would answer that question.
“I was going to. But when Mo did his digging, he came acrossher marriage certificate. And her new husband was in the process of adopting the boys.”
Cal’s tone had been brisk and businesslike, but now it dripped with pain and loss. Landry couldn’t stop herself from reaching for where his hand rested on Maisy’s back. She squeezed. “Losing her was hard. Losing the boys must have been like a death.”
He turned to her, a look of surprise on his face. “Yes. I’d dated before. Been dumped. Been the one doing the dumping. You move on. But with the boys? The last thing I’d said to them was that we’d talk soon.”
She squeezed his hand again.
“It gutted me that they’d never hear me tell them how awesome they were again. That I hadn’t told them I was proud of them. Or that no matter what, I’d always be there for them.”
Cal stopped talking and looked out over the river. “Therapy helped. I got out of the Marines. Moved home. Meredith was still in the Raleigh area, and Mo was still in the Army, so they weren’t here to help diffuse any of the stress. I was living in my parents’ basement apartment and trying to get used to civilian life. My aunts, bless their hearts, thought I needed a girlfriend—and I needed one yesterday. They threw every eligible female they could find at me. I was twenty-eight when I moved back. They suggested a woman who was forty-two. I’m not saying a fourteen-year age gap is insurmountable, but that woman had been my high school biology teacher.”
Landry couldn’t help laughing at the horror in his voice.
“There was a woman from a town about fifteen miles from here, another from Asheville, one from Greenville. As far as I could tell, their only prerequisites were that the women had reasonable personal hygiene and knew how to read.”
He leaned back and stared at the sky. “When they started with the single moms in town, I had to put a stop to it. My parents knew the gist of what had happened with Gina, but no one else diduntil the day Aunt Rhonda spent five minutes trying to convince me to call a girl I’d dated in high school. A girl who was divorced and had three kids under six. I’d seen her in town. Spoken to her. She’s a nice woman. Her kids are cute. I think one of them is in Abby and Eliza’s class. I tried to tell Aunt Rhonda I wasn’t interested, but she wouldn’t let it go. I held on to my frustration until she made a snide remark that at my age, I wasn’t in a position to rule out single moms.”
Landry had another bad feeling, but she didn’t say that. “What happened?”
“We were eating under the tent, like we did today. I stood up from my chair, leaned down until I was about a foot from Aunt Rhonda’s face, and told her, loud enough for the rest of the family to hear, that I’d dated a single mom before and had my heart shredded for my trouble. Then I said it would be a very cold day in a very hot place before I took that chance again.”
“Did you actually say ‘cold day in a hot place’ or...”
“Oh, there’s no cursing at Granny’s house. I said it just like that. Granny was okay with it until Aunt Minnie got it all mixed up and told her it would be a hot day in a cold place before she would eat her broccoli.”
“Aunt Minnie is a hoot.”
“Yeah. But seriously, Granny didn’t care. She’d gotten most of the story from Dad, and she understood.”
Landry waited for him to go on, and when he didn’t, she nudged his shoulder. “So you don’t have a problem with Eliza, but you kind of do have a problem with Eliza.”
He straightened. “No. Eliza is not a problem. I have problems. I have demons. I have issues. I have two boys out there in the world who have a piece of my heart, and they could walk past me on the street today and I wouldn’t recognize them. And they wouldn’t know me either. It guts me every time I think about it. I remember theirbirthdays, but I can’t send them a card. It would be inappropriate, and I would never want to come between them and their new dad.”
“I know you wouldn’t.”