The Blessing

  But now, looking at the glittering people in the glittering apartment, he remembered them. “Buy myself all of them,” the man had said. And wasn’t that what Amy had said, more or less? That Jason was trying to buy himself a family?

  He signaled the waiter to refill his glass, then kept on staring at his guests. In the last year Jason had done everything he could to forget that last night with Amy. Twelve whole months of refusing to think about it, to remember it. Twelve long months of hanging on to his anger. If she’d just listened to him . . . If she had thought about his side of things . . . If she’d just been willing to wait until the morning to talk . . .

  Jason drained the glass, then held it up for another refill. But tonight, in spite of the fact that he was in very different surroundings and the giant tree in the corner bore no resemblance to the one he and Amy had decorated, it was as though he were back with her.

  Images came before him until he could hardly see the roomful of people. He remembered Amy laughing, Amy teasing, Amy’s excitement at being able to buy her child some furniture.

  The waiter started to fill Jason’s glass again, but he waved him away; then Jason put his hand over his eyes for a moment. For the first time since Amy left he thought, Why didn’t I listen?

  His head came up, and he looked about him. No one was looking at him. No, they were all too busy looking at each other and enjoying Jason’s food and drink to give a thought to their host, who was quietly sitting in a corner and going mad.

  I am going mad, he thought. For one whole year he hadn’t had a moment’s peace. He’d tried to carry on a life, but he hadn’t been able to. He’d dated women, beautiful women, and today he’d even thought that he’d ask this latest one, Dawne, to marry him. Maybe marriage was what he needed to make him forget. Maybe if he had a child of his own . . .

  Breaking off, his breath caught in his throat. What was it David had said? There are “other children.” In Jason’s mind there was only one child: Max.

  But he’d lost that child because he had—

  Again Jason rubbed his hand over his eyes. Maybe it was all the alcohol he’d consumed; maybe it was the anniversary, but tonight he couldn’t work up his usual anger at himself, at David, at the town of Abernathy, at his father, at anyone.

  “She left because of me,” Jason said to himself.

  “Jase, come and join us,” said a man to his right.

  Jason recognized him as the CEO of one of the largest corporations in the world. He’d come to the party because he was afraid he was about to be fired, so he was trying to get a job with Jason. In truth, every person in the room was there because he wanted something from Jason.

  Shaking his head, Jason turned away from the man. Amy left because Jason had wanted to put her in a house and leave her there. He’d wanted to take away her freedom, her free will, all while causing himself no inconvenience whatever.

  It was a hard truth to look at, Jason thought, very, very hard. And if he’d succeeded in persuading Amy to marry him, where would he be tonight?

  He’d be here, he thought, just as he was right now, because he would have continued to think that CEOs were important people.

  And where would Amy be? he wondered, and he knew the answer. He would have bullied her into attending also. He would have told her that, as his wife, she had an obligation to attend his business parties and help him earn money.

  Money, he thought as he looked about at the people in the room. The sparkle of the jewelry on them was enough to blind a person. “You’d swallow me up,” Amy had said. He hadn’t understood a word she’d said that night, but now he did. He could see her in this glass-and-chrome room, with its designer tree and the well-designed people, and he could almost feel her misery.

  “Other children,” David had said. “Other children.”

  Maybe he couldn’t have Max or Amy, but maybe he could do something in life rather than make money.

  “Other children,” he said aloud.

  Instantly, Dawne was at his side, and Jason looked at her as though he’d never seen her before. Reaching into his pocket, he withdrew the ring with the huge sapphire and handed it to her.

  “Oh, Jason, darling, I accept. Gladly.” Ostentatiously, making sure everyone in the room saw, she reached up to put her arms around his neck, but Jason gently took her wrists and put them down at her sides.

  “I’m sorry I’ve been a bastard. I think you already know that I’m no good for you,” he said.

  “But, I want you to have this ring. Wear it in good health.” He looked away, then looked back at her. “Unfortunately I have to cut this evening short; I’ve just remembered somewhere I have to be.” With that he turned away from her and went into the hallway. Robert, his butler, was right behind him.

  “Going out, sir?”

  “Yes,” Jason answered as the man held up his coat and Jason slipped his arms inside.

  “And when shall I say that you’ll return?”

  Jason looked back at the party. “I don’t think I will return. See that everyone is taken care of.”

  “Very good, sir.” Robert then handed Jason his cell phone, something that Jason was never, ever without. Jason took the instrument, then looked at it as though he’d never seen it before.

  In the next second he dropped the thing into the trash bin; then he started for the door.

  “Sir!” Robert said, for the first time losing his composure. “What if there is an emergency? What if you’re needed? Where can you be reached?”

  Jason paused for a moment. “I need to talk to somebody who knows what it feels like to lose a child. You know that little church over on Sixty-eighth Street? Try me there.”

  As his butler’s jaw dropped, Jason left the apartment.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  ONE YEAR LATER

  The President of the United States of America would be pleased to attend the grand reopening of the town of Abernathy, Kentucky. He has asked me to convey his particular interest in the Arabian Nights mural in the public library as the tales are favorites of his.

  JASON READ THE LETTER AGAIN AND WAS ABOUT TO GIVE a whoop of joy and triumph—until he looked at the second paragraph, in which the president’s secretary asked that the dates of the reopening ceremony be confirmed. “But that’s . . .” He broke off in horror as he looked at his watch to check today’s date, then glared at the calendar on his desk to reconfirm his suspicions.

  “Doreen!!!” he bellowed at the top of his lungs, and after about three minutes his secretary came wandering into his office.

  “Yeah?” she said, looking at him with big, bored eyes.

  Jason had long ago learned that nothing, not any intimidation on earth, could overset Doreen’s complacency. Calm down, he told himself. But then he had another look at the presidential seal on the letter and tranquillity be damned.

  Silently, he handed her the letter.

  “That’s good, isn’t it? I told you I’d get him here. We got connections, me and Cherry.”

  Jason put his head in his hands for a moment and tried to count to ten. He made it to eight, which was a new record for him. “Doreen,” he said with controlled, exaggerated calm. “Look at the dates. How far from now is the date when the president is due to arrive?”

  “You need a new calendar?” Doreen asked in puzzlement. “ ’Cause if you do, I can get you one from the store.”

  Since Doreen had been spending six thousand dollars a month on office supplies, Jason had had to cut off her charge accounts, and he did not want to reopen them. “No, I can read one of the ten calendars that are on my desk. Doreen, why is the president coming in a mere six weeks when the opening is planned for six months from now? And why does he think the library murals are about the Arabian Nights when the painter has been commissioned to do nursery rhymes?”

  “Nursery rhymes?” Doreen blinked at him.

  Jason took a deep breath intended to calm himself, but instead thought of ways to murder his brother. David had, once again
, conned his “wiser,” older brother into something that was driving Jason insane. Doreen was Cherry Parker’s sister, and David had begged and pleaded for Jason to hire her to help him supervise the rebuilding of Abernathy. At the time, Jason had readily agreed because he missed Parker and he’d never found anyone half as efficient as she was.

  But Doreen was as inept at business as Parker was adept. Doreen was as inefficient, as disorganized, and as scatterbrained as Parker was perfect. Within three hours of her employment, Jason had wanted to fire her, but Parker was pregnant and she’d started crying, something that had completely disconcerted Jason, since he’d had no idea that Parker could cry.

  “Can’t you just keep her for a few days?” David had pleaded. “This pregnancy isn’t easy for Cherry, and Doreen is her only sibling, and it would mean so much to both of us. After all, you’re so good at this that you could do it without a secretary.”

  Jason had been flattered and, ultimately, persuaded.

  That was eight months ago. Parker was still pregnant, still crying at the least thing, and Jason was still trying to work with Doreen as his secretary. If she wasn’t misunderstanding everything he said, she was buying things, such as six cases of red paper clips and twelve dozen Rolodexes. “In case we run out,” she’d given as an explanation. To make matters worse, she’d also made it a personal mission to help him get over Amy.

  “Nursery rhymes,” Jason said tiredly. “You know, ‘Humpty-Dumpty,’ ‘Little Miss Muffet,’ that sort of thing. We hired a man to paint them, and he’s to start on Monday. It’s going to take him three months to paint the whole library, but the president is coming in six weeks to see them. Except that the president expects to see Arabian Nights, not nursery rhymes.”

  Doreen stared blankly at him. Maybe he should call David again and see if his wife had given birth yet, for the minute Parker delivered, Doreen was out of here.

  “What about the knights?” she asked at last.

  “Nights? As in Arabian Nights? Or are you asking whether the painter will work nights?” With Doreen, one never knew.

  “No, silly, knights, like in Robin Hood.”

  Jason wanted to scream. “There are no knights in Robin Hood.” Heaven help him, but he was beginning to understand her!

  “Oh,” Doreen said, blinking. She was beautiful in a blank sort of way, with enormous eyes that she rimmed in black, which made them seem even larger, and she had about fifty pounds of crinkly blonde hair. The men of Abernathy nearly swooned when they saw her.

  “Doreen,” Jason said, this time with more urgency. “Where did the president of the United States get the idea that we were doing Arabian Nights murals?”

  “From that man who discovered the world and rode with the Robin Hood knights,” she said.

  Unfortunately for him, Jason sometimes almost enjoyed trying to piece together the logic of Doreen’s thinking. Now what she’d said rambled about in his head: man who discovered the world, Robin Hood, and knights. It was the name Columbus that gave him a clue. “The Knights of Columbus,” he whispered, and when Doreen rolled her eyes as though she was frustrated at his slowness, he knew he was right.

  The Knights of Columbus were one of the sponsors of the remodeling of the old Abernathy Library, and for some reason, Doreen had chosen them to fixate on. How she got from Knights of Columbus to Arabian Nights intrigued him—as Doreen’s brain often did.

  “What made you think the library murals were going to be about the Arabian Nights?” he asked softly.

  Doreen gave a sigh. “Mr. Gables really likes Princess Caroline, and since she’s there, of course that’s what she would like.”

  It took Jason a moment to follow her reasoning—if it could be called reasoning. Mr. Gables owned the local pet store, which was next door to the building where the Knights of Columbus met, and Princess Caroline lived in Monaco, which sounded like Morocco, which is part of the Arab world.

  “I see,” Jason said slowly. “And Mr. Gables’s interest in the princess made you think the library was to be painted with Arabian Nights stories instead of fairy tales.”

  “They’d look better than Humpty-Dumpty, and, besides, the president won’t come to see Little Bo-peep.”

  With a glance at the letter, Jason had to admit that she had a point in that. “You see, Doreen,” he said patiently, “the problem is that a man is flying in from Seattle to paint the murals and he’ll be here tomorrow. The man has spent the last year working on the drawings for the murals, and—”

  “Oh, is that what you’re worried about? I can fix that,” she said, then left the room.

  “Here,” she said when she returned a moment later. “This came two weeks ago.”

  At first Jason wanted to bawl her out for leaving a letter lying around for two weeks before showing it to him, but he decided to save his energy and read the letter. It seemed that the mural painter had broken his right arm and would be out of commission for at least four months.

  “You aren’t going to yell again, are you?” Doreen asked. “I mean, it’s just a broken arm. He’ll get well.”

  “Doreen,” Jason said as he stood, glad that there was a desk between them or he might be tempted to wrap his hands about her neck and squeeze. “In six weeks the president of the United States is coming here to see a town that is months away from completion, and he wants to see murals in a library that have yet to be painted because I have no painter.” At the end, his voice was rising until he was nearly shouting.

  “Don’t you shout at me,” she said calmly. “It’s not my job to hire painters.” At that she turned and walked out of the room.

  Jason sat down so hard the chair nearly collapsed. “Why did I give up business?” he muttered, and, once again, when he looked back on his former life, he remembered it as efficient and organized. When he’d moved everything back to Abernathy, he’d tried to take his key staff with him, but for the most part they’d laughed at him. His butler had laughed heartily. “Leave New York for Kentucky?” the man had said, highly amused. “No, thank you.”

  And that had been the attitude of everyone else who’d worked for him. So he’d returned to his hometown virtually alone. Or at least that’s how it had felt at the time.

  Jason looked at the baby pictures of Max that covered the upper right-hand side of his desk. Two years, he thought, and he’d not heard a word about either of them. It was as though the earth had opened its jaws and swallowed them whole. All he had were these photos that he’d begged from Mildred, Amy’s mother-in-law, and had framed in sterling silver. Nothing but the best for his Max.

  At least he still thought of the child as his. And again in this he was alone, for no one had any sympathy for him when it came to his pining away for Amy and a baby he’d known for only a few days.

  “Get over it!” his father had said. “My wife died. She had no choice in leaving me, but that girl you wanted left you and she hasn’t called since. You should take a hint and get it through your thick skull that she didn’t want you and your money, so she hightailed it out of here.”

  “My money has nothing to do with this,” Jason had said quietly.

  “Yeah? Then why are you spending a fortune paying a bunch of snoops to try and find her? If she wasn’t for sale when she was here, what makes you think you can buy her when she’s not?”

  Jason had no reply to his father’s words, but then his father was the only person on earth who could reduce Jason to a naughty nine-year-old boy.

  David was even less sympathetic than their father and his cure for his big brother had been to introduce him to other women. “Kentucky courtship” is what David called it, and Jason had no idea what his brother meant until the food started arriving. Single women, divorced women, women contemplating a divorce, showed up on Jason’s doorstep with jars and dishes of food.

  “Just thought you might like to taste my bread-and-butter pickles,” they’d purr. “I won a blue ribbon at the state fair last year.”

  Within three wee
ks of his arrival, Jason had a kitchen full of every kind of pickle, jam, and chutney known to mankind. His refrigerator was always full of cakes and coleslaw.

  “Do they think I’m a man or a hog to be fattened for the kill?” Jason asked one night in a bar as he looked at his brother over a glass of beer.

  “A little of both. It is Kentucky, you know. Look, big brother, you ought to take one of them out. You ought to get back into life and stop mooning over what you can’t have.”

  “Yeah, I guess so, but . . . You don’t think they’ll try to pickle me and enter me in the fair, do you?”

  David laughed. “Maybe. Just in case, you should try Doris Millet first. Her specialty is mulberry gin.”

  Jason gave a bit of a smile. “Okay. I’ll try. But . . .”

  “I know,” David said softly. “You miss Amy and Max. But you need to get on with living. There are lots of women out there. Look at me. I was mad about Amy, but then I met Cherry, and—” He broke off because it was still a sore spot with Jason that he’d lost his magnificent secretary and was now stuck with Doreen.

  So Jason had dated one female after another, and without exception, they all fell in love with his money.

  “What do you expect?” his sister-in-law had snapped. “You’re rich, handsome, heterosexual, and eligible. Of course they want to marry you.”

  Jason liked Cherry much better as a secretary than he did as a pregnant relative. He didn’t need to be reminded that his greatest asset was his bank account.

  “What you’ve done is sanctify her,” Cherry said in what had become her usual tone of exasperation. She wasn’t handling pregnancy well, as her body was so swollen even her nose was fat. And the doctor had put her on bed rest. “Amy Thompkins is a very nice person but not out of the ordinary. There are lots of Amys out there; you just have to find them.”

  “But she didn’t want to marry me,” Jason said with a sigh.