Page 116 of Summer Weddings
“A number of things,” he said, but didn’t elaborate. He brought out a couple of snifters and poured a liberal amount into each. “This will cure what ails you. Guaranteed.”
“Maybe you’re right.” At this point she figured a glass of brandy couldn’t hurt.
“Cheers,” Ben said and touched the rim of his glass to hers.
“To a special…friend,” she said and took her first tentative sip. The liquid fire glided over her tongue and down her throat. When it came to drinking alcohol, Bethany generally stuck to wine and an occasional beer, rarely anything stronger.
Her eyes watered, and this time it had nothing to do with her emotions.
“You all right?” Ben asked, slapping her on the back.
She pressed her hand over her heart and nodded breathlessly. Her second and third sips went down far more easily than the first. Gradually a warmth spread out from the pit of her stomach, and a lethargic feeling settled over her.
“Have you ever been in love?” she asked, surprising herself by asking such a personal question. Perhaps the liquor had loosened her tongue; more likely it was the need to hear this man’s version of his affair with her mother. This man who’d fathered her…
“In love? Me?”
“What’s so strange about that?” she asked lightly, careful not to let on how serious the question really was. “Surely you’ve been in love at least once in your life. A woman in your deep, dark past maybe—one you’ve never been able to forget?”
Ben chuckled. “I was in the navy, you know.”
Bethany nodded. “Don’t tell me you were the kind of sailor who had a woman in every port?”
He grinned almost boyishly and cocked his head to one side. “That was me, all right.”
Although she’d solicited it, this information disturbed Bethany. It somehow cheapened her mother and the love Marilyn had once felt for Ben. “But there must’ve been one woman you remember more than any of the others,” she pressed.
Ben scratched his head as though to give her question heavy-duty consideration. “Nope, can’t say there was. I liked to play the field.”
Bethany took another sip of the brandy. “What about Marilyn?” she asked brazenly, throwing caution to the winds. “You do rememberher,don’t you?”
“Marilyn?” Ben repeated, a look of surprise on his face. “No… I don’t recall any Marilyn.” He sounded as though he’d never heard the name before.
Ben might as well have reached across the counter and slapped her face. Hard. She hurt for her mother, and for herself. Before she met him, she’d let herself imagine that her mother’s affair with Ben had been a romantic relationship gone tragically awry.
In the past few weeks, she’d begun to think she shared a genuine friendship with Ben. A real bond. Because of that, she’d lowered her guard and come close to revealing her secret.
Bethany clamped her mouth shut. She wanted to blame the wine. The brandy. Both had loosened her tongue, she realized, but she’d been on the verge of telling him, anyway. She shook the hair out of her face and stared past him.
“Three years ago,” she began resolutely, struggling to find the right words, knowing she couldn’t stop now, “the doctors found a lump in my mother’s breast.”
“Cancer?”
Bethany nodded.
Ben glanced at his watch. “It’s getting kind of late, don’t you think?”
“This story will only take a couple more minutes,” she promised, and to fortify her courage, she drank the rest of the brandy in a single gulp. It raged a fiery path down her throat.
“You were talking about your mother,” Ben prodded, and it seemed he wanted her to hurry. Bethany didn’t know if she could. Those weeks when her mother had been so sick from the chemotherapy had been the most traumatic of her life.
“It turned out that the cancer had spread,” Bethany continued. “For a while we didn’t know if my mother was going to survive. I was convinced that if the cancer didn’t kill her, the chemo would. I was still in college at the time. My classes usually let out around two, and I got into the habit of stopping at the hospital on my way home from school.”
Ben nursed his drink, his eyes avoiding hers.
“One day, after a particularly violent reaction to the treatment, Mom thought she was going to die. I tried to tell her she had to fight the cancer.”
“Did she die?” Ben asked. For the first time since starting her story she had his full attention. Either she was a better storyteller than she realized, or Ben did remember her mother.
