Page 83 of Summer Weddings
He buried his hands deep in his pockets, because he couldn’t trust them not to reach for her. “Good movie, wasn’t it?” he asked.
“Wonderful,” she agreed, but she couldn’t hide the disappointment in her voice.
* * *
“Mom, I’m so sorry.” Lanni Caldwell stood in the doorway of the Anchorage hospital room. Her grandmother had died there only an hour before. “I came the minute I heard.”
Kate looked up from her mother’s bedside, her eyes brimming with tears, and smiled faintly. “Thank you for getting here so quickly.” Lanni’s father stood behind his wife, his hand on her shoulder.
Lanni gazed at Catherine Fletcher, the woman on the bed.Grammy.A term of affection for a woman Lanni barely knew, but one she would always love. Her heart ached at the sight of her dead grandmother. Over the past three months, Catherine’s health had taken a slow but steady turn for the worse. Yet even in her failing physical condition, Catherine had insisted she’d return to Hard Luck. Dead or alive.
She would return.
Not because it was her home, but because Catherine wanted to go back to David O’Halloran, the man she’d loved for a lifetime. The man who’d left her standing at the altar more than fifty years earlier, when he’d brought home an English bride. The man she’d alternately loved and hated all these years.
“My mother’s gone,” Kate whispered brokenly. “She didn’t even have the decency to wait for me. Like everything else in her life, she had to do this on her own. Alone. Without family.”
After spending the summer in Hard Luck, Lanni better understood her mother’s pain. For reasons Lanni would never fully grasp, Catherine Fletcher had given up custody of Kate when she was only a toddler. At a time when such decisions were rare, Catherine had chosen to be separated from her daughter. Chosen, instead, to stand impatiently on the sidelines waiting for David’s marriage to Ellen to disintegrate. When that didn’t happen, Catherine had decided to help matters along. But Ellen and David had clung steadfastly to each other, and in the end,after David’s untimely death, Catherine had let her bitterness and disillusionment take control.
All her life, Kate Caldwell had been deprived of her mother’s love. She’d known that her mother had married her father on the rebound. The marriage had lasted less than two years, and Kate’s birth had been unplanned, a mistake.
“Matt’s on his way,” Lanni told her parents. She’d spoken to her brother briefly when he phoned to give her his flight schedule. Sawyer O’Halloran was flying him into Fairbanks, and he’d catch the first available flight to Anchorage that evening. Lanni had arranged to pick him up at the airport.
After saying her own farewell to her grandmother, Lanni moved into the room reserved for family to wait for her parents. Her heart felt heavy, burdened with her mother’s loss more than her own.
Footsteps alerted her to the fact that she was no longer alone. When she glanced up, she saw Charles O’Halloran.
“Oh, Charles,” she whispered, jumping to her feet. She needed his comfort now, and before another moment had passed, she was securely wrapped in his embrace.
The sobs that shook her came as a shock. Charles held her close, his strength absorbing her pain, his love quieting her grief.
“How’d you know?” Although tempted, she hadn’t phoned him, even though he was currently working out of Valdez.
“Sawyer.”
She should’ve guessed his brother would tell him.
“Why didn’t you call me?” he asked.
“I…didn’t think I should.”
Her answer appeared to surprise him. “Why not?”
“Because… I know how you still feel about Grammy. I don’t blame you. She hurt you and your family.”
They sat down together and Charles took both of Lanni’s hands in his own. “I stopped hating her this summer. How could I despise the woman who was ultimately responsible for giving me you?”
Lanni swiped at the tears on her cheeks and offered a shaky smile to this man she loved.
“And after my mother told me the circumstances that led to her marrying my dad,” Charles went on,“I have a better understanding of the heartache Catherine suffered. My father made a noble sacrifice when he married Ellen. I know he grew to love her. But in his own way, I believe he always loved Catherine.”
“I’d like to think they’re together now,” Lanni said. Charles’s father and her grandmother. “This time forever.”
“I’d like to think they are, too,” Charles said softly, and he dropped a gentle kiss on the top of her head.
Lanni pressed her face against his shoulder and closed her eyes.
“The memorial service will be in Hard Luck?” he asked.
