Forever Promised (44 page)

Benny let out a growl of frustration. Her back hurt, her neck hurt, and her head hurt. She needed food, and she needed a nap, and she needed this little woman with no spine to get out of her fucking way and let her get an education.

“I am five months pregnant. Do you know what that means?”

The woman’s eyes opened and closed and then focused with laser intensity on Benny’s expanding midsection. “That maybe now isn’t the best time to finish your degree?” she asked, like that might possibly be the right answer.

Benny thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head and roll on the floor. “Wrong answer!” she growled. “It means that sitting on the ground while I’m waiting to get a spot in the class is going to be a
colossal
pain in the ass, and I don’t mean that in the good, fuck-me-harder way, either! Do you think that maybe, just
maybe
,
you could check your computer again and see if there’s maybe a junior or a sophomore who could be bumped down, since
they’re
stuck in this hellhole for at
least
another two years?”

Hellhole was unfair. The Sacramento State campus was actually very pretty, once you got over how close the buildings had gotten as the student population had grown larger. Trees grew over the river, and a wide, generous green opened out in front of the library. Drew was, in fact, playing with Parry on the green now, because Parry had this Monday off for some inexplicable reason, and Benny had been reluctant to just leave her at home. It was like a holiday for her, and since Benny didn’t actually
have
any Monday classes, she figured they could go down to the school while Benny cleared this up, and then maybe take Parry to the railroad museum in Old Town, or to Sutter’s Fort or the Crocker Art Gallery or something.

She left it up to Drew to choose, since he was coming down with her, when she knew
he
had things at the ranch he wanted to do too. The business had gotten big enough—and they had enough horses to care for—that he and Deacon had started divvying up tasks. There were some things Drew couldn’t do—he was very agile on the prosthetic, but agile didn’t always cut it when you were dealing with a monster stallion with an anger management problem. But there were some things—breaking the gentler horses, putting the babies through their paces in the ring—that he
could
do, and that he took pride in doing. Since Deacon had given him more and more autonomy, he’d gotten less and less enthusiastic about going back to school, and Benny wasn’t sure what to think about that.

On the one hand, she’d been proud of his ambition. On the other, she was proud of The Pulpit and of what the four of them—her, Deacon, Drew, and Crick—had made of it. It was a thriving business—and one of the few successful horse-training operations that had survived after the crash. She knew that some of that was the canny investments she’d made when they’d started working in the black instead of the red, but most of it was… was
them.
It was Deacon and Drew and the way they treated the kids who were paid to come help them. It was Deacon’s philosophy of kindness and strength and not cruelty and domination, and the way he favored the gentle animals over the pretty ones. It was the way Crick dealt with the people (blunt asshole that he could be) and the way Benny ran the books and Drew filled in all the spaces in between.

If Drew was happy at The Pulpit, Benny wasn’t going to object to living her life there and raising Drew’s children.

And watching the one inside her continue to grow.

She couldn’t lie to herself that the baby, the
something wonderful
,
was part of her motivation for wanting to stay. Deacon would want to watch Parry grow—that was never in any doubt—but that she would want to watch this child grow too? Even though she would only be “Auntie Benny” to this one, that was starting to loom in her mind as something important.

How stupid would it be if she had this baby to make it possible for her and Drew to leave The Pulpit, but it became one of the reasons they decided to stay?

That irritation was spilling over into her little interview now, and she didn’t think she could contain it.

“Do you not understand?” Benny leaned over the desk, scrabbling on the woman’s blotter like she was trying to find flesh under her fingers. “Don’t you get it? I
need for things to be settled.
And they’re not going to be. My boyfriend may or may not go back to school after we get married. We may or may not continue to live in the same house. I may or may not be able to let my stupid brother and his awesome husband have this baby. All of this shit is up in the air, but the one thing, the one
goddamned thing
that
wasn’t
up in the air, was whether or not I was going to
have this class.
Do you think you could maybe fix that for me? Do ya? Maybe? Maybe could I just take this fucking class and get my education?”

“Did you say your brother’s
husband
?” the little woman asked.

“
Ergh—
hey!”

“We’re awfully sorry, Mrs. Abrams,” Drew said, taking her by the shoulders and almost physically lifting her out of the chair. “She can take the class next semester. Is it offered online?”

“Drew—”

“Let the woman answer, Bernice—is the class offered online?”

“Why yes,” said the evaluator, looking shaken. Benny had no idea why she’d be so puzzled—after what Benny had dealt with today, she was sure all
sorts
of people must threaten Mrs. Abrams with imminent physical danger. Crick would have driven the woman shrieking from her desk in
half
the time it took Benny to lose her temper.

“Can we have the information? We can get Benny signed up this summer, and in the meantime, maybe you can look into when she’d be able to apply for graduation.”

“Oh, yes… of course.”

Mrs. Abrams looked relieved, and as far as Benny could tell, she
should
be relieved, because Drew’s surprise arrival had
totally
gotten her off the hook.

“But Drew—” Benny was going to object, and then she saw Parry waiting not so patiently at Drew’s side, with the Frisbee they’d been playing with in her hand. That was when Benny realized that they were both cold and their clothes were coated with mist. The gray sky that had shrouded their trip down must have finally decided to drop and give rain.

After a few more minutes, and the woman’s business card, and a finalizing of Benny’s schedule with only nine units, taken on Tuesday and Thursday of the semester, Benny, Drew, and Parry were on their way.

“Don’t pout, Bernice,” Drew said on their way out to the car. It had started raining, and Benny pulled two little umbrellas out of her purse. Parry had the bright pink umbrella in front of them, and Benny and Drew held one with Monet colored flowers, just a couple of steps behind. The rain wasn’t falling that hard, and they’d bundled well. The walk—under the trees, around the buildings, between the wide lawns—actually felt sort of pleasant. Or it would have been, if she wasn’t in a shit-kicker of a mood.

“I’m starving,” she snapped, and he shoulder-bumped her in spite of her crappy attitude.

“There’s orange juice and crackers in the car,” he said gently. “I packed.”

Benny brightened considerably. “Yeah? That was sweet. I was going to put some in my purse, but—”

“There wasn’t enough room with the umbrellas. I get that. But see? We work good together—right?”

She nodded and shoulder-bumped him in return—and to warn him about a pile of slippery leaves up ahead. Parry just went gamucking through them, but Drew couldn’t sense the changes under his prosthetic foot, and she didn’t want him to slip. Together they walked around the hazard, and when they got back on the path, she realized she had sighed away some of her tension.

“I’m not going to be done until next semester,” she said, and Drew didn’t argue.

“Nope. But this way, you can take more of those poetry classes you’ve been whining about.”

“But….” She waved the hand
not
holding the umbrella. “But… you know… we were going to….”

Drew sighed. “How upset would you be,” he asked after a moment, “if, you know, that AHT and veterinarian thing didn’t happen?”

It so exactly mirrored what she’d been thinking that she actually felt
guilty
, like she’d somehow beamed her secret hopes to him by telepathy. Or maybe just really clear signals—it wasn’t like she’d ever kept her heart’s desires under lock and key.

“But… but…,” she sputtered now, trying to think of a good reason to make him go out and do something he apparently wasn’t excited about anymore. “But you
wanted
us to be on our own. You
longed
to go do something autonomous, remember?”

Drew’s sigh sounded almost as guilty as Benny’s wild heart flail a moment ago. “Yeah,” he confessed, “yeah. But… I don’t know. I was… I’m not as jealous now, I guess. All that insecurity, all of that doubt about having you to myself—that’s no longer an issue.”

Benny felt an acute moment of unfairness. “But… but if all that was going to go away, why did I do
this
?” she asked, gesturing to her swollen, irritable, unhappy body.

Drew wrapped a reassuring arm around her waist. “Don’t you get it, Benny? You were right.
This
”—and he squeezed her thickening middle—“is
exactly
the reason I can stay.
This
is going to be the part of you that Deacon and Crick get, and it’s going to be
awesome.
Just because it’s not going to be my baby, do you think I don’t want to see it grow?”

Oh fuck. Oh hell. Oh
no
!

“Benny, are you crying?”

They had gotten out to the parking lot by now, and Benny was looking around their section for her car, the nice safe gold sedan Deacon had bought her not long after she’d had Parry Angel. “Shut up,” she muttered.

“Benny?”

Parry had found the car, and she was standing next to it, staring up through her umbrella to see the pattern the rain made when it fell on the pink surface through the fabric.

Benny wiped her eyes with the damp sleeve of her coat. “Orange juice,” she muttered. “I need orange juice. And crackers. And a big chocolate cake.”

“Benny,” Drew muttered, tightening his arm around her waist. “
Talk
to me!”

Benny turned toward him and looked up, thinking that everything about his dark-skinned rectangular face was especially dear today. She cupped his cheek and pulled him down for a quick kiss that got a little deeper and a little deeper, until Parry’s plaintive “Momm-eeeee!” reminded them both where they were.

“You’re perfect,” she said hoarsely. “You’re perfect, and you’re awesome, and you’re right. I really
did
want to take those classes in poetry and politics.”

She hurried then, to go help Parry get in the car (although Parry didn’t need much help these days—she could pretty much sit in the car seat and do the belts all by herself), and let Drew muddle through all the rest on his own.

T
HAT
was a nice moment—and it helped her get through the next few months. Parry’s birthday party was in February, and although Lila was
sorely
missed, Parry got to invite other friends to Chuck E. Cheese, and that seemed to make her happy beyond all reason. She went to sleep that night in a brand-new princess bed with pink sheets, and newly painted pink walls in her room in the cottage, and Benny and Drew retired to make happy, triumphant love. Their little girl was seven, and they’d made her happy, and damn if that wasn’t to celebrate.

And as it seemed to be every year since she’d been born, Parry’s birthday was a harbinger of spring. Spring at The Pulpit was always something special—when Mother Nature wasn’t trying to kill them dead, that is.

This go-round, spring was actually pretty mild. Not as much rain as people would have liked, but it often seemed that when there
was
enough rain, there was actually
more
than enough rain, and the world went straight to shit. The year before, there had been flooding—not quite as bad as the year Crick was gone, but enough to give them all a scare.

The rain that day lasted a week and then went away. What followed was February clear and dry and so cold
Deacon
actually remembered his hat and gloves.

The first week of March, though, the rains came back—and didn’t go away for another three weeks. Drew and Deacon came in and pretty much shed mud in the mudroom, and the dog got away from them and ran into the living room and shook twice, leaving little brown pellets all over the couch and walls like a shotgun blast. Everything in The Pulpit and Benny and Drew’s house started taking on a mild brown patina from all the damned dirt tracked in and out, but since Drew and Crick were doing the cleaning, Benny managed not to get into a tizzy about it.

Benny spent Monday, Wednesday, and Friday working at The Pulpit, answering the phone and doing the books in between doing her homework. Crick took on Parry Angel duty, right down to stopping at the frosty a couple of times a week for a treat, and Benny began to see the pattern for the next semester, and maybe the semester after that one.

It didn’t seem so bad.

Especially on Saturday, when most of the riding lesson clients cancelled because of the rain. Deacon stayed outside for a couple of hours to work some of the more high-spirited horses who would go apeshit without workouts, but he sent Drew inside and the kids back to Promise House as soon as the stables were mucked and the horses fed.

Kimmy came by, Jeff in tow, and Crick plopped down on a couch next to Benny, and they sat and drank some sort of coffee/chocolate thing Crick had experimented with, knitted quietly, and listened to the rain.

Drew was on the floor, helping Parry put together a puzzle, and the television was on quietly—Parry had seen
Tangled
so often she knew it by heart (Benny wished Crick would stop saying Flynn Ryder
really
belonged with Prince Phillip at the end).