Hope Street (43 page)

“There is no ‘me and Foster,’” she said quietly.

“There was.”

“Years ago.”

“All right.” He sank back in his seat, his hands curled into fists on his knees, and shut his eyes. “Never mind.”

He was finally opening up.
Never mind
wouldn’t do. “Talk to me, Bobby. For once in your goddamn life, talk to me.”

She heard him inhale, then let his breath out on a broken sigh. “I always loved you, Jo. Maybe I didn’t say it in words, maybe I didn’t express it the way you wanted, but I always loved you. And you loved Drew.”

“In high school,” she emphasized. “I was young, I didn’t even know what love was. It was a schoolgirl crush.”

“You wanted to marry him. You planned your future around him.” Now that he was talking,
really
talking, the words sprayed from him like water from a garden hose, soaking and chilling her. “I asked you to marry me because I loved you. You were the only good thing in my life back then, and I saw a way to keep you in my life, and I grabbed it and held on tight. That’s why I married you. And you married me because you couldn’t have Drew.”

“That’s not—” she stumbled over the next word “—true.” But it
was
true. If, when she’d phoned Drew to tell him she was pregnant, he had sent her bus fare to travel not to an abortion doctor in Cincinnati but to New Hampshire, to his college campus, so he could marry her, she would have gone. She would have been his wife and had his baby.

And she would never have had the life she’d lived with Bobby. She would never have struggled with him and celebrated each triumph with him, whether that triumph was his tossing away his cane or starting his own business or earning a college degree. She would never have had her two glorious sons. She would never have built her own world with Bobby. She would never have had all those loving nights in their bed, trusting, touching, connecting in the most elemental way.

“Back in Holmdell, you accused me of never saying I love you,” he reminded her, sounding oddly drained. “And I’ve spent this whole damn marriage knowing I wasn’t your choice, I wasn’t the one you loved. You settled for me in desperation. The son of the town drunk. The kid who mowed the grass at the cemetery. You didn’t marry me for love.” He sighed again, almost a moan. “You want me to open up, Jo? There. I’ve done it.”

She didn’t realize she was crying until the double yellow line striping the road turned into a blur. Somehow she managed to steer onto the shoulder and stop the car. How could he have thought she’d
settled
for him? Hadn’t she loved him enough? Hadn’t she given him everything she had—her joy, her sorrow, her patience, her passion?

He had lived the past thirty-seven years doubting her love, just as she’d lived the past thirty-seven years doubting his. If only he’d opened up, if only he’d shared his feelings with her. If only she’d known he felt that way.

The last time she and Bobby had kissed in this car, he’d been in the driver’s seat and she’d had the wheel jammed into her back. This time, she climbed over the console to the passenger seat and settled onto his lap. She clung to his shoulders and wept into his shirt until he closed his arms around her. Only then did her sobs subside. “I love you so much, Bobby,” she murmured, brushing her mouth against the hollow of his throat with each word she spoke. “The only thing I love about Drew was that his stupid selfishness sent me to you.”

“You came to me because you were panicked,” Bobby insisted.

“No.” She lifted her head and gazed at him. “When I found out I was pregnant, the first person I thought of was you.”

His eyebrows arched in surprise. “We’d never done the deed,” he reminded her. “You couldn’t have pinned it on me.”

She managed a feeble smile. “I wouldn’t have pinned anything on you. It was just…you were the one I wanted to share my pregnancy with. My first thought was, ‘I’ve got to tell Bobby.’”

“Why?”

She struggled to remember that day, when the nurse at the community college clinic had given her the news and she’d immediately thought of Bobby. “Because you were my friend?” she said, testing the idea as she spoke it. “Because you were my soul mate? Because—” she let out a damp, bleary sigh “—because I trusted you in a way I never trusted anyone else. If that’s not love, Bobby, I don’t know what love is.”

He twined his fingers into her hair, pushing it back from her tear-soaked cheeks. Then he kissed her forehead, tucked his thumbs under her chin and angled her face so he could kiss her lips. A soft kiss, not steamy, not erotic, yet it was the most loving kiss he’d ever given her. “For all these years,” he said, barely above a whisper, “you kept me going. You rescued me from that graveyard, from Holmdell, from ’Nam, from a million kinds of hell. And I always told myself that was enough. I loved you, you saved my life, and that was enough. If Foster hadn’t come through our door that day, I probably could have kept on going, believing it was enough. But he came through our door…and I realized it wasn’t.”

“Is it enough now?” she asked. “Knowing I love you with all my heart—is that enough?”

He kissed her again. “It’ll have to be, because I can’t go through this opening-up shit every day. It hurts, Jo.”

“Not every day. Just now and then,” she assured him. “When it’s absolutely necessary.” They kissed again, and she felt the dampness on his cheeks, too. Her tears or his? She didn’t know and didn’t care.

“We don’t have to go to New York,” he said. “Claudia’ll be fine. Let her save some poor boy’s life. Just like her mother.” He kissed her again, one last, deep, lingering kiss. “Can we go home?”

She wanted to go home, too—home with Bobby, her husband, the man she loved. But she didn’t want to leave the warmth and safety of his arms. She wanted to remain this way with him forever. Their lips touching, grazing. Their bodies pressed together. “Will you take me to bed?”

“Yeah,” he said, then smiled gently. “I’ll do that.”

She returned his smile and blinked back a few fresh tears. Reluctantly she eased off his lap and back into the driver’s seat. She turned on the engine, merged back onto the road and risked an illegal U-turn. Then she cruised north, away from New York City, away from the Fosters and her daughter and the boy whose life she would save.

Joelle and Bobby drove away from their past, away from the lies, away from the doubts, heading home. The sooner they got there, the sooner they would be in each other’s arms, in their bed, expressing their love in the most honest way they knew.