The Night We Met (11 page)

I threw my arms around him, pressing my lips to his, wishing I could go back eight years, to my wedding night, and stay right there in that little piece of heaven.

He kissed me back, opening my mouth with his tongue and my response was eager—too eager for standing out on the driveway.

"Hey." He set down his briefcase, slipped his keys inside his pocket and pulled me ful y against him.

"What's this about?"

I was scared to death I was going to lose him. He loved his boys completely, but Sarah—a daughter

—had held a unique place in his heart. And now he had a second chance.

"I have something to tell you."

"You're pregnant."

Hardly. We'd tried. But it just wasn't happening anymore. Maybe because Nate was older. Or because I'd been so upset by Sarah's death that I was somehow sabotaging my chances.

"No, but it's kind of like that."

His hands on my shoulders, holding me, the look in his eyes as he peered down at me like I was the only person alive, gave me the strength I needed to think only of him.

"I've got some good news for you, Nate." I smiled and my heart settled momentarily into that peaceful state I'd found so long ago. "At least I think it's good news...."

For him.

"You remember Holly Gilbert?"

His fingers tightened as he frowned. "Ye-e-ess. What's she got to do with this?"

"She gave you something twenty-three years ago and even though she didn't tell you about it, she took excel ent care of it. Today, it arrived."

"A gift?" He sounded puzzled, as well he might.

I was botching this.

"You have a daughter, Nate. A beautiful, intelligent, kind and delightful young woman who has your eyes and your mouth. She's inside right now, sick with nerves while she waits to meet you."

"""What! ""His gaze darted to the house and back again. His frown deepened.

"Her name's Lori. Lori Gilbert. She spent the afternoon with the boys and me. You should see them with her. I'll bet that if she told them to eat spinach, they would."

"Holly and I didn't have a child. We were hardly married."

"She was pregnant when she moved to New Jersey with her parents. They agreed to help her on the condition that she not tell you about the baby."

"The hell they did!"

"There's no doubt she's yours, Nate. You only have to look at her to see that. Or..." I paused, swallowed the tears that wanted to interrupt my tentative composure. "Look at the baby picture she brought. She's so much like Sarah, it's... it's as if our precious baby's back again."

And in a way, for Nate, she was.

He watched me for a long time, as though trying to get right inside my heart. I tried, silently, to reassure him that I was fine—when I wasn't sure I was. I wanted him to know he had my complete support. No matter what.

And then he glanced at the house again.

"Go to her."

I waited outside. Lori deserved to have her father's undivided attention—or at least not to have Nate worrying about me, about how his actions might affect me as he met his daughter for the first time.

"Crazy as it was, I felt inadequate, as though I'd somehow failed him where Holly had succeeded. I wondered if they'd be in touch now that they shared a child. And at the same time, I was genuinely happy for him. I loved Nate far more than I loved myself. He was a good man.

A great man.

I remembered how he'd sacrificed his own needs for mine after Sarah died—holding in his own grief and taking on mine, as well. And I knew he needed this.

Thirty seconds after he disappeared, Nate poked his head out the back door.

"Liza?"

"Yeah?"

"Come in here. I don't want to do this without you."

I climbed the steps slowly.

"I thought you were right behind me."

"I wanted to give you time alone with her...."

"Time alone is not time apart from you' he said softly, wrapping his arms around me as we stood for a moment on the back porch. "You're part of me, Liza. A vital part. Whatever happens to me, happens to you. We do it together. Right?"

My eyes filled with tears and I nodded. I should have known. Should never have doubted. Nate and I were one. Had been since the night we met. Would always be. No matter what.

Lori entered our lives, staying with us most of that first summer so she and Nate could get to know each other, so she could spend time with her half brothers and, she said, so she and I could become family, too. Her advent was a blessing in so many ways. The boys adored her and she them. She became a good friend to me. And Nate had a daughter again.

It had taken him a while to get over his anger with Hol y for robbing him of the first twenty-three years of his daughter's life, but he'd come around. Especially after I pointed out that he'd hate himself if he messed up the next twenty-three with regret.

Every night that summer, he beguiled Lori with stories about his own life and questions about hers.

Her mother had remarried when she was three, and her stepfather was good to her. They'd never had other children. He was a doctor, recently retired at fifty, and her parents were vacationing in Europe for the summer before coming home to settle in their new house off the Cape.

Lori had just graduated from Yale and been accepted at Georgetown's law school.

Her appearance that summer freed me up to spend my days with Nate at the resort, getting the camp up and running—bringing me closer than ever to my husband. Other than my brief stint as a maid after Sarah's death, I'd never shared Nate's working life. I enjoyed it immensely.

And after Lori returned east to enter Georgetown and the boys were back in school—-Jimmy going full days, starting that year—I continued to work at the resort as Nate's assistant, and to volunteer at the women's shelter in Denver.

The next winter, in February of 1977, on the same day that San Francisco suffered its worst earthquake in ten years, James Kenneth Crowley, my father, passed away in his sleep. He was only sixty-eight.

Nate, the boys and I went to California for his funeral. The visitation at the funeral home was the first time any of them ever saw my father. And the last. I cried bitterly, grieving for al that had been lost.

He'd never seen his grandsons or met the man I loved with all my heart. Regret was like acid in my stomach. I'd grown up in the past few years and knew that one day I'd see my daddy again. And that he'd welcome me with open arms.

My God would welcome me in His home again. I had to believe that.

The time with my mother and sisters and their families was good for the boys. And for me, too.

We got to meet William's girlfriend. At thirty-five, a year older than he was, she was a scientist with a pharmaceutical company. She'd never been married. She was quiet. Unassuming. And lovely. I told my brother he'd better marry her quick before he lost the best thing that ever happened to him.

He did just that, in July of the following year. July 20th to be exact. In a double ceremony with two very handsome eight- and nine-year-old ring bearers, and a twenty-four-year-old maid of honor, Nate and I also walked up the aisle, celebrating our tenth anniversary with a renewal of our vows.

I was twenty-nine. Much more seasoned than I'd been when I married this man. My hair was longer, my hips a little wider, my mind a bit wiser, but my heart was just as certain.

The church was filled to capacity with Wil iam and Shelly's friends. We'd invited a few of my old high-school friends, too, including Patricia. Even Walt, Betty and Mary Blackwell came. Most important, my whole family, and of course Shelly's, were there to cheer us all on.

Nate played piano for the reception, which meant I spent a lot of time without a partner, but I didn't mind. I used those hours to visit with loved ones I seldom saw. And sat on the piano bench whenever I needed my husband close.

Toward the end of the evening, as the lights were dimming and the children were getting tired, Nate hit a familiar chord and I stopped in midsentence the conversation I was having with Patricia.

Glancing over, I met his eyes—and held them as he sang.

My gaze never wavered clear through to the last chorus of "My Cup Runneth Over" although my husband's image blurred as my eyes wel ed with happy tears.

We'd come through so much, years of living and loving, and as I lay in my husband's arms the next night—back at Walt's cabin in Colorado, while our sons stayed with my mother in California—I could honestly say I was happy.

And looking forward to the next forty years with anticipation and gratitude.

* * *

In the winter of 1978, shortly before Christmas, President Jimmy Carter doubled the size of the country's national park system. That brought about a resurgence of interest in outdoor sports, and business at our little resort picked up so much we had to expand. Nate hired a manager, but he was too hands-on to leave the running of the resort to someone else.

He did take time, though, to teach the boys to ski. I fought him the whole way. I thought eight and nine was far too young, and feared broken legs and worse.

Unfortunately, I was outnumbered and my men took to the slopes—to be joined by Lori when she came out over her winter break.

By January, the four of them had skis strapped to my boots, too, and to my own surprise, once I got over the initial shakiness, I loved the sport I'd avoided for the first twenty-nine and a half years of my life.

As long as I stayed on the baby slopes.

I made the boys ski there with me that year, although Keith, the stronger and huskier of the two, was probably capable of doing more. He knew better than to push me on that one, though, and we waved off Nate and Lori as they took the more chal enging runs.

I'd signed my sons up for piano lessons the previous summer and both continued to attend and to practice. Keith was the more talented of the two, not so much in the music-reading department—

Jimmy had him beat on that—but my oldest son had clearly inherited some of his father's musical gift.

If he heard a song Jimmy was practicing, he could usually manage to pick it out and find chords that complemented it.

The problem was in stretching his hands to play the chords. One of the tendons had been damaged by his injury a few years before, and I feared that would prevent him from ever enjoying the piano as much as his father did.

Nate and I told him he could quit piano lessons, but he refused, saying that if Jimmy could do it, he could, too.

I was proud of his determination.

Still, I began to dread the afternoons when he'd sit down to practice. More often than not, the session would be interrupted by frustrated pounding on the keys. I was afraid he'd built in his mind some idea that his father would be disappointed in him if he didn't succeed at the instrument. I knew Keith would rather die than let Nate down.

One afternoon in March of 1979, I was in the kitchen scrambling to find something to make for dinner.

I'd forgotten to take the chicken out of the freezer before I'd driven the boys to school and headed to the resort to check last-minute details for a wedding that was taking place there that weekend. I was now in charge of overseeing al events. There'd been a glitch with the florist, and I'd been tied up until it was time to pick up Keith and Jimmy from school.

I'd decided on omelets with cheese and bacon when the banging started in the living room where we now kept the piano. I cringed, trying to tune out the discordance. And didn't immediately notice that the sound had changed, down to one note at a time, with an added percussion beat that sounded strangely like something cracking—-over and over again.

Dropping the seasoning I'd been planning to put in the egg mixture, I ran for the living room just as I heard Jimmy's call.

"Mo-o-ommmm! Keith's breaking the piano!"

"I am not!" Keith called back. I was close enough, at that point, to hear his hissed "shut up" to his brother.

"Mo-o-ommm!" Jimmy cal ed again. I'd reached the archway to the living room.

"Keith Armstrong Grady! What have you done? Get up off that bench! Go to your room! And don't ever, ever come out again, do you hear me?"

I rarely raised my voice to my children. I'd never shrieked at them before. Two sets of brown eyes stared up at me. Both mouths hung open.

"Now!" I said, my heart breaking as I saw the little white chips all over the floor—and the tiny, misshapen grooves at the end of almost every key.

"Both of you," I added when neither boy moved.

"But I didn't do anything," Jimmy said.

"Now!"

The boys jumped up and ran from the room. I sat down on the bench, rubbing my fingers along the jagged edges of the chipped ivory.

Nate cherished this old piano. He'd had it since he was a child. It was all he had left of the family he'd grown up with.

It was ruined.

And I felt responsible.

I had no idea how I was going to break the news to him.

"Where are the boys?"

Nate had already put his briefcase in our small home office. He'd washed his hands. And was standing in the kitchen watching me put the finishing touches on dinner. He'd just noticed the table set only for two.

"In their rooms."

"They're not coming down for dinner?"

"I told them they couldn't come down again—ever."

Nate's silence behind me was my cue. All I could think about was those unsightly keys on his beloved piano.

And the crumbs of ivory he'd see if he looked in the wastebasket beneath the sink.

"Mom?" Keith's voice was tentative—behind me on the stairs.

"I told you to stay in your room."

"I know, but is Dad home?"

"Yes, son." Nate moved to the bottom of the steps. "But if your mother said you have to stay in your room, then I suggest you get your butt back up there immediately."

I heard Keith turn on the stairs. And then stop.

"Mom? Can I tel Dad, please? I was the one who did it and I should be the one who he gets mad at."