“No, but from what his cousins say, they’re pretty damn supportive of their only boy. According to LeAnn and her brother, Todd, he never had to work a day to put himself through school.”
“His parents cut him off a few months after we reached San Francisco.”
“Why would they do that after paying his way until then?”
She turned her attention to the remote and muted the television, but he got the impression it was just to give herself something to do so she wouldn’t have to look at him. “They had…reason.”
“Are you going to tell me what that reason is?”
She dropped the remote into her lap. “I’d rather not talk about it.”
“I’d like to know.”
“Fine.” A touch of belligerence entered her voice. “They came to visit us in San Francisco and were pretty disappointed by what they saw, okay? At that stage, Andy was hardly someone to be proud of.”
He raised his eyebrows in place of demanding an explanation, but she got the point. Groaning, she rested her forehead on her knees. “Andy rarely bothered to come home. When he did, he was usually wasted.”
“You mean drunk?”
“High, although he drank, too. He got involved in the party scene almost the first week we lived there.”
Booker didn’t feel he could say much about Andy’s partying. There’d been a rough patch in his own life when he’d deadened the pain with whatever he could beg, borrow, buy or find. And he’d acted out in other ways, too, and paid a heavy price. Only now, years later, was he glad his actions had caught up with him. Prison had changed him. Forced him to realize that his behavior was more self-destructive than anything else. Taught him to appreciate the simple things in life. He wasn’t proud of his past, but he’d finally come to terms with who and what he was.
“By the time his parents left, his mother was crying,” Katie went on. “And Andy’s father told him not to bother calling with any more sob stories about being laid off or losing his last paycheck. He said they weren’t going to send him any more money and, as far as I know, Andy hasn’t heard from them since. I’m guessing he’ll contact them now, though. I’m not sure he can survive without me there to pay the rent.”
“So his folks don’t know about the baby?”
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to tell them?”
“I don’t know. Andy wanted me to have an abortion. Right now, I feel the baby’s pretty much exclusively mine.”
Wonderful. Katie’s life was the complete mess he’d been hoping for since she’d rejected him, yet Booker couldn’t feel good about it.
He got slowly out of the recliner. “Don’t worry about paying for the car. You need some way to get around.”
“Booker, I can’t accept—”
“We can settle up whenever you have the money,” he said brusquely and started to leave before he could ask the one question that burned in his mind. But he only got as far as the door. Then he stopped, turned, and asked it anyway. “You love this guy?”
Katie twisted a lock of hair around one finger as she stared at him. He could see a shine in her eyes and thought maybe they were filling with tears, but the room was too dark to tell for sure. “I don’t think I even know what love is,” she said softly.
THE SMELL OF freshly baked doughnuts enveloped Booker the moment he entered Don and Tami’s Bakery the following morning at six o’clock. The bell went off over the door, but Don barely glanced up before going right back to what he was doing—transferring fresh apple fritters, glazed doughnuts and maple bars from rolling metal trays to the display case.
“I need to talk to you,” Booker said.
“We don’t have anything to say to each other,” Katie’s father responded.
Booker knew Don didn’t like him. Don was one of the locals who still took his car to a neighboring town or to Boise for service and repair. But Booker wasn’t asking for his business. He just wanted Don to take Katie off his hands and to see that she was safe and well cared for. “I think we do,” he said. “Katie’s staying out at my place.”
Don shifted to the bottom shelf and start lining up custard and jelly-filled doughnuts. “That’s what I hear.”
“She’s pregnant.”
Don craned his head around, as if he expected Tami to come out of the back room where they did their baking, but no one appeared. “I’m afraid that’s her problem. We tried to tell her what she was in for with Andy, but she wouldn’t listen. He lived here in Dundee, off those cousins of his, for months and never got a job. What does that say about him?”
Booker didn’t want to get into an argument over Andy. “You’re her parents,” he said. He knew from experience that parents didn’t always care. But from what he’d seen in the past, Don and Tami Rogers were certainly more supportive than his own parents had been.
“She’s of age.” Don finally stopped long enough to catch and hold Booker’s gaze. Eyes narrowing, mouth tightening, he added, “So don’t come in here thinking you can criticize us. She probably wouldn’t have made the mistakes she made if she hadn’t gotten involved with you first.”
Booker felt the old anger—the dark kind of anger he hadn’t felt for years—coil inside him. He’d loved Katie. That should have redeemed him somehow. But because of his reputation, it didn’t seem to matter. Even though his reputation didn’t have a damn thing to do with any of this. “Don’t you care what happens to her?” he demanded.
“We love her enough to let her feel the natural consequences of her actions.” Don wiped powdered sugar from his hands onto a towel. “How will she ever learn if we’re always there to rescue her?”
“There’s a baby involved,” Booker said. “The baby hasn’t done anything wrong.”
Tami poked her head out from the back. “I’ve been reading some of those parenting books that are so popular these days,” she said, “and they all say you’ve got to have tough love.”
“What’s tough love? Telling someone you care about, ‘tough luck’?” he asked.
“I’m sure Rebecca will hire her back at Hair and Now,” Don said. “Katie will pull herself up by her bootstraps eventually.”
“And when she does, she’ll thank us.” Tami nodded self-righteously. “She’ll gain perspective and confidence from working through her own problems.”
The only catch was that Katie couldn’t work. Obviously they didn’t know that. Booker considered breaking the news to them. He wanted to see their faces when they realized they were expecting the impossible. But something inside him rebelled. The only reason they didn’t know about the difficulty with Katie’s pregnancy was that they’d treated her so poorly. They hadn’t even bothered to ask how she was doing. In his view, they didn’t deserve contact with her or the baby.
“Forget it. She’ll be better off without the two of you,” he said and walked out.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE PHONE RANG, finally waking Katie at eleven o’clock. She’d actually opened her eyes earlier, when she heard Booker and Delbert leave for work, but she hadn’t been able to drag herself out of bed. She didn’t have anything to get out of bed for. No job opportunities. No one to see. She didn’t even know if Booker and Delbert would be home for dinner, or if she’d spend the entire day alone.
She remembered that Mona had offered to give her a manicure….