Coming Home to Greenleigh

Chapter 4

He had been tempted to accept Ricky Junior's invitation and join them for lunch. Shawn sat in his office, glumly evaluating a soggy tuna sandwich. He had been entirely too tempted. But who was he kidding. He could not put aside his past with Beth, not even for an hour. Not when watching her pretend that there was nothing between them caused his chest to constrict with pain.

He knew she needed money. He had hesitated over that five-thousand dollar check, knowing full well that it represented a bigger commitment to her than he had any right to give. As managing partner, he really ought to have cast a wary eye toward any young attorney desperate enough to take a job as a legal researcher. But he couldn't get the sight of her thin little body out of his mind, hovering in a cloud of flowery cotton print, and the fine, weary lines around her eyes. And in the end he had written the check, thinking that it was at least a partial apology for the nasty comment he had made about her mother.

Her mother was dead, she had said. When had that happened? He allowed his mind to wander back in time, back to the summer before he'd left. Her mother had been ill, off and on. He'd hardly seen her, in fact. But he had never supposed that she was really all that sick. After all, she had seemed to devote an enormous amount of energy nagging away at Beth. Beth was always running around, trying to anticipate her every need, and that woman hardly had a kind word for her, he mused. Wouldn't even let her finish her bachelor's degree, for God's sake. A waste of time, she had said more than once. Implying, of course, that Beth herself was rather a waste of time.

Shawn found himself getting angry. Abruptly, he tossed the sandwich into the trash can and got up to pace about the room. He had always felt that Paula Burnham would not be content with less than ruining her daughter's life, just as she had felt her own life was ruined by her marriage to a pleasant but unfocused man who would never make anything of himself.

"It's just as well she's dead," he said aloud, then immediately was assailed with guilt. Beth had loved her mother devotedly. Her death must have devastated her.

And of course, I wasn't there for her, he reminded himself. He gave an abrupt laugh, almost a snort. I wasn't there. I didn't even know.

He paced restlessly, his anger getting the better of him as he considered the injustice done him. He should have known, he thought, scowling. She should have written to tell him. He would have flown back to be with her, to have helped her with the funeral, to have sorted out the inevitable messes that death brings. She could have cried in his arms. Maybe this eight year estrangement would have been restricted to just that one year. Maybe she would have joined him in New York after all, and they'd have been married by now. She'd have mothered his children.

All the what-ifs whirled through his brain as he mentally accused her of cruelty, stubbornness, stupidity, and a host of other crimes. Why hadn't she told him?

And then of course, his lawyer's brain said sensibly, why hadn't he spoken to her? It would have been just as easy for him to have called, or indeed to have stopped by. He even could have sought out a mutual friend or two in order to ask after her. He'd had plenty of opportunity. It wasn't as if he had turned his back on Greenleigh completely during that time.

But I couldn't, he protested to himself. How could I, when she's the one who left me standing around waiting? I'm not the one who changed my mind about getting married. Oh, no. I'm just the one who sat up all night in the high school parking lot. I'm just the idiot who couldn't believe that she would really stand me up, after all those promises to each other. How could I be the one to break the ice? When I had nothing to do with putting it there to begin with?

"I'm going insane," Shawn said out loud. He had stopped pacing, and was staring blankly at the wall. He sank down on the sofa and put his head in his hands. His head hurt, objecting to the stresses and strains of thinking about subjects left untouched for too long, as if he were trying to do calculus when he hadn't done algebra in ages. He needed to understand what had happened. He needed to make sense out of the people they had been, and how they had arrived at the people they were now. Eight years spent shoving his feelings away had obviously not amounted to any kind of success at healing his wounded heart. He needed to work through his pain, or he would not be able to survive a new start in Greenleigh.