“No. I don’t think so. I think you are I are going to take a ride together and return this to your father.”
“The hell we will,” she said, forgetting her earlier resolve. “The hell you say, Anton Love. That is my damn inheritance, not a charity check for another of your projects.”
He glanced at the paper in question again, then held it between his fingers and ripped it into two pieces, then four, then eight, then more. He tossed them into the air. Some landed on the table. Still more landed on his hair and, she assumed, hers.
“I don’t take money from the Halloran family, Lindsay. End of discussion.” He turned, stomped into the house, up the steps and out the door, slamming it so hard she heard it all the way out where she still stood, in the baking heat, in the middle of a tiny paper snowstorm.
Chapter Fourteen
Her brothers kept her fully apprised of their father’s condition as he slipped even deeper into the bottle after his wife’s death. After a few attempts to get him to stop or at least slow down the boozing, and receiving near-violent rebukes, they’d stopped trying.
He’d given up, they claimed. He wanted nothing more than to pass out drunk one night and never wake up. On December 23rd of that year, he got his wish.
Arranging a funeral for a man with such far-reaching connections in the horse world, and at Christmas, and while nearly eight months pregnant, was a trial. Doing it without any help from Anton was even more so.
But after his temper tantrum and the ripped up check, Lindsay had not let him in the house. It had taken about three days of yelling, pounding on doors, intervention from his mother and brothers for them to get her message: Anton was no longer welcome in her house, near her boys or in her life.
The months between that dramatic weekend and what had once been her favorite holiday were full of long, sleepless nights, coupled with vast stretches of days she stumbled through in a haze of exhaustion.
After about a week, both Antony and Kieran were asking for their dad. By the end of the third week without him, they were all thoroughly sick of one another.
But Lindsay was resolute. No amount of begging, pleading, or even several visits from the new priest from their church would move her.
She surrounded herself with friends. Young mothers she’d helped out, and her brothers—and in the case of JR, his fiancée—all provided support. But at the end of every day, she looked at her sons in their high chairs, and honestly believed she was doing the correct thing. Even if it meant, by then, missing Anton so much it was a physical pain in her chest.
Various epiphanies during long, lonely nights forced her to admit to herself that she’d only married Anton out of pure spite. That she’d not had sex with him that first time out of any real emotion—merely a deep, unmet, selfish, physical need. It took her self-enforced separation to realize that she relied on him, she required him … that she did, now, in fact, love him.
But it was too late for that revelation.
She would not be spoken to or treated as he had done. She was a partner in this business of their marriage. She had a say in the overall health of it, and that included the financial side.
All it took was for her to close her eyes and remember that scene on the lower patio—the tiny drifts of paper and the oppressive heat … the raw fury on his face when he told her she “had to” return it … and her memory of all the sacrifices she had willingly made in order to have a life as Mrs. Anton Love—and she would gird herself for the next twenty-four hour period of single motherhood.
She had her checkbook from their account, and would visit the bank every other day or so to ensure there was money for the bills she had to pay, the groceries she needed, mainly to feed the boys. Her appetite had more or less disappeared the split second she made the decision to keep Anton at arm’s length, much to the dismay of her doctor, who reminded her every month that she had a responsibility to the child in her womb.
The bank tellers were always polite, even when imparting the bad news that there were only a few dollars left until Mister Love could make another deposit. Many of them knew her from church.
In the small town she now inhabited, pretty much every living soul knew about her, her wealthy, horsey background, her stable-hand husband, and their struggle to make a brewery profitable. She hated that. The stares in the grocery. The whispers on the street. She blamed Anton for every damn one of them.
She felt nothing for the child. If anything, she resented the hell out of him—her—or “it” as she would say under her breath when “it” would make itself known via fluttery kicks, rolls and other annoyances. Her basketball-sized belly swelled out from her hips, stretching her skin so thin she could trace the pattern of veins under it when she sat and studied it late into yet another sleepless night.
She’d taken to dragging the boys out to the rented stable where she kept a much more patient Zelda and the “new” Daisy her brothers had bought for her. They also paid for the boarding and upkeep of both animals, thank heaven. She’d never be able to manage it or enjoy what she considered the ultimate luxury—the company of her horses—otherwise.
When she was still able to ride, she would put one or the other of her sons in the saddle in front of her and wrap her hands around his small ones while he held the reins. Antony took to it like a duck to water, asking daily about another Zelda ride. Kieran was less inclined, but after a couple of calm sessions cantering about the small paddock, had at least stopped screaming in fear at the sight of the barns.
Kieran stopped asking for his Daddy well before Antony gave up on it. The first day that happened, Lindsay had cried for hours after putting them to bed.
And now she had another funeral to plan. She and her brothers spent as little time as possible on the decision-making about the service and large reception. And when she arrived for the funeral at the large Methodist church where she’d married Anton, it had made her cry even harder. Recalling herself, giddy with the thrill of pissing off her parents, fairly zinging from head to toe with a constant, low-level horniness, and eager to get her husband alone, she’d spent that day flushed with success.
Now it represented her failure at everything. She gripped her boys’ hands, and they ascended the long flight of steps to the door. They were both somber, thanks to her lecture that morning about best behavior. They’d reached a shaky detente after being together non-stop, more or less twenty-four/seven, for six solid months. Antony had calmed considerably, as if worried he’d upset her. He had done that very thing enough times to scare him. Kieran was sweet and easy-going as always, less inclined to dramatic reactions to his brother’s random bouts of bullying, which had a welcome calming affect on Antony.
Her head had been pounding for three days straight. She’d tried to eat some of the food people brought by once word got out about her father’s passing. But every bite she put in her mouth gave her heartburn, so she’d been living on protein drinks, interspersed with the occasional banana and cup of coffee, the two things she did crave.
The baby felt like a bowling ball hanging off her front, heavy as lead, and constantly throwing her off balance. It had been kicking up a storm for the past two days, but thankfully had gone quiet this morning. The whoosh-whooshing sound she kept hearing, the echo of her own heartbeat, got louder, almost drowning out the words coming at her out of the mouths of the people gathered to honor her father.
She wiped shaking fingers across her dry, cracked lips, letting go of Kieran, since he could be trusted not to run off. Antony pulled at her once he caught sight of his uncles, so she released him with a sigh of relief. Surveying the huge sanctuary, stuffed full of horse cronies, church friends, golf and card-playing families, she got a scary rush of déjà vu from the service for her mother that she’d also attended without Anton, at her insistence.