found turtle tracks!”
Gauging by the panic in the voice, Cara figured the woman was one of her mother’s novice volunteers for the island’s Turtle Team. “Uh, great,” she replied. “Thanks. I’ll tell her when she comes back.”
“Wait! Don’t you want to know where they are? I’m at the 6th Avenue beach access. What should I do? Should I wait here?”
Cara sighed and woke up a little more. “Really, I don’t have the foggiest idea what to tell you to do and without coffee I couldn’t even venture a guess.”
From out on the porch she heard the footfall of someone trudging up the steps. Thanks heavens, the cavalry, she thought.
“Hold on,” she told the woman on the phone. “I think that must be her now.” Cara stretched the cord of the ancient black phone to peek around the corner. The front door swung open. Instead of her mother, however, she saw a young woman enter the house free-as-you-please. Her shaggy, blond hair cascaded over her eyes as she bent down, struggling with several plastic grocery bags. With a muffled grunt, she kicked the door shut with her heel.
The young woman was hardly threatening in appearance. Pregnant women usually weren’t. She wore a pastel, A-line floral dress that was very short and cheaply made of thin rayon that lifted higher in the front where the fabric strained against her belly. When the woman raised her head she shook her hair back and their eyes met.
Cara ducked her head back behind the corner, tugging down her T-shirt. In contrast, the woman didn’t seem the least astonished to find Cara in the house. Cara leaned against the hall wall listening as the mystery woman moved on into the kitchen without so much as a hello, opening and closing cabinets as though she owned the place.
“Excuse me,” Cara called out with authority. “But who are you?”
“Didn’t your mama tell you about me?” she called back. Her voice carried the drawl of a rural southern accent.
It flashed through Cara’s mind that she’d fallen asleep without a meal or so much as a good-night to her mother. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about schedules or visitors or a girl who might stop by in the morning. Cara assumed she was either a neighbor or someone hired to help with the shopping.
From the phone, a strident voice rose up. “Hello? Hello? Is anyone there?”
Cara called out to the woman in the kitchen. “I’ve got a frantic phone call here about a turtle. Do you know where my mother is?”
“I’ll take it.”
The voice drew nearer and in a moment the face was looming before her. Cara saw that it wasn’t a woman’s face at all, but a teenager’s. The girl had a sexy, baby-doll kind of face, all rounding cheeks and full, pouty lips. Her youth surprised Cara and her gaze dropped to the belly. Instantly the girl’s hand moved to rest on the rounding curve. Looking up again, Cara saw the girl’s pale-gray eyes turn icy. Lined as they were by dark kohl, the challenge she read in them gave her a hardened, tough-girl appearance that set Cara immediately on edge. With a slightly raised brow that was dangerously close to a smirk, the girl returned a cool glance at Cara’s outfit. For a second, no one spoke as they sized up one another.
The voice of the caller rose up between them. “Hello? Hello?”
The girl reached out her hand, palm up, and wiggled her fingers.
Cara narrowed her eyes and handed over the phone. The girl deliberately turned her back to Cara in a snub and began speaking to the woman on the phone, confirming the address and giving instructions with the confidence of someone who had done this many times before.
Why, the little punk, Cara thought to herself, affronted. Then fatigue got the best of her. “Whatever,” she muttered, turning and heading back down the hall. At least the girl, whoever she was, knew what to do with the pesty phone call. En route she noticed that the door to her brother’s old room was open. Peeking in, she caught a glimpse of the rumpled unmade bed and on top of it, a pink, frilly nightgown.
Cara’s heart fell as the mystery was solved. The girl was a houseguest, she realized. So much for plans of a private mother-child reunion. The cottage was barely large enough for the two of them, but with three, it would be crowded. There would be no escaping the recalcitrant teen-mother who appeared equally thrilled to see her. If she’d known there’d be guests…
Grabbing her pillow from the floor where it had landed, she tossed it back onto the bed, then slumped against the pillows. What was she expecting, anyway? Her mother had always put others in front of her—her brother, her father and the guests who always seemed to fill the Charleston house.
But the beach house had always been different. She’d hoped that here…
Cara’s mouth pinched and she thought herself a fool. She’d learned long before her teens to take care of herself and not to expect anything. In the piercing morning light her room no longer appeared as charming. The colors in her old quilt were sun-bleached and the paint had yellowed on the walls. Although a gentle breeze still fluttered the thread-bare curtains, without air-conditioning, the humidity would be brutal by midday. Cara began to regret her hasty decision to return home.
The beginning of a headache from too many days of stress and too little sleep nagged. Lying back, she punched her pillow a few times, then relinquished her troubled thoughts to a deep, brooding sleep.
Toy Sooner stood at the kitchen sink rinsing out the coffeepot, tapping her foot in agitation. She carefully spooned out six tablespoons of coffee grinds into the filter, then pushed the start button. She knew Lovie enjoyed a fresh cup of coffee when she returned from her turtle watch. Toy had gone to the Red and White to purchase a box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. There wasn’t much she could afford to do to show Miss Lovie how grateful she was, and Lovie had said a hundred times or more that she didn’t expect any thanks. Things like that just made Toy want to thank her all the more.
Toy wasn’t used to people giving her something without expecting something in return. To live here with Miss Lovie was like a dream come true. This was the nicest place she’d ever lived and she had a room all her own, too. Best of all, there wasn’t any fighting or hollering at her all the time. She didn’t know before living with Miss Lovie that mealtime could be so nice, with a clean tablecloth and napkins and a knife, fork and a spoon—for every meal!
And they had meals regularly. Not an open can of soup in front of the TV or McDonald’s out of the bag, but real dinners with vegetables. Lovie talked to her, too, like she was someone worth talking to and listening to. Not just some worthless, ungrateful kid who was dumb enough to get her self pregnant, like her parents said. They’d stood at the door of the trailer and wouldn’t even let her in when she tried to come back home. “If you was grown up enough to up and move in with Darryl then you’re grown up enough to take care of his kid,” is what they told her. Now what kind of parents is that? They wouldn’t even help when she told them about Darryl hitting her. “You made your bed, now go lie in it.” That’s all they had to say. That and how she ought to go to church, too, and pray hard for the Lord’s forgiveness for being such a sinner.
But Lovie told her again and again that love was never a sin. Not loving, now that was the very worst kind of sin, she said. Miss Lovie was the saintliest person Toy had ever met, and if she said so, then Toy believed it. She always had a way of making Toy feel better about herself instead of making her feel like nothing…worse than nothing. Something to be discarded, which is what her own mother made her feel like.
That’s why it made her so mad to think that Miss Lovie’s own daughter didn’t appreciate how lucky she was to have someone like her for a mother. Just let Cara spend a day with my mother and see how she feels, Toy thought with resentment.
From the moment she heard that Caretta Rutledge was coming home, Toy knew it would be bad news for her. First of all, she heard from Miss Lovie that Cara was some big shot ad executive in Chicago. That figured. Toy knew the