For Baby's Sake. Janice Maynard

home together. My job was to give them a snack, make sure they did their homework and sometimes start a portion of the dinner meal before the parents rolled in at five thirty.”

      “That sounds like a lot for a—what were you? A fifteen-year-old?”

      “Yes. But I had been doing it almost four months. The children respected my authority. The parents were thrilled with how smoothly their evenings went after I had been there. I was making good money and socking it away for college.”

      “Has anybody ever told you your storytelling skills are a downer?” His anticipation of what was coming was accompanied by a rueful grimace.

      “You asked for this.” It wasn’t as if she enjoyed rehashing some of the worst days of her life. “It was getting close to the holidays. The cat got under the Christmas tree and chewed on an electrical cord that was already frayed. The tree skirt caught on fire, but only smoldered at first. Then at some point, the drapes were involved, and after that, the room was engulfed in flames.”

      “What about smoke alarms?”

      “Dead batteries,” she said soberly. “It was a perfect storm of bad decisions by the parents...critical things they had overlooked. I was in the back of the house in the den watching TV with the children. When I smelled smoke and tried to get them out of the house, the rear hallway was on fire. Our only escape was through the front door. I had to put wet towels over the kids’ heads and hustle them past the flames and out into the yard.”

      “My God, Lila. That’s horrific. Were you hurt?”

      “They treated all four of us for mild smoke inhalation. By the time the fire engines arrived, most of the house was engulfed. It wasn’t a total loss, but the family had to live in a motel for three months.”

      She finished her tale and ran out of steam, sitting down abruptly. Even now, years later, retelling the story made her queasy.

      James stared at her, his eyes narrowed as if trying to see inside her head. “Is that it?”

Seven

      “Isn’t that enough?”

      James heard the snap in her voice. Maybe he had been trying to get a rise out of her. He wasn’t sure why. But if she was still dealing with guilt about things that had happened a decade and a half ago, she needed to let all of it go.

      “I’m not sure what any of that has to do with you and Sybbie.”

      Lila tucked her hair behind her ears. At one time, she’d threatened to cut it. He’d made her swear not to. It wasn’t likely that a woman felt bound by a three-year-old promise. Even so, the beautiful blond hair was still long. When she dressed for work at the bank, she wound it up in a complicated chignon that always made him hot.

      Lila gave him a look of frustration. “I’m not good in a crisis,” she said. “It terrifies me to think of everything that can go wrong when you have little ones to take care of, and that’s not even taking into account disease and illness. The accident possibilities alone scare me to death. Especially because I’ve never cared for a baby. If the experiences I had with other people’s children shook me so badly, I don’t even want to know how I would react if the kid were mine.”