no age, young man.” Opal raised her coffee and sipped, watching him with hawk eyes. After a few uncomfortable seconds, she went on. “When she knew the end was coming, she brought him to me, her only living relative. I love the child as I loved his mama. I want what’s best for him.”
Eli breathed a sigh of relief. She loved the boy. She’d take good care of him. “I’ll send money when I can.”
“Money?” Her tone sharpened.
“Child support.”
She tilted closer until he thought she’d tumble from her chair. “Child support?”
Was the woman hard of hearing? “I’m…not working much yet—” A painful admission though he’d long ago lost his pride. “When I do, I’ll send all I can.”
“I’m not asking for your money, Eli Donovan.”
“Isn’t that why you wanted to see me? Child support?”
With a shove of her cane, Opal pushed to a stand and tottered toward him, a dangerous expression on her wrinkled face. “Look at me. I’m eighty-four years old. I have congestive heart failure and diabetes. I can barely toddle around with this stupid cane.”
Dread started at the bottom of Eli’s feet and worked up through his chest and into his brain. Like a wild stallion, his flight instinct kicked in. He knew what was coming. Knew and couldn’t stop her.
“Mindy wanted you to take the boy. You’re his father.” Opal stuck a bony finger in his face. “She expected you to raise him.”
Eli bolted from the chair. “Are you nuts? Do you know where I’ve been all of his life?”
She pointed the cane at his chest. “You’re out now. And you have a son to care for.”
“I don’t belong around kids. I’m not even sure it’s legal.”
“Don’t be stupid. He’s your blood.”
“You don’t understand. I can’t take care of a child.”
A flash of Jessica’s face, bloated and white, floated through his head. Floated the way she had, facedown in the water, while he’d rocked to Michael Jackson through his Sony Walkman headphones.
“I don’t have a home or a steady job and no one wants to hire an ex-con. I’m at the beck and call of a parole officer who doesn’t like me much.” He rammed splayed fingers through his hair, panicked. “I can’t even take a leak without checking in first!”
“Stop raising your voice in my house. Do you want him to hear?”
His heart pounded as if he’d been the one under water too long. “Look, Opal, let’s be reasonable. What you’re asking is impossible. You don’t know me. I’m an ex-con. I am not father material. I wouldn’t know what to do with a kid.”
“Do you think any parent knows anything when their child is born? You’ll learn like everybody else.”
“Impossible.” He couldn’t take responsibility for anyone, especially a child. Dear God, she didn’t know what she was asking!
“Do you know what will become of the boy when I die?”
He shook his head. “Another relative, I suppose.”
“You got family that will take him? Love him?”
The ball of ice in Eli’s chest became an iceberg. “No.”
“All right, then. You’re his only other relative. He’ll go into foster care, into the system.” She spit the last word like profanity.
“Anywhere is better than with me. There are plenty of good foster parents who care for kids.”
“Mindy never wanted that for her baby.”
“I’m sorry, Opal. I can’t do this.” He stalked to the door, torn asunder but certain he was not a fit man to father a child. Ever. “I’ll send money as soon as I can.”
“Mindy defended you. She said you were a good man.” Opal’s thin lips curled. “She was wrong.”
“Yes. She was.” Tormented by the truth, Eli stormed out of the house, across the overgrown yard and into the safe confines of his car. Breathless, his chest aching, he cranked the Dodge, and was out on the streets of Honey Ridge in seconds.
At the corner, Eli stopped at the stop sign and leaned his head on the steering wheel. He was shaking worse than he had on his first day in prison.
He was the worst possible parent for a little boy, a man who had nothing to offer, a man with no future and an ugly past.
Responsibility tightened around his neck like a noose. He had a son. A son who needed him.
And he didn’t even know his name.
Peach Orchard Farm
1864
“Lizzy, help me.” The stench of blood and gunpowder strong in her nostrils, Charlotte called to her maid above the unholy clamor echoing through the farmhouse.
The groans and cries of distressed men tore at her compassion and frightened the children into hiding, a mercy, Charlotte thought, to spare them this horror.
Chaos reigned over Peach Orchard Farm while Captain Gadsden shouted orders and men dragged themselves and each other into her house.
With the wounded sprawled on the bare floors of her parlor and dining room, Charlotte pulled sheets from storage and ripped them into long strips. She’d been dismayed at the lack of medical supplies carried by a warring army. Indeed, the bulk of bandages and medicine came from the Portlands’ belongings, not the military.
Lizzy, her dark, deft fingers quick and strong, took up a sheet. “You tend that one. I’ll make the bandages.”
Grateful for her maid’s able assistance, Charlotte poured a basin half-full of water Cook had heated on the stove and knelt beside one of the many men lying on the dining room floor. He wasn’t the first she’d tended during the long wait to see the single, harried surgeon.
“What’s your name?” she said, as she slid scissors under his fragmented shirtsleeve.
Through gritted teeth, the man managed, “Joshua Bates. Will I die?”
Charlotte’s hand paused as she gazed down at the ghastly wound laying bare the bone. The wound alone wouldn’t kill him, but infection was the enemy, as she well knew from her mother’s missions of mercy in the slums of London.
“Only a flesh wound.” At the masculine voice, Charlotte gazed up at Captain Gadsden as he dropped to one knee beside his fallen soldier. They exchanged looks and she saw that he no more believed his words than she did. He placed a hand across the man’s sweaty brow. “You fought bravely today, Private.”
Bates, his face as bleached as new muslin, hissed when Charlotte carefully dabbed at the jagged flesh. A river of blood flowed out. “Would you give him a drink of whiskey, please?”
The captain didn’t hesitate. He held the other man’s head and slowly poured in the numbing liquor while she pressed a bandage into the bullet hole and wrapped a strip of sheet round and round the arm, tying it off with a knot.
“That should stop the bleeding.” She prayed it would, for prayer was the only other help she could give him.
“Have you nursing experience, ma’am?” the captain asked, recapping the bottle of whiskey. Edgar would not be pleased at the loss of his liquor cabinet, the medicine he took for his crippled foot and other ailments.
“My mother cared for the sick. She taught me.” Though nothing of this grisly nature.
Satisfied