Child of Their Vows

“Dear God, Max,” she said in a broken whisper. “What have you done to us?”

He was silent.

“Did you know before you got the letter you had a child?”

“Yes. Although until yesterday I didn’t know he was a boy.”

“And that made the difference. That’s why you’re telling me now,” she said, struggling to understand.

“No. It’s the letter.”

Her stomach heaved; she gripped herself tighter. “All these years you knew you had a child and you never told me.”

“I wanted to put it all behind me.”

Suddenly she was furious. She sprang to her feet on the rock. “What gives you the right to put a child behind you? To walk away and forget it ever existed?”

“Do you think that was easy for me?” he cried. “Do you think I haven’t wondered and worried all these years whether or not he or she was growing up happy and healthy?”

“How would I know?” she shouted. “You didn’t tell me!”

Her voice echoed off the cliff face, startling her into awareness of their surroundings. She took a deep breath, then another. “Okay, let’s calm down.” She sat again, forcing herself to ignore the pain that was eating away at her like acid. “You’d better start at the beginning and explain.”

Max told her the whole story. The dude ranch, Lanni pursuing him, the pregnancy, the subsequent meetings between both sets of parents. Kelly noticed he glossed over the part where he’d capitulated to Lanni’s advances. Fine, she sure didn’t want to hear about that, although it had always been her experience that it took two to tango.

“Lanni’s family were strong Catholics. They wouldn’t hear of abortion,” Max went on. “My parents gave her money to pay for medical expenses and kept in touch with her parents throughout the pregnancy. The baby was put up for adoption and…” He gazed at his hands, twisted together. “That was the last I’d heard of the child. Like I said, until yesterday I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”

At the ache in his voice part of her, amazingly, wanted to comfort him for the years of loss. He was a loving and responsible father and she knew he must feel guilt and regret.

An instant later, her heart hardened. Had he considered her feelings when he’d slipped away from the bunkhouse at midnight for a rendezvous with Lanni?

A chilly raindrop hit her cheek and she glanced up to see the sun had completely disappeared behind the gray clouds massing around the mountain peaks. “It’s starting to rain. We’d better head back.”

The rain came on with sudden violence, in driving sheets that turned the dirt trail to mud and the bushes and trees to dripping greenery that slid from their grasp as they pulled themselves up the slippery track. By the time they’d arrived back at the lodge, they were soaked through and cloaked in mud from the knees down.

In their room Kelly began to haphazardly pile sweaters and underwear into her suitcase, not even bothering to change out of her wet clothes.

“What are you doing?” Max demanded, toweling his head. His pale hair had turned dark with rain and now stuck out in spikes. “We’re booked for another night.”

“I can’t sleep in this bed with you.” She tossed in her cosmetics case with an angry jerk of her wrist. “Not with your affair making a mockery of last night and of every night of our marriage. I want to be with my children.”

“Kelly, for God’s sake.” He threw down the towel and tried to take her in his arms. “Don’t do this.”

Shrugging him off, she snapped the locks shut on her suitcase and faced him, chin in the air. “I want to go home.”

On the drive back to Hainesville, Kelly couldn’t look at Max. In her mind, she replayed endlessly that summer they were apart. How could she not have known he was up to no good? How could she not have gleaned from his infrequent phone calls and hesitant assurances of affection that he had someone else on a string? At the time she’d put his awkwardness down to the difficulty of communicating on the public telephone in the lodge. God, but she’d been naive.

Max slid his hand onto her knee and squeezed tentatively. “Talk to me, Kelly.”

“I have nothing to say.” Her voice was as dead as love gone wrong.

“Come on, you must. What are you feeling?”

“What am I feeling?” She twisted in her seat to face him. “Now you want to talk. Suddenly you’re interested in feelings. Well, listen up. I’m hurting, Max. I never imagined I could hurt this badly. And I’m angry. I’m so furious I could kill you. While I was sewing my wedding dress, you were sleeping with another woman. While I was counting the days until we could start a family, you were making a baby without me. While I poured out my heart in long loving letters, you were already lying to me. Our whole marriage is a lie.”

“Kelly, you know that’s not true.”

Scalding tears heated her already flushed cheeks. “You led me to believe I was your first, just as you were my first. And only. How many other women have you had that you haven’t told me about?”

“None.”

“How can I believe you?”

He didn’t answer. Finally, in a low voice, he said, “I guess you can’t. You have to trust me.”

With a snort, she threw up her hands. “Trust? What’s that?”

“Except for that one time, I’ve never lied to you or cheated on you.”

Kelly rubbed her hands over her face, suddenly exhausted, as though her anger had drained all the energy out of her. “I know. Or do I? That’s the problem. I’ll never know for sure.”

Silenced, Max drove on through the rain and the dark. Once or twice she glanced sideways, to see his hands gripping the wheel and his jaw set. He was thinking about Randall. She couldn’t stop thinking about the boy, either.

She didn’t want to talk, but she had to.

Her fury had dissipated, leaving behind an icy calmness that frightened her almost as much. “I can’t believe you fathered a baby and didn’t tell me.”

He took his gaze off the road. “I was eighteen. I was stupid. And too much in love with you to risk losing you by confessing the truth.”

“And now you’re not.”

The blaring horn of a passing semitrailer snapped his attention back to the wet highway. “Not what?”

“In love with me,” she said, exasperated by his inability to grasp the logic. “Now you can tell the truth because you don’t love me anymore and don’t care if you lose me.”

“For God’s sake, Kelly. That’s not true. It’s only come up because the boy contacted me.”

He had a son, not by her. Calmness deserted her as hysteria clawed at her throat. “The boy, the boy. He’s the boy you always wanted.”

“You know I love the girls more than anything. Randall isn’t going to change that.”

“You’re already saying his name as if you know him. What does he want, anyway?”

Max shrugged. “Just to see me. He’s curious about his biological parents. And no, I don’t know if he’s contacted Lanni.”

“Do…do you want to meet him?”

“Yes. Would that bother you?”