Sugar Daddy (Travis Family #1)(46)

My sister was diagnosed with croup, and they brought out a plastic mask attached to a nebulizer machine that pumped out medicine in a gray-white mist. Frightened by the noise the machine made, not to mention the mask, Carrington shrank into my lap and cried pitifully. No matter how I reassured her that it wouldn't hurt, it would make her better, she refused until her body spasmed with coughing.

"Can I put it on?" I asked the RN desperately. "Just to show her it's okay? Please?"

He shook his head and looked at me as if I were crazy.

I turned my wailing sister around in my lap so we were face-to-face. "Carrington, listen to me. Carrington. It's just like a game. We'll pretend you're an astronaut. Let me put the mask on you for just a minute. You're an astronaut—what planet do you want to visit?"

"Planet H-h-home," she sobbed.

After another few minutes of her crying and my insisting, we played Carrington-the-space-explorer until the RN was satisfied that she had inhaled enough of the Vaponefrin.

I carried my sister back out to the car in the cold dark of midnight. By then she had exhausted herself and was sleep-heavy. Her head dropped on my shoulder and her legs wrapped around my midriff. I relished the solid, vulnerable heft of her in my arms.

As Carrington slept in her car seat, I cried all the way home, feeling inadequate, anguished, filled with love and relief and worry.

Feeling like a parent.

As time passed, Miss Marva and Mr. Ferguson's relationship acquired the knotty tenderness of two independent people who had no reason to fall in love but did anyway. They were a good match, Miss Marva's peppery nature balanced by Mr. Ferguson's stubborn tranquility.

Miss Marva proclaimed to anyone who would listen that she had no intention of getting married. No one believed her. I think what finally did Marva in was that despite his comfortable financial situation. Arthur Ferguson was clearly a man who needed taking care of. He had missing buttons on his shirt cuffs. He sometimes skipped meals because he simply forgot to eat. His socks weren't always matched. Some men just thrive on a little nagging, and Miss Marva came to acknowledge that she probably needed someone to nag.

So after they had been dating for about eight months, Miss Marva fixed Arthur

Ferguson his favorite meal, beer pot roast and green beans and a big skillet of cornbread. And red velvet cake for dessert, after which, naturally, he proposed.

Miss Marva told me the news sheepishly, and claimed Arthur must have tricked her somehow, because there was no reason a woman with her own business should get married. But I could see how happy she was. I was glad that after all the ups and downs of her life, Miss Marva had found herself a good man. They were going to Las Vegas, she said, to get married by Elvis, and after that they would see a Wayne Newton show and maybe the fellas with the tigers. When they returned, Miss Marva was going to leave Bluebonnet Ranch and move into Mr. Ferguson's brick house in town, which he had given her leave to redecorate from top to bottom.

It was less than five miles from Miss Marva's single-wide to her new residence. But she was traveling a greater distance than you could measure with an odometer. She was moving into a different world, acquiring a new status. The thought that I would no longer be able to run down the street to visit her was unsettling and depressing.

With Miss Marva gone, there was nothing keeping me and Carrington at Bluebonnet Ranch. We were living in an old mobile home worth nothing, sitting on a rented lot. Since my sister was going into preschool next year, I needed to find an apartment in a good school district. I would find a job in Houston, I decided, if I was lucky enough to pass the upcoming Cosmetology Commission exams.

I wanted to get out of the trailer park—I wanted it even more for my sister than I did for

myself. But at the same time it would be cutting off the last link I had with Mama. And Hardy.

My mother's absence was driven home every time I wanted to tell her about something that had happened to me or Carrington. Long after she was gone there were moments when the child in me who wanted comfort still cried for her. And then as the grief was weathered by time, Mama slipped farther away from me. I couldn't remember the exact sound of her voice, the shape of her front teeth, the color of her cheeks. I struggled to hold the details of her like water cupped in my hands.

The loss of Hardy was nearly as acute, in a different way. If a man ever looked at me with interest, spoke to me, smiled, I found myself helplessly searching for hints of Hardy. I didn't know how to stop wanting him. It wasn't that I had any hope—I knew I'd never see him again. But that didn't stop me from comparing every other man to Hardy and finding them all lacking. I had exhausted myself loving him, like a blackbird fighting its own reflection in a plateglass window.

Why was love so easy for some people and so hard for others? Most of my high school friends were already married. Lucy was engaged to her boyfriend, Matt, and she claimed to have no doubts at all. I thought of how wonderful it would be to have someone to lean on. To my shame, I fantasized about Hardy coming back for me, telling me he'd been wrong to leave, we'd find a way to make it because nothing was worth being apart from each other.

If loneliness was a choice, what was the other option? To settle for second-best and try to be happy with that? And was that fair to the person you settled for? There had to be someone out there, some man who could help me get over Hardy. I had to find him, not only for my own sake, but for my little sister's. Carrington had no masculine influence in her life. All she'd had so far was Mama, Miss Marva, and me. I didn't know psychology, but I was aware that fathers, or father figures, had a big impact on how children turned out. I wondered if I'd had some more time with my own father, how different my own choices might have been.