Dean cleared his throat, looked at her and then away. “Chrissie and me are getting married.”
Summer had been so focused on Emma she hadn’t even noticed the woman waiting in the car.
Chrissie looked enough like her that they could be sisters. Same platinum hair, same fair tone to their skin, but this woman had a hard look to her. A partying girl where Summer had always been more a homebody. A girl up for anything, a wild one, happy to stay out half the night doing shots then throw her tank top off and run topless through the bar’s parking lot just for the attention. The kind of girl Dean always wanted Summer to be, only to be disappointed to discover she was anything but.
“Oh,” Summer said, surprised that he’d even think she’d care after all the misery he’d put her through. “Congratulations.”
That she hadn’t flown instantly into a jealous rage at the news seemed to melt the tension right out of his shoulders.
“I bet your momma’s excited about you get married again,” Summer said, just to say something. “I bet she’s all about doing up the wedding.”
He looked away, reaching into the pocket of his jeans. “We don’t want to tire her out. We’re just going to head out west. Get married in Vegas. Listen, I just—here.”
He shoved some papers at her, folded into quarters to fit in his front pocket, the edges worn.
“What’s this?” Summer asked, her frown deepening, already opening the papers to look at them.
Her mouth parted.
“I got it notarized and everything. Should be good to go.”
“Why?” she got out, looking right at Dean’s signature scrawled on the paperwork that waived his parental rights to Emma. “Why after all—why now?”
He glanced out the window, out at Chrissie sitting outside in the Hyundai. She was half-kneeling, the rearview mirror skewed so she could see herself to fix her makeup, apparently completely unaware that the passenger side sunshield would have a lighted mirror just for that purpose.
“Chrissie . . . Look, she just don’t want to be a mom.”
She stared. Your boyfriend having his kid once in a blue moon could hardly be called being a mom.
“I tried to call you,” he grumbled.
Summer scanned the paperwork, her heart pounding, trying to check it before he vanished again.
It looked all right. Everything looked in order.
“No,” she breathed. “It’s okay.”
Her grip tightened on the agreement as if he might snatch it back. Chrissie was regarding her reflection with a critical eye, turning her heavily made up face this way and that.
“You know this means you don’t get no child support or nothing.” His tone was halfway between surly and triumphant. “Not anymore.”
With Dean bouncing from job to job, taking one crap job after another and getting fired when he didn’t up and quit, the support the state forced him to pay was less than three hundred dollars a month. And he was late paying every damn time. The time and trouble it took to file the paperwork with the family court and have her lawyer remind him they could get a bench warrant for failure to pay, plus all the time and worrying herself sick he wouldn’t take proper care of Emma when he did take her wasn’t worth a million times that.
She gave a nod. “I got it covered.”
He paused at the door to the cabin. “She’ll be okay, right?” He glanced at his daughter, asleep on the sofa, her soft golden curls and rounded baby cheeks. “Even if she don’t have a daddy.”
“She’ll be fine.”
Summer pushed the storm door open in a not-so-subtle hint that he should get going. He took his time about it too, this boy who, no matter how old he got, would never really be a man, crossing to his car and getting in.
He said something to Chrissie and she gave Summer a catlike smug look as she settled into her seat. He fixed the rearview mirror she’d skewed and put his arm on the back of her seat, looking over his shoulder as he backed up, going fast enough to kick up a bunch of snow and ice.
“You look like a princess, Momma,” Emma murmured, her big blue eyes sleepy.
Summer smiled through tears and shut the door, sitting beside Emma on the sofa to smooth her hair back. “I missed you so much, sweetie.”
“I missed you too, Momma. Where’s Dean?”
“You mean Daddy?”
“He said I can’t call him Daddy no more.” Emma rubbed one eye with a chubby fist. “It makes Chrissie mad.”
“Oh. He’s gone home.”
Summer turned her face toward the window. It was starting to snow.
“Daddy’s gone home . . .”
Emma was blinking up at her.
“Come on, baby,” Summer said quickly, wrapping the blanket around her daughter and scooping her up.
“Momma?” Emma asked as Summer ran with her through the back door, her slippered feet crunching in the snow.
“It’s all right,” Summer panted, balancing Emma on her right hip, her daughter’s little arms tight around her neck. “Everything’s all right.”
“Why we out in the woods, Momma?”