“I paid a heavy price for my self-respect,” he told her. “I don’t negotiate with it.”
“Paid how?”
“When I first realized I was going to have to quit school to take care of Nonnie because her care was going to require more money than we had and I was going to have to go to work full-time, I was angry. Bitter.”
“Both understandable emotions. You were a sixteen-year-old kid with the world on your shoulders while most kids were worrying about what they were going to do to have fun in the next twenty-four hours.”
“Nonnie insisted that I don’t quit school, but back then she was really sick. She couldn’t stay out of bed for more than an hour. There was no way she could work. The co-pays were too much. She knew as well as I did that we weren’t going to make it unless I got a full-time job.”
He hung his head and then raised it again.
“I was also ashamed. Of Nonnie, my mother. Ashamed of who I was.” Something about this woman was making him crazy. Or right for the first time in his life. Hearing his thoughts out loud, for the first time ever, he had a second’s irrational thought that lightning might strike him down. “All my life I’d been trying to pretend that the town didn’t look down on us. That the kids at school didn’t make snide comments about us being white trash. I left the hospital the night that Nonnie was diagnosed and just kept on going. I didn’t look back. More to the point, I didn’t call. Nonnie was lying there in a hospital bed, unable to get up, let alone come after me, and I didn’t even call to let her know I was okay.”
“Where’d you go?”
“The woods at first. And then to Charleston. I had no cash, no food. I couldn’t get a real job because I was certain the cops were looking for me as a runaway. I slept wherever I could find shelter and stole what food I had to eat. Eventually, I went to the only place I knew where folks would be friendly, maybe help a guy out—a local bar. I was also looking for an underground card game. My friends and I had been playing poker in our basements for years and I thought I was pretty good.”
“No, Mark.” Addy looked stricken. He looked away.
Minutes passed. And Mark knew for certain what he’d realized the night before. You were who you were. You could move on. Move out. Move past. But the person you’d been, the things you’d seen and done, kept up with you.
“When my grandmother couldn’t reach me for a couple of days she checked herself out of the hospital and called a neighbor to come get her. She could barely walk but she was determined to find me.”
“How long did it take?”
“A couple of weeks.” He’d told himself that he’d had to leave. Nonnie had sacrificed everything for him. He couldn’t be more of a drain on her now that she was ill.
He’d told himself a lot of things. Most of them bogus.
“She’d have found me sooner, but she was afraid to report me missing, sure that they’d take me away, put me in the system. So while I was hiding from the cops, afraid they’d haul me in as a runaway, the cops weren’t even looking for me.”
“Nonnie still wanted you with her.”
The truth was he’d run because he’d been scared as hell that his grandmother wouldn’t want him anymore, that she’d turn him over to the authorities and he’d have no say what happened to him, or what direction his life would take.
So he’d taken his life in his own hands and flushed it down the toilet.
Or would have if she hadn’t found him.
“Thank God she knew me so well,” he said. “She hadn’t called the cops, but she’d told people she knew in the bar community about me in nearby cities. A couple of days after I’d hit that first bar in Charleston, someone spotted me and called Nonnie.”
“I’m guessing you slept in your own bed that night?”
“With a very sore hide.” And a sick soul. He’d run out on the one person who’d been there for him at her time of greatest need.
Nonnie had said she’d understood. She’d never blamed him. But he’d seen the sadness in her eyes.
“From that night on, I swore that I would not disappoint her, or myself, again. I am not like my parents. I don’t run. I face the music, no matter how loud or bad it gets.”
He’d learned that night to be grateful for what he had. And to spend his energy making the world around him better rather than always thinking about greener grass.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
MARK WAS GOING to marry Ella. Addy was convinced, even if he wasn’t. And since he couldn’t leave Shelter Valley until he could either afford to pay back his scholarship, or until he graduated, he was going to be married, raising a kid, right on the other side of the wall from her.
There was no way she was going to live next door to a married man she had the hots for. That wasn’t good, even as things stood in the present.
Knowing he was going to be a father had in no way diminished how much she wanted Mark Heber for herself. And she had absolutely nothing to offer him but the one thing he hated most. Lies.