Butterfly Bayou (Butterfly Bayou 1)

Armie was wrong. She might not have had two loving parents, but she’d had Will and Laurel and Lisa. They’d loved and supported each other. They’d taught each other what it meant to be a family.

“We had a fight. He broke up with me.” She petted Peanut, taking comfort from his closeness.

Lisa gasped. “What did you do?”

“Why do you think I did anything at all?”

“Because I’ve known you my whole life. You can be a bitch.”

She could, but this time she’d been a bitch for all the right reasons. “I pushed Noelle at PT. I tried to get her up and walking and I said some nasty things about it being easy to stay in that chair. I think I was close to getting her mad enough that she would have done it just to throw it back in my face.”

Lisa sighed. “Like you did when I was flunking physics. I remember that well. You and Will thoroughly pissed me off enough that nothing was going to stop me from passing that class and showing you two up. You know Laurel did the same thing and you simply helped her. She got a C and you were happy with that. I got an A-minus and all you did was pat me on the back and tell me you knew I could do it.”

She’d been only a few years older than her younger siblings, but she’d been the one to make sure they did their homework and ate dinner. “Laurel was never good at math and science. It didn’t come naturally to her. She had other talents. You were being lazy and floating by on your innate intelligence. If you had flunked that class, the school would have wanted a parent-teacher conference. We didn’t have a parent to send.”

Those years had been so rough, always walking a tightrope. She couldn’t do it again. She couldn’t simply apologize for something she wasn’t sorry for and go back to him. It was inevitable that she and Noelle would clash from time to time and she would go through this all over again. She would walk a tightrope, the same one she had in childhood— be perfect or she would lose it all.

“Huh, I never thought of it that way. As a teen it just felt unfair,” Lisa said.

“Yeah, well, I’m sure Noelle would agree with you. Armie certainly does. He asked me to leave because if I stayed he wouldn’t be putting Noelle first. The funny thing is, I’m trying to do the same thing.” She’d known they would fight about it and she’d done it anyway.

“He doesn’t want her to do the physical therapy?”

“He believes what the old doctor told him. He doesn’t want a second opinion because he doesn’t want to give Noelle false hope. I personally think it’s better than no hope at all. At least if she thought there might be a chance, she would try to figure out how to be more independent. Armie’s rigged the whole house so she doesn’t have to struggle. That’s great, but the world won’t be like that. It isn’t like that for anyone. He’s done a great job of making her comfortable, but he won’t teach her life skills. I’ve been trying to teach her how to help around the house. She tells me she can’t do it. Do they honestly believe people in wheelchairs can’t cook or do laundry? Because that’s ridiculous. Even if she never gets out of that chair, she can be independent. She can go to college and study whatever she wants. She can have a full life where she does amazing things, but she can’t if she won’t believe in herself.”

“You need to talk to him,” Lisa urged.

“I tried that. He said the only way he’ll consider talking to me is if I make an apology to Noelle. I assume he’ll also want me to stop pushing on getting her to walk.” There were other things she feared. “Maybe it’s for the best. Not for Noelle, but for me. I don’t think we would have worked out in the long run because I don’t think he’ll ever take the chance on having another child, and I don’t know that I can live without trying to have one.”

Lisa’s eyes went wide. “He doesn’t want more kids? I mean, I do get it that he’s been through it once, but he told you flat out he won’t have kids?”

“He said he needed to think about it. Maybe if I’d met him at another time. It’s not wrong or bad for him to be done with having kids. It certainly doesn’t make him a bad person, just a wrong match.” Or perhaps they were simply far too different to ever have worked. She was so tired. “I think he enjoyed the idea of having a woman in his life, but the reality turned out to be not so great. I was convenient for a while and then I wasn’t, and I was out.”