Love, Marriage And Family 101. Anne Peters
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solitariness and oddly mature self-possession marked her an only child.
“And the two of you had no problems prior to your move to Long Beach?”
“I didn’t say that”
“Then you did have problems?”
“Doesn’t every family?” Mike looked up from his hands with a dark-eyed glare of resentment.
“Mr. Parker.” Struggling for patience, Hally took a deep breath and quietly let it out. “I appreciate how difficult this must be for you…”
“Do you?”
“Well, y-yes….”
“How?”
“Well, I….” Thrown off balance, Hally momentarily faltered. Her earlier empathy waned in the face of his tightlipped challenge. Affronted, she angled her chin. “Are you baiting me, Mr. Parker?”
“Not at all.”
“Then what was the point…”
“The point, Ms. McKenzie, is that I very much doubt you can have any idea what it’s like to lose your mate and suddenly find yourself on your own with an adolescent child you think you know but don’t.”
On his feet again, Mike paced the few steps of Hally’s confined office space with the same agitation and pent-up violence her cat, Chaucer, displayed in his carrier during trips to the vet.
“I’m at my wits’ end here, Ms. McKenzie.” Parker’s tone was low, but fierce. “And what I need from you is help, not simpering platitudes about knowing how I feel.”
He grabbed the edge of the desk and pinned her to her seat with his eyes. “You don’t know squat about how I feel.”
“I know that you’re angry and that it has nothing to do with me,” Hally said steadily. The flare of alarm she’d initially felt at his outburst had been only that—a flare, as quickly extinguished as ignited by the recognition that frustration, not violence, had driven him to it. “And I’m quite convinced now that you care about Corinne…”
“You doubted that?” He pulled back, his tone as incredulous as his expression.
Hally shrugged. “Corinne is a new student with—you’ll excuse my bluntness—nothing much to recommend her so far. And you…”
“What about me?”
“Well, to be frank, everything about you shouts ‘upwardly mobile executive,’ which leads me to wonder just how much of your time you can spare to hands-on parenting.”
“I can spare as much time as it takes,” Mike growled, furious at the implication of parental neglect when he’d been knocking himself out trying to do the right things. “But I do have to make a living, I can’t be in two places at once, and until you finally did your job and notified me, I had no way of knowing that my daughter wasn’t in school when she was supposed to be. Now did I?”
His eyes drilled into her, daring her to refute his logic. Hally couldn’t, but that didn’t mean she was prepared to back down. She stared at him with all the authority she could muster and waited in silence until he sat down.
“Thank you,” she said coolly, much as she would say to one of her students after she’d subjugated them with one of her looks.
So secretly—and unprofessionally—thrilled was she with this minor victory over the formidable Michael J. Parker that she forgot all about the extra inch on her thighs and the fact that her tights offered nothing in the way of camouflage.
She shoved her chair back from her desk and crossed her legs. “Now that that’s out of the way,” she said briskly, “let’s discuss how the situation should be handled….”
Troubled and pensive, Mike slowly traversed the nowdeserted school parking lot on his way to his car. Strange woman, that Halloran McKenzie, he thought. Talk about contradictions—the mind of Dr. Joyce Brothers in Shirley Temple’s head and Marilyn Monroe’s body. Combined, those traits made for a very tantalizing package, however, he had to admit. And he doubted many boys missed her English class.
This somewhat wry reflection abruptly recalled him to his troubles since it reminded him that his daughter evidently did miss English and every other class with frightening regularity.
Grimly, he started the car and pulled out into traffic, knowing he would have to have a serious talk with Cory when he got home. He dreaded it. It seemed not a day went by that they weren’t at each other over something. And, man, he was tired of it. In fact, he was tired period. Being mom and pop, housekeeper, breadwinner and disciplinarian to a recalcitrant teenager was wearing him out.
Cruising the route home on automatic pilot, and removed by time and distance from the dedicated Ms. McKenzie’s ardently persuasive plea for patience, Mike thought that giving in to Cory’s demands just might be the best thing to do after all.
Why not let her go back home? Why not let her go back to Idaho, to Marble Ridge, to Becky’s folks? Lord knew they were at him about it almost as much as Corinne was, if for different reasons. Cory professed to hate him, whereas the Campbells simply didn’t deem any man alone capable of raising a teenage daughter.
And maybe that was why he wasn’t letting Cory go—because his in-laws were right and, aside from the fact that he didn’t much care to be pressured, he needed to prove them wrong.
Mike knew that wasn’t really the reason he had so far hung tough, though. Part of it, sure. But another part was that, while alive, his wife had clung way too tightly to her parents, and even to his, only three miles further down the road. Becky’s dependence had given the older folks the impression they could butt in whenever they felt like it, an attitude that didn’t fly with Mike at all.
But even that wasn’t the main reason for his determination to bring up his daughter himself from here on in. That had strictly to do with himself and Cory. She was his daughter, his child. She was the baby he and Becky had been so happy to have created. And she’d grown to be a stranger.
His fault. Drilling for oil all over the globe didn’t leave a man with much family time. Nor was three weeks of home leave every four months anywhere near enough time for a father to bond with his child. A child who didn’t understand why he wasn’t around like other daddies; who considered his long absences a form of desertion no matter how often he tried to explain the real reason for their lifestyle.
Not that he hadn’t understood Cory’s bewilderment and agonized over her increasingly resentful attitude. After all, what could something as intangible as the dream of a horse ranch possibly mean to a young child? Or for that matter, to anyone other than Becky and himself?
It was their dream. Just as it had been their decision to live as they had—he overseas in his oil camps, Becky home with Corinne in Marble Ridge—to one day make that dream a reality.
Where else could a geologist earn the kind of money Mike had brought home than in those faraway oil fields? Money a fair chunk of which they had faithfully put into savings each month. Watching it grow—every dime and dollar reducing by minutes and hours the time they’d have to wait to be a family again—was what had made it all bearable.
And then, just like that, time had run out
First, Becky had become strange and secretive, increasingly so. And then her illness had taken its toll, draining their savings account as relentlessly as the cancer had sucked the life from her body. And their dream had collapsed like a house of cards in a windstorm with Becky’s death.
Cory’s grief had been as terrible as his own bewilderment. He couldn’t seem to figure out how everything could have gone so wrong. And while the loss should have drawn them closer, it had, instead, driven them further apart.
Cory had been livid, wild, out of control with rage when she’d seen him packing to fly back