Hard Love (Wild Hearts, Contemporary Romance Book 3) Read online

  “I think it's time, don't you?” she asked Robbie. “I think we need to go and arrange to have everything shipped over for storage, and then think about whether you want to sell the house, or maybe have a management company take it over and rent it out. If you rent it, then the rent money would go into the trust funds for you kids. Your dad's life insurance paid off the house, so you don't owe any money on it.”

  Robbie shrugged. “Yeah, I guess we can go and pack everything up. Everything we want to keep, I mean. I want to pick some things for Anna to have, later, to remember mom and dad by. And of course, I want to get some things like that, too. I guess we could put the furniture away, because I know a lot of it was antiques. Mom was always so proud of that.” He glanced at Linda as he spoke, but there wasn't even a flicker of recognition in her face, even though it was her that he was talking about. She didn't know that, of course, and he had become used to talking about the past right in front of her. She didn't remember any of it, and as much as it hurt, in some ways he figured it was good. He could imagine that it would be worse for her, to be like this but vaguely remember a time when she was capable of so much more. “There's some stuff we could put up for sale, or give away. Will we all be going?”

  Aunt Kay glanced at Linda, then turned back to Robbie. “I think we could all go,” she said. “I don't think it will cause any problems, if you know what I mean.”

  Robbie nodded. “Yeah, I agree. And I think it might do Anna some good, to see our old house again. Maybe even Linda, I mean, you never know, right? No, not getting my hopes up, just—you know, just wondering.”

  “Well, all of her life in that house would be within the memories that she lost,” Aunt Kay said. “According to the doctors, those memories were lost because certain parts of her brain were actually damaged beyond any chance that they could heal. That's why she's like a little girl, because she's lost some of the ability to learn and grow, and she can't remember what being a grown-up was like.” Aunt Kay reached over and caressed his shoulder. “It's hard not to hope,” she said. “I just don't want you to get hurt.”

  “I know, Aunt Kay, and I know there isn't much chance she'll ever remember. I'll be all right, I promise. So, when would we be going?”

  “Well, I don't want to interfere with your hot date tomorrow night,” she said, “so how about if we planned on leaving Friday morning? I think we could probably go through the house in two or three days, so we could probably be back here on Monday or Tuesday.”

  “We don't have to hurry on my account,” Julie said. “I mean, if you're about getting back in time for my day off, it's not a big deal. I wouldn't mind hanging out with you guys, if we needed to stay an extra day or two. I mean, it's not like I have some big life of my own that I go to on my day off. All I’ve got is my dad, and he lives in California, now.”

  Aunt Kay smiled at her. “Yeah, yeah,” she said. “I've got you figured out, young lady. You're just trying to get more time to hang out with my nephew, aren't you?”

  Julie looked at Robbie. “Uh-oh,” she said. “She's figured us out! Were busted! What we do now?”

  Robbie turned red, and got tongue-tied when he tried to answer. Finally, he just grinned and shrugged, and both women began to laugh. “Don't worry, Robbie,” Aunt Kay said. “Your secret is safe with me.”

  The day went pretty smoothly, with most of it spent around home. Robbie helped around the house, straightening things he could reach and even putting dishes into the dishwasher. Julie enlisted his help in watching the girls for a while, so that she could run the vacuum cleaner, and then she took over again so that Robbie could spend some time working with his weights. He had always kept himself in pretty good shape, but since the accident he'd been watching muscle mass disappear into thin air. That was depressing to him, so he’d gotten Aunt Kay to buy him a set of dumbbells. It wasn't the same as the weight machine he’d had back home, but since all he could work on was upper body strength, anyway, he felt it was good enough.

  His legs were getting thinner. The last visit he'd had with his new doctor, Dr. Marshall, it had been explained to him that atrophy was normal. Muscles that weren't being used faded away, and that's just how it was. Robbie was scheduled for the first of what would probably be several surgeries that were hopefully going to restore his ability to move his legs.

  “You see, Robbie,” Dr. Marshall said, “your spinal cord was not severed in the accident. What happened was that several of your vertebrae were shattered by an impact on your spine. All the doctors could do at that point was to keep you as immobile as possible, and so they began to grow back together even though they weren't actually in the right places. That means that we have to go in, now, and basically re-break them so that we can put them back to their proper shapes. That will take pressure off your spinal cord, and hopefully, the relief of that pressure will make it possible for you to use those muscles again. I'm planning the first operation for the middle of next month.”

  Robbie wasn't looking forward to being back in the hospital, but if that was what it was going to take to get him back on his feet, then he was ready to go as soon as possible. Being in the wheelchair, no, being crippled at all, simply was among the most horrible fates he could have imagined for himself. In a way, he felt that he would have preferred to die in the accident, rather than be like this.

  There's nothing worse than being crippled, he wrote in the journal he kept on his computer. There is no worse feeling in the world than to know that you cannot do those things that you have always done. When the ability to do simple things like walking and running is taken away from you in the blink of an eye, you suddenly realize just what mortality means. There's no silver lining to that cloud, there's nothing good that can come from it. No matter how you look at it, you are simply crippled, you are less than you were before.

  He didn't let anyone else see his journal, because he didn't want people to think he was feeling sorry for himself. It wasn't about feeling sorry for himself, it wasn't about self-pity of any kind, it was simply about venting. He was letting out the frustration, the fear, the anger, the bitterness, all of the feelings that were boiling inside him. They had to have a way out, and he instinctively knew this. Venting into his journal was a safe way to let off the pressure that was building up inside him. It meant that he could let go of parts of it, and he released some anger with every entry.

  There were entries that had nothing to do with his injuries. How can I look at this woman who used to be my mother, who is now like a little sister I didn't even know I had, and not feel some resentment toward her? I know that it's not her fault, that she would never have chosen for this to happen. I understand that, but that doesn't make it any easier to look at this overgrown child that wears my mother's face. It's not that I dislike Linda; I actually like her a lot, and I enjoy sitting down with her and Anna to play their games. We play Candyland and old maid and go fish, and sometimes they give me a stuffed animal or a doll, and I become its voice. I don't mind these things, and I even enjoy them, but the fact remains that Linda hijacked my mother's body. She didn't mean to, and she can't give it back, but none of that makes it any less painful when I look at her. All I can do is remind myself that it isn't her fault and that she needs me, now, the same way I needed my mother when I was a little boy.

  Robbie spent a lot of the time lifting his dumbbells just thinking about his next entry. Sometimes, it seemed like he got the best ideas for things he wanted to say while he was feeling the burn, while the acid was coursing through his muscles and telling him that the weights were doing their job. He needed that burn, he needed that sensation to remind him that he was still alive, and that life had not ended.

  That day, however, he wasn't thinking as much about what to write in his journal as he was about Julie. One of the reasons that he felt so attracted to her was that she didn't look down on him for his physical condition. His handicap meant nothing to her, and she made sure he understood that all the time. He wondered if maybe she was
serious when she talked about what might happen a few years down the road, or if she was merely teasing him. He suspected that it was just a tease, but then, you never knew how things might turn out. If there was one thing he had learned from recent events, that would be the lesson.

  He kept his weights on the back porch of the house, which was enclosed. He had taken a couple of empty five-gallon buckets and turned them upside down, and positioned them so that his wheelchair fit perfectly between them. He could roll in between them, lock his brakes, and sit there while doing the various dumbbell exercises that he had selected. He had a number of different sizes, but was using his 20-pound set most often. He could do arm extensions, curls and more, and could hold both arms straight out to the sides or in front of him and lift the weights over his head 30 times or more in a set.

  He had rigged a bar so that he could flip his chair backward. It was set up in such a way that the push handles on the back of his chair would catch on it, holding him in a position that was almost horizontal. From that position, he could work on his pectorals, extending his arms straight out and then bringing them up in front of him, as if flapping wings. That, of course, was why they called it a “fly.” It was one of his favorite exercises, and really got the acid burn going in his chest and upper arms.

  He was just finishing up his workout when he noticed that Julie was on the porch, watching him. He reached up and grabbed the bar to flip himself back up onto his wheels, and grinned at her. “Spying on me?” he asked.

  Julie shrugged and grinned back. “Little bit,” she said. “I really just came out here to ask what you might want for dinner. Then I saw you, so I just sort of stood back here and watched. I hope you don't mind.”

  “Mind? Why would I mind? It's not every guy who gets to work out with a pretty girl for an audience.” Robbie felt a blush, but he'd gotten so used to it that he didn't let it stop him from flirting with her anymore.

  Julie sat there and looked at him for a long moment, without saying anything, and then she smiled again. “There's something I want you to know,” she said. “I really do admire you. You amaze me, the way you simply took all this in stride, the way you just accept the things that have happened to you and go on. When I found out my mom was having all those problems, it just about destroyed me. I was only 12, and in the space of just a few months I saw my mom go from a happy, vibrant woman to someone who couldn't even take care of herself. My dad and I had to do everything for her, and I've got to give him credit, because he never tried to dump it on me. He stuck right by her, all the way up to the point where she had to go into the nursing home. She got to the point that she had to have 24-hour supervision, and she couldn't even go to the bathroom by herself. There was just no way we could continue to take care of her at home, so her doctor told us it was the best thing we could do.” She sighed, and Robbie saw tears falling out of her eyes. “So, anyway, to make the long story short, we put her in the nursing home close to where we lived, and we promised we'd come and visit her all the time. It hurt, at first, not having her there at home with us, but we knew we had done the right thing and that she would be better taken care of. What we didn't know was that some of the staff they had at that nursing home weren't always the most reliable people. She'd only been there a couple of months when one of them left her in the bathtub to help someone else. The lady was only gone for a couple of minutes, but that's how quickly someone can drown in a bathtub.”

  Robbie hadn't known any of this before. He'd heard about her mother having dementia, of course, but it never occurred to him that she had died. Even the way Julie talked, always about her dad, it had never occurred to him that anything else might have happened to her mother.

  “Julie, I'm—I'm so sorry,” he said. “I didn't know, and I'm really sorry.”

  Julie shrugged and grinned sadly. “Of course you didn't know,” she said. “It's not something I tell people about, especially people I'm trying to take care of. I just—you're kind of special, and I feel close to you, so I wanted you to know. I admire you for all that you have gone through, and you keep on going. That's just amazing to me.”

  “But, Julie, you did the same thing. You took care of your mom for a long time, and then you lost her. But you keep going, just like me.”

  Julie shook her head, with an expression of irony on her face. “Not quite,” she said. “Mom died when I was 15, and I went off the deep end for a while. I rebelled in every possible way, I ran away from home, got mixed up in drugs and alcohol—I think I was trying to get myself killed, so I could go be with mom. It took a year for my dad to get through to me and make me understand that what happened to mom wasn't our fault. That's when I realized that I'd been blaming myself, and that's when I started to get better.” She took a deep breath, and Robbie could hear the shuddering sob that she was holding in. “That's when I decided I wanted to help other people who had similar problems. I always thought it would be helping folks who had problems like my mom had, but your Aunt Kay and my dad were old friends, and they were always talking on the phone and stuff. Her husband and my dad, I guess they were in the service together. They were old friends, and when her husband died, she used to call and talk to my dad now and then. Anyway, he had told her that this was the kind of thing I wanted to do with my life, so when this happened to your mom and she found out about it, she called me and asked me if I would come and work for her.”

  Robbie grinned. “Yeah? Bet you wish you'd said no, right?”

  Julie walked over and sat down in a white plastic chair that was near where he worked out. “Of course not,” she said. “I'll tell you something, Linda is a lot easier to deal with than my mom was. Even before mom got to where she couldn't take care of herself, she would argue and fight with us about the littlest things. It was always a fight to get her to eat, or to change clothes, or to take a bath. Compared to that, Linda is a joy. She really and truly is a lot like your little sister. I just love her to pieces, but I know it isn't quite that easy for you.”

  For a brief moment, Robbie wondered if she had gotten into his computer and read his journal. He didn't really think she would do that, though, so he shrugged his shoulders. “Sometimes I wish I could make mom come back out from wherever she went. But, let's face it, I can't, so I try not to let it show. I don't want Linda to ever think there's anything wrong between us, you know what I mean?”

  Julie nodded her head. “Yeah, I know,” she said. “It's just another one of those things that I admire so much about you.” She shook her head then, and smiled at him. “Holy cow, I just never open up like that. I hope I didn't upset you, I—I guess I just needed to talk. You're pretty easy to talk to, Robbie.” She suddenly leaned over and kissed him on the cheek. “Makes me wish you were a few years older, or maybe that I was a few years younger.” She smiled, and Robbie reflected it back to her.

  5

  “…And then when he jumped the car over all those other cars and trucks on that bridge, that was awesome!”

  Julie laughed with delight at Robbie's excitement. Because of an incident with Linda, one that created such a mess that it took an extra hour to clean up, they didn't get out of the house in time for dinner before the movie, so they had gone straight to the theater and gotten themselves through on popcorn, candy and soft drinks. It had been an incredible evening, topped off in Robbie's eyes when a man had tried to flirt with Julie. She had looked up at him and calmly said, “Excuse me, but can't you see I'm here with my date?”

  The guy had stared at her for a moment, and then turned and walked away. Robbie had felt like a million bucks, and it only got better when the movie turned out to be one of the most exciting he'd ever seen. They were on the way to the restaurant, and Julie was delighted at Robbie's constant recitation of his favorite parts of the movie.

  When his voice suddenly ran down, Julie looked over to see if he was okay. She found him sitting on his side of the car, just staring at her. “What's wrong?” she asked.

  “Nothing's wrong,” he sa
id. “I just wanted to tell you how awesome that was, when you told the guy I was your date. I thought he was gonna die right then and there. That was so cool!”

  Julie grinned at him, and then she winked. “Well, it was true. You are my date, right? I mean, let's see, you asked me out, you took me to a movie, and you paid for the tickets, the snacks and everything, and now we're going to a restaurant where you promised to buy me dinner. I don't know about you, Bucko; to me, that sounds like a date.”

  Robbie laughed heartily. “Yeah, okay, so I guess it's a date,” he said. “This is the first date, right? Our first date, I mean?”

  “Yes,” she said with a smile, and then she giggled. “But if you promise not to get out of line, and not to tell your Aunt Kay on me, we might be able to relax that rule about no kissing on the first date.” She laughed again as his eyes suddenly bugged out and the smile on his face got even wider. “Look, Robbie, I was 13 once, too, remember? I remember what it was like to feel like a grown up and be treated like a kid.”

  Robbie managed to keep his face under control, except for that grin, and soon they arrived at the restaurant. Julie got his wheelchair out of the trunk of her car and brought it around to him, and he swung himself into it like a monkey. She didn't try to push him inside, but walked beside him as he wheeled himself along, and opened the door for him. Robbie thanked her as he wheeled inside.

  The hostess met them at the door and led them to a table for two. She quickly moved a chair so that Robbie's wheelchair could get up close to it, took their drink orders (both of them ordered cokes), gave them their menus, and walked away. The two of them sat there facing each other, and both of them were having trouble keeping the grins off their faces.