A Soldier's Heart. Marta Perry

don’t need to feed us. We can go home for supper.” And have frozen pizza again.

      “We want you to stay. Your father and I can’t eat all this chicken by ourselves.”

      She should take the kids, go home, prove to herself that she could manage the whole working-single-mother thing. Still, it was a family joke that after cooking for so many for so long, her mother couldn’t fix a meal for two. Twenty, maybe, but not two.

      “You spoil us.” She’d work on self-reliance tomorrow. “Where are the kids?”

      “In the backyard, playing ball. I’ve been keeping an eye on them from the window.”

      Shawna and Michael were fine. Of course they were. So what compelled her to step out onto the back porch, just to be sure?

      “Hi, Mom.” Shawna waved a bright red plastic bat. “Look at the neat ball set Grandpa got for us.”

      “Very nice.”

      Michael came running to give her a hug. She held him tightly for an instant, wondering how soon he’d begin to emulate Shawna’s independence, making these embraces a thing of the past.

      Michael squirmed out of her arms. Looking at his blue eyes and golden red curls was like looking into a mirror. Everyone had always said the kids had little of their daddy in their appearance. That hadn’t bothered her too much until Kenny was gone.

      “Grandpa says the ball set is ours, but we should leave it here to play with when we’re here,” Michael said, with his typical determination to do everything according to the rules. “They’re our Grandpa’s house toys.”

      “That’s a good idea.” She ruffled his red curls. “I’m going in the house with Grammy. You two stay right in the yard, okay? If you hit the ball outside, you come and tell me. Don’t go after it yourselves.”

      “We know, Mom.” Shawna gave an exaggerated sigh.

      Was she being overprotective? Maybe that was inevitable. She’d learned that disaster could strike just when everything seemed fine.

      She went back into the kitchen, to find her mother pouring glasses of iced tea. She handed one to Mary Kate. “It’s so warm for the first of May that I thought I’d make iced tea. So, tell me. How did it go with Luke? Did he actually let you in the house?”

      “Not exactly let me in. I’m afraid I barged in.”

      Her mother’s brow wrinkled. “Brendan thought we should respect his wish to be left alone.”

      “Brendan doesn’t know everything, even if he is a minister.” After having been raised with her cousin Brendan, she didn’t have quite the same reverent attitude toward their minister that the rest of the congregation did. “Anyway, this was business.”

      “Poor Luke.” Her mother’s fund of sympathy was unending. “How did he take it?”

      “Not well.” She still trembled inside when she thought about that encounter. Had she handled it the right way? Someone with more experience might have done it differently, but at least she’d gotten results. “He finally agreed to the therapy. But he put some conditions on it.”

      “Conditions?”

      She swallowed, trying to ease the tension that tightened her throat. “He’ll go through with the therapy, but he insists on home visits. And he’ll only do it if I’m his therapist.”

      Her mother clasped her hand. “That’s fine, Mary Kate. You’re a good therapist. He couldn’t be in better hands.”

      “I’m not sure Mr. Dickson will agree with that.” She gave a wry smile.

      “Then you’ll just show him how good you are.” Siobhan always had high expectations of her kids, and more often than not, they managed to meet them, maybe feeling they couldn’t let her down.

      “I hope so, but—”

      The back door flew open to allow Shawna and Michael to surge through. “Is it almost time for supper?” Shawna surprised Mary Kate by diving into her arms, face lighting up with a smile. “We’re starving!”

      “In a minute.” Mary Kate hugged her and then opened her arms to include Michael. “Group hug, please.”

      The feel of those two warm, squirming bodies against hers chased away the doubt she’d been about to express. Of course she could succeed. Fueled by the fierce love she had for her children, she could do anything.

      Chapter Two

      The silence stretched in the clinic director’s office when Mary Kate finished describing her visit with Luke—stretched just like her nerves. She fixed her gaze on Carl Dickson’s face, determined not to look at the floor like a kid called into the principal’s office.

      Dickson had a smooth, expressionless face, rather like an egg. It was the perfect mask for a bureaucrat, impossible to read. Why would someone go into physical therapy, the essence of hands-on helping, and then choose to be an administrator?

      He cleared his throat. “Well, Mary Kate, you’ve brought us to a difficult place.”

      Her heart sank. He was reacting negatively, probably thinking that she was trying to use her one-time friendship with Luke to grab extra hours of work.

      “I don’t see what else—” she began, but the telephone rang.

      Dickson held up his hand in a stop signal. “One moment, Mary Kate. I should take this.”

      She subsided. That was another, separate annoyance—Dickson’s use of her first name. It had been made clear that he was Mr. Dickson to her, and the inequality irked. He was probably about her age, but he was already running the clinic.

      He’d also shown that he didn’t consider her age an advantage. Most of the other therapists were a good ten years younger than she was. She’d started late, and whether she’d catch up was still up in the air.

      She surveyed Dickson’s degrees, framed and hung on the wall behind his desk, trying to ignore his phone conversation. The glowing recommendations from the instructors of the refresher courses she’d taken had made him willing to give her the part-time position. If she did well, he’d implied that she’d be considered for a full-time job opening up in September. If not…

      Given his reaction to the way she’d handled Luke Marino, that had begun to look doubtful. Tension tightened her hands on the arms of the chair. She had to provide for the children. Kenny hadn’t carried much life insurance—after all, the only way he’d ever thought he’d go was fighting fire, in which case there was a department policy.

      Her family wouldn’t let them be in need, but providing for her children was her job. She couldn’t be a burden to her parents or brothers or sister. As for Kenny’s elderly, ailing parents—they must never imagine that Kenny hadn’t left her well-provided-for.

      Dickson hung up and turned back to her, so she focused on him, steeling herself. But he looked ever so slightly more approachable.

      “Well, as I was saying, this is not quite the result I expected, but perhaps we can make it work.”

      She blinked, sure that was not at all what he’d intended to say. “I tried to convince Mr. Marino that the equipment here would be far better than anything I could provide for home therapy.”

      “Let’s not worry about that. We’ll arrange for rental of any necessary equipment and we can spare you to work with him at home as much as needed.”

      Granted, she was the most expendable of the staff, but still—“Will the army cover the cost of rented equipment?”

      “Perhaps, but under the circumstances we don’t have to rely totally on the army.” He nodded toward the telephone. “That was Marino’s father on the line. We’ve been talking about the situation for several days. He’s