Chapter 14

“Why are you doing this, Abigail?”

That had been my mother's question. My father's questions had been worse – and I was sitting in my car, in the driveway of Joey's house, asking myself most of the same questions.

My mother knew me like the back of my hand. We had squabbled when I was a teenager over little things, like most mothers and daughters at that age, but we always had a good relationship. Our bond was strong, since she raised me alone for a good portion of my life. She was in tune with me, and there was something in my voice that told her something was different.

“Abigail,” she had said disapprovingly. “Be careful.”

She was a mother; she worried about me and that was to be expected, and it worried her even more that I was involved with an inmate. It was probably one of her fears. When I became a prison nurse, everybody except my mom thought I was insane – now my mom had jumped on the wagon, too.

But I had spent the past six months with Lance every single day. I couldn't explain how my feelings for him were so strong, but I felt like I had known him my entire life. I knew from the beginning that he didn't belong at Warren. Something about him was different than the other inmates – he was angry at the whole world, but he didn't scare me.

What did scare me was Bailey's birthday party. I saw the way Joey looked at me when he visited. I had appeared out of nowhere to him and he was unsure of me, and after Lance's little money scheme I had no idea what he thought about me. I didn't have a clue what I would be walking into today.

I sighed a heavy breath of air to calm my nerves and looked at the box sitting in the passenger seat next to me, wrapped in pink paper with a sheer white ribbon. This was why I was here; I had fallen in love with this little girl most of all.

“Abby,” Joey said when he opened the door to me, smiling. “I didn't expect you so soon.”

“I thought maybe you needed some help setting up,” I said. “So I came a little early.”

“You didn't have to, but now that you're here that would be a big help,” he said.

He invited me in with his body language and led me through the living room. I looked over and saw Bailey and two other girls playing together.

“Those are my daughters,” Joey said, seeing me looking at them. “Brianna just turned eleven and Kloey is two. And of course you know Bailey.” He turned to look at the girls. “Girls, this is our friend Abby, can you say hello?”

Kloey didn't even look up, and Brianna looked up and gave me a friendly “hello”; but when Bailey heard my name, she stood up and sprinted toward me.

“Abby!”

“Hey there, kiddo,” I said. She grabbed onto my leg and wrapped her body around it. “Have you had a good birthday?”

“Yeah,” she said and smiled excitedly. “Aunt Kelly made my favorite breakfast this morning.”

“What's your favorite breakfast?”

“Pancakes with blueberry syrup and orange juice.”

“Oh, that sounds yummy.” Compared to the slightly-burnt toast I had managed for myself before I ran out of the house this morning, it sounded delicious.

“Is my daddy with you?” Bailey asked.

Lance had warned me that Bailey probably wouldn't remember the discussion we had with her that day at the prison, and she would probably ask me about him again. Together, we had come up with the perfect excuse.

“No, sweetie,” I said. “He couldn't come because he had to work today. But this present is from both of us.”

She looked at the box under my arm.

“Okay,” she said, rather nonchalantly. “I'm going to go back to playing with my cousins, okay Abby?”

“Okay, sweetheart, go have fun,” I said with a smile, watching her run away from me back to the girls on the rug. She tucked her legs underneath her and went back to playing, as if she had never left the small circle.

“That went surprisingly well,” Joey said, taking the package out of my arms.

“Lance warned me this time,” I said. “He told me she's used to hearing that he can't do something because he has to work, so we thought it was our best bet to use that. My excuse last time was kind of lame.”

Joey shook his head at me. “No, I thought it was perfect. Give yourself some credit, even Lance and I didn't know what to say, and we're parents.”

I laughed. “All girls for both of you, huh?”

“We call it the 'boy band curse',” he said with a smile. “This is our punishment for warping the minds of millions of prepubescent girls.”

I looked away and smiled, blushing a little at the fact that at one point, I had been one of those girls who had the posters on my walls. I hadn't been a dedicated fan who knew all the details of their personal lives like a lot of their fans, but I had every one of their albums. It was something I hadn't even told Lance yet, because it left me a little embarrassed to admit it to him.

A woman came into the room, and Joey looked to her then towards me.

“Abby, this is my wife, Kelly.”

She smiled warmly and held out her hand to me.

“Hello, Abby,” she said. “I've heard a lot about you in the past couple weeks, I'm glad you could come for Bailey.”

I smiled and shook her hand in return. “I'm glad I could come, too. She's such a sweet little girl.”

She looked over at Joey, and then looked back to me.

“I'm only sorry we had to pull you out of work today.”

“Speaking of,” Joey said, “if you're here, what is Lance doing there?”

“I knew that without something to do he would sit in his cell and drive himself nuts.” I smiled. “So I asked my cousin John and Roberta to find little things for him to do during the day. They're both guards and they like him and try to keep him company on my days off, but today he needed to have something to occupy his mind so he wouldn't think about not being here.”

“You know, I'm glad you're looking out for him,” Joey said seriously as Kelly exited the room. “I'm out here and he's in there. I do what I can out here, but he needs someone in there.”

“I know it probably sounds insane, since I haven't known Lance long, but I care about him. And I care about Bailey, too.”

“Why would that sound insane to me?” he said, with a bemused look on his face.

“Well,” I responded, “I guess I'm used to people thinking that. They thought I was crazy when I decided to become a prison nurse, and now I'm involved with an inmate.”

Joey briefly looked over to where the girls were playing, and then motioned me to walk with him. I followed him into the kitchen, where Kelly was busy putting together snacks for the party.

“Lance isn't a bad guy,” he said. “I hope you know that.”

“Of course,” I said with a nod. “I knew that the moment I saw him. It's...my family, you know?”

Joey chuckled. “Yeah. I know.”

“Lance is a good guy,” Kelly said. “Really good. It's a shame what she did to him.”

I nodded in agreement. I looked over at Joey and saw him looking down at his feet, contemplating something. He looked like he was letting it eat away at him, a lot like Lance had looked the past few months.

“Can I help you with any of this stuff?” I said as I looked at Kelly. “You must have a lot to do.”

She smiled at me.

“Oh Abby, that would be great. Thank you.”

For the next few minutes I helped Kelly put together platters of cut fruit and vegetables, bags of party favors and candy, and helped her put the candles into Bailey's cake. As we took everything outside to the table, guests started arriving. Joey had disappeared from my sight after I got busy helping Kelly, but he reappeared to answer the door.

As the party got underway, I found myself more at ease than I had started. Bailey stuck by my side through most of the party, and Kelly kept looking over at us with a smile on her face.

After the party was over and everyone left, the girls all collapsed on the living room floor in a cake frosting and vanilla ice cream coma. Joey sat on the couch, “just to rest a minute,” and ended up falling asleep a few minutes later. Kelly and I started picking up all the dishes to take them to the kitchen.

“It's a sad sight, isn't it?” Kelly said with a smile as she looked at Joey on the couch. “He does this all the time. I'm lucky if he's alert five minutes after the girls are all in bed.”

I chuckled.

“Must be hell to be old before your time,” I said. “I'm lucky that I can create enough work for Lance to do to keep him awake ten minutes at a time in the office.”

“You care about him a lot, don't you?” she asked as we walked over to the sink.

She put the dishes in the sink and I dipped a plate under the water and started mindlessly washing.

“I don't know exactly how I feel right now, Kelly. I'm so confused.”

“I'm not. You feel exactly how Brayden never felt for him.”

“Well, that doesn't tell me much – I've never even been in the same room with her.”

She sighed.

“Would you like some coffee or tea or something?” she asked.

I smiled. “Coffee would be great, thanks.”

She brewed a pot of coffee while I washed a few of the dishes from the party. When the dish strainer was full, she urged me to sit at the table, setting a cup of coffee in front of me.

“I met Brayden a couple months after she got pregnant,” she said, sitting down in the chair in front of me. “We had a few friends over and they showed up. Joey had met her before then and I got the impression he didn't like her much. I didn't understand why until I met her myself. She was too showy, always had to have designer clothes and shoes and handbags. I'm not like that but she was a model. I thought we were just...different, you know?”

I nodded.

“Truthfully, I never liked her much either. I always thought there was something about her that she was hiding. Joey felt the same way. She treated Lance like crap. He never was good enough for her. It didn't seem to bother Lance much, but it killed Joey.”

“They must be close,” I said.

“Oh yeah, they are. It hurts Joey so bad. He feels like he should be able to do more to help Lance. Sometimes he acts like he's ready to burst through those prison doors and bust Lance out – like they'd ever get away with it. They can't even stay awake much past nine o'clock anymore; they'd fall asleep at the wheel of the getaway car.”

I laughed and took a sip of my coffee.

“And poor Lance – he feels things more than your average guy does. Most guys don't have feelings like us girls do. But Lance does. I wouldn't call him sensitive, but he's more so than any of the other guys. Bray hurt him so bad, and she doesn't even care.”

“She sounds like a nightmare.”

“I tried to stay away from her. Lance brought Bailey over without Bray because he knew I didn't get along with her much, so I didn't see her again until Bailey was about a year old. Joey and I went to have dinner at their house, mostly because Lance begged us to. Imagine my shock when I walked in to see Bray wearing flip-flops, cooking at the stove, with Bailey sitting there at her feet playing.”

“But that's not Brayden now,” I said.

“It wasn't long after that that Joey and I found out that she'd been going out with some new friends. Lance had never met these people and she wasn't coming home until ungodly hours in the morning. When we asked how long it had been going on, he told us a couple of months and brushed it off. Joey told him that Bray was up to something and whatever it was, it wasn't good, but Lance wouldn't listen. After a while, Joey stopped saying anything. He was too afraid it would ruin their friendship.”

“You had to have said something though, right?”

“Honey,” she said with a laugh, “Lance and I are good friends, but I'm not his best friend. If he wouldn't listen to it from his best friend, there was no chance that I could manage to get through to him.”

“I guess you're right,” I said with a sigh.

“Now Bray's trying to paint this picture of Lance and make it seem like he was the bad guy in their relationship. He put too much pressure on her to be a good mom and wife-material, and it got to be too much and that's why she turned to drugs. That's what she thinks Joey's done to me.”

“And that's not what he's done at all.”

She chuckled. “Far from it. I'm not perfect, and Joey can't make me perfect. If you weren't here those dishes would have sat in the sink for three days waiting for me. I don't trust anybody who does their dishes the same day they eat off them. It's not natural.”

I laughed and took another drink.

“The sad thing is that Lance never wanted to change her. He loved Brayden exactly how she was in the beginning. That woman was mean, manipulative, and self-centered – but he loved her, he had a daughter with her, and all he wanted was his old Bray back.”

It raised up a question in my mind that I had been contemplating for months.

“Do you think he still wants her back?”

She paused. “Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?”

I looked away from her, feeling that I already had my answer. I knew she could tell that I was disheartened.

“She's the mother of his child. She'll always have to be a part of his life in some way. I don't think you have to worry about him wanting her back. If he didn't care about you, I don't think he'd be giving you a second glance. I think she's scorned him enough that he wants to keep his distance from her. But you have to understand that she probably won't disappear.”

“I know,” I said with a nod. “He comes with baggage. Maybe I am crazy, because I don't care. I love him and I love that little girl in there.”

“I haven't ever seen Bailey open up to someone like she has with you,” she said. “It's amazing. She only met you one time three weeks ago and in three weeks, she's talked more about you than she has her own mom.”

I could tell that she saw my surprised look.

“Brayden didn't do Bailey any favors in her life. There are only a few people she trusts – her dad, Joey, me, and now you. You made some kind of impact on her. Children are pretty good at judging character.”

She went silent as I tried to take in our whole conversation.

“You know,” she said after a while, “I also don't trust parents who don't pilfer the leftover birthday cake after the kids have passed out from the sugar high.” She smirked at me from across the table. “What do you say?”

I smiled. “You're right. It's completely unnatural.”

She immediately stood up and grabbed two plates out of the rack of dishes.

“Abby, we're going to get along perfectly.”