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“Then forget my money. We’ll figure something out, even if it’ll be hard at times.”
Ricky stopped pacing long enough to glare at me. “Hard? You don’t know the meaning of the word. Have you ever worked a day in your life?”
“I never needed to,” I admitted.
“And that’s your problem,” Ricky said. “You and your family sit around all day letting the rest of us do the real work. If the shoe was on the other foot, I bet none of you would last a day.”
I’d never seen him angry before, and the only reaction I hadwas to start crying. I tried to hold the tears back, but they fell anyway, streaming down my cheeks.
Ricky’s tone softened as soon as he saw them. Pulling me close, he said, “Hey now. No need for that. I’ll think of something. It’ll just take a little more time. Don’t you worry about a thing.”
Because Ricky told me not to, I didn’t.
A mistake, Mary.
For there was much to worry about.
But don’t think for a second that this is simply a tale of a young girl used and discarded by a callous man. There’s more to it than that. Nearly everyone at Hope’s End played a role in what happened--and most paid dearly for it.
Including me.
Especially me.
TWENTY-THREE
The photograph remains on the table, Lenora staring out from it in shades of sepia. Minutes have passed since I first saw it, yet I remain flabbergasted.
Lenora was pregnant.
And even though she hasn’t revealed it yet, I’m pretty sure Ricardo Mayhew was the father. What I can’t begin to understand is what this has to do with Mary. Or, for that matter, Carter.
“Why did your friend Tony insist you work here?” I say. “Because of this picture?”
Carter nods. He’s sobered up in the past few minutes, likely from a combination of coffee and confession. Although what he’s confessing is far from what I expected.
“I started working here because I needed to know.”
“Know what?”
“If I’m Lenora Hope’s grandson.”
“I still don’t understand,” I say.
“On Christmas morning in 1929, a baby was left at the front door of the Episcopal church in town,” Carter says. “The baby was freezing, barely alive. Because it was Christmas, the priest who found him got to the church earlier than normal. If he’d arrived even a few minutes later, the baby would have died. That’s why the church called it a Christmas miracle.”
“That baby,” I say. “He was—”
Carter, like me, can’t stop looking at the picture of Lenora. “My father, yeah. He was adopted by a young couple at the church who couldn’t have children. My grandparents. My father never tried to find out who his birth parents were, mostly because he had no idea where to start looking. Besides, he was literally abandoned. Why bother trying to find someone who didn’t want you? So my birth grandparents remained a mystery. Until Tony found this photo.”
“Why did he think your grandmother is Lenora?”
“Because of the date,” Carter says, tapping the photo. “How many months pregnant does she look to you?”
I peer again at the picture. “Six?”
“That’s what I thought, too. Which means her ninth month would have been—”
“Around Christmas,” I say.