The December Market (Shelter Springs #2)

23

Rafe watched Amanda rush out of the elementary school as if she were being chased by El Cucuy de Navidad , the bogeyman his cousins used to tell him roamed the streets at Christmas looking for naughty children to punish.

What was that about? She had been speaking with his mother one moment, the next she had rushed away as if she couldn’t go fast enough.

What had his mother said to her? They seemed to have been conversing amicably enough but maybe he had misinterpreted the discussion. Had his mother been cool again to her, despite their talk earlier that day?

Louise bustled back into the auditorium before he could ask her.

“Dad, can we watch the rest of the concert? I want to hear the older kids sing.”

He wanted to chase after Amanda, to make sure she wasn’t upset about something his mother had said. Right now, his son had to be the priority.

“Sure. Let’s go support your cousins.”

They made their way back to the crowded auditorium, where they found two empty seats near Birdie and Paolo.

“Can we sit by you, Abuelo ?” Isaac asked his grandfather.

“Of course. Sit down. Sit down.”

“Is that Isaac?” Birdie asked. She managed her world with such ease that Rafe sometimes forgot she had low vision.

“Yes,” his grandfather responded. “Isaac and Rafael.”

She smiled brightly in their direction.

“Paolo said my granddaughter was here earlier,” she said. “What a surprise. She doesn’t often come to many school events. I have a feeling the two of you might have something to do with her presence here.”

“Amanda is my friend,” Isaac said. “I invited her so she could hear me sing.”

“Oh, how nice.”

“It was very kind of her to make the effort,” Rafe said.

Despite the principal’s admonishment for everyone to be seated, the second concert still hadn’t yet started. He could hear rustling behind the curtain and assumed the next grade of children were moving into position.

“You know,” Birdie said in an undertone, “I worry for that girl.”

“Who? Amanda?”

She nodded. “She was always such a sensitive girl. She couldn’t bear raised voices. Growing up in that home was a nightmare for her. She internalized everything.”

Rafe didn’t know what to say, saddened to think about Amanda struggling through her difficult childhood.

“I love my daughter,” Birdie went on. “I only wish she had found the strength to walk away from her husband years earlier. They all would have been much better off.”

“It can be tough to give up hope on someone you love.” Even up until he found out about Caitlin’s overdose, Rafe had hoped she would be able to find the strength to overcome her struggles.

“Amanda jumped into a relationship with Jake Shepherd, I think because she was so very desperate to remake her unhappy childhood into something better. I thought she was much too young to even think about marriage, but she wouldn’t listen to me. Jake was her refuge, especially after the accident. She was engaged straight out of high school. And then...everything happened afterward.”

“It was rough, wasn’t it?”

“She didn’t smile for a long time after Jake died. I wasn’t sure she ever would again. She withdrew into herself, dropped all her friends, fell behind in her college coursework. She was in a really dark place. I worried about her. I was afraid she would one day decide she couldn’t bear the pain anymore.”

Caitlin had struggled through pain that dense and difficult.

His wife had never known her father, and her mother was also an addict. Caitlin had ended up in foster care for several years before she had been taken in by a reluctant aunt and her husband, who had been neglectful, bordering on abusive. In high school, she had dabbled in drugs, had made poor romantic choices and had been a victim of domestic and sexual abuse from a series of men.

Caitlin had fought through it all to try to have a happy life. After going to college and earning her associate’s degree, she had finished cosmetology school and had taken a job at his mother’s salon, where Rafe had met her.

She had been deliriously happy after Isaac had been born and he thought they were in a great place. They might have stayed there, adding to their family and building their life together in Shelter Springs, until she had received word her estranged mother had died and for reasons he still didn’t quite fathom, that information had sent her spiraling.

His beautiful, bright, courageous wife had turned into someone else almost overnight, slipping back into destructive patterns and leaving him feeling helpless and sick with worry for her.

Perhaps she still yearned for her mother’s love or maybe she didn’t feel she deserved happiness and had deliberately sabotaged herself. He didn’t know. But eventually, Caitlin had left town, ostensibly to go through rehab and therapy so she could work on overcoming her difficult past once and for all.

Only a few months later, he received a call from the Portland police department, telling him his wife had died at a party of a drug overdose.

Amanda wasn’t Caitlin.

Yes, she had endured hard things but she hadn’t turned to destructive habits, hadn’t tried to dull her pain with anything she could find.

Instead, she reached out to others. She brought meals to wounded neighbors, she cared for her grandmother, she volunteered to lift those in need.

“Please take your seats,” Elizabeth Williams said into the microphone.

Birdie held her gnarled, wrinkled hand out and Rafe grasped it, not sure what else to do. “Amanda is lonely. She won’t admit it to anyone, but there it is. She has so much love to give the right person, if only she can learn to trust her heart again.”

He wanted to ask Birdie why she was telling him this, but the curtain opened and the next group of children began to sing about joy and peace and goodwill.

As he listened to their sweet voices, Rafe couldn’t seem to think about anything except the woman he had begun to care about deeply.