A Soldier's Heart Read online

  “Luck is not a word I associate with this.” He slapped his useless legs, getting a stab of pain in return.

  “Fine.” Her voice was crisp, as if she’d moved into a professional mode where friendship had nothing to do with them. “We both know I’m right.”

  He’d like to deny it, but he couldn’t. If the army wanted him to have this therapy, he’d have it if they had to drag him kicking and screaming. Not that he could do much kicking.

  “Okay.” He bit off the word. “When you’re right, you’re right.” At least with Mary Kate, he was over the worst—that moment when she looked at him and saw the ruin he was.

  Surprise and relief flooded her face. “That’s great.” She shuffled the forms, picking up a pen. “We’ll send the van for you tomorrow—”

  “No.”

  She blinked. “But you said—”

  “I’ll do the therapy, but I’m not going anywhere. You can come here.” Conviction hardened in him. He wasn’t going out where anyone might see him. “And don’t bother telling me you don’t do that. I know you do in-home therapy.”

  “That’s true, but we have equipment at the center that you don’t have here. There’s a therapy pool, exercise bikes, weight machines—all the things you might need.” She dangled them like a lollipop in front of a recalcitrant child.

  “So we’ll improvise. That’s the deal, M.K. Only you, only here. How about it?”

  If she reacted to the high school nickname, she didn’t let it show. Obviously she’d toughened up over the years. Still, she had to be easier to deal with than those hard-nosed army docs who’d outranked him.

  “I can’t authorize something like that.”

  “Then go back to your boss and get him to authorize it. Deal?”

  She must have seen this was the best she could hope for, because she shuffled the papers together and shoved them back in her bag. Her lips were pressed firmly together, as if to hold back further argument.

  “I’ll try. I can’t speak for the director, but I’ll tell him what you said.”

  “Good.” Well, not good, but probably the best he was going to get. He watched her hurry to the door, as if afraid he’d change his mind.

  He wouldn’t. He’d drag himself through whatever torture she devised, because he couldn’t get out of it, but in the end it would amount to the same thing. Whether he was in a wheelchair or staggering around like an old man with a walker—either way, his life was over.

  The butterflies in her stomach had been replaced by the tightness in her throat that said she’d bitten off a lot more than she could chew. Mary Kate drove down Elm Street toward her parents’ house, glancing at her watch. It was too late to catch Mr. Dickson at the clinic. Her revelation of the terms Luke had put on his therapy would have to wait until tomorrow.

  How would Dickson react to that? She honestly didn’t know her new employer well enough to guess. He might be relieved to have a difficult situation resolved. Or he might think that she had overstepped her bounds and used her friendship with Luke to gain the case for herself instead of persuading him to come to the clinic.

  It’s not as if I have a choice. You understand that, don’t You? I have to take care of the children, so I have to do whatever it takes to succeed at this job.

  Sometimes she thought these running conversations with God were all that had kept her going throughout the past year. Even when she’d been venting her anger, raging at the injustice of Kenny’s death, she’d been aware of God’s daily presence. She might have been furious with Him, but she’d always known He was there.

  I’m sorry—I’m thinking too much of myself. Please, be with Luke. Let me be the instrument of Your healing for him.

  She pulled into the driveway. Shawna’s and Michael’s bicycles lay abandoned on the front lawn, but they were nowhere to be seen. She slid out, leaving her bag on the seat, and hurried toward the door. The visit to Luke had taken more time than she’d expected, so her parents had had the children for a longer time after school.

  Not that they minded. All the members of her large family were only too eager to help her since Kenny’s death. She appreciated it. She just hated needing it.

  She walked into the living room. The chintz furniture always looked a little worn and the coffee table bore the scars of the six children who’d been raised here. And now her own two would be here too much, probably, since she’d started work. Her parents deserved to relax in their retirement, not take care of her children.

  “Mom?” She crossed to the kitchen, drawn by the aroma of baking chicken. “I’m here.” She’d almost said I’m home, the phrase the Flanagan kids had always shouted when they rushed in from school or play.

  The phrase said that you belonged, that here you were important and valued and sure of your welcome. She thought again of Luke. How must it feel to him to be back in the house where he’d grown up, with his mother gone?

  Maybe similar to the way she felt now each time she came here—torn between longing for the reassurance she’d felt as a little girl in this place and feeling as if she ought to be able to handle everything on her own.

  “Mary Kate.” Her mother straightened from bending over the oven door, pushing the pan back inside. Her cheeks were rosy from the heat and her dark hair curled around her still-youthful face. “You’re just in time. Supper will be ready in fifteen minutes. I promised Michael biscuits with the chicken.”

  Siobhan Flanagan never seemed to look any older—or at least any less beautiful. Why couldn’t she have inherited her mother’s ageless beauty instead of her father’s red hair and freckles?

  “You 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.”

  “Bre
ndan 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 offered to pick up the tab for anything his son needs that the army won’t cover.”

  That startled her into silence. Certainly Phillip Marino could afford it. Several businesses in Suffolk carried the Marino name, including the largest auto dealership. But his estrangement from his former wife and the son of that marriage was almost as well-known as his car ads.

  “I don’t know that Luke would agree to that,” she said slowly. “He and his father—well, they’ve never seen much of each other.”

  “That’s hardly our concern.” Dickson’s voice sharpened. “Our focus must be on what’s best for the patient, not on the source of our payment.”

  He was only too pleased at the prospect of collecting from both the army contract and Phillip Marino. She closed her lips firmly. It was not her place to criticize his decisions. At least this meant that she had a job to do and a chance to prove herself.

  Dickson rose, signaling the end of the conversation. “Meet with the senior therapist and draw up a treatment program and a list of the necessary equipment. You have my authorization to put in whatever extra hours are needed. All right?”

  She stood, as well. “Of course.”

  What else could she say? But she was uneasily aware that she was being manipulated from both sides.

  Dickson thought he could use her to collect from both the army and Luke’s father. And Luke thought he could use her to skate through the mandated therapy with as little effort as possible.

  She wasn’t sure which she disliked more.

  “That’s as far as it will go.” Luke managed the words through gritted teeth, trying not to sound like a wimp.

  Mary Kate, kneeling on the living-room floor next to his mat, just shook her head and continued to press his leg up with both hands. Those small hands of hers were a lot stronger than he’d have expected. The dead weight of his leg had to be a strain, but she hadn’t lost that serene expression throughout the whole torturous hour.

  He clenched his fists against the mat. “I can’t do it.”

  “Sure you can.” Her tone was as gentle and reassuring as if he were a preschooler learning how to tie his shoes. “Just try a little more. We have to do better than yesterday.”

  “We?” He grunted the word. “I’m the one doing all the work.”

  That wasn’t true. He knew it, but he wasn’t about to admit that she’d been struggling as hard as he was to shove him through the exercises, with him arguing all the way.

  Well, he had a right to complain. He hadn’t asked for this. He didn’t want it. Mary Kate would have to accept the bad temper that went with forcing a man to do something he didn’t want to do.

  Something that hurt. His leg, protesting, stretched a bit farther and he couldn’t control the groan that escaped.

  “Very good.” Mary Kate eased off immediately, bringing his leg back down and massaging it with long, smooth strokes that soothed away the pain. “You went a good half inch farther today than yesterday.”r />
  He lay back on the mat Mary Kate had brought with her. Three times they’d done this, and three times she’d pushed him more than he’d have thought possible. Maybe he’d been wrong about Mary Kate being easier to manipulate than the staff at the army hospital. She was quieter, but there was iron beneath her soft exterior. He wasn’t sure what he’d expected of a grown-up Mary Kate, but she certainly wasn’t the gentle girl she’d been.

  He turned his head far enough to look at the waiting wheelchair. It might as well be forty feet high, for the effort it would take to get back into it.

  “Quite a climb,” she said, guessing his thoughts with uncanny accuracy.

  He grunted in agreement. “Hard to believe I used to climb mountains for fun.”

  He’d loved the adrenaline rush of pushing his body to the utmost as he scaled a sheer rock face, the euphoria of reaching the top and knowing he’d conquered it. Now he couldn’t even get himself into a chair.

  “Just rest a few minutes.” Mary Kate sat back on her heels as if she could use the rest, too. Her hair clung in damp ringlets to her neck, and while he watched she stretched her arms overhead as if trying to relieve taut muscles.

  Her willingness to wait for him made him perversely eager to get back into the chair. “Let’s do it.” He shoved himself up onto his elbows. “No sense in wasting the day lying around.”

  “Eager to get back to daytime television?” She maneuvered the chair into position and locked the brake before squatting down next to him.

  “Not much else to do.” He’d been mildly embarrassed when she’d come in and found him watching reruns of sixties comedies.

  “Let your friends come by and see you,” she said promptly. “Check some books out of the library. Take up a hobby.”

  “Stamp collecting?” He let her pull his arm across her shoulders. Once he’d have enjoyed being that close to her. Now it just reminded him of his own helplessness.

  “You still have a woodworking shop in the room behind the kitchen. I notice your mother never cleared that out.”