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Overview
When the three children next door are abandoned by their mother, Ivy and Nick take them in for the night. One night becomes several, and suddenly Ivy and Nick find themselves foster parents to the only African-American kids in the town of Copper Cove, Maine. As Ivy grows more attached to the children, Nick refuses to accept their eclectic household as a permanent family. Just as Ivy begins to question whether or not she wants to save her emotionally barren marriage, Nick begins to discover how much Ivy and the children mean to him. But is his change of heart too little, too late?
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781414396064 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Tyndale House Publishers |
| Publication date: | 05/16/2014 |
| Series: | The Darlings , #1 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 400 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
Read an Excerpt
All Right Here
A Darling Family Novel
By Carre Armstrong Gardner, Sarah Mason
Tyndale House Publishers, Inc.
Copyright © 2014 Carre Armstrong GardnerAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4143-8814-4
CHAPTER 1
Nick was going to hate his birthday gift. Even as she taped down the ribbon and set the wrapped package on the kitchen table, Ivy Darling was already sure of this. It was a book of Mark Strand's poetry, and although she had gotten her husband a book of poetry every birthday for the six years they had been married, he had yet to open the front cover of one of them. That did not stop her from hoping, nor from appropriating the books for her own collection after a decent waiting period. Gifts, she thought, sometimes said more about the giver than the receiver. When you gave something you loved and thought beautiful, you were inviting another person into your world. You were saying, Here is something that brings me joy. I want to share that joy with you. She couldn't help it if her husband had never been all that much into joy sharing.
To be fair, it was also important to give something the other person actually wanted. With this in mind, Ivy had bought Nick a year's membership to the Copper Cove Racquet and Fitness Club, which he would love, as well as a bathrobe, which he needed.
She would give him all three gifts when he got home from work, before they went to his parents' house for dinner. She did not want him to unwrap the things she had chosen in front of his mother, who would be hurt if her own gifts were upstaged. Nor did she want to give them in front of Nick's sisters, who would diminish them by being bored with everything.
She found the broom and swept up the scraps of wrapping paper, then emptied the dustpan into a plastic shopping bag and carried it to the back porch. The five o'clock sunlight flashed off the windows of the vacant house next door, making her squint. The place had been empty as long as she and Nick had lived here. It was a depressing sore on the pretty neighborhood: the house bleached and shabby in the summer sunshine; the grass growing high against the warped and splintered front steps, unstirred by human movement. A faded For Rent sign sagged in one window. She turned her back on it and went inside.
Ivy was sprinkling chopped nuts on top of the iced birthday cake when she heard Nick's car in the driveway. She met him at the door with the remains of the frosting and a kiss.
"What's this?" he said, frowning at the sticky bowl.
"It's your birthday icing. Did you have a good day?"
He stepped around her and set his briefcase under the hall table. "It was all right. What are you doing?"
"Making your cake. We're going to your parents' for dinner, remember?"
He ran a hand through his thick hair. "I forgot. I was hoping to go for a run. What time do we have to be there?"
"Six o'clock. I wanted you to open your presents here first."
He went through to the kitchen and began washing his hands, eyeing her over the top of his glasses. "You're not wearing that to my parents' house, are you?"
Ivy looked down at her T-shirt. It was yellow, with a picture of half a cup of coffee over the words Half Full. Below that, her faded cutoff shorts ended in ragged hems. "What's wrong with what I'm wearing?"
"You look like a slob."
She gave him a gritty smile. "You say the nicest things."
"I'm only saying it for your own sake. Don't you have anything with a little shape to it?"
"Yes, but it wouldn't be nearly as comfortable."
"Come on, Ivy."
"All right, I'll change before we go. But if we're going to be on time, you have to open your presents now."
He dried his hands and turned to survey the packages on the table. "What'd you get me?"
"A present you'll love, a present you need, and a present you'll learn to love."
"Hmmm ...," he said, pretending to think. "A Porsche, a Porsche, and a book of poetry."
"Close. Come on, you have to open them to find out."
She sat down across from him while he opened the packages. She had been right on all scores. He was indifferent to the poetry, satisfied with the bathrobe, and pleased with the gym membership.
"There's no excuse for me now," he said, pulling his wallet from his back pocket and tucking the envelope into it. "I'll be in shape before you know it." Nick, who was already in great shape, was the only person Ivy knew who thrilled to the prospect of more self-discipline.
"You look great just the way you are," she said, standing and kissing him on the top of his head. "But if you want to half kill yourself in the gym five days a week, knock yourself out. We should probably leave in fifteen minutes, unless we want to give your mother an ulcer."
"Okay. Just ... don't forget to change your clothes."
Her smile felt grittier this time but she did as he said, reminding herself that he was only trying to protect her from his mother, who had a finely tuned radar for her daughter-in-law's every shortcoming, fashion or otherwise.
* * *
Nick's parents lived across town, never a long drive even at the time of day considered rush hour in bigger cities. For three-quarters of the year, Copper Cove was small even by Maine standards so that now, in June, when the tourist season had filled the beach houses and hotels along the water, the town still did not feel crowded. Cars moved lazily along High Street, pulling in at Cumberland Farms for gas and at Blue Yew Pizza or Salt Flats Seafood for supper. Traffic, Ivy was sometimes surprised to realize, was just not something you ever thought about here.
At Nick's parents' house, his sister Tiffany met them at the door. "Oh, it's you."
"We thought we might show up," Ivy said. "You know, since it's Nick's birthday party and all."
"Happy birthday," Tiffany said grudgingly. "Everyone else is already here. The guys are watching the Red Sox game with Daddy." She aimed this bit of news at Nick. "And Mumma's in the kitchen," she added, a clear hint that Ivy should join her mother-in-law there and not join her sisters- in-1 aw at whatever they were doing.
They followed Tiffany through to the kitchen, where Nick's mother, Ruby, was emptying fish market bags into the sink.
"Oh, wow, lobster," Ivy said. "Thanks for having a birthday, Nick."
"Nicholas!" cried his mother, turning from the sink and drying her hands on a towel. "Happy birthday, sweetheart. Thirty-two years old!" She tipped her cheek up for a kiss, smoothed down the sleeves of his shirt, and straightened his collar. Ivy had an image of a plump, pretty wasp buzzing around a pie at a picnic.
She set her cake carrier on the sideboard. "I brought the cake."
"Wonderful." Ruby brushed imaginary lint from Nick's shirtfront. "What kind is it?"
"Carrot cake with cream cheese frosting."
Ruby turned from Nick and eyed the cake as though Ivy had said it was made of sand and seaweed. "Oh ...," she faltered. "I was afraid one cake wouldn't be enough for all of us, so I did ask Jessica to make a cheesecake to go along with it." She smiled damply at her son. "You know how Nick loves cheesecake."
Ivy felt her nostrils flare. As a matter of fact, Nick did not love cheesecake. He preferred carrot cake. It had been one of life's long lessons, however, that objection was always futile with her mother-in-law. She felt her mouth twitch in a rictus grin. "Can I help with dinner?" she managed to choke out.
"You might set the table. We'll use the good china. The cloth is on the ironing board in the laundry room. You'll have to put the leaves in the table, but Nick can do that for you."
Nick trotted off to find the extra leaves and Ivy, having retrieved the tablecloth, began counting out forks and knives from the sideboard. The familiar task calmed her. "It's quiet around here," she observed as her mother-in-law added salt to two enormous canners full of hot water on the stove. "Where is everyone?"
"The men are watching television, and the girls are looking at Jessica's new scrapbook."
Nick had three sisters. His family, the Masons, and hers, the Darlings, had always belonged to the same church. In her growing-up years, none of Nick's sisters had seemed to object to Ivy as long as she had been just another girl in youth group. But from the moment Nick had brought her home as his girlfriend, Jessica, Angela, and Tiffany had circled like a pack of she-wolves guarding their kill. Together, they presented a solid, hostile wall designed to keep Ivy on the outside. They whispered with their heads together when she was in the house and stopped talking when she came into a room. They planned sisters' shopping trips in front of Ivy and did not invite her to come along. When Nick and Ivy were engaged and a family friend hinted that the groom's sisters might want to throw the bride a shower, they'd been offended and told Ivy so, with the greatest of umbrage.
Ivy liked people—all kinds of people—and in general, people liked her back. She was unused to having her friendliness met with such stubborn, protracted rejection, and at first she had been bewildered by Nick's sisters' antagonism. "They hate me for no reason," she had once wailed to her own twin sister, Laura. "I can't understand it. It's like being in eighth grade all over again." By the time she and Nick had been married a year, however, she was wiser. Nick's mother doted on him, and this was at the root of her daughters' treatment of Ivy. Nick's sisters were not horrible to her because of anything she personally had done; they simply resented Nick for being their mother's favorite and were punishing Ivy for being his wife. It was a situation Ivy had gotten used to.
More or less.
When the lobsters were ready, Ruby sent her to call the family to the table. She found Jessica, Angela, and Tiffany upstairs, in Angela's old bedroom, looking at what appeared to be paint chips from a hardware store. When they saw Ivy, they stopped talking.
"Yes?" said Angela, who was Nick's middle sister, tucking the paint chips under one leg.
"Your mother says come to the table." She would not give them the satisfaction of being asked what they were doing.
"Thank you, Ivy. Tell Mother we'll be there in a moment." Angela stared at her until she took the hint and went back downstairs to the kitchen.
Nick's father, Harry, had muttered a long, rambling grace and they were all cracking their lobster claws when Angela rapped her fork against her water goblet. "Everybody! Everybody," she called, half-rising from her chair. "Vincent and I have an announcement to make."
"Angela, that goblet is crystal," her mother protested.
"Well, it's an important announcement, Mother."
Some blessed instinct of self-preservation warned Ivy of what Angela was about to say and gave her a heartbeat of time to compose herself for it.
"Vincent and I—" Angela looked around the table in delight—"are pregnant!"
It was evident that Jessica and Tiffany already knew, but that to the rest of them, it was a complete surprise.
"And here's the best part," Angela said, looking at Vincent and gripping his hand atop the tablecloth. "We're having the baby at Christmas! My due date is the twenty-fourth, but the doctor says if I haven't had it by then, he'll induce me so the baby can be born on Christmas Day. Won't that be so much fun?"
"Tell them how you planned it, Ange!" Tiffany said.
Angela looked around, ready to implode with pride. "Okay, ready for this? We knew we wanted to have the baby at Christmas, right? Because ... so meaningful. Like Jesus. And obviously that meant we would need to get pregnant in March. But I didn't want to get really gross and fat while I was pregnant. So last January I went on this diet—"
"I remember," said Ruby, frowning. "I didn't approve. You're thin enough as it is."
"Right." Angela snorted. "I thought so too, because that's what everybody tells me? But then I thought, Just wait until nine months from now. So I went on this diet and got down to a size four, which was my goal, and then we got pregnant. Now it's just gotten warm enough to go to the beach, and ... look!" She stood up and turned sideways, smoothing her T-shirt down over her stomach, and Ivy saw what she had missed before. A small but very definite baby bump.
"So ... showing, right? But still cute!" Angela beamed around at them.
Ivy stared back. She felt powerless over her own facial expression and could only hope she didn't actually look as though she wanted to vomit all over her lobster tail.
Angela was impervious to disapproval. She bubbled on. "You should see my maternity swimsuit. It's so cute! And by having the baby in December, I'll totally have time to get back in shape by next beach season!"
Her husband, Vincent, a caustic CPA who sipped black coffee as incessantly as most people breathe oxygen, said, "Tell them about the nursery." It turned out that the paint chips Angela and her sisters had been looking at were for the nursery, which would be done in a Beatrix Potter theme....
It went on and on. The problem with Angela and Vincent reproducing, Ivy thought bitterly, was that they would create another person every bit as narrow and self-absorbed as themselves. Sometimes the world—or at least Nick's family—did not seem large enough to hold another person like that.
Nick had little to say on the drive home.
"The woman from Family Makers e-mailed me yesterday," Ivy said at last, breaking the silence. "She asked if we would consider foreign adoption." She looked at her hands but watched Nick from the corner of her eye.
He kept his own eyes on the road and did not answer her.
Which, she reflected, her heart lying in her chest as cold and heavy as one of Ruby's lobsters, was more or less an answer in itself.
* * *
It had been an especially good summer so far, with hot blue days subsiding to brief rain showers nearly every evening, and the garden showed it. The colors were reaching toward their peak, an untidy riot of blossom, which was how Ivy loved it. Along the split-rail fence, the red bee balm and pink tall phlox clashed in a kind of reckless ecstasy. Black-eyed Susans nodded in some faint, unfelt breeze—rogue wildflowers among the more genteel daylilies, gayfeather, and baby's breath. In front of these, the cheery yellow cinquefoil bush rustled and the hostas waved their pale-purple arms in greeting.
The afternoon was alive with the hum and drone of insects hidden in the tall grasses beyond the flower bed. In the clean, baking heat, the brilliance of her garden was as refreshing as a glass of cold water. Ivy had planted all of it and knew each of the flowers by heart, like old and well-loved friends.
Her sister Sephy was finally home from college and had called to say she was coming over in the afternoon. Sephy had stayed on in Ohio an extra month to take a summer school course and to babysit some professor's kids, and Ivy had missed her.
Ivy was up to her elbows in an azalea bush when the familiar dark-green Corolla pulled into the driveway. She shaded her eyes with a gloved hand, extracted herself from the bush, and hurried over.
"Sephy! How was the babysitting?"
Her red-haired younger sister got out of the car with some difficulty and hugged her—a soft, comforting hug with no thought of the dirt Ivy was undoubtedly leaving on her clothes. "Fine, thanks. And it was nannying, if you please, not babysitting."
"Oh, excuse me. What's the difference?"
"You get paid more for nannying. And you get to go to Cedar Point with the family."
"Sounds like a good gig. How about an iced coffee?"
"It's the only reason I came over."
They went into the house, and Sephy found the pitcher of coffee in the refrigerator while Ivy washed her hands. "Are you exhausted?" Ivy asked over the sound of the running water.
"Completely. I worked on Tuesday and took my last exam. On Wednesday I drove halfway home and spent the night with a friend in Rochester. I drove the rest of the way yesterday. Kids, exams, then eight hours in the car each day. It's been a long week." She yawned. "Are those brownies?"
"Help yourself." Ivy opened the plastic container and handed it to her. "What are your summer plans?"
Sephy ticked them off on her fingers: "I'm taking two classes online—s tatistics and nursing management; I'm working as a CNA at the hospital; and for the next four weeks, I'm giving piano and voice lessons for the youth program in Quahog."
"Wow, no rest for the wicked. Why are you taking summer classes?"
Sephy bit into a brownie and rolled her eyes in bliss. "They're about half the price if I take them online, for one thing," she said around a mouthful of chocolate. "For another, it'll loosen up my schedule next year. Not much, but a little. They say the two years of clinicals are brutal, so I may as well get ahead if I can."
"Any thoughts about what you want to do after graduation? I mean, I know it's still two years off...."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from All Right Here by Carre Armstrong Gardner, Sarah Mason. Copyright © 2014 Carre Armstrong Gardner. Excerpted by permission of Tyndale House Publishers, Inc..
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