“Well, they did get that right.” She smirked. “But not a whole lot else.”
“Damn,” he muttered again. “Where’s your son now?”
“Over at his friend’s.” She had answered absentmindedly. Now she studied him more intently. “And why are you in town? You never did answer me.”
He motioned at the steps. “May I sit?”
Immediately she backed up, so there was room for two. “Go ahead.”
He sat down and explained about the War Dog.
“So you got your dream to join the navy.”
“I really did. And then I got badly injured in an accident, and I’m now no longer in the navy.”
She froze. “Oh, my God, are you hurt?”
“Well, I’m not the same, not as whole as I was before, but I’m okay.”
“But not capable of doing your job in the navy?” she asked curiously.
“Not the kind of job I was doing, and I didn’t want the kind of job I was capable of doing at the time. So I discharged out.”
“And now what?”
“Well, I haven’t been out of rehab very long. I was helping this one group in New Mexico, and then this job came up to find the dog, for which I was more than happy to get out of town for a bit.”
“Why?”
“I just needed a break. Doing lots of thinking about my life and what I want to do with it and how different it is to be here compared to where I thought I’d be at this point.”
“Did you ever get married, have kids?”
“Nope, I didn’t.” He paused, then chuckled. “I understand Daniel has two boys and a third child on the way through.” A big grin filled his face.
She laughed. “Yes, I see him every once in a while. I see his wife more often than not.”
“I couldn’t believe it when he told me who he’d married.” Harley shook his head. “She was always the head of the class.”
“She still is. He probably didn’t tell you that she is a doctor.” Harley stared at her in shock. “After medical school she came home, and that’s when the two of them got together.”
“Wow. Well, good for both of them. And you?” he asked. “Did you ever get married, have any other children?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Are you kidding? I’m the infamous one with a bad rep in town. I got a ton of invitations, but you can bet they weren’t the kind I wanted to accept. Never been to a party since.”
“I’m sorry. That’s really shitty.”
“Not only shitty but, after my father died and my mother became sick, it was, … then I became a single parent to two kids. It’s like your entire adult life is defined by all those events.” She sighed the sigh of a worn-out parent. “I couldn’t go out with friends. I didn’t have babysitters because somebody had to look after not only Mom but my son.” She shook her head. “This has been my life. Very quiet and boring.”
“And I’m sorry for that too. You were hoping to travel and to see the world.”
“Yeah, that died a quick death with my pregnancy.”
Harley was happy that at least there was no bitterness against her son in her voice. “Do you have any idea who it is who did this to you?”
She shook her head. “A lot of people were at the party, when I got there.” She shrugged. “It could have been anyone.”
“Anybody else end up pregnant after that?”
She looked at him in surprise. “I didn’t even think of that. I don’t know. I didn’t have a whole lot of girlfriends back then, what with my parents keeping me fairly isolated—allowing only the people who they thought were worthy.”
“And that’s a challenge, isn’t it?” he murmured. “Because you always felt like you had nobody.”
“Of course I felt like that. They didn’t let me have sleepovers. They didn’t let me go on trips with anybody else—only the church-approved ones that they allowed me to go on. And then, when I did go someplace, it was on my own, mostly out of rebellion and hurt because you’d left me,” she explained. “And I ended up pregnant.”
“And for that alone your father would have been incredibly angry.”
“I don’t know if he was angry so much as disappointed. It was very difficult to tell him. As it was, I held off telling them anything, and then more or less threw it in their faces when we were having an argument.”
“Even to have argued with them, that’s something you would never have done before.”
“I changed a lot over that. I pretty well knew what had happened immediately when I woke up the next morning, but again I was ashamed and didn’t know who to turn to, didn’t have a support system, and sure as heck wouldn’t go to the hospital or the authorities on my own before all that. Even afterward, facing it alone, I didn’t figure the authorities would even listen to me, and when I told them, and they proved to me that they weren’t listening …” She shook her head for a long moment. “So I just hid it all and became a bit of a recluse. It wasn’t an easy time.”
“No, of course not,” Harley was thinking about all Jasmine had been through in such a short time frame. “To lose me, to find out you’re pregnant, to lose your father, and then to have your mother in this deteriorating condition, hats off to you for even keeping your sanity.”
“Did I say I was sane?” she asked calmly.
He chuckled. “You still have the same dry wit.”
“Other than my son, it’s about all I have.” She gave a heavy sigh. She looked at him. “We’re a hell of a pair.”
“Well, it’s a case of life gives us something that we weren’t expecting. And it’s up to us to try to make the most of it.”
“Yeah, I don’t feel very philosophical these days.”
“Did you ever do any secondary education, training, anything?”
“Nope, I just had courses in real life,” she replied, with a touch of bitterness.
“Understood. Just the death of your father would have been tough.”
“And I had to deal with Mother after that. Since then, it’s been dealing with medical bills, trying to keep the bills paid, wondering why my father hadn’t set things up better, and all that good stuff.”
“I thought you guys were well off?”
“No, apparently they took in foster kids, like you, to pay the bills.” He stopped and stared. She nodded. “I know. It wasn’t exactly the high and mighty role that Dad proclaimed he was doing it for.”
“Interesting. He had a good job. He was an accountant.”
“Yes, but for a small company that couldn’t afford to pay him more, and apparently my father didn’t do well with change so didn’t want to change companies.”
“I’m sorry.” He frowned. “Did you ever get any other foster kids after I left?”
“No, and it was one of the things that my dad was kind of bitter about because he figured that, at least if I were a foster kid, or they had taken in my son as a foster, as they did take him in obviously,” she noted, “Dad would have got paid for him.”