Promise Me A Rainbow Read Free Page B

R’s?”
    “They don’t want me to teach them the three R’s. Pat Bauer is going to do that. Believe it or not, they want me to teach them what they really need to know—how to take care of themselves while they’re pregnant and how to take care of their babies.” She could do that whether she’d had one of her own or not.
    She turned away as the kettle whistled sharply, lifting it off the burner and handing him the jar of coffee and a cup and spoon. There was a time when she would have fixed the coffee for him herself.
    “Pat’s going to come in half days for the academics. The rest of the time I’m going to do prenatal nutrition, early childhood development, how to buy baby food, and anything else I think might help—” She stopped because he was again staring at her. “I like it and I’m good at it, Jonathan.” She didn’t tell him that she’d taken a major pay cut to get the job, or that she’d worked as a volunteer for nearly a month with no pay at all until the program for pregnant students had been funded.
    “I know you are. I know how involved you get. It’s one of the things I always liked about you. Pour the hot water, will you? Who held your hand every time you were burned out?”
    You did, she thought, but she didn’t say it; she poured. It was true. He had held her hand all the times when she couldn’t deal firsthand with death and dying and disease anymore. It was only when she hadn’t been able to give him a child that he wasn’t there for her.
    “I thought Pat was too sick to work,” he said.
    “She’s managing the half days all right.”
    “Are you . . . sure this is the right thing for you to be doing?” he asked when she sat down at the table.
    “The right thing? Because I couldn’t have a child of my own?”
    He seemed not to mind her candor. “It’s bound to remind you.”
    “Jonathan, everything reminds me.”
    Especially you, she thought, but she didn’t say that, either. “Or it did,” she qualified, because she didn’t want to go through the guilt and the remorse again, not when she had no inkling who should forgive whom and for what. She got up from the table. She was tired of being civil and, whatever this visit was about, she had had enough of it. She wanted him to go.
    “Catherine, you know I’ll always care about you, don’t you? You know that if you ever need anything, you can ask me.” He reached toward her and would have touched her if she hadn’t stepped away.
    She looked into his eyes, thinking only of Pat Bauer, who was seriously ill and forced to depend upon an estranged husband for help, a husband who had made it clear that he was in love with another woman. She had no intention of becoming another Pat Bauer.
    “What’s wrong?” she said.
    “Nothing’s wrong. I just wanted to make sure you know that you can count on me if you ever needed . . . things.”
    “Why would you want me to know that? What sort of things?”
    “Catherine, you really know how to take a man’s goodwill and shove it down his throat, don’t you? I just want things settled between us. I just want—I have to go,” he said abruptly. He got up from the table, leaving the coffee he’d wanted steaming and undrunk.
    “Are you going to tell me what this visit is all about or not?” she said, following him into the living room.
    “It’s not about anything. I just wanted to see how you were.”
    “Bullcrap,” she said mildly. She was barren, not stupid. “You’ve been leaving since you got here. And since I didn’t initiate this visit, it’s got to be something with you. So what is it?”
    “Catherine, it’s . . . nothing.”
    “You don’t come out into the rain for ‘nothing,’ Jonathan. You stay at home by the fire with your feet up and a copy of The Wall Street Journal .”
    “You think you’ve got my number, don’t you?”
    “I think you’re changing the subject. If you need a loan, you’ve come to the wrong place.”
    “I don’t need a