The Warmth of the Day

Her finger left my lips to be replaced by her lips. "That's important to me." Her eyes welled up before she added, "Very important to me."

*******

Three years later...

The question and answer session lasted longer than usual, all good questions I would add. My old professor had primed his class ready for me to turn up, and as he brought the proceedings to an end we all seemed to collectively breathe out. A lot of those young men and women would go far.

Her voice cut through the general noise of us all putting things away. "Mr. Bennett, thank you for your time today, but since nothing you say has any relevance to today's market since you now live the life of a recluse. Is there any reason we should even be listening to your lecture?"

The collective gasp came from everyone in the room. My professor placed his hand on my arm, but my attention was still on the woman standing her ground three tiers back and five seats to the left of centre of the isle, the two students on either side of her moved their seats further away. Most stopped packing books and notepads away, others sat back down waiting to see what happened next as silence still dominated the room.

I knew I had to say something. "I come from an era of been there done that. My being here, giving you all advice is to show you all what you can achieve by listening to this man, not me."

My professor smiled and I believed he even blushed.

"But you sold out, your wife got sick and you sold your company to the man. Did anyone in your employ at the time have a say in you selling up and running for cover?"

A couple of students in my line of sight winced, the two students either side of this woman got up and sat away from her, leaving their open books still on the desk. This time it was my turn to hold onto my professor's sleeve when I felt him move to challenge this woman. He whispered the name 'Andrea Lawrence,' I think it was his attempt to level the field a bit.

Time may heal all wounds, and to a point it was true, but this woman was intent on ripping at a wound that had all but healed. The tiny hand that slid into mine instantly poured cold water over the venom I had intended for Andrea. Looking down and into the eyes of the second love of my life was easy; her smile made my heart beat ever so slightly faster.

Lifting Maddie into my arms I walked around the podium and sat her on the edge of the adjacent desk, the peck on the cheek when I did was an added bonus, the heart warming smile mirrored her mothers when I sat on the edge of the desk next to her, my arm crept around her waist to keep her safe.

I told the whole class of Lisa and our first meeting in this very room, the introductions from my professor and the summer internship that eventually became a marriage. I held nothing back about the chemo treatment, and even paused my story a moment to remind every person in that room to get checked and often.

"Lisa and I were still young and held the attitude of youth. That cancer only happened to old people. It doesn't so get checked regularly."

My impromptu speech paused for a moment as I took in every person sitting in that class. My plea to each and every one of them was real. No one should have to go through what we went through. Not if it meant that loosing someone like Lisa. My gaze moved to Andrea and I paused, hoping that she would have understood. When I stared at the munchkin perched on the desk next to me, she smiled because she knew she was next.

"My first meeting with this little angel was when her momma crashed her car into my fence and destroyed the flowerbeds."

I'm sure half the class heard the giggle behind me. She had sat at the back of the class in the only place that shadows formed. Clare had picked this place for her and our daughter, pointing to the podium before telling my professor and me that was my place in this building.

Maddie was the balm that smoothed the ruffled feathers of both adults. I'm sure that if she was older she would have just banged our heads together and told us to get on with it. It sure would have saved us a year of fighting the inevitable. My daughter was now a very accomplished horse rider, and we both thought it helped that her horse loved her as much as we did.

I even shared our wedding day with the class, something that even Clare wasn't expecting, and all this while staring at Andrea as she glared right back at me.

"Amongst the guest were every member of my old company and their own families except one, your father, Andrea. Why was that?"

All eyes were now on the woman as her outburst became clear.

"Because he left us, divorced mom and married some whore from the company you sold yours to."

"And that makes it my fault?"

The hate on Andrea's face was total; she even placed her hands on the desk in front of her to lessen that distance between us. "Of course it's your fucking fault. So what if your wife was dying, at least my family was still a family."

Two women grabbed the sleeves of the two men next to them; the looks on both men's faces said so much. The women pulled them back to their seats, one couple was close enough for me to hear the girl tell her partner that this wasn't his fight. She was right, of course, and kept my own feelings neutral. Maddie pulled at my sleeve, the happy face of my daughter now looked so sad. It was also the emotional salve needed to calm my own thoughts on the matter and not turn this into a shouting match.

Whether she had set out to try and verbally hurt me or to show me just how much pain she was in only highlighted the depths she would go to prove that very thought.

"Daddy that lady said a rude word." Maddie's voice, although that of an innocent child of seven, cut through the room and slammed straight into Andrea.

It seemed to also pull her back from the precipice where she had placed herself. As sanity returned and her eyes scanned the room, she finally noticed everyone watching her. We also watched as she burst into tears and ran from the room. The class already dismissed before Andrea's outburst, finished packing and left. Clare came and wrapped her arm around mine, the six months worth of baby bump limiting her ability to get too close.

Professor Saunders stepped in front of my line of sight of the exit Andrea left through. "I'm sorry, Alex, I'll deal with her."

Feeling my wife tense around me made me realize what my professor meant.

"No. let it be. That poor girl is still hurting, if this helped her then so be it but I don't want any action taken against her by the college."

My professor half smiled and nodded his head. With that, I grabbed my munchkin from her perch, and with my wife's hand in the other we left my college and headed for home.

*******

Clare didn't seem to follow her own advice: the reporter in her was now mixed in with the wife in her and that spelt answers to questions. It took a week for Clare to corner me about our encounter at my old college. It seems Andrea Lawrence didn't fare to well with the divorce. Daddy was the apple of her eye, and then he was the destroyer of marriages. The newlyweds moved across the country, leaving Andrea and her mother to pick up the pieces in their own relationship.

When my wife finished talking I just sat and waited. It was Clare fidgeting in her seat that proved to me she was done.

"Clare, she's a man hater. Nothing I do or say now will ever change that. You heard her; it's all my fault, not the man who couldn't keep his own dick in his pants."

My wife nodded and agreed with me, and that alone made me look closely at her. This was a trap, it had to be there is no way she would agree with me so quickly.

"I agree with everything you say, but it didn't stop me wanting to reach out to her."

My face said it all, but I made sure she knew my feelings on this. "But you haven't, have you? This is none of our business, remember?"

Clare quickly shook her head that she hadn't and my relief must have been self evident.

"I needed for you to agree first."

That's when I left my chair and stood over her. In defiance, she stood to make eye contact. The words we used after that made us both put aside our marriage while this conversation lasted. I'm not saying our marriage wouldn't have survived, but it sure would have taken us some time to get it back. I quickly learned that starting any conversation with my wife by using the words 'are you out of your fucking mind?' caused her to loose it as well.

The rise in voice, or shouting to put it more honestly, just increased to the point that Isabel came rushing into the room expecting us to be exchanging blows. She listened and quickly figured the rest out before agreeing with everything that Clare was saying.

"But it's none of our business. So what if her father was a dick and chose to stick it in any female who didn't shut him down straightaway? He wasn't like that when I knew him."

Clare changed tactics after that, she moved in close and held me tight. "We have to do something; her attack on you that day shows just how close this has driven her to the edge."

I tried again. "Please, let this go."

Feeling her head shake against my chest let me know, long before she chose her words.

"I can't, we can't. We must break this cycle before the damage is done and the baggage she carries eventually devours her."

My wife, she had such a way with words.

In the end I used the only argument I had left. "I made a promise to you that I wouldn't interfere in other people lives ever again."

She smiled at me. Clare even tilted her head ever so slightly before saying. "That was then, this is now. Her own actions showed us all just how close she is to the edge."

Her eyes filled up and she rested against my shoulder as Clare cried in sadness for the woman who so needed our help. "Find a way, Alex, please."

*******

The topic of Andrea Lawrence came off the table for a couple of days. Clare found me sitting on the chair out on the porch when she got back home from the paper. We both watched Maddie cantering around the field on her horse while Charlie watched from the fence-line, chipping in with comments about her posture and how she held the reins. To both Clare and me, it looked like poetry in motion and we continued to watch the love both Maddie and her horse had for each other.

After a while I opened the conversation. "I got a call from Don. He emailed me a preliminary report. He's got his man digging further, but what he's pulling out of the ground so far isn't good. The marriage to number two lasted a year before she caught him cheating on her he's now living with mistake number three and I suspect that's not going to make it to the church."

"What about Andrea?"

I smiled and held my wife just a little tighter.

"Her outburst got to the deans ear, he hauled her in but Professor Jacobs went with her and backed her up. He handed the Dean the letter I emailed him confirming I didn't want any action taken against Andrea Lawrence whatsoever."

"So she dodged the bullet?"

"For the most part, yes, the Dean gave her a verbal warning about her behavior to any and all guest speakers coming to the college and left it at that. It won't go on her record, and in return I'm down to guest speak twice more this year."

I managed an exasperated tone for the back end of that statement, Clare giggled and hugged me right back.

"While I was at it, I made a couple of calls. Kerry was my go-to girl at the office. She retired not long after I sold the company. To be honest, she only worked for me to keep herself busy since her husband earned wheelbarrow loads of money in the city and she was bored sitting at home. I asked her about Tony Lawrence and she told me that he was fine while he worked for me, but towards the end she heard rumors that some of the girls had to shut him down."

I thought it was best not to mention too many details of my conversation with my ex- administrator, but our conversation was far longer than those few details. I had asked Kerry why there was never any mention of this to me; Kerry basically told me that was her job, not mine. When she heard from the girls that he was making comments that were not only making the women at work uncomfortable but were also downright sexual in nature, Kerry hauled him into her office and verbally reamed him a new one.

When Kerry reminded me of when this meeting took place, I could see why she took this on her own shoulders. Lisa was already going through chemo for her cancer and, of course, my attention was on my wife. Kerry was my right arm and had been holding the company together since I had already dropped the ball, so to speak. Kerry and two others in the company took the reins over from me while my world fell apart. Informing me about the lack of social skills of Mr. Lawrence was within her remit, and she chose not to inform me. I could understand her reasoning and of course, some weeks later when I sold the company the conversation would have been redundant.

To Andrea Lawrence, her father may have walked on water, but even as far back as Kerry reminding him of his need to be civil around the female workforce, he was already showing his true colors. In a sense I may have even done him a favor. When my company merged with a bigger company he now looked on it at a fresh pool of talent to go after, and with Kerry now retired and out of the picture as well, he was effectively let off the hook to explore said pool.

*******

I held my wife tighter to me. What I was about to say was foreign to me when I said. "I can't fix this, either with stealth or magic. Tony Lawrence was a womanizer by his own choice; he held his original marriage together with nothing more than smoke and mirrors."

"Then tell Andrea that."

She must have felt me stiffen, the shake of my head soon followed. "I can't."

"Sometimes we have no choice. We both know now that you can't scheme a way out of this, so that leaves only one option: the brutal facts.

It was times like those that I came to realize why I loved this woman so much. She was right, of course, and nothing I could think of was ever going to work. Well, short of buying her a plane ticket to visit her father so she could find out first hand just how low he had become. To do that meant she would have no support network around her when reality finally grabbed hold and shook her.

It surprised me that she accepted Clare's invitation to join us at the ranch for the weekend a month later. By then I had Don's PI's report, as well. My only thought when I finished reading it was that it would totally destroy Andrea if she ever read it, even my wife agreed with me.

*******

Andrea Lawrence parked her car and paused before getting out. I was standing at the door with nothing more than the fly-screen and the distance of her car between me and her. The bravado of our last conversation still etched on her face, although I suspected that the slightest breeze could tear it from her features. Clare shouldered me out of the way as she mumbled 'men,' and met Andrea mid-way between the house and her car.

Both hugged, and with one arm in the other they walked towards the house, I held the door open as my wife again recited how we had met. Both looked back at the flowerbed and giggled between themselves. When the tow truck pulled Clare's car back onto the road, the tires left deep furrows in the flowerbed and across the grass back to curbside. Charlie had replaced the flowers that didn't make it with grass, so now two lanes of perfectly mowed grass cut straight through the flowerbed and stopped at the tree that still sheltered the flowers from the harshest of the afternoon sun.

Charlie never did manage to fix that fence line. When I asked him once, he simply shrugged his shoulders, grinned and said why bother fixing it, they both managed to get in anyway. It took me a while, and even to this day, I smile when I did finally figure out what he meant.

Both Andrea and Clare sat in the day- room, I wandered into the kitchen as Isabel fixed us all cold drinks. When I looked out the window at the paddocks, Charlie and little Maddie were on horses and heading out to circle the grounds. We all knew this wasn't going to be a conversation for little ears to catch hold of, so why not let her do something she enjoyed. As I helped Isabel carry the drinks in, the last of our guests pulled onto the drive.

Kerry leaned in for a hug when I opened the door. "Are you ready for this?" Was her only question when we parted.

"Unfortunately, my dentist couldn't fit me in for root canal work at such short notice, so it seems I have little choice."

She was still smiling when I introduced her to our guest. When Kerry explained to Andrea that she was my admin girl for my old company, our guest lost some of her smile. It only took her ten minutes into their conversation, for her to leap from her chair and call Kerry a liar. Kerry simply pulled her over-sized bag around to her feet and pulled out a file to silence out guest. We could all see she didn't want to touch the file in Kerry's hand, and in the end she placed it on the coffee table in front of Andrea.

Over the next two hours, both Clare and Kerry would drip feed information to Andrea about her father. Her dad was on such a high pedestal in her mind, it was only the steady feed of information about him that brought him back to earth. It was only then that Andrea could muster the courage to read the file still sitting on the coffee table in front of her. Clare added a box of tissues to the table some minutes later.

*******

Then my whole world went sideways.

Clare suddenly grasped hold of the arms of her chair and said. "Oh my."

We all looked over towards her, but her gaze was on her lap. When her head came up and her eyes met mine, her smile brought the sunlight into the house.

"Honey, you need to pull the suitcase out of the closet, I've just had my first contraction."

We had rehearsed what to do next what must have been a thousand times, so much so that I threatened to let Charlie take her if we had to rehearse this one more time. I just sat there, in shock, hell I would have had trouble remembering my own name if I had been asked. It was Andrea that leapt from her own chair and helped my wife to her feet.

She looked at me and shouted, "Suitcase, you idiot."

I believe that was all the momentum I needed. For the next few minutes rehearsed never got a look-in as we placed Clare into the car and I drove us to the hospital. Some hosts we were.

Our baby seemed to want to take it's time after we got there. The little thing put Clare through ever increasing and more powerful contraction, not to mention repeated reminders that I was a bastard and this was all my fault.

At three fifteen on June twenty-first, Katie Isabel Bennett screamed her way into the world and welded herself to both our hearts. Once one very exhausted mother and our daughter were put to bed, I was told to go home and rest. It was also then I remembered we had houseguests, whom we had left in such short notice.

Andrea's car was still on the drive. I knew Isabel would have sorted the logistics since we already had a room made-up for her. I made it to the kitchen and was already in the process of making a coffee when Isabel walked in.

"A very healthy baby girl," I stated before she could ask.

Isabel waited for more, as I continued to make coffee. "We're all going to see them tomorrow anyway, so you women folk can talk the finer details amongst yourselves."

That woman didn't loose her cool all that often, but she was about to go for it right there and then, until she see me smile, pull my phone out and I showed her the pictures. All those harsh words she was about to conjure up seemed to evaporate as soon as she held my phone and flicked through the twenty odd pictures I had. The oohs and aahs seemed to alternate between each picture.