Promise Me by Richard Paul Evans Read Free Book Online Page B

bed. I don’t think it was coincidence that his confession was the start of his great decline. He lived for just three and a half weeks more and I cared for him through it all. It wasn’t easy. I’m neither a doormat nor a saint. I stayed with him because of Charlotte. She was still sick, complaining every few days of a stomachache, no doubt made worse by her fear and anxiety over what was happening to her dad. I wasn’t about to punish her for the sins of her father. Besides, Marc had nowhere else to go, and regardless of how much I’d been hurt, I couldn’t live with my daughter’s father dying alone, even though more than once I wished I could have.
    On the third day of October the hospice workers started their vigil. My husband, they told me, was actively dying (which sounded to me like an oxymoron). I had no doubt that Marc was sorry for what he’d done, sorry for his betrayal, even more sorry, I think, that he had told me. Those were his last words to me, the saddest last words one could leave this world with: “I’m sorry.”
    A week later, on October 10, he passed quietly in the night. Charlotte cried for her father the entire next day and every day after for the next two weeks. By then my heart already felt like it had died a hundred times over.
    Marc had a small life insurance policy, only $25,000, which wasn’t enough to do much more than cover his medical deductibles and funeral expenses and to catch up on the bills that had piled up since we had both stopped working.
    That is where Charlotte and I were as the year came to a close. Winter came again and the days shortened and seemed darker and colder than ever before.
    Then the holiday season crept upon us. I did not welcome it. I was feeling anything but festive, anything but believing. I was trustless of life and men. I would say that I was without faith, but no one is truly faithless; they just have faith in the wrong things: fear and defeat.
    Then, when I least expected anything new in my life, he came.

I have found that the most significant experiences of our lives rarely come when we’re expecting them and oftentimes when we’re not even paying attention.
    Beth Cardall’s Diary
    The first time I saw
him
was on Christmas Day, 1989. As the Bing Crosby song had it, it was a white Christmas. Actually, more of a
white-out
Christmas. Nearly thirty inches of heavy snow had fallen during the night, and it was still falling, with brisk winds sculpting the snow along the roadsides into four-foot-high curled drifts that looked like frozen ocean waves. The radio said that more than five thousand homes in the city had lost electricity. Charlotte and I were among the fortunate who still had power and a cozy fire in our wood-burning stove.
    Our Christmas tree looked like I felt inside: small, sparse and dry, with too few lights. Truthfully, I felt ugly, inside and out. I had been pretty once, or at least that seemed to be the general consensus, but not so much lately. I felt worn-out and broken, like an old running shoe.
Through the ringer
, my mother used to say. It sounds silly to me now, but I was only twenty-eight and I already felt old. I was much too young to feel that old.
    Had I been alone I probably would have just ignored the season, but Charlotte really needed the holiday and Roxanne wouldn’t have let me off that easy. We celebrated ThanksgivingDay with Roxanne and her family. The next Saturday, in a quest to capture the spirit, Charlotte and I made Christmas tree ornaments. We dipped walnuts in Elmer’s glue and glitter and tied them with yarn. We also cut snowflakes from paper.
    Money was tight, but I stretched to get Charlotte what she wanted, a Skip-It, a set of
Baby-sitters Club
books and her big present, an American Girl doll. She squealed when she opened the package with the doll.
    â€œLook, Mom, what Santa brought!”
    â€œShe’s beautiful. What’s her