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  Baby Girl

  Memory House Series

  Book Four

  BETTE LEE CROSBY

  A Free Gift…

  Welcome to Burnsville, a fictional town in Virginia. If you’d like to know more about the characters in this and several of Bette Lee Crosby’s other novels, CLICK HERE to download a free copy of “Stories”… and sign up to receive Bette’s monthly newsletter, Words, Wit & Wisdom.

  Books by Bette Lee Crosby

  The Memory House Series

  Memory House

  The Loft

  What the Heart Remembers

  Baby Girl

  Silver Threads

  The Wyattsville Series

  Spare Change

  Jubilee’s Journey

  Passing through Perfect

  The Regrets of Cyrus Dodd

  Beyond the Carousel

  The Serendipity Series

  The Twelfth Child

  Previously Loved Treasures

  Wishing for Wonderful

  Classic Singles

  Cracks in the Sidewalk

  What Matters Most

  BABY GIRL

  Memory House Series, Book Four

  Copyright © 2016 by Bette Lee Crosby

  Cover design: damonza.com

  Formatting by Author E.M.S.

  Editor: Ekta Garg

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the author, except by reviewers who may quote brief passages for a review to be printed in a newspaper, magazine or journal.

  This is a work of fiction. While, as in all fiction, the literary perceptions and insights are based on life experiences and conclusions drawn from research, all names, characters, places and specific instances are products of the author’s imagination and used fictitiously. No actual reference to any real person, living or dead, is intended or inferred.

  ISBN: 978-0-9969214-1-1

  BENT PINE PUBLISHING

  Port Saint Lucie, FL

  Published in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  A Free Gift…

  Books by Bette Lee Crosby

  Copyright

  Dedication

  BABY GIRL

  Cheryl Ann Ferguson

  1991

  Two Years Later

  Graduation 1995

  The Apartment

  New Life

  Baby Versus Boat

  Finding a Family

  Memory House

  The Nineteenth Week

  Baby Girl

  Too Soon

  January 4, 1998

  Letting Go

  A Time of Renewal

  A New Year

  The Next Move

  Ryan’s Reason

  Who Gets What

  A Small World

  A New Millennium

  The Apartment

  The Letter

  The Flat Tire

  The Miracle

  And Thus It Was

  Working Mom

  The Party

  The Consequences

  A Family of Three

  The House

  A Forever Place

  The Favor

  Starting Date

  No Mistakes

  A New Life

  Dilly Beans

  Perceived Value

  The Big Picture

  The Legacy

  A Note from the Author

  More by Bette Lee Crosby

  About the Author

  For Crystal J. Casavant-Otto

  I will be forever grateful to you for

  sharing a story that took hold of

  my heart and never let go.

  Baby Girl

  Memory House Series

  Book Four

  Cheryl Ann Ferguson

  When I left Spruce Street, I was crazy in love and thought I knew exactly where I was going. Life, despite its ups and downs, was stretched out in front of me like one long highway to happiness. I discovered soon enough that there are forks in the road, places where the path splits off in two different directions and you’re forced to choose one way or the other.

  There are no signs on this road, no arrows pointing this way for Happy Ever After and that way for Years of Regret. You choose blindly and trust your heart will take you in the right direction. It doesn’t always.

  I chose many of the wrong roads and now have a storehouse of both memories and regrets. There were times when I loved and times when I hated. I did both with a passion so fierce it tore holes in my heart.

  Now I have at long last reached my destination. I am where I was meant to be. Those much wiser than me claim that no matter what pathway a person chooses, in time they will end up where they were intended to be. I have reached a point in my life where I believe this is true.

  To understand this journey, you’d have to know how it all began some twenty-odd years ago.

  1991

  The first time I laid eyes on Ryan Carter was the day he and his mama moved into the Ballinger place. The house had stood empty for three, maybe four years and was considered an eyesore even for Spruce Street.

  Rumor had it that Alfred Ballinger bought the house with intentions of fixing it up, but he died just three months after they moved in. The whole three days he was lying in a casket waiting to be buried, his wife, Martha, sat by his side. Then once he’d been laid to rest she went back to the house and closed the curtains, and that was the last anybody ever saw of her.

  According to Mama, Martha Ballinger was just waiting to die, but it took almost twenty years to happen. In all that time not a single repair was made to the house. It sat there with the paint peeling and the shutters hanging loose. When the lawn got to be knee high, one of the neighbors generally came by with a lawn mower or weed whacker and cut it back.

  The Ballinger place is only two doors down from us, so we were among the first to catch hold of the stench. It was in the early spring when Mama flung open the windows to air the house out. After two sniffs, she knew something was wrong.

  “Felix, get outside and check the backyard!” she screamed. “There’s a dead animal stinking up the place.”

  Daddy went looking and traced the smell to Missus Ballinger’s house. He knocked at the door for more than twenty minutes, and when nobody answered he banged out a pane of glass and climbed in the window. That’s when he found her, dead as a doornail.

  There was no telling how long she’d been there. Since there were no friends or family to call, the county came and carted off her body. With no mortgage on the house and no relatives looking to claim ownership, it sat there getting more dilapidated year after year.

  Mama said not in a million years would they be able to sell that place, but as it turned out she was wrong.

  In late July, on a day that was considerably hotter than it should have been, I spotted the U-Haul truck rounding the corner at the far end of Spruce Street. It was moving slow like a lost dog in search of a place to settle.

  Spruce Street wasn’t a place where people cruised by to look at houses or cut through on their way to someplace else. It was just two short blocks with wood frame houses on both sides and little strips of yard in between the houses. Seven doors down from us the street turned to a dead end. Once you passed by the Gomez house that was it. The only thing you could do was make a three-point turn and drive out the same way you drove in.

  Mama and I were on the front porch trying to cool down. I squatted on the steps, and she was pushing herself back and forth in the swing.

  “Looks like some damn fool has got himself lost,” she said.

  �
��Maybe we’re gonna get new neighbors,” I replied wistfully.

  Mama gave a cynical grump and fanned her face with the postcard from Aunt Mildred. “That ain’t likely.”

  The U-Haul slowed to a crawl once it crossed Jenkins Road and came to a rolling stop when it passed our place. The woman in the driver’s seat craned her neck to see the number on our mailbox then moved on.

  “Lord God,” Mama said with a groan, “I do believe those idiots are headed for Martha Ballinger’s place.”

  The Ballinger place was the only vacancy on Spruce Street. Sure enough, two doors down the truck creaked to a stop.

  Ryan Carter was first to step out of the truck. He gave a long lazy stretch then combed his hair back with his fingers. He was the kind of guy you couldn’t help but notice: good looking with a chiseled jaw and dark hair that tumbled onto his forehead. He was wearing a black tee shirt with something written on the front, but he was too far away for me to see what it was.

  I watched as he came around to the back end of the truck and raised the door. He climbed inside, shoved a few boxes onto the loading platform, then jumped down and started carrying them to the house.

  His mama tromped up the walkway ahead of him, unlocked the front door, then disappeared inside. She was twice the size of Ryan and bristly from head to toe. It was obvious she had little patience for anything not to her liking. I could hear her fussing at him.

  “Get your butt in gear,” she said with a grunt. “We don’t have all day!”

  It seemed the more she fussed the slower he moved, almost like he was trying to aggravate her, although why wasn’t obvious. Twice she raked him over the coals good and proper, and both times he gave a satisfied grin and walked off with a swagger.

  Mama and I both had our noses turned toward the Ballinger place. The hedge around that house was nothing but a few bare branches sticking up out of the ground, so from our front porch you could see and hear most everything.

  On his third trip back to the truck, Ryan glanced over and caught me looking at him. He kind of nodded and gave me a wink. I didn’t want him to know I’d been watching, so I lowered my eyes, started picking at a scab on my knee and pretended not to notice. When he went back to carrying boxes, I went back to watching.

  Nothing exciting ever happened on Spruce Street. Absolutely nothing. To have somebody moving in or out was big news, and Mama liked to be first with gossip of any sort. She watched everything Ryan carried in, and when he went by with a mahogany nightstand she murmured, “Looks like they’ve got halfway decent furniture. Wonder why they’d pay good money for a rundown old house?”

  I shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  Since Mama wasn’t about to help carry boxes and couldn’t come up with any reason for going over there herself, she swatted me on the back of my head and said, “Instead of sitting here being useless, get yourself over there and lend a hand.”

  “Okay,” I answered and jumped up.

  The minute I stepped off the porch, I saw Ryan eyeing me. When I strolled up the walkway and told him I’d come to lend a hand, he gave me a grin and said he thought I might.

  Years later I would think back on that hot summer day and remember him hot and sweaty with his tee shirt stuck to his skin and that sexy grin calling out to me. I think that’s when I fell in love with him.

  That afternoon Ryan and I carried in all those boxes, plus several pieces of furniture. While we were unloading the U-Haul we laughed and joked as if we’d been friends forever. A big kitchen table was the last thing to come out of the truck. Ryan pushed it to the edge of the loading platform and yelled, “Hey, kid, get the other end of this, will ya?”

  Kid. That’s what he called me. He had two years on me, but I was nearly as tall and looked older than my age.

  “I’m no kid,” I said. “I’ll be fifteen in three months.”

  He laughed. “Three months, huh?”

  I nodded.

  “Okay, so how about I call you kid for the next three months, then I’ll switch over to Cheryl Ann?”

  “How about you just call me Cheryl and start right now?”

  He grinned, and it wasn’t the kind of grin he gave his mama. This one was sincere. I could feel the warmth of it taking hold of my heart.

  “So, Cheryl,” he said, “you gonna get the other end of this table or not?”

  That’s how it started. We became friends, and our mamas did too. Blanche Carter and Mama had a lot in common. They both saw life as one giant thing to complain about.

  For the rest of that summer, Missus Carter was at our house almost every day. She’d amble down about a half-hour after Daddy left for work and stay for hours. Mama would brew a fresh pot of coffee and they’d sit at the kitchen table, Missus Carter talking about the no-good husband who’d left when Ryan was just a baby and Mama talking about Daddy.

  According to Mama, Daddy had next to no ambition, was lazy as a log and snored like a sick bull. Mama told every bad thing she could think of, but she never once mentioned how Daddy made people feel good about themselves and happy to be around him.

  Once when Missus Carter was in the middle of complaining about Ryan’s daddy, Mama said, “Blanche, consider yourself lucky. Having no man is better than having one who’s worthless.”

  Her words were clear as a bell. Even though I was in the living room, I heard them. Hearing Mama imply Daddy was worthless made me come as close as a person can come to hating someone. I loved Daddy with all my heart. She might have thought him worthless, but to me he was the dearest person in the world.

  When Mama would start picking at me, Daddy would almost always step in.

  “Cheryl Ann’s got more than her share of good qualities,” he’d say and give me a hug right there in front of her. Afterwards he’d take me to Wilke’s Drugstore for ice cream. We’d sit in a booth across from one another, drinking sodas and talking.

  “It’s not because your mama doesn’t love us,” Daddy used to say. “She’s just high strung and lets aggravation get to her. Your mama’s the sort who takes her troubles to heart.”

  There were times when I thought Mama didn’t even have a heart, but I never said so. I wanted Daddy to think I was forgiving like him instead of being judgmental like Mama.

  For the rest of that summer when Mama and Missus Carter settled at the kitchen table with their coffee and complaints, I’d slip out the back door, go down the block and help Ryan fix up their house. By the time school started we’d cleared the weeds out of the yard, nailed the shutters back in place and painted the whole downstairs.

  I know it sounds like a lot of work, but it wasn’t. When you’re doing something with somebody special, work doesn’t feel like work. I liked Ryan. A lot. I liked when he high-fived me or bumped his hip up against mine. I liked when our hands touched and when we sat together on the back step. In a way that’s hard to explain, being with Ryan was like being with Daddy. He made me feel good about myself and happy to be near him.

  Two Years Later

  The year Daddy died everything changed. It happened two weeks before Thanksgiving on a Saturday that started out just like any other day. Mama was fussing because of the leaves in the yard.

  “Our yard doesn’t look one bit worse than any other house on the block,” Daddy said patiently. “The oaks lose their leaves every year, so why get riled up over something that’s inevitable?”

  Mama gave a loud harrumph, then slid Daddy’s eggs out of the frying pan while they were still runny. She picked up the plate and thumped it down in front of him.

  “I’m expecting that yard to be cleaned up today,” she snapped.

  With Mama there was no mistaking a command. She made it perfectly clear that if you didn’t do what she said, there would be hell to pay.

  Daddy saw those slimy eggs swimming in a pool of grease and pushed his plate back. He finished his coffee then got up from the table.

  “Well, I guess I’d better get started,” he said, and those were the last words he ever
spoke.

  An hour or so later I was up in my bedroom and heard a thud. I stuck my head out the window and looked down into the backyard. There was Daddy lying face down with the rake still in one hand.

  He died before they got him to the hospital.

  Until that day Mama never had a kind word for Daddy, but once he was gone she became the most sorrowful woman in town. When the neighbors stopped by with casseroles and pies, she’d sit in the living room chair and dab at her eyes.

  “I don’t know how I’ll manage without Felix,” she’d say with a moan. “I’ve got nothing to live for.”

  That’s what I was to Mama—the same as nothing. She and I never did have a good relationship, but after Daddy was gone it went from bad to worse.