Free Shattered by Karen Robards Page B

with good grace, knowing that they gave her mother pleasure. She had not, however, paid any real attention. Now, suddenly, she was not only interested, she was eager.
    "I'd love to."
    Beaming with surprised gratification, Martha looked at Robin. "You know where I keep--Lisa's baby book. Would you bring it to us--in the TV room, please?"
    "You want I should bring some ice cream, too? We 've got peach." Like Lisa, Robin was always trying to tempt Martha to eat, and peach ice cream was one of her favorite sweets.
    "I don't--want any, thanks. Lisa?" She looked at her daughter, who shook her head.
    Ten minutes later, they were in the TV room with their heads together over Lisa's baby book. The TV, which had become Martha's chief distraction as her world continued to shrink around her, was on, but the volume was muted. Tall windows looked to the east, where shadows were just starting to purple the distant rolling hills and creep across fields full of grazing horses. The hand-carved paneling and book- and memento-laden shelves should have made the room feel dark and closed-in, but the bamboo blinds were raised to the tops of the windows to admit the full complement of golden evening light, and that plus the sheer size of the space made it feel surprisingly cheery.
    "Look--how big I was." Martha pointed to a picture of her pregnant self standing in front of a glass door leading through a concrete wall, which Lisa knew from the sign above it was in fact the hospital. Her knowledge of her parents' lives up until her birth was a little hazy--mostly from lack of interest on her part, she had to admit--but she knew she 'd been born in Maryland, right on the outskirts of Washington, D.C. The photographer, she presumed, had been Barty. Back when he and Martha had still been a couple. Lisa wondered briefly if they'd been happy, then dismissed the thought from her mind. "I had--such a hard time getting pregnant. I was so--excited. I wanted you--very, very much."
    "If you'd known how much trouble I was going to be, you would have run away screaming right there and then, right?" Lisa gave her mother a teasing grin. She 'd been a wild teenager, sneaking out, partying, running with an out-of-control crowd of other privileged kids who'd had, basically, three thoughts in their collective heads: getting drunk, getting high, and getting laid. She hadn't been as bad as some of them, but she'd been plenty bad enough to provoke innumerable screaming fights with her worried mother.
    "Are you--kidding? I wouldn't have--missed a minute of it. Raising you--has been the joy of my life."
    An unexpected lump rose in Lisa's throat. She had no doubt that her mother meant it, and equally no doubt that she didn't deserve all that unconditional love. After her wild teenage years, she 'd gone away to college, and then law school, with scarcely a backward look. After the first summer, she'drarely even come home. She 'd taken everything--her mother's love, the slightly anachronistic world she 'd left behind, the constant security of having plenty of money--for granted. If she 'd ever bothered to think about it at all, which she hadn't, she would have been sure that all of it, everything, would always be there waiting for her. It had been bewildering--shocking, even--when she'd first begun to realize that that was not so.
    "A glutton for punishment, aren't you?" Lisa asked lightly, determined not to let her own maudlin reflections dampen her mother's mood. Martha laughed, and Lisa smiled, too. Depression was an understandable side effect of the illness, and Lisa made every attempt to keep her mother upbeat.
    At Martha's direction, Lisa slowly turned the pages, looking at pictures of her mother in the hospital bed with Barty standing beside her, of her naked baby self, blood, umbilical, and all, clearly having just been delivered, being carried by a nurse toward what looked like a scale in the corner of the room, then cleaned up and wrapped now in a pink blanket with a