 Taking Back Mary Ellen Black
August 2005
Harlequin Next
ISBN
0-373-88049-9
"All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players."
— William Shakespeare
A starter marriage hadn't been the first act Mary Ellen Black had meant to
script for herself, but bowing out provided hard-won perspective: The most
important things in life were not things at all, but the people she held dear.
In her case, the lovable eccentrics she called family, the ones who were more
than ready to support her leading role — if only she'd step into the spotlight.
So now Mary Ellen's drafted act two — her return home — and she's pretty sure
she's ready for the performance of Her Life, starring a strong, single mother of
two.
She's all dressed up and ready to take on the world...and take back the woman
she was meant to be.
Reviews
"Taking Back Mary Ellen Black
(4.5) by Lisa Childs is vividly set in a
working-class neighborhood with sympathetic
characters who provide humor and warmth.
Strong growth, not just in the heroine's
life but also in her view of the people
she's known forever, adds depth to the
story. The hero is great, as is the growing
relationship between them." -- Page
Traynor,
RT BookClub
Usually, the A, B, Cs start it all, the beginning of the alphabet, of words,
sounds, books. In this case, the first chapter of my life will start with D, for
divorce, which, in some ways, is really when my life began — when I first took
back Mary Ellen Black. My husband, ex-husband as of today, hadn't wanted her, hadn't even bothered to
turn up at the courthouse to contest my asking the judge for my name back, the
name I'd been born with but couldn't use again until I was told it was legal.
Eddie hadn't contested my full custody of the girls, either; he knew pushover
Mary Ellen would let him see them whenever he wanted. But he hadn't wanted, not
since he'd walked out on us for the twenty-year-old waitress at the restaurant
he owned — or barely owned. If what he'd convinced the Friend of the Court was
true, the restaurant was losing so much money that he couldn't pay child
support. And so I was stuck where I sat, in my grandmother's car, in the alley behind my
parents' house in the old West Side Grand Rapids neighborhood where I'd grown up
and where I'd had to return after the bank had foreclosed on my gorgeous
six-year-old house in Cascade. The repo man had taken my SUV, so I had Grandma's
Bonneville to use since her cataracts prevented her from driving anymore. Of
course, she could still keep track of ten bingo cards every Saturday morning at
Saint Adalbert's. Sitting in the car behind my parents' house wasn't going to help me figure out
how everything had gone so wrong. I knew that, but still I couldn't summon the
energy necessary to open the car door and crawl out. I'd done enough crawling
when I'd begged Eddie to come back, to work things out, and then when I'd lost
the house, I'd crawled home to Mom, Daddy and Grandma. No, Mary Ellen Nowicki had done all the crawling; Mary Ellen Black was stronger
than that. I didn't know much else about her anymore, but I knew that. Yet still
I slumped on the bench seat of Grandma's old Bonneville. No wonder her
blue-haired head didn't show above the steering wheel. This seat was low, really
low. I glanced over the wheel and around the alley. No yard. Just the big, square
two-story house where I'd grown up, the alley and the detached garage. Inside
the dark shadows of the garage, the tip of a cigarette glowed. Dad had knocked
off early from the butcher shop and was checking his oil. That's what he told
Mom he was doing when he was really out getting a smoke. Nobody checked his oil
as often as Dad did. If he wanted to talk to me, he would have stepped out. Despite living in the
same house since the foreclosure on mine a few months ago, we'd managed pretty
well to avoid each other. I was his little princess, and he had always sworn to
protect me from all the bad things in the world. He couldn't protect me from
this. And that hurt him more than it did me. I had grown up; I was responsible
for my own happiness or lack thereof. I pushed away the fleeting thought of turning the key in the ignition and
backing out of the alley. Three blocks farther down was a bar, a strip club now.
I could get a drink there. The fact that I didn't drink didn't erase the
temptation. Hell, maybe I could even get a job there. Divorce was the only
successful diet I'd ever gone on. My clothes hung on me. A glance in the rearview mirror revealed lank, brown hair and a washed-out face.
Yeah, like I could get a job in a strip club. I probably wouldn't make as much
as I did waiting tables at the VFW, and the biggest tips the vets gave were
quarters. That was the only job I'd been able to get since being out of the
workforce so long, as a stay-at-home mom. Before dropping out of design school
to marry Eddie, the only job I'd ever had was waiting tables. But the job at the
VFW was only temporary while the regular waitress was healing from a broken hip. With a heavy sigh, I threw open the creaky door. Dad couldn't ignore that sound.
Nothing moved in the garage but the glowing tip of the cigarette. "Daddy?" He eased out of the shadows toward the gravel driveway. "Mary Ellen?" He never
lifted his gaze from the tip of his contraband. "Yeah, Dad." It's me. Look at me! But we weren't that kind of family. We didn't
face our problems. We ignored them until they walked out on us. We both turned
our heads, scanning the alley and the little ribbon of grass between the garage
and the house. "'so, Mom's gone?" I asked. "Yeah, she took the girls and her mother to the store. Thought you might want to
be alone after…" But I wasn't alone, not if he would look at me and talk to me, really talk to
me. But that wasn't happening. And Mom, fearing that I might fall apart in front
of my children, had taken them away. I wasn't allowed to fall apart with anyone.
I had to do it in private, crying into the lumpy mattress of the foldout bed of
the couch in the den. Maybe I didn't want to wait until I was alone in the dark
to fall apart. Not that I wanted to fall apart. "That was nice of her," I said. He nodded. "Yeah, your mother's really worried about you. So are the girls." They'd had to leave their home and their school. Next week they'd start at a new
school where they knew only a handful of neighborhood kids they'd met over the
summer. Their world had fallen apart, and they were scared that I couldn't fix
it. They weren't the only ones. "I'll be fine, Daddy." Maybe if I repeated the lie enough, I'd believe it, like
I had believed Eddie and I had had the perfect marriage, the perfect life…until
debt and infidelity had eaten it away. "Yeah, you've always been a smart girl, Mary Ellen. A real smart girl." The laugh slipped out. Daddy was the only one who ever complimented me, but he
didn't have a clue. "Thanks, Dad." "I mean it, Mary." I detected a slight slur and eased closer to him. Beer breath
almost covered the scent of blood and garlic that clung to his clothes. So he
still had another stash from Mom; I'd thought he'd given up drinking years ago.
With his high blood pressure and his high cholesterol, cigarettes and alcohol
weren't just forbidden, they were suicidal. If only I'd had an ounce of my
father's strong, stubborn will… "Got another one, Dad?" "Smoke?" Since my eyes were already tearing up, I doubt I could adopt that vice of his.
And I'd die if my girls ever saw me smoking. "A beer." "You don't drink." "I just started."
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