Your Dream and Mine by Susan Kirby Page A

laundry room.
    “Oh, ya.” Winny spread her dimpled hands. “It’s a great big dollhouse called a part…part…What’s it called, Thoma?”
    “Apartments.”
    “Right!” Winny yawned and lifted her arms to Thomasina as Trace turned the key in his door.
    “Did you get Ricky home all right?” Thomasina called after him.
    He turned back to nod just as she leaned down and lifted Winny into her arms. He noticed her slender fingers as she caressed Winny’s hair and pressed a kiss to her forehead.Noticed too, that she’d changed her blouse. He shifted his feet “If those rods give you trouble, let me know.”
    “Thank you, Trace.”
    Trace moved through the dark house and up the stairs with two pictures in his mind. One was of the deer-in-the-headlights look as Thomasina swirled on top of that stepladder. The other was of her mothering Winny whom she had met only a day ago, and doing it in a way so natural to her that he realized with a flash of insight that she was God’s to the core.
    It was a sobering thought, for Trace had learned the hard way that a man couldn’t compete with God for a woman’s heart.

Chapter Ten
    T homasina put the curtains up, and stretched out with Winny beside her. She had just drifted off to sleep when Antoinette came with news that a severe case of bronchitis was responsible for her father’s chest pains.
    “Then it wasn’t his heart.” Thomasina rubbed the sleep from her eyes.
    “No, thank God! I was pretty scared. I don’t know what I’d do without Dad.”
    Antoinette averted her face, but not before Thomasina saw the tears in the woman’s eyes. She looked no older than a child herself as she plucked up the sheet covering Pauly, and touched his freckled face. “Daddy’s the glue that holds us together, and my safety net, too. He keeps my babies while I work,” she added, voice breaking.
    “It must be difficult, two little ones depending on you,” Thomasina said gently. “What a blessing we’ve a Heavenly Father to look after us, too.”
    If Antoinette replied, it was lost on her way out the door. Thomasina picked up Winny and followed her out to the car.
    “What do I owe you?” asked Antoinette, as she lay Pauly across the front seat.
    “Nothing. If you need someone again, let me know.”
    Thomasina hurried inside, climbed the stairs and dropped on a makeshift bed of cushions, limbs aching with weariness. She thought she’d go to sleep right away. But she could not turn off the Ferris wheel in her head. Antoinette and the kids. Milt and Mary. The farm. Flo and Nathan— she had forgotten to call them. A perky blonde named Deidre. They all circled by, appearing and reappearing. Trace, too. Handsome in a dark suit and tie and white shirt that set off his tanned features and those tummy-tipping summer-sky blue eyes of his.
    Darkness fell over the Ferris wheel as those images, only hours old, cycled. The rickety ladder. Trace’s unseen approach. A voice. A touch. Terror and a slap propelled by a cataclysmic panic that burned away reason and thrust her back in time to a kitchen that reeked of dishes left in the sink, and her mother’s flowery perfume.
    Thomasina broke out in a cold sweat, pulse fast, breath shallow as she tried to hold images from the past at bay. A strange bird, Ricky had called her. Trace’s expression had echoed that sentiment, with indignation thrown in. Jumpy, he labeled her response. It didn’t come close.
    The mouth of the tunnel yawned wider. Thomasina stopped ducking the images. She turned her eyes on that squalid kitchen and was there once again. Her chest tight, her breath shallow, her eyes level with the countertop.
    “Mama?”
    Her mother stepped into the dim light of that single overhead bulb. She gleamed like Christmas tinsel. Shining eyes. Starry-bright hair. Smudged lipstick on her laughing mouth.
    “Go back to bed, Thomasina.”
    Thomasina didn’t remember the rest of the conversation.Just that it went on for a short space, and