by JoAnn Ross
He slanted her a sideways look. “Wanna know one major difference between men and women?”
“Not particularly. But I've no doubt you're going to tell me.”
“A man can actually quietly enjoy a car ride from the passenger seat.”
“And women don't necessarily feel the need to drive faster than the speed of sound.”
“This car, she wasn't meant to go slow.” As if to prove his point, he stepped on the gas causing the car to shoot forward as if shot out of a cannon. “I remember a time when you liked to go fast.”
“I was seventeen. There should be a general amnesty for any stupid, reckless things people do in their teens.”
“You're not gonna get any argument from me on that, sugar.”
Although he was still breaking the speed limit, he eased up on the gas. Just a little. Silence settled over them, broken only by the sound of Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys doing the Creole Stomp on the radio.
“How much farther?”
Dani had been to the prison once, when a friend's parents had taken both girls to the rodeo put on by the inmates every Sunday in October. But that had been a very long time ago, and needless to say, she'd never had a reason to return. Until now.
“About fifteen more minutes.”
Another milepost blurred by. Jack muttered a rough French word Dani didn't recognize, but didn't need a translator to know it was a curse.
“What's
wrong?” He blew out a breath. “Look, I made a promise to the judge.”
“I know. To pick him up today.”
“There's more.” He shook his head. His smile was rife with a grim humor she couldn't decipher. “Who would have thought I'd have any conscience left, me?” he murmured, more, Dani thought, to himself, than to her.
At a loss, she wished she could see his eyes and realized, as she never had before, how much Jack kept hidden.
He'd always been so outrageously outspoken, seeming to enjoy scandalizing people by ignoring the polite and complex rules of southern society, that if you didn't look carefully, as she was doing now, you'd never notice how much he actually held back.
“I've been trying like hell to keep my word, but this isn't fair to you,” he was saying when she shook off the sudden insight, deciding to think about it later. “If the judge ends up living with you—”
“He will be living with me.” Dani would not allow herself to think otherwise.
“Then you have the right to know he's not well.”
Icy fingers twisted at her stomach. Dani stared hard at a trio of Lycra-clad cyclists who were framed in the window for an instant as she and Jack sped past. “Exactly how not well? What's wrong with him?”
“In a nutshell? He says he's dying.”
She shifted in her seat, turning not just her head, but her entire body—which throbbed as if it had been hammered with a two-by-four—toward him.
“I don't believe that.” It couldn't be true. Surely her father would have broken down and written to her about that?
“Hell, Danielle, I'm sorry.” His expression echoed his words. “I tried to talk him into at least lettin' the prison doctors get in touch with you, but, well”—he shrugged—“you know how mule-headed he can be.”
“He doesn't want anything to do with me,” she said flatly. “Even when he's dying.” Of all the things her father had done to hurt her over the years, this was the worst.
“He didn't want to burden you.”
“Burden me?” Dani's voice cracked. “He's my father, dammit!” She looked out the window again, the rolling green hills blurred by a veil of unshed tears. “We're supposed to be a family.”
“I figure he feels he let you down when he broke the law.”
“I refuse to believe he broke the law. But even if he had, he would only have done it to save his home. The same way Annabel Dupree did when the Yankee army marched upon Beau Soleil.”
The former New Orleans socialite had killed every chicken on the place and roasted them for the invading Northern troops to keep them from looting and burning the plantation home.
Desperate times called for desperate measures. Dani had grown up on grand tales of the various sacrifices that had been made by her ancestors to keep the house in the family for generations.
“The judge always set some pretty high standards. As hard as he was on others, he was even harder on himself. Which, I suppose, is why he refused that plea bargain people say the D.A. practically got down on his knees beggin' him to accept.”
“My father, unfortunately, can be incredibly rigid.”
He certainly hadn't given into her tears when she'd begged to be allowed to continue dating Jack. He'd called him a delinquent, and perhaps he had been. But these days people would see an angry boy who'd been emotionally wounded that horrific day he'd held his dying father in his arms. The day Jake Callahan had given his own life to save Dani's father.
Fate, Dani thought on a soft, sad sigh, often seemed like a web, all the people and events being complexly connected, destined, no matter how they might struggle against its silken threads, to meet at the center.
Nor had he relented when she'd wanted to stay in Blue Bayou during her pregnancy. Or that memorable day, a week before her daughter had been born, when she'd used her single weekly allotted telephone call, pleading to be allowed to keep her child.
“You say he's dying. What's the diagnosis?”
“Congestive heart disease.”
Hope instantly fluttered delicate wings in Dani's heart. “That's not necessarily fatal. Has he gotten a second opinion? A third? Or is the only medical care he's had the past seven years a prison doctor?”
“Hell, I don't know. It was like pulling teeth to get him to tell me as much as he did.”
“Which was?”
“Apparently he signed up to be part of some medical test group five years ago after his first heart attack.”
“First?”
“He's had two, that I know of. The second one got him kicked out of the test group, since instead of gettin' better, he's worse than he was.”
“Which means for five years his heart problems were getting worse because he wasn't getting appropriate treatment?”
“That's how those tests work. You can't go combining regimes or no one would ever know which drug was working and which wasn't.”
That earlier valiant hope took a nosedive. Dani managed to pull it up again.
“Surely there's something that can be done. Bypasses, transplants, shunts, that roto-rooter procedure I saw on some television news magazine, new drugs, defibrillators, all sorts of things.”
“Like I said, I don't know the details. But I do know it was his choice to take part in the study. Nobody held a gun to his head.”
“Why would he do such a thing?”
“Beats me. But knowing the judge, I'd guess he was trying to give back to society. Maybe make amends for what he did.”
“Even if he did those crimes, which I'll never believe he did, that's what going to prison is supposed to be about. You do your time, pay your debt, and resume your life.”
Damn the man! How could he be so egocentric? Didn't he realize he wasn't the only person affected by such a life-and-death decision? He might not want to acknowledge them, but he had a family. A daughter and a grandson he should have been thinking about.
She'd just begun the climb out of despair into irritation rising quickly to a healthy, cleansing temper when the prison came into view. If Jack's GTO was like a time machine back to the 1960s neither of them had ever personally known, this was like going back a hundred and fifty years.
Formerly a plantation farmed by slaves who'd been forcefully uprooted from their homeland in Angola, Africa, the Angola State Penitentiary was the largest—and one of the toughest—in the United States. Bordered by the levee of the Mississippi River on three sides, the eighteen thousand acres were now tended by a convict workforce.
When two straight lines of prisoners carry
ing hoes and shovels marched along the levee into the cotton fields, guarded by armed men on horseback, the harsh reality of her father's life these past years hit home.
Her stomach, which had been tied up in knots, lurched. “Could you please pull over?”
He didn't hesitate. Then got out of the car and waited calmly at the side of the road while she threw up.
“I'm sorry.” The tears she'd been fighting broke free, trailing down her cheeks. She dashed at them with the back of her hands. “It's just that I'm beginning to feel like those balloon clowns they used to sell at Cajun Days. Every time I think I'm managing to stand on my feet, I get knocked down again.”
He took out a square white handkerchief and silently handed it to her
“Thanks.” Dani blew her nose. “I didn't realize there was anyone anywhere in the world who still used these things.”
“I'm an old-fashioned kinda guy,” he said mildly as he retrieved a stick of gum from his shirt pocket.
Nervous about today, Dani hadn't slept well last night, and the sugar from the Juicy Fruit hit like a jolt in her bloodstream.
“And you may feel like one of those balloons, sugar, but the important thing is, you keep gettin' back up again.”
She sniffled. “It's not that I have much of a choice. A single mother can't afford the luxury of a nervous breakdown.”
“Maybe you just need someone to take a bit of the burden off your shoulders for a while.”
He skimmed his palms over the shoulders in question. Then, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to do, drew her into his arms.
“Why, what a dandy idea.” As if it were the most natural thing in the world for her to do, she rested her head against his shoulder. Just for a moment, Dani assured herself. “So, are you going to call my fairy godmother, or should I?”
He chuckled, but when he tipped her face up with a finger beneath her chin, lifting her gaze to his, his warm eyes were more serious than she'd ever seen them.
“You're spinning a helluva lot of plates right now. What with trying to get the apartment livable again after the fire, a new job, settling your boy in a new school, taking your father in.”
“I'm handling things.”
“Sure you are.”
Jack liked the little sparks of temper and resolve he kept witnessing. The Danielle he'd known back then had been frustratingly acquiescent. In fact, the only time he'd ever seen her go after something was when she'd wanted him. And then it had been damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
Jack had long ago come to the conclusion that there was nothing more powerful than a teenage girl determined to snare herself a boyfriend.
“You're handling everything damn well, from what I can tell,” he said. “But all of us could use a little help now and then. So how 'bout you let me be in charge of makin' you feel good?”
“I suppose feeling good would involve sex?”
“That's one of the most fun ways.”
She looked up at him through moisture-brightened eyes. “Jack. Write this down. I am not going to have sex with you.”
“Sure you are.” He lifted her knuckles and grazed them with his smiling lips. “But me, I'm a patient man. Meanwhile, we'd better get movin'. Before one of those guards with the rifle in his lap decides to check out what we're doing here hangin' out on the side of this road.”
“I hate thinking of my father working on a prison gang,” she said when they were headed toward the prison.
“Then don't. Because he never so much as lifted a hoe.”
“Because of his illness?”
“That might've had something to do with it. If he'd been in the general population. Which he wasn't.”
“He wasn't?”
“Dani, the guy's a judge,” he reminded her. “A hardliner who spent most of his adult life sending people to prison. This prison. Do you think the warden's actually going to risk having him spend his days and nights with grudge-carrying felons who are more than likely armed with some lethal homemade weapon?”
Dani had thought of that, early on. Then forced it out of her mind, when her father refused to have any contact with her and the worry became too difficult to handle. Heaven knows Lowell had been no help. He'd refused to even speak about his former mentor, the man who'd gotten him elected.
Nor had he done a single thing to attempt to get his father-in-law's sentence commuted or win a pardon for the man everyone, including the sentencing judge, acknowledged had, despite how people may have felt about him personally, been a pillar of integrity.
“He's been in solitary confinement for seven years?”
“Pretty much. But the past year they've let him volunteer in the hospice program, which I think has been good for him.”
Dani drew in a deep, shaky breath. “I hate this.”
“You could've stayed home.”
“Not coming out here. I hate all this.”
She waved a hand, taking in the fields, the workers bent over their hoes like some painting of slaves in the 1800s, the guards on their horses, the swamps on the fourth side of the penitentiary, the high fences, towers, the compound of buildings they were approaching.
“I hate thinking of my father wasting so many years behind bars with common criminals.”
“Nothing common about the judge,” Jack agreed.
Dani was grateful that he didn't point out, as he could have, that her father may not be common, but what he'd been convicted of, no matter the reason, had indeed been a criminal act.
And while she wasn't about to admit it, she was also grateful that she wasn't going to have to face her father for the first time after all these years alone.
As it turned out, things didn't go as badly as Dani had feared. They went worse.
To begin with, her father looked nothing like the larger-than-life figure she remembered. Despite Jack having warned her he was gravely ill, the first sight of him came as a terrible shock.
His formerly thick black hair was now a wispy bit of white, his complexion, beneath its prison pallor, the sickly hue of library paste. The white suit he'd always worn with the confident panache of Tom Wolfe strained at the seams.
“I thought he'd be thinner,” she murmured.
“I checked with a doc in town about heart disease,” Jack surprised her by revealing. “She said that when the heart isn't pumping right, fluids tend to build up, making a person look heavier, even when he isn't eating very much.”
Rather than marching through the prison gate on his former robust stride, her father's stooped shuffle nearly broke Dani's heart.
“You gonna be all right?” Jack asked quietly when she sucked in a harsh painful breath.
He was leaning against the red fender of the car, arms folded over his chest.
“Yes.” Dani set her face into a fixed half smile. She would not allow her horror to show.
Her father lifted a hand, as if to greet Jack. Then, as he viewed Dani standing beside him, his face darkened. “What are you doing here, Danielle?”
“Hello to you, too, Daddy.” She kissed his cheek and steeled herself against the coldness that was even more painful than she remembered. “I came to bring you home.”
“Don't have a home anymore.” He shot a look toward Jack, whose expression remained inscrutable. “Callahan's livin' in it now.”
“So I recently discovered.”
His eyes, which were still as bright and avid as an eagle's, bored into hers. “You saying that husband of yours never told you he picked it up for back taxes?”
“No. I'd been under the impression that we'd lost it years ago.”
He looked at Jack, who nodded. “Well,” the judge decided on a shrug, “guess it doesn't matter all that much. What's done is done. Might as well get this show on the road.”
Dani climbed into the backseat, leaving the passenger seat for her father, who did not seem inclined to speak as they headed back to Blue Bayou. A strained silence filled the car.
“Matt's really
looking forward to meeting his grandfather,” she volunteered after they'd gone about ten miles.
“I told you to tell the boy I was dead.”
“The boy's name is Matthew and since I don't lie to my child, that wasn't an option.”
“Better he think his grandfather dead than find out he's a jailbird.”
“Matt knows you made a mistake you were punished for.”
“So you told him his grandfather was put in time-out for seven years?”
“Something like that,” she said evenly as Jack shot her an encouraging look in the rearview mirror. Not wanting to get into an argument that might make her father angry and cause him to have a heart attack before she could even get him home, Dani took a deep breath and tried again.
“Matt's a very special boy, Daddy. He's warm-hearted and extremely tolerant. He's always the first to make friends with the new children in his class. And he reads way above his grade level.”
“So did you. Didn't you win the reading certificate every year?”
“I never realized you were aware of that.”
“Just because I didn't come to the school awards assemblies didn't mean I didn't know what was going on. After all, who do you think wrote the checks to pay for those fancy frames Mrs. Callahan kept buying?”
Dani's spirits took a little dive at the idea that the only reason her achievements stuck in her father's mind was that they'd cost him money. For not the first time, she also realized how fortunate she'd been to have Marie Callahan as a surrogate mother during those turbulent teen years.
“Jack says you volunteered in the hospice program.”
“Jack talks too much.” The judge glowered Jack's way.
Jack shrugged, obviously unwounded.
Reminding herself that part of her reason for returning home had been to try to establish a sense of family for her son, Dani refused to allow her father's negative attitude to ruin their long-awaited reunion. “I hadn't realized they had hospice programs in prison.”
“Eighty-five percent of the inmates in Angola are going to die in there. You think they all get shived in the shower? Most die of old age. Like they say inside, life's a bitch, then you die.”
“What a lovely thought.” Perhaps the prisoners ought to start printing it onto the license plates.
