Heartbreak, Tennessee

by Ruby Laska

“Aw, don’t mind me,” Gray said, tossing an arm casually over Mac’s shoulder as the two resumed staring out at the parking lot. “I’m just trying to help. Sometimes where the ladies are concerned, I think we’d do well to stick together. Am I right?”

  “Hmm.”

  “Anyway, you ever hear of something called the Bear Creek Trail?”

  Mac said nothing for a moment. But yeah, he’d heard of it. Walked it a thousand times. At least a hundred of them with Amber, carrying a cooler and a blanket, making their way carefully up the stony trail, high above the small valley carved by the nearly dry creek, until they found a patch of grass in the trees near the top of the ridge.

  “I’ve heard of it,” he finally said.

  “Well, I think you might find what you’re looking for there. It’s been a pleasure,” Gray added before delivering a final thump on Mac’s shoulder with his meaty hand. “Best of luck, friend. Next time I see you, I’m afraid we may be sitting on opposite sides of the table. Now I got a ton of work to do. Never should have let that woman out of my sight in the first place.”

  Amber sighed and set down the stack of papers she’d been staring at for the last half hour. She was flattered that Gray had asked her to take a look at the annual reports and budget projections, but at the moment the columns of numbers were just swimming before her eyes, making no sense at all. She’d just have to take another stab at them later.

  It was her lunch hour, she rationalized, as she leaned back on the soft bed of grass and wildflowers. This ridge, overlooking Bear Creek way down below, caught the breeze like nowhere else in town, and the leafy tree above her provided a shady canopy. Sighing contentedly, she shut her eyes and stretched her limbs luxuriously.

  She hadn’t had a lot of sleep last night. To say the least. The few hours she’d managed after returning to her room had left her a little groggy. In fact, the night before had taken on a dreamlike quality, as though she’d imagined the entire thing.

  But the tender spots on her body were proof that it had been no dream. She could trace the path of their ardor by the places that were chafed, sore, throbbing. As though she had run a race, her arms and legs were weak with a pleasant exhaustion.

  But instead of being utterly spent, her body hummed with electricity, with expectation, with desire. Even if her mind was a tumble of doubt and regret, her body, at least, yearned for another chance to love Mac.

  A crunch of brush down the path broke the quiet stillness. Footsteps. Someone was coming up the path.

  No, Amber groaned inwardly. Judging from how overgrown the trail had become, most of the few remaining markers bent and broken, not too many folks came up this way any more.

  Obviously, however, at least one other person remembered the way.

  “Hello, Mac,” Amber called without opening her eyes. “I see you’re too smart for me. Let me guess. You ran into Gray?”

  “He seems like a nice man.” The footsteps, sure and steady, reached her, and Amber finally opened her eyes as Mac sat down next to her, leaning back on his elbows.

  They gazed at the view together, the creek bed giving way to a field and then a cluster of buildings, a farm at the edge of town. Further on, they could make out the town, spread out like toys on a child’s carpet, the sun glinting off of cars and buildings and sending splinters of brilliant light their way.

  It was a stunning view, one that made her heart hum in response. On a day like today, she could almost imagine that she’d never left, that she’d never stopped breathing the sweet air of Heartbreak.

  “He is a nice man...oh Mac, why did you have to come up here? You aren’t very good at taking a hint.” Amber sighed heavily and sat up, hugging her arms around her knees. The crumpled moss-green linen of her dress had picked up bits of grass and bracken, and she carefully flicked them away.

  And kept her eyes off him.

  “Tell me something,” Mac said, his voice measured and careful. “Do you always do a disappearing act after spending the night with a guy?”

  Amber froze. “You make it sound as if I make a habit of sharing other people’s beds.”

  Mac said nothing, letting her comment lie between them like a lit fuse. Well, fine. If he wanted to believe that, let him. He thought he knew her so well, but clearly he knew nothing. Nothing.

  Still, it might be easier this way. Easier to end something she’d had no business starting.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, her tone gentler. “I shouldn’t have left that note for you, instead of talking to you myself. It was cowardly. I just - I got scared. What happened last night was wonderful. But that doesn’t change the fact that it shouldn’t have happened.

  “I should have had the courage to tell you this then,” Amber continued, lifting her head and looking Mac in the eye. “But at least I’m telling you now. We can’t make a mistake like that again.”

  “Mistake. That word again.” Mac made a sound, deep in his throat, half a choked laugh, half something else.

  Something angry.

  “So you’re just going to walk away again,” he said.

  Amber picked up a short stick and traced lines in the fabric of her skirt.

  “Don’t say it like that,” she said. “I’m not walking away. There is nothing to walk away from. It was just one night together—it’s not like we were...” Her voice trailed off as her hand stilled, the stick falling from her fingers.

  Not like they were what? Engaged? But they had been, once. And Amber wasn’t sure she’d be able to keep pretending she’d forgotten all about that other time.

  “All right,” Mac said tightly. “I won’t use those words, if they offend you. Anyway, I suppose I don’t blame you. I imagine you can’t wait to get out of this pathetic little backwater, back to your bright lights and high living. Don’t worry, Amber—Heartbreak’ll wash off you right quick. In a few days you will have forgotten all about us.”

  Mac’s sarcastic tone, the way he lapsed into a parody of local speech patterns, made his words all the harsher, and Amber bit her lip to keep it from quivering. “That’s not fair.”

  “Not fair? You want to talk about fair? You come to me, talking about some damned terrible event in our past, and you won’t even give me the whole story? Last I checked, a guy’s got a right to know what crime he’s been accused of.”

  Mac’s anger was well-contained, but Amber could see it in the way his fists clenched handfuls of grass. In the tendons which stood out from his chiseled jaw. In his eyes, which smoldered a green that was nearly black, the color of a storm at sea.

  “What happened didn’t have anything to do with you,” Amber breathed, feeling tears sting the corners of her eyes. How easy it would be to lay a hand on his arm, the way she did so many times when he was a much younger man. Her touch had once calmed and soothed him, helped him back away from his anger.

  Today, though, it might send him over the top.

  “Nothing to do with me?” Mac was incredulous. “How can you even say that?

  “All right,” Amber bit her lip, willing the tears back. She could not cry, not now. “I know my decision affected you. Hurt you. But remember, I did give you a chance. I begged you to leave Heartbreak, and you said no. After that...well, my reasons were something you wouldn’t have understood.”

  “Try me.”

  “Don’t you get it?” Losing her battle, Amber brushed angrily at the corners of her eyes. She turned her body so that she was facing Mac, inches away from the danger and the fury written in his face. “It doesn’t matter. There’s nothing between us. I don’t want you. I don’t care about you.”

  “You lie.” Mac’s hands shot out and took her forearms in a grip that was hard as iron. She twisted her shoulders but he didn’t budge. “Say what you will to me, Amber, but don’t ever lie to me again.”

  Seconds ticked by, and then slowly Mac took his hands off her arms, though his gaze never left her face. Amber rubbed the places where his fingers had gripped her, as though she were cold, hugging her
arms to her body.

  “I just want you to leave me alone.”

  “You never even came back after your mother’s accident,” Mac said softly, ignoring her words. “I couldn’t believe it. Nobody could. How could you stay away? She was your mother, Amber, for God’s sake.”

  “I know that,” Amber said hoarsely. “I loved my mother with all my heart. It nearly killed me too when she died.”

  “Yeah. So much so that you didn’t even come to her funeral.” The sarcasm in Mac’s voice cut to her heart. “I think right up until they lowered the coffin into the ground everyone was convinced you’d come running up, that you were just delayed somehow. No one wanted to believe you’d miss it.”

  “Why should I have been there?” Amber said. “There was almost nothing to bury. You must know that. The car was burned so badly they couldn’t even identify her remains until they...until they—” Amber stopped, swallowing hard, unable to finish.

  She would never forget the call when they finally confirmed through dental records that it had been her mother whose car careened off the cliff, tumbling over and over to burst into flames on a rocky ledge. Amber squeezed her eyes tightly shut for a moment, regaining her composure before she continued.

  “Whatever they buried that day, that wasn’t my mother. Her spirit was long gone before that funeral. And I wasn’t about to listen to some pious sermon from someone who never really knew her.”

  “You still should have been there,” Mac accused.

  “No,” Amber said, shaking her head. “No. She wouldn’t have wanted that. When she took her life—”

  “What did you say?” Amber glanced at Mac, surprised by his sharp tone. The shock on his face was real.

  “My mother’s death was a suicide, Mac.”

  “Why would you even think that? That turn’s treacherous. There’s been dozens of accidents there over the years. It was night, and there was fog—”

  Amber shook her head again. “Don’t argue with me, Mac. And don’t ask me to explain it. But my mother killed herself.”

  Mac stared back, his brows knit together, his jaw slowly relaxing. “Even if what you say is true,” he said finally, “you needed to be there when they buried her. I think it would have surprised you, Amber, to see who was at her service.”

  “I heard,” Amber said dully. “Funny how the whole town showed up to mourn her passing when most of them never even offered her so much as a cup of tea when she was alive.”

  “People cared about her, Amber. In their own way.”

  Amber was silent, thinking of all the women who’d brought armloads of clothes to the door for her mother to mend and tailor. Of her mother’s unfailing cheerfulness, asking after their families, their husbands, their health. How she chatted during fittings, complimenting the way they wore their hair, remembering all the significant events in their lives.

  Even when they never asked after her own life, or that of the slender girl with the wild hair who silently held the pincushion at their feet.

  “That would have to be a pretty unusual way of caring,” she finally said, her voice ice.

  Mac shrugged. “I can’t make you believe something you don’t want to. But Amber, you forget that I knew your mother too. I loved her. She was more mother to me than my own mother.”

  “Yes.” Amber looked down at her lap. That was undeniably true. Her mother had adored Mac, relishing his visits, fixing him meals. She carried his picture in her wallet next to Amber’s. “I suppose I should thank you for...filling in for me, at her funeral.”

  “We should have been there together.”

  “You just can’t let it drop! Damn it, can’t you leave these things buried? My mother couldn’t get off this earth quick enough. She’d had enough pain to last several lifetimes!”

  “I know it must have been tough to raise you alone—”

  “No, Mac, there was more to it than that. Mom was always stronger than anyone I knew until—” Amber stopped abruptly, covering her face with her hands.

  “Is this another one of your damn secrets? Come on, Amber, tell me what was going on!”

  The urgency in Mac’s voice was real, Amber knew, and yet she couldn’t stop feeling as though he were hammering at her relentlessly. She wanted to cover her ears with her hands, block him out, block out all the thoughts and memories of that terrible time.

  Shuddering, tears half-blinding her, she turned and began to make her way down the path.

  “Amber! Come back here, damn it!”

  Ignoring him, Amber wiped tears furiously away and increased her pace, her feet in their strappy sandals slipping dangerously on loose pebbles and exposed tree roots.

  “Amber!” The anger in his voice was unmistakable. “You’re running away again! Running from things never solves anything. Just think about your mother if you doubt me!”

  Amber stopped, the full impact of his words settling like ice in her heart. How dare he compare her decisions to her mother’s choice, escaping unbearable pain the only way she knew how?

  Slowly, her eyes narrowed to furious slits, her fists clenched at her side, she turned and glared up the steep incline at Mac, who stood with arms folded across his chest where she’d left him.

  “You want answers, Mac? You want to know why my mother killed herself? Why I left town? Why you and I never ended up with the happily-ever-after? Well, it’s too bad you never had a chance to ask your father!”

  “My father?!”

  Seeing the shock and confusion on Mac’s face ought to have given her a shred of satisfaction, Amber thought, but instead it felt like just another weight on her shoulders, dragging her down, down, down.

  “Forget I said that,” she said, suddenly exhausted. “Let’s just my mother wasn’t the only one who carried secrets to her death.”

  With that she turned and made her way down the path.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Mac absently swirled the contents of the tumbler as he stared at the photo above the mantle, Amber’s words echoing in his mind.

  It’s too bad you never had a chance to ask your father.

  He had no idea what she meant by that. No idea what mysteries his father had kept hidden, if any. No idea what went through the mind of the somber man who had been his father.

  The night Amber came to him and begged him to pack a few things, pick her up in and drive away. Some place far away where they would begin their life together.

  “Your father,” she had cried, her voice trembling as he held her ice-cold hands in his own. “He s-said he won’t let us be together.”

  “But Amber, we’ve always known they didn’t approve,” Mac said. “We’ve never let that stop us.”

  “But n-now it’s different. We have to go. We can’t stay here.”

  “What happened tonight?”

  “Nothing—”

  “Did you go to see my father?”

  “No...yes—it doesn’t matter. Please, Mac, just come with me.”

  “What did he say?” The force of his demand caused her eyes to open wide and she stared at him a moment.

  “He said he’d ruin our lives unless I agreed never to see you again. He said he’d fix it so my mother couldn’t get any more work.”

  “He’d never do that.” Mac shook his head, incredulous.

  “He said it, Mac.”

  “He was bluffing.”

  The pain in her eyes burned into him as she shook her head violently. “He means it. I’m telling you.”

  “No, it’s just like at work—with his suppliers, he’s always pulling that crap. It’s the only way he knows to get his way. I know he’d never...Dad’s a son of a bitch sometimes, Amber, but he would never do anything to...hurt me. Hurt us.”

  “He doesn’t give a damn about us.” The bitterness in her voice chilled him, and he put out a hand to caress her face, still her trembling.

  She pushed it away.

  “Come with me now.” The urgency in her voice was raw and powerful. “With us gone,
he won’t have any reason to hurt her.”

  “Hurt...your mother? She doesn’t have anything to do with this! Besides, it’s all about my mother, I know she put him up to this.”

  “She doesn’t matter.” Amber’s voice was dull.

  “Look Amber...we don’t care what they think, remember? Look. This will blow over. Trust me. Dad—he’ll come around.”

  Amber’s hand shot out and grabbed his wrist with surprising force.

  “I’m begging you,” she whispered. “Please, please, Mac. I love you more than anything in the world. Come with me.”

  The silence was long, her grip on him relaxing only when he finally shook his head.

  “I can’t,” he whispered.

  He would never forget the anguish in her eyes as she begged, her limbs shivering against him.

  Or how it deepened when she understood he wasn’t coming, how she slowly drew away from him, tears streaking down her face, how she gave him one last look before tearing from his arms and running, running out of his life.

  He hadn’t known then it was forever.

  And now she was telling him the secret lay with his father.

  In the days after Amber left, Pete wasn’t his usual self, it was true. He muttered a few words of comfort as Mac stood in the cramped kitchen, staring out the window long after his coffee grew cold. “You’re hurtin’ now, son,” he’d said. “But this will all pass. It’s for the best.”

  And they’d never spoken of it again. Like so many things, it became part of the silent fabric of their relationship. Years went by and the son, now a man, worked side by side with his father. Two men who loved each other awkwardly, revealing little, asking even less.

  But no one could accuse Mac of not trying to understand him, in those final days, when his father’s life was ebbing away. Mac had made a last effort to get to know his father.

  It had been an effort a long time coming. His father was the one constant, an eternal, silent, brooding presence who was always there.

  Mac remembered a set of tools, cut small for a child’s hand, that his father gave him when he was barely old enough to see up on the work benches. He remembered how his father took him to the shop after school, on weekends. He certainly wasn’t wanted at home; his mother’s bridge club and garden club and ladies’ auxiliary left little time for him.