Wood U (Carved Hearts #4)

by L. G. Pace III

M.J. announced the final gift under the tree was also for her. It was the size of a jewelry box, and I saw a knowing look pass between the other adults in the room. Kelly saw it, too, and her eyes widened. A nervous laugh escaped me.

  “Relax, y’all. That box is from the boy, not me.” As if in consolation, I pulled her hand to my lips and kissed it. She released a giant sigh, and I tried not to be offended.

  “Well that was anticlimactic,” Granny snapped, and Kelly and I exchanged loaded glances. My arm went around her shoulders, and I rested my head against hers.

  Over our lime vodka slushies (Francis’s and M.J.’s were non-alcoholic, of course), we took turns opening our gifts. My haul from Kelly was a Longhorn grill for tailgating. She and Robin had chipped in and picked up Cowboy’s tickets for Mason and me, and she’d already cleared my day off with Joe so I could go.

  My presents to her included a t-shirt that said “I run because punching people in the face in frowned upon,” Downton Abbey DVDs, and reflective gear for running in the dark.

  “Thank you.” She pecked me on the mouth, her eyes promising a much bigger gratuity later.

  “I can’t have anything happening to you,” I murmured in her ear and placed a soft kiss on her cheek.

  “Can Miss Kelly open my present next?” M.J. was dancing back and forth as if he had the urgent need to use the restroom.

  “Of course I can,” she replied, taking the tiny box from him. He’d insisted on wrapping it himself, and I could tell that the sight of his careful handwriting on the label yanked on her heartstrings. She popped open the lid of the velvet box, and we all saw a large silver cube on a delicate chain.

  “It’s so pretty,” she told him, holding her arms out for a hug.

  “It’s a sugar cube,” Junior explained, bounding into her arms. “It made me think of you since Dad always calls you Sugar.”

  After our guests had packed up their cars and gone home, I FaceTimed with Kelly’s mom and her stepdad, which was awkward, since we’d never even spoken on the phone before. Kelly’s mom was kinda pushy about the entire thing, and I could tell Kelly was pretty embarrassed to introduce us over the internet. Regardless, I wanted to make a decent first impression, and Candice (as she insisted I call her), seemed friendly enough to my face, so to speak. M.J. had no such concerns about making an impression and kept the old broad talking for a good forty-five minutes before she finally told Kelly she had to go. We laughed about that for days.

  For the most part, we were solid. We had tiffs about small things, like the fact that I rarely let her out of my sight. Her early morning runs made me jittery in a way they never had before, but she was way too headstrong to change her routines because of some dead man. She agreed to carry mace, and I declared that a victory.

  Kelly had finally taken to leaving a few things hanging in my closet and had accepted a small drawer in my dresser so that she didn’t have to run home every day. Some might laugh at me for saying so, but for Kelly, this concession was akin to having my name tattooed on her ass. Every time I knocked over one of her giant bottles of shampoo or had to unplug her hairdryer to plug in my electric razor, it brought a smile to my face. Yes, we still had problems. Everyone does. But I felt like we were working out what we needed to, and no one will ever have a wrinkle-free existence.

  M.J. was smitten with Kelly and thought she’d hung the damn moon. They conspired to make me eat healthier and gave me a hard time for the occasional cigarette I succumbed to. Though they drove me batshit crazy when they ganged up on me, I told myself that this was what a family was supposed to be like.

  My family was ready to march us down the aisle at gunpoint if I didn’t propose soon. With the shop running so smoothly and things progressing so well with Kelly, it was inevitable that Patricia would lose her shit and cause her usual brand of calamity.

  First, she filed a complaint with the court stating that my behavior on camera during Molly’s abduction was grounds for severing my parental rights. At first, I laughed it off. It had been months since the incident, and I figured no one would take her drunk ass seriously. As ridiculous as it sounds, I ended up in front of a judge explaining how punching the side of a truck was the best outlet for the unfathomable stress of a lunatic abducting my sister and nephew. I was lucky that I knew a few lawyers. Joe’s sister Tamryn recommended a family law guy she knew, Colt Dorr. He mopped the floor with Patricia’s ambulance chaser. The case was thrown out, but I wasn’t foolish enough to think Patty was done. I kept my lawyer’s card and put his number in my phone.

  Her next trick was a simple smear campaign. Several anonymous calls were made to CPS, claiming that I spanked M.J. with a paddle. I was subjected to a series of interviews and inspections; family and friends had to tender character references. Kelly stayed away for weeks on end, not wanting to give them another target to focus on. Not having her with us added to my tension, and I lost my temper. I asked the case workers if they’d bothered to check on M.J.’s mother, as she might have been the one the tipster meant to call about. They claimed they didn’t find anything over at her place. The fact that she came up clean was definitive proof in my mind that she’d called them.

  The final straw that broke the camel’s back came over spring break. Kelly was sleeping over that Saturday night, and we’d just drifted off, when the sound of breaking glass jolted me awake. Kelly sat straight up as well, and I saw that she was covered in glass.

  “Mac! I can’t find my fucking key! Did you give that little bitch my key?!” I heard Patty slur. I rubbed my eyes, trying to figure out if I was having a vivid nightmare. I saw Patty, reaching up for the sill, as if she was going to climb in the broken window with no regard for the remaining glass.

  “Mac!” Kelly snapped, and I realized she was trying to get me to move so she could crawl to the glass free side of the bed. She had a small bead of blood on her cheek, and I saw more glass in her hair. I hurried to accommodate her, though her expressionless face disturbed me.

  “Mac!” Patty whined, her hand coming down on a part of the sill that thankfully was glass free. She stumbled, and I had no doubt she was drunk off her ass.

  “Call the police,” Kelly said.

  “Patty, don’t move. I’ll be right out,” I demanded. I dialed the phone as Kelly hurried into the bathroom. I trailed after her.

  “Are you alright, Sugar?” I asked as I watched Kelly remove several large pieces of glass from her hair. By the light of the vanity, I saw a couple of other tiny cuts on her left forearm and on her hairline.

  “I’m fine.” Her calm tone gave me the push I needed to leave her and go deal with Patty. I opened the front door for Patty, who was working her way up the steps, as M.J. appeared in the living room door.

  “Mom?” He blinked at her tiredly, and for a second I thought he was going to start sucking his thumb, something I hadn’t seen him do since before he started school.

  “Hey, baby,” Patty slurred, smiling a toothy grin.

  “Why are you here so late?” he asked.

  “It’s not late, little man. It’s early.” Patty laughed, and I noticed her car was parked half on the curb. She’d come inches from rear-ending Kelly’s car.

  “I just called your mom a cab.” As soon as the sentence left my lips, I saw Kelly appear in the doorway.

  “What?” Kelly asked, her voice as cold as a February rain.

  “I’m just gonna sit down for a minute,” Patty murmured, and she plopped down on the couch. “Junior, can you get Mama a glass of water?”

  “Okay,” M.J. replied, and brushed past Kelly on his way into the kitchen.

  “What’s she doing here?” Patty’s gaze settled on Kelly. Kelly’s dark eyes found mine, and she seemed to assess me in a quizzical manner I’d never seen before.

  “That’s a good question,” Kelly chimed in, and she spun on her heel and vanished into the bedroom. I assumed she’d decided to wait out Hurricane Patricia in there until the cab came, but three minutes later she appeared fully
dressed with her bag slung over her shoulder. She was still bleeding a tiny bit, and I reached out for her; but she sidestepped me as if I was a piece of furniture.

  “Kelly,” I blurted, as the door slammed in her wake. I realized I couldn’t go after her, and I immediately shot her a text.

  Me: Please call me when you get home. I want to be sure you get there okay.

  “Where’s Kelly going, Dad?” Junior was visibly upset, and I had no idea what to say to comfort him. I needed someone to comfort me.

  “She’s going home, Sweetie.” Patty’s tone was as sweet as honey, and it made me feel a little homicidal. As much as I wished her gone forever, I had no desire to have M.J. see his mom hauled off our front lawn in cuffs.

  Patty was out of the house in less than ten minutes, but it took forever for me to get M.J. back to sleep. The next day I took Junior over to my mom’s and went in search of Patricia. She was lying on her living room floor, the door ajar, her keys still in the lock. I didn’t even raise my voice, but I think the calm way I spoke to her scared her.

  “If you ever pull anything like that again, if you ever come to my home drunk, or I even suspect that you are drinking when M.J. is with you, I will take you back to court, and that will be it. No visitation. No child support. Nothing. Do you hear me?”

  She had stared at me with a haunted look of fear that almost made me feel bad. One look at her keys in the door, though, made all of my guilt vanish.

  When I went to see Kelly I was nervous that she wouldn’t answer her door. She let me in, but our reunion wasn’t pretty. She picked up right where we’d have left off the night before, had she not stormed out.

  “I don’t understand why you keep giving Patricia second chances. As far as I’m concerned, she belongs in a loony bin.”

  “She knows there are no more chances,” I explained, but when I put my hands on her shoulders she shrugged away from me.

  “What if she’d broken Junior’s window? What if he’d been cut instead of me?” I could tell by her body language that she’d been rehearsing this fight since she left my house. “Would you have called the cops then?”

  “Junior has enough to overcome without having a jailbird mom.” I thought I sounded reasonable, but my words seemed to have the opposite effect.

  “Are you still hung up on Patty?” She frowned, and I laughed. It was my instinctual reaction, but it made Kelly furious.

  “I think we need a break,” she proclaimed as she marched to the door, flinging it open.

  I didn’t let her kick me out that day, but there was no resolution to our argument. We fought about Patty for about a month, on the phone, over text, and once in a while in person when I could get her to agree to dinner. I could tell that Patty wasn’t something that I would be able to explain away, and there were times when Kelly’s arguments were so well thought out that she actually had me doubting my own motivations. Our talks on the subject had never been pleasant, but now there was a giant wedge between us.

  One of the things Child Protective Services asked about during their probes was how often Kelly spent the night. I’d had no choice but to tell her about it, and Kelly used this to solidify her stance that she stop sleeping over period. I talked until I was hoarse, but she wouldn’t hear me. Junior was crushed when she stopped coming over while he was with me.

  “Did I do something wrong?” he asked. I tried to explain, but found myself pissed at her in the process.

  How she could so easily cut him out of her life?

  Thankfully, Kelly stopped by the very next night with Junior’s favorite Chinese takeout. She assured him she’d still tuck him in before she went home, and I could tell by her gleaming eyes that she missed him. I took comfort in it.

  In hopes of keeping the peace, I tried to keep Kelly out of any of the problems that Patty caused after that.

  I made a point of checking up on Patty and was surprised. Her house stayed clean, and as far as I could tell, every time I stopped by she was sober. I didn’t even smell old cigarette smoke inside the house the last time I was there.

  “Did I pass inspection, Warden?” She acted like it was all a big joke, but I wasn’t laughing.

  “This isn’t a game, Patty,” I said.

  As I was pulling out of her driveway, I noticed Patty wave from the window, a thoughtful expression on her face. Junior was beside her, and the image of her with her arm possessively around our son made me wonder what her next move might be.

  WHEN MAC BACKED out of taking me to Jerry’s wedding in San Antonio, I wasn’t surprised. They were so behind at the shop, and things were so messed up between us that I would have been amazed if he’d kept our plans. He’d had to cancel on me before in the previous two weeks, and though I tried to tell myself it was nothing, I’d never been a big believer in coincidence.

  We’d been out of school for two days, and I was sure he’d start pressuring me to stay over again now that I was on summer break. I missed him, I missed M.J., and in my heart I wanted him to invite me back. It was foolish to wish in silence, but after seeing him with Patricia, I didn’t feel as confident about us. I wondered if there were lingering feelings between them. After seeing them together, it was surprisingly easy to imagine them married. The eager way she looked up at him, the calm and soothing way he spoke to her. How he ignored my injuries to make sure that Patricia didn’t hurt herself. It was all just too much.

  As much as I wanted to tell myself I was being ridiculous, a slow trickle of doubt worked its way into my mind. The worst thing had been hearing her interact with M.J. That had been an eye opener. It was obvious that that little boy didn’t need me and my sophomoric attempts at child-rearing. He had a mommy who wanted to be in his life. Having my own step-parent, I knew what that meant for any fantasies I had about our future. Though I respected Bart more than I did both of my parents, he’d never be my flesh and blood.

  During one of our recent fights, I’d finally mentioned the late night visit we’d had from Patty when Mac was at Joe’s. Mac was furious when he found out.

  “Why am I just now hearing about this?” he snapped. My heart beat a thousand miles a minute when I saw how upset he was.

  “I handled it, Mac. I took her key and kicked her out.” I kept my cool, though I wanted to yell back at him. “You had your hands full with Joe, and I didn’t want to bother you. Then with everything that happened when y’all found them, it slipped my mind.”

  I watched him process my explanation, and the longer he was silent, the madder I became. Why was I defending my actions? How fucked up was that? Mac seemed to think Patty’s behavior was no big deal, and he wouldn’t even entertain taking her back to court. The way he defended and made excuses for her was a serious blow.

  He finally reached for me, and though I was tight with tension, Mac’s caresses soon turned me into a pile of jelly. “I’m sorry, Sugar. I don’t know what I’d do without you.”

  We digressed into sex, as we always did after our fights, but while he drifted into a peaceful sleep, I stared at the ceiling and wondered what had become of me. As nice as it was to hear that he needed me, his words and actions didn’t match up. Regardless of his take on things, Patricia’s drunk and disorderly behavior put me in an ethical dilemma. If Mac refused to do anything about it, I might find myself in a position in which I’d have to report her. Rather than be the bad guy in this situation I decided that I had to keep my distance, and I began to spend a lot less time at Mac’s place.

  The subject of Mac came up every time my father and I had our weekly dinners, which we still scheduled religiously. I figured if anyone could give me male insight, especially into Mac, it was Dad. To my surprise, my father went out of his way not to have an opinion. He listened to me intently, with what seemed like neutral objectivity. He asked questions without providing advice, and it was pretty frustrating. I still loved the time with him, though. He seemed very happy with Beverly and looked so healthy, it was hard to believe he was the same man I’d encountered
on my first trip to Austin.

  These were the thoughts rolling around in my anxious brain as I navigated my car toward the beautiful hotel that would host Jerry’s wedding. Jerry’s cowboy Chuck was a physical therapist from San Antonio whose parents were both doctors. I was very glad my mom didn’t know any of this. Once the pics hit Facebook, I knew I’d never hear the end of it.

  Ever since Molly’s situation became national news, my mother had blabbed to everyone she knew that I was dating Mac, the handsome biker brother of the pretty chef who had been abducted. The gorgeous one who lost it and beat up his truck on live TV when he heard they hadn’t found her. I could just imagine her regaling people at the salon, the country club. The notion of my private life being casual gossip all over Denver would have been nauseating, had I not been so in love with Mac and so proud of the dignified way he’d handled the media attention.

  Mom had been pushing to come down and meet him in person since Molly went missing, but we’d agreed she should wait until summer vacation so that I’d be off of work and available to be their full-time Austin tour guide. Since the broken window incident over spring break, things between Mac and me had taken such dismal turn, I’d been tempted to call off their visit entirely. I’d been dragging my heels. I just couldn’t accept that we couldn’t fix things.

  For the first time in my life, my heart was in charge, not my head. Mac was the one, I felt it as sure of that as I felt sure that I could push through the next mile every time I ran. I knew what kind of man he was. The kind who didn’t leave his sister hanging, even though they fought constantly, who played Battleship with his kid on Saturday mornings before he’d even had his morning coffee, the kind who worked his fingers to the bone to cover for a friend so that he could be with his struggling family.

  I already had myself pretty worked up during the rehearsal dinner when I discovered I’d been paired with the bad John Travolta impersonator who’d been my blind date when I first moved to Texas. I pulled out my phone immediately to text Mac.