“He is, but it’ll be hard at first. He’ll need some watching.”
“I’d better check on him,” Suze said. “They’re awfully quiet in there.”
Suze started to rise, giving Sierra an appreciative nod when the woman grabbed her elbow and gave her a boost. Slipping her crutches under her arms, she stumped over to the other side of the hallway as quietly as she could so she could see into the living room.
There sat her father, in his usual chair. And there sat Isaiah, cross-legged on the floor in front of him. The boy looked totally enraptured by the big doings on the Ponderosa, and as she watched, he leaned back against the front of her dad’s chair.
“What’s that guy’s name?” Isaiah asked, pointing to the screen.
Suze waited for the fireworks, or at least a bad-tempered admonishment, but her dad simply said, “Hoss.”
“Sure fits him,” Isaiah said. “We got a guy like that at Phoenix House. My friend Carter. I think I’m gonna start calling him ‘Hoss.’”
Earl grunted. But it was a nice grunt.
“Dang,” Suze said. “We’ll take him.”
Chapter 48
Brady stopped at Suze’s house every morning and every evening. He knew Sierra was bringing Isaiah out, and the kid was capable of feeding the horses and turning them out, but what if one of the horses was sick? What if one of them got injured? Someone with experience ought to be around to keep an eye on a horse like Speedo.
Besides, there were kisses to be stolen and glances to share. Everything seemed to have changed between him and Suze. She’d apparently changed her mind about him. He didn’t know why, but he didn’t really care. He just liked the result.
The only problem was Isaiah. The kid was probably his favorite out of all the Phoenix House boys, but he was always there, watching with those dark eyes. And he didn’t miss a thing.
“You two getting married?” Isaiah asked him once, as he was leaving.
Brady knew Suze could hear them, and it took a couple beats too long for him to think of an answer. “I guess that would be up to her,” he said.
Actually, Isaiah wasn’t the only problem. There was also Earl Carlyle, lurking in the living room like some malevolent presence in a horror movie. Ridge and Isaiah had moved the recliner back into the living room, so Brady had lost that fight, but he’d found a beautiful old rocking chair in the attic at the ranch, with tapestry upholstery that was only a little torn, in places where you’d barely notice it. Suze spent most every day ensconced in its old-fashioned comfort, watching her horses and knitting.
But Earl wouldn’t be a problem today. His truck wasn’t in the drive. No, the only problem Brady would face today was the Big Lie.
It might be a sin of omission, but keeping Suze in the dark about Speedo’s kidnapping at the hands of Cooter Banks just felt wrong. Besides, he was bound to be found out. His brothers knew about Speedo’s kidnapping. So did Cooter, and anyone Cooter had told. Plus he’d asked about the missing horse all over the county. Suze would find out about it sooner or later. And if she didn’t hear it from him, there’d be hell to pay.
There might be anyway.
On the day he decided to come clean, he arrived at the Carlyle ranch late in the afternoon. Taking the stairs two at a time, he swung into Suze’s bedroom to find a rumpled bed, a half-filled water glass, and a paperback novel splayed on the pillow. Gently, he touched the sheets with the back of his hand to see if they were warm. They weren’t. He adjusted the pillow, inhaling her familiar feminine scent as he punched it into plumpness.
He glanced back at the bedside table. He was used to seeing the photo of her mother there. But never before had there been another photo stuck in the edge of the frame, nearly obscuring her mother’s face. He leaned closer.
Dang. It was the photograph he’d seen in her underwear drawer. The one of the two of them, him and Suze, sitting on a fence on a summer day.
Their faces were open, laughing, young, and alive. They weren’t thinking about the future; they were thinking about that moment, that single, golden, magical moment. And each other. They’d definitely been thinking about each other.
Apparently, they still were.
Both of them.
She loves me back. Holy crap, she actually loves me.
It had to be true. No way would she allow that photo to obscure her mother’s face unless it really meant something to her.
His hand shook a little as he stuck the picture back in its place and intensified his search. She wasn’t in the bathroom upstairs, or the living room or the powder room downstairs. She didn’t seem to be anywhere.
She loves me. That wasn’t going to make it any easier for him to tell her what he had to say. But maybe it would make it easier for her.
He checked the downstairs.
No Suze.
Could she have gone town with her father? He doubted it. She was doing better, but a full day in the truck would be torture for her.
She loves me. She loves me. The words repeated with every beat of his heart. He knew it for a fact now. There was no other reason for that picture to be there, where she could see it as she drifted off to dreamland.
But she wasn’t here.
Head hanging low, he walked back to his truck. As he opened the door, a thought occurred to him. Slowly, he closed the truck door and headed toward the barn.
Dooley raced to greet him. Last time he’d been with Suze, she’d accused him of alienating the little mutt’s affections, and maybe she was right. The dog jumped in place like a jackrabbit with no place to go, pink tongue panting, hind end wiggling in ecstasy every time he hit the ground.
“Poor buddy. Were you lonesome? Huh? Were you lonesome?” He gave the dog a wild belly rub while the dog rolled happily in the grass. Suze would kill him if she saw him getting her dog so dirty, but hey, Suze wasn’t here.
“Are you all by yourself? Huh, Doolers? Did they go away and leave you, Dooley-pants?”
He played a brief game with the dog, jumping from side to side as the dog tried to rush past him. They’d played for quite a while before a voice behind him made him jump higher than Dooley.
“Dooley-pants?”
Brady squinted into the shadowy depths of the barn. “Where are you?”
“Right here.” Suze stepped out into the sunshine.
What he noticed first, before anything else, was her smile.
What he noticed next was that she’d left her hair down, and it spilled in twisting spirals over her shoulders.
Then he noticed her legs—both of them—and the cane.
“You—aw, honey, you got it off! And no crutches!”
This was cause for celebration.
He couldn’t tell her about Speedo now. It would spoil her good day, and God knew she didn’t get enough of those.
He reached her in three long strides and scooped her into his arms, spinning her around and around. When he put her down, he pulled her against his body and they kissed like a couple of teenagers, right out there in the middle of God’s outdoors.
“Where’s your dad?” Brady asked when they came up for air.
“He went to town,” Suze said. “He’ll be gone all afternoon.”
Brady stroked her hair back from her face and kissed her again.
This was definitely a good day.
Chapter 49
Earl sat in the front seat of his pickup, checking the list he made every week of the items he needed in town. He’d gone clear to Cheyenne to do the grocery shopping, and then circled back to Wynott to pick up a few miscellaneous items at Boone’s Hardware. He did this every week, just one time. If Suze forgot to add something to the list, she had to wait for the next trip. It was over an hour’s drive.
He’d left early this morning, before she was up. She’d probably have a fit about something she hadn’t gotten t
o add to the list. Well, let her fuss. In his experience, women enjoyed it.
He started the truck and eased out of his parking space. There was no traffic in Wynott, even on a Saturday. If it wasn’t for Boone’s and that new home for kids, the place would be a ghost town.
Of course, there was Gwen’s sculpture studio, but if you didn’t know what it was, you’d think it was just another crazy small-town junk shop. You’d never know the owner was a sculptor who’d sold her work as far afield as Chicago and New York. So Gwennie had said, anyway, when she came to visit Suzanne.
Suzanne. Not him. For some reason, that rankled.
He didn’t begrudge his daughter the company. But there’d been a time when Gwen Saunders didn’t have eyes for anybody but him, and he hadn’t realized, until she’d stopped by, how much he’d missed her sunny disposition and her joking demeanor. She had a way of lightening things up, Gwen did.
Gwen was the only woman he knew who didn’t like to fuss. When things went wrong, she’d always reacted with a smile and a wave of her hand, as if she were erasing the problem. Funny thing was, it usually went away for her, just like that.
Maybe he should have asked her to do that the other day when she’d come to visit. He could use that smile and that wave of her hand that erased the past. If only she could erase his grief, erase Suze’s accident, erase their money troubles.
When she was just a little thing, Suze had always insisted Gwennie was a witch—a good witch, she’d said. Sometimes it seemed like she was right. Gwennie would show up and rough roads would turn smooth, old arguments would be forgotten, and the sun would come out from behind the clouds. He’d seen it happen. Maybe that was why she and Ellen had been so inseparable.
On impulse, he pulled over next to the junk shop.
Studio. He meant studio. That’s what she’d called it.
Maybe he’d go on in and see what it was she did in there. From what he’d heard, she rarely left the place, and she didn’t talk much to anyone in town. She was a bit of a mystery.
That didn’t sound like the Gwennie he’d known. She hadn’t looked like the Gwennie he’d known either. Lord knew she’d gained a whole ’nother Gwennie while they were apart. But she was still the same bright-eyed girl at heart.
He pulled over onto the shoulder of the road and parked by the gate that offered the only visible access to the six-foot fence surrounding Gwennie’s peculiar fortress. He knocked on the gate and waited, but nobody came. Glancing right and left, he lifted the latch—a complicated contraption made out of the head of a hammer welded to a hinge—and let himself in.
It sure looked like a junk shop. Matter of fact, it looked like a junkyard, with defunct cars all over the place and a rusted Caterpillar earthmover lording it over them all, its toothy bucket filled with soil that had sprouted a healthy crop of weeds.
He made his way through the mess, which wasn’t easy. There were tangles of barbed wire, stacks of what appeared to be roofing shingles, and old wheels lying all around the place.
He could hear the hum of an air compressor, and the weird zippery sound of a welder. As he came around the back of the building, he caught sight of Gwen—or at least, he thought it was Gwen. It might have been Neil Armstrong, for all he knew. She was dressed in what was probably a fire-retardant suit and welding helmet, but she looked like an earthbound astronaut. She was welding a bunch of gears and flywheels together. The device she was working on wasn’t much bigger than a box of Kleenex, but a few much larger creations stood around the shop. They didn’t make a lick of sense, but they were so complicated, they were fun to look at. Kind of like those old Rube Goldberg cartoons, where a big, complicated machine did something simple like pet a cat.
“Do they do anything?” he asked.
He had to repeat the question twice before she heard him. Flicking off the welder, she flipped up the see-through mask, revealing her round, smiling face.
“They all do something.” She pointed to a shining contraption made mostly of stainless steel medical equipment, from scalpels to stethoscopes. “That one’s called Time. It heals all wounds.” She pointed to another contraption, one that looked a little like a catapult. “That one throws caution to the winds.”
“And it’s called…”
“Youth.”
“That fits,” he said. “And this one?”
Her eyes sparkled and she grinned. “This one repairs broken hearts.”
“Hah,” he said. “What do you call it, then?”
“Love,” she said.
“Well, that doesn’t make any sense.”
“No?” She didn’t seem bothered by his scoffing tone, but then, it had always taken a lot to bother Gwennie. She wouldn’t stand for cruelty or meanness. But that was about all that would ruffle the smooth waters she sailed in life.
“No. Love causes broken hearts.” He spoke with the certainty of the afflicted.
“What do you think the cure is, then?” she asked, her head tilted, her smile playful.
“There is no cure.” He sat down heavily on the running board of an ancient pickup truck that had rusted to a uniform shade of brown. “And I’m speaking from experience.”
“Oh, Earl.” Gwen sat down beside him and the truck groaned, shifting slightly from her weight. “I know Ellen broke your heart.”
Earl nodded. “When she died.”
Gwennie stood and the truck rose about six inches, almost pushing Earl to his feet. “I thought she did it way before that.”
“Like when?”
Gwennie dropped the shield back over her face. “Like a little bit at a time, every day, from the moment you met her.”
Flicking a switch, she brought the air compressor back to noisy life, making further conversation impossible.
Chapter 50
Earl sat there awhile, his elbows on his thighs, his hands dangling uselessly between his knees. Ellen had been the love of his life. She’d made his world a better place just by being by his side.
Hadn’t she?
Gwennie finished welding one more piece onto her sculpture, then took off the helmet and shook out her mop of gray hair. “Remember that necklace Ellen wanted?”
Earl remembered, all right. It was made with some fancy blue stone that matched her eyes, and it cost more than two weeks’ pay.
“She pestered you and pestered you until you bought it, remember? And then she lost it the first time she wore it.”
“I know. I thought she’d be upset, but she shrugged it off like it was nothing.” Earl had done his best to admire Ellen for that. At least she hadn’t raised a ruckus or cried or anything.
But it had hurt at the time. He’d scrimped and saved for that necklace, and she’d barely bothered to look for it.
“Once she had it, she didn’t care about it anymore.” Gwen gave Earl a long, considering look. “Maybe you’re not ready to hear this, but that’s how she was with you.”
“What do you mean?”
Gwennie shed the fire-retardant suit and sat down on a crude wooden bench that stood beside the studio’s big back door. “I had a crush on you back then, you know that?”
“I knew.” He eked out a smile. He hadn’t used those muscles in a long time.
“She took you away from me,” Gwennie said. “And then she didn’t care anymore. She’d proven she could do it.”
Earl sat in silence for a while. What Gwennie was saying hurt like a blow to the chest, and he was having trouble catching his breath.
It was true. And the truth hurt. For all these years, the years of his marriage and the years after Ellen’s death—he’d been hurt by that truth.
Everyone had recognized it but him. He’d refused to believe he couldn’t make Ellen love him, so he’d followed his wife around like a servant, bowing to her every whim—trying to make her love him.
It was embarr
assing, that’s what it was.
“We had some good years,” he said. “When she was sick, she was a different person.”
“Because she was scared. And she needed you.”
He scowled. “I thought you two were friends.”
“We were. That’s why I understand. It was the same way for me.”
“You weren’t there when she was sick.” He knew his tone was accusing. He didn’t care. He’d never understood why Gwen had abandoned her best friend when she needed her most.
“I would have been there for you more than her,” Gwen said. “I was afraid she’d think I was waiting for her to die. It seemed best to stay away.”
He hadn’t thought of it that way. Ellen might have believed that, even of Gwen—because she’d been that way herself.
They sat in silence for a while. Earl was used to silence—the long, uncomfortable silences that hung in the air between him and his daughter, a silence made of secrets. But this silence was different. Comfortable. Comforting, even.
“You need to tell Suzanne the truth,” Gwen finally said. “About everything. Even about Slim.”
He shook his head. “Slim Harris took enough away from me. I’m not giving him anything else. She’s the closest thing I’ve got to family.”
“Suzanne loves you.”
“I’ve never given her a reason to.” Earl looked at Gwen a long time, making up his mind whether he’d trust her.
He decided he would.
“I can’t stand to see her,” he said. “She looks so much like Ellen. She’s a reminder of my failure.” He struggled to speak through the hard, aching lump in his throat. “I never made Ellen happy. I try to honor her memory because I failed her in life.”
“You didn’t fail,” Gwennie said. “She just made you feel that way. You did the best you could. Sometimes that’s as close as we can get to success.”
They sat together a long while, watching the sun drop in the sky. Earl thought he finally understood why Gwen lived here. He felt safe behind her high fence—safe from cruelty and secrets and lies. Safe from life.
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