by Jane Graves
“So how are things going?” he said.
“Okay.”
“Did you have that talk with Kim?”
“Yeah. I talked to her.”
“And?”
“And she told me she doesn’t care if I don’t like her staying up late and bringing friends over. She says I’m too uptight, so it’s my fault there’s a problem.”
Well, shit. “Can you change rooms?”
“It’s too late for that. If you want to change now, you have to get a letter from God.”
“Well, it’s your room, too. Have you talked to your resident advisor? Maybe she can talk to Kim.”
“Oh, right. Like that’s going to solve anything? It’ll only piss Kim off. And then she really will be awful to me.”
Marc started to say, Come on, Angela! That’s bullshit! Didn’t I teach you to stand up for yourself? But he could hear that shaky, on-the-verge-of-crying tone in her voice, so he knew he’d better shut up.
“You’ll be here Sunday for Shannon and Luke’s wedding, right?” he asked her.
“Yeah. I’ll be there. I’d never miss Shannon’s wedding.”
“Kari offered to fix dinner for the family after the wedding.”
Silence. And it dragged on so long Marc wondered if he’d lost the connection.
“Oh,” Angela said finally. “So she’s still there?”
“Yes. Will you stay for dinner?”
“I don’t know. I probably need to get back to school. I have a sociology test on Monday.”
“Come on, Angela. I’d like to see you for a little while.”
Yet another long silence. Then a heavy sigh. “Okay. I’ll come to dinner.”
Marc felt a surge of relief. “Good. That’s good. I know Uncle Daniel wants to see you, too. And Aunt Nina. We’ll have a nice time.”
“Whatever.”
That word frustrated the hell out of Marc, because she acted as if she didn’t care about any of this when he knew she felt exactly the opposite. He couldn’t even imagine what Sunday was going to bring.
After he said good-bye, Marc stuck his phone back into his pocket, and he and Brandy got out of the truck. As he was walking inside, he happened to see Luke coming out of the hardware store down the street. He had Fluffy on a leash.
Marc waved, and Luke approached. “Plumbing parts,” he said, holding up the bag in his hand. “I hate plumbing.”
“What’s the problem?”
“Leaky faucet. Shannon tried to fix it. She’s good at a lot of things. Plumbing isn’t one of them.”
“And now you get to fix her fix?”
“Exactly.”
“Let me know if you need some help.”
“Thanks,” Luke said. “Here for lunch?”
“Yeah. Want to join me?”
“Shannon’s expecting me back at the shelter, but what’s thirty minutes? A man’s gotta eat, right?”
A few minutes later, Marla seated them in a booth by the front window. The dogs circled and sniffed, then lay down beside each other.
Marc looked over to see the kitchen door swing open. Kari came out, carrying a plate in each hand and baskets on her arms. She saw Marc and gave him a smile as she delivered the food to the family in the next booth. Then she swept by their booth and gave each dog a pat on the head and a dog biscuit.
“Hi, Luke!” Kari said, standing back up. “I didn’t know you were going to be here, too.” She took out her order pad. “So what’s it going to be, guys?”
“Chicken fried steak,” Luke said.
Kari wrote down the order, then turned to Marc.
“Double cheeseburger,” he said.
“Got it. Do you want that zombiefied?”
As Marc was trying to figure out what she could possibly mean by that, Gloria breezed by. “Definitely get the zombie version,” she told Marc with a wink. “It’s so worth it.”
“Then by all means,” Marc said, feeling totally lost but loving the smile on Kari’s face.
“Coming right up,” Kari said with a gleam in her eye. Then she hurried off to give another diner his check. Marc watched her walk away, thinking how goofy she looked wearing blue capri pants with her pink apron and Angela’s beat-up sneakers. But even looking goofy, he swore she was still the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen.
He finally dragged his gaze away and looked back at Luke. “So how are things going? Pretty soon you’ll be a married man.”
Luke smiled. “It’s about time. Shannon’s obsessing over the wedding. Her mother’s obsessing even more. But to tell you the truth, it’s the honeymoon I’m interested in.”
“Where are you going?”
“San Antonio. We’re just getting a suite at a nice hotel for several days. Shannon doesn’t want to stay away from the shelter any longer than that. But I’m going to make sure that at least while she’s on her honeymoon, she forgets all about it.”
“Smart man.”
“Your harvest is coming up soon. Are you really leaving after that?”
“Yep.”
Luke shook his head. “We’re sure gonna miss you.”
“I’ve been planning this trip for years. Never thought the day would come.”
“That’s a hell of a business you’re leaving behind.”
“Hell is right. A vineyard is nothing but blood and sweat for the things you can control, and a lot of hope and prayers for those you can’t. I need a break. Daniel will handle things.”
Daniel will handle things.
Marc had said those words to himself so many times he thought he actually believed them, but saying them out loud turned out to be a very hard thing to do.
“What about Angela?” Luke asked.
“I doubt she’ll come back here after college. She wants to be a vet. This town already has one and probably can’t support another one.”
Luke nodded.
“What was it like?” Marc asked. “Traveling the country on the rodeo circuit?”
Luke shrugged. “Pretty good for a while. Drinking. Partying. What’s not to like about that when you’re twenty years old?”
“A woman in every city?”
“Just about.” Then Luke’s smile faded. “After a while, though, I think I was pushing so hard for the championship that I didn’t notice when it stopped being exciting and started being a hard, lonely life.”
Marc couldn’t imagine loneliness like that. All he could see was peace and quiet and the freedom to do whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted.
“Sometimes responsibility is like a noose around your neck,” he said. “I love my daughter. She’s just amazing. But raising a kid is hard. Raising a kid by yourself is even harder. Over the years I’ve wondered what I’ve missed by doing that.”
“Sometimes freedom isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.”
“Yeah, but I’m sure going to give it a shot, anyway.”
“If you want to leave that bad, you should do it. But I gotta tell you, Marc. I’ve been both places. And now all I want to do is stay.”
“That’s because you have Shannon.”
“So find yourself a good woman.” He nodded toward Kari. “I see a certain little redhead you can’t seem to keep your eyes off of.”
Suddenly Marc heard applause. When he turned around, he saw Kari standing on a chair. What was she doing? Balancing a spoon on her nose?
He wasn’t sure how, but that spoon stayed there as if she’d superglued it. She held her arms out in a ta-da! pose. After several seconds of showing the trick to everybody in the place, she grabbed the spoon off her nose and bowed deeply, and the crowd erupted with more applause.
“She’s something else, isn’t she?” Luke said.
Marc couldn’t have agreed more.
As she handed out spoons for everybody in the place to try the same trick, she glanced over at Marc and gave him a wink. She was crazy. He’d known that from the first time she knocked on his door. But when he looked at her now, he didn’t see anything wrong wit
h that. He saw a woman who loved life, who enjoyed people, who made friends easily, who had injected the kind of light in his life he’d totally overlooked all these years.
Then she turned toward the front of the café, and all at once her broad, beautiful smile fell into a look of dismay. Marc spun around to see a tall, stout man standing at the door. He looked to be about sixty years old, wearing a pair of sharply creased slacks, a buttoned-down shirt, and dress shoes. His salt-and-pepper hair was set into a rigidly conservative style, and judging from the heavy downward creases at the corners of his mouth, he looked as if he hadn’t smiled a day in his life. And when Marc looked out the window and saw a black Mercedes sedan parked at the curb, he knew who the man must be.
Every muscle in his body tightened with anger. What was that bastard doing there?
Chapter 15
When Kari saw her father at the door of the café, the incongruity was so overwhelming that for a moment she thought it couldn’t possibly be him. She wondered how long he’d been there, but judging from his expression, he’d seen her spoon-on-the-nose trick. She was instantly filled with the same humiliation she’d felt so many times in her life—the kind of humiliation only her father could heap on her with a single frigid expression.
She took a deep breath and walked across the restaurant. “Dad? What are you doing here?”
“May I have a word with you?” he said.
Before she could respond, he turned and walked out of the café. Kari paused for a moment and looked at Marc. His eyebrows were pulled together and his eyes narrowed in anger. That told her he knew who’d been standing at the door, and she read his thoughts as clearly as if he’d shouted them.
It’s your father. Something’s up. Do you need me?
It’s okay, she said, moving just her lips, even though she wasn’t sure it was going to be okay at all.
She left the café and followed her father to his car. His driver opened the back door. She got in, and her father followed. The interior of the car was so quiet Kari could hear the blood rushing through her ears. And in that moment she realized how much she associated the smell of the rich leather upholstery with negative feelings, and a single whiff nearly made her sick.
She couldn’t believe this. Her father had driven all the way from Houston to see her. That had to mean something. Maybe it meant he would acknowledge her self-sufficiency, give her money back to her, and maybe tell her he was sorry.
Oh, right. Had her own wishful thinking ever gone her way where her father was concerned? Ever?
He looked her up and down, focusing on her pink bib apron. “So this is what you’ve been doing for a living?”
His face was all hard planes, with a bullish nose and eyes so impenetrable that Kari felt as if she were talking to a stranger. “Yes.”
“Your job is waiting for you in Houston.”
“I have a job.”
“No. This isn’t a job. This is what uneducated, uncultured people do in order to feed themselves. Is that what you want to be associated with?”
“I like it here.”
He sighed—that bone-weary, long-suffering sigh intended as a wordless reprimand. There had been times in her life when that alone had intimidated her enough that she’d stopped being herself and started being whatever her father wanted her to be.
“I’d hoped the older you got, the more you’d get this kind of nonsense out of your system,” he said. “Apparently that hasn’t been the case.”
“I don’t want to go back to Houston. And I don’t want to marry Greg.”
“Forget him. If he couldn’t hold on to you, he doesn’t deserve my money.”
So that was all this was to her father. A game played for money. He dangled millions in front of a man to see if he could be the one to control his wayward daughter, and when he failed, he was out the door. The very thought of that made Kari dizzy with despair. But was she really surprised? Didn’t she know it already?
“I thought it was possible…” Kari’s voice trailed off.
“You thought what was possible?”
She nearly choked on the words, but she had to say them. “That you might be proud of me.”
Her father raised a single eyebrow, tilting his head with disbelief. “Proud of you? For being paid a pittance to entertain the masses by balancing a spoon on your nose? I fail to see the accomplishment.”
“I’m taking care of myself.”
“By waiting tables and living with a man? Again—I fail to see the accomplishment.”
Kari felt as if she were ten years old again, looking for any chink in her father’s wall of disapproval. But now, like then, she saw nothing. She wasn’t looking for total approval. She wasn’t looking for a pat on the head. She just wanted some acknowledgment that maybe she was doing something at least marginally admirable by sticking it out and running her own life.
“And just so you’ll know,” her father went on, “Marc Cordero is hardly a wealthy man. That vineyard barely affords him a decent living.”
“How do you know that?”
“Kari, please. Is there anything on this earth I can’t find out if I want to?”
“I don’t care whether he has money or not.”
Her father shook his head with disgust. “After your upbringing, how can you stand living like a pauper?”
“I’d have an easier time if you gave me my money back.”
“As I’ve always told you, there are consequences to everything you do. That money will remain with me until you come to your senses. Then I’d be happy to return it.”
Consequences. God, how she hated that word.
“I’m still in the middle of my shift,” she said, clasping her hands together to keep them from shaking. “I need to get back to work.”
“I could buy that place, Kari. With a single swipe of my pen, I could own it.”
Kari’s heart skipped with apprehension, because she knew her father wasn’t just blowing smoke. “Rosie would never sell.”
“Everybody has his price.”
“If you buy this restaurant,” she said, her voice trembling, “I’ll quit.”
Her father’s expression slowly turned ugly, and his voice took on an undercurrent of fury. “I gave you everything a person could want or need in this life. A decent upbringing. A college education. A position at my company. A wedding not one in ten thousand women will ever have. And this is how you repay me?”
“That’s the point, Dad! You gave those things to me. You never asked me what I wanted!”
“And there was a reason for that. If you’re given the opportunity to have what you want, this is where you end up.”
With that, every last bit of the pride she’d felt at finally getting near the point of self-sufficiency evaporated. She knew he was angry. But if they could just talk a little when the anger subsided, maybe he’d see her point of view. Maybe that awful expression on his face would finally melt into a smile, and he’d tell her that after thinking about it, maybe he did feel just a little bit proud of her.
“Like I said,” Kari told him, “I have to go back to work. But maybe we can talk again later. There are a few inns in town. Maybe you could—”
“Enough!”
Kari’s heart slammed against her chest.
“I don’t allow anyone to disrespect me,” her father said. “No one. Not friends, not business associates, and certainly not my own daughter.” He sat back and took a deep, silent breath, letting it out slowly, regaining his composure. But still the anger was there, laced around the edges of his voice. “If you forget this nonsense and come back to Houston,” he said, “I’ll overlook all this. But if you stay…” His face turned to stone. “You’re not my daughter any longer.”
Kari was stunned. Those words…those horrible, dismissive words…she couldn’t stand the sound of them. For all her father’s criticism, his manipulation, his disapproval, she’d always thought deep down that he loved her. He had to love her, didn’t he? Didn’t all fath
ers love their daughters?
Now she knew it wasn’t true. It couldn’t be true, or he wouldn’t be talking to her like this. He was the one person on this earth who should have loved her and protected her and stood up for her. Instead, he did everything he could to tear her down into a meek, helpless waif of a woman without a shred of self-respect. She was hovering in that terrible realization that he intended to hold a hard line no matter what. That nothing she did was ever good enough, and it never would be, making her feel more lost and alone than she ever had in her life.
Then she looked through the side window of the car into the café and saw Marc staring back at her. He was so strong, so sure of himself. It radiated from him even at this distance, and just looking at him made her feel a burst of courage and resilience. She knew it was only a matter of time before he left Rainbow Valley, before she couldn’t count on him being there every day for her, making her feel strong and self-sufficient. But it was because of him that maybe she could do what needed to be done right now.
She looked at her father, and this time her words came out with strength and conviction even though her hands were shaking and her stomach was in turmoil.
“Then I guess I’m not your daughter any longer.”
Her father’s hard, expressionless face never changed. “Well, then. You’ve left me no choice.” He nodded toward the car door. “Get out.”
In spite of everything she knew about her father, she still couldn’t have imagined those words coming out of his mouth, and her heart crumbled to dust.
In a daze, she turned and opened the car door. Stepped out. Closed it behind her. Her stomach felt like shattered glass, but she kept walking. Even when she heard the car pull away, she didn’t look back. She just kept walking toward the door of the café, but now tears clouded her eyes so much she wasn’t even sure she was walking in the right direction. She had the sense of Marc jumping up from the booth with Brandy at his heels and hurrying out the door. He caught Kari as she reached it, and she collapsed in his arms and her tears spilled out.
“Kari? What happened? What did he say to you?”
