Redemption Road: Jackson Falls Book 5 (Jackson Falls Series)

by Breton, Laurie

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hi.”

  “Whatcha watching?”

  “Just an old movie I rented. The Way We Were. Robert Redford and Barbra Streisand. Are you in for the night?”

  “Yeah. Hey, you were quite something tonight.”

  Her blue eyes widened in surprise. “You were there?”

  “In the kitchen. Hiding.”

  “No doubt mortified because of your mother’s brassy and juvenile behavior.”

  “Are you kidding? You and Aunt Casey rocked. I was just hiding because I had a lot on my mind.”

  “Everything okay?”

  “Everything’s fine.” Better than fine, he thought, and momentarily considered telling her his news, before sanity took over and reminded him that he wasn’t supposed to tell anyone. But for some crazy reason, tonight he wanted to be with her. “I saw popcorn in the kitchen,” he said. “Want me to pop some? We can watch the movie together.”

  “I’d love that. But it’s not exactly your kind of movie.”

  She might be surprised. With the mood he was in tonight, anything could happen. Tonight, he might be able to enjoy the sappiest love story ever written. “I’ll get the popcorn. How far in are you?”

  “Only about five minutes. I’ll rewind the tape.”

  He headed for the kitchen, hesitated as he heard the familiar whirring sound of the tape rewinding. “Mom?” he said. “About the other day…I’m sorry. I was rude, and out of line.”

  “You were,” she said, “but it doesn’t change how I feel about you.”

  He didn’t know how to respond to that, so he went to the kitchen for the popcorn instead.

  The movie was as sappy as he’d expected. He and his mom sat side by side on the couch, feet propped on the coffee table, and shared the popcorn. He tried to focus on Streisand and Redford, but his mind was awash in images of Paige. After his proposal—and after she’d pronounced him certifiably batshit crazy—they’d escaped from her house and taken his truck to the high school, where they parked out back by the football field and talked for what felt like hours. He’d pleaded his case, and she’d poked holes in it. That was Paige. She wasn’t the kind of girl to jump into something this serious without looking at it from every possible angle. They’d talked about feelings, about possibilities, about practicalities: how she would finish her schooling, what kind of life they’d both be leading, far from home and loved ones. They talked about the hardships they’d undoubtedly face. About her own dreams, about how to make sure she didn’t get shortchanged if they did this crazy thing. This wasn’t just about him; it was about both of them.

  When they were done talking, they spent some time steaming up the windows in his pick-up truck before she told him that if she didn’t get home, her dad would be out looking for her. They’d agreed to keep everything low-key for now. They still had a little time to work out the details.

  “You’re quiet,” his mom said. “Are you sure everything’s okay?”

  If she only knew. I’m getting married, Mom. He wished he could tell her, but if he did, Paige’s dad would know within a nano-second, and he’d be banished forever. He couldn’t take that chance.

  “Everything’s fantastic,” he said, and examined her tired face. “How are things with you?”

  “Oh, you know how it goes. Some days you’re the windshield, some days you’re the bug. I’m a tough old broad. I get by, one way or the other.”

  “Want me to make another bag of popcorn?”

  “No, thanks. That stuff’ll kill you.”

  “Hasn’t killed me yet.”

  She leaned her head back and looked at him, a wistful half-smile on her face. “You loved popcorn when you were a little boy.”

  “Did I?”

  “You did. We used to go to the movies, just the two of us, and I’d have to sneak in a big bag of popcorn because the stuff they sold there was so expensive. I think we saw every Disney movie that was ever made.”

  “Dumbo. I remember insisting that we sit in the front row.”

  “You were such a sweet little boy.” She reached out a hand, brushed a strand of hair from his face. “How could I say no to you?”

  “You used to buy great big coloring books,” he said. “And we’d spend hours on the floor together, flat on our stomachs, coloring.”

  “I was barely out of childhood myself. When you were born, I was younger than you are now.”

  He’d never looked at it that way, never really thought about how young she’d been. He tried to imagine himself, at the age of eighteen, being responsible for a kid, but it was unimaginable. “You were a good mother,” he said, surprised to realize it was true. She had been a good mother, right up until the day she walked out of his life and left him wondering what he’d done wrong and why she’d stopped loving him.

  “If I’d been a good mother,” she said, “I would have stayed, instead of—” She stopped, shook her head, and turned her face away from him so he wouldn’t see the tears. But he saw them anyway. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m having a rough night. Too many old ghosts, I guess.” She picked up the remote control and clicked off the VCR and the television. “I’ve seen this movie before. I don’t much like how it ends.”

  “You okay?” he said.

  “I’m just tired. It’s almost midnight. We should get to bed. Get our beauty rest.”

  “As if you need beauty rest.”

  She narrowed her eyes. “Why are you being so nice to me tonight?”

  He felt himself flushing, hoped she wouldn’t notice in the dim lighting. “You’re my mother,” he said. “I love you.”

  “You’re the second person who’s said that to me tonight. Do you suppose Armageddon is right around the corner?”

  “What? You don’t think you’re worthy of love?”

  “Not yours. Or Casey’s.”

  “Oh, Mom,” he said. “Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

  She cupped his cheek in her hand. “You’re a good kid, Mikey. No thanks to me. Your father and I may have our differences, but I can’t fault him for the way he raised you. I’m so proud of you.”

  Guilt made him flinch. If she knew—if any of them knew—what he and Paige were planning, her stellar opinion of him would go south faster than a flock of robins in November.

  She misinterpreted the reason he’d recoiled. He could see the hurt in her eyes as she removed her hand. “Well,” she said, “I guess I’m going to bed now. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  And she left him there, sitting in the dark, torn between his shame at hurting her needlessly and his desperation to keep secret his plans to marry Paige MacKenzie.

  Harley

  He found the skates by accident.

  Will Bradley had been a packrat, and most everything he’d packed away was still sitting on shelves in a small storage room in the barn. Cans of spray paint, random lengths of electrical wire, an ancient container of Vaseline, blackened by years of smudged, greasy fingerprints. Harley almost missed them, hanging in a dim corner, those two pairs of women’s ice skates. Both had once been white, but two decades had turned them a dingy shade of gray. He lifted the nearest skate, swiped away dust and cobwebs with his sheepskin-lined gloves. And saw the name, barely legible, written in indelible ink in a teenage girl’s flowery handwriting: Colleen Bradley.

  The blade was dull and rusty, but could probably be rehabilitated. Harley turned the skate upside down to shake out any creatures that might have set up housekeeping inside its dark interior. He estimated it to be a size eight, which sounded about right. The Widow Berkowitz was tall, at least five-seven, and she had feet to match. The second pair was smaller. Maybe a six. Those had the name CASEY BRADLEY block printed in the same indelible ink. He was pretty sure they would fit Annabel.

  He went to the barn phone and dialed Casey’s number. “It’s Harley,” he said when she answered. “Got a question for you.”

  “Good morning, Harley! Ask away.”

  �
�I found your old ice skates hanging in the barn. I think they’ll fit Annabel, but I didn’t want to just go ahead and give them to her without asking.”

  “Annabel is welcome to them. I haven’t thought of those things in years. We used to skate on that little pond behind the barn. Coll and I would bring a transistor radio and a box to set it on, build a bonfire in one of Dad’s old metal trash barrels, and we’d spend hours out there, skating until our feet went numb and our legs swelled up with chilblains.”

  He grinned. “So the two of you harbor other talents besides being cabaret singers.”

  “Very funny. Actually, I wasn’t the most talented of skaters. I enjoyed it, but I never really learned to do it well. Colleen, on the other hand—could that girl skate! Frontward, backwards, she was skating around me in circles while I was still trying to learn to stand up without falling. She was absolutely fearless. We used to watch old Christmas movies on TV. People skating at the ice rink at Rockefeller Center. That was her dream, the sum total of what she wanted when she was Annabel’s age. She wanted to skate at Rockefeller Center.”

  The wheels began spinning in his head. “Think she can still skate? Hers are here, too.”

  “She might be a little rusty. But isn’t skating like riding a bicycle? You never really forget how to do it once you’ve learned.”

  ***

  He spent two or three days, in his spare time, rehabbing the skates. Grinding the rust away. Sharpening the runners to a fine edge. Scrubbing the leather, applying white shoe polish he found in the kitchen junk drawer. When he was done, when both pairs looked like new, he replaced the laces with new ones from the shoe store in town. Hot pink for Annabel, electric blue for Colleen.

  Then he took his big snow scoop and cleared the snow from the surface of the pond. While he worked, he did some thinking. There was an old wooden bench in the upstairs hall, and he’d seen a pile of used lumber out back of the barn. The attic was full of stuff the Bradleys had left behind. If he did enough digging, he could probably locate everything he needed right here, without even having to make another trip to town.

  Mid-afternoon, when Annabel stepped off the school bus, she waded through ankle-deep snow to stand at the edge of the frozen pond, watching him solemnly. Pushing the scoop in front of him, he skated over to where she stood, her backpack dangling from her shoulder. “Dad?” she said. “What are you doing?”

  “What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m clearing snow off the pond. So we can skate.”

  “But I don’t have skates.”

  “I know that. But I do believe I have a solution to your state of skatelessness.”

  She snorted. “You just made that word up.”

  He let go of the snow scoop, took a single step off the ice, and landed unceremoniously on his ass in the hard-packed snow. Annabel covered her face with her mittened hands so he wouldn’t see her laughing, but merriment danced in her eyes. “Damn snow,” he muttered as he tugged off his skates and pulled his boots back on. “Stop giggling and help me up.”

  His daughter held out a hand. Harley took it and, grunting like some aged granny, he managed to get back on his feet. Dusting off the seat of his pants, he said, “I found a couple pairs of skates in the storage room the other day. They used to belong to Mrs. MacKenzie and her sister. I fixed them up so they’re like new. I think Casey’s are about the right size for you.”

  “Oh, I hope so! I miss skating.”

  When she was smaller and they were living in Manhattan, they’d gone to Rockefeller Center every weekend to skate. Amy, of course, had never had a smidgen of interest in joining them. Her idea of an enjoyable winter activity was sitting in front of a crackling fire, sipping mulled cider and reading a good book. So he and Annabel had skated without her. To offset the cost of rentals, he’d purchased his own skates. But Annabel was growing by leaps and bounds, and what fit her one year would be too small the next. So she’d never owned a pair of skates. Until now.

  She tried them on in the kitchen, and he pinched the toes to see how much room she had. Just as he’d suspected, they fit perfectly. “You don’t mind that they’re secondhand?” he said. “That they used to belong to Mrs. MacKenzie?”

  “Are you kidding? She’s one of the coolest people I know. I feel honored to wear her skates.”

  Still crouched at her feet, Harley solemnly studied his daughter’s face, wondering if he was about to become the biggest jackass of all time. Annabel had already lost one mother. It had taken them both some time to come to terms with Amy’s defection. Hell, who was he kidding? They were still dealing with it, every day of their lives. Yet here he was, about to jump off the cliff again by getting involved with another woman who was all wrong for him. All wrong for both of them. A woman who had “temporary” written all over her.

  “Listen,” he said, “there’s something I want to talk over with you.”

  “If it’s about Mrs. Berkowitz, I already know. You like her. You like her a lot.”

  His mouth fell open. Annabel rolled her eyes. “Dad?” she said. “Are you blushing?”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. Men don’t blush.”

  “If you want to ask her out on a date, I have no problem with it. She’s a nice lady. I like her. And you’ve been alone for too long.”

  For once in his life, he was speechless. Somewhere along the way, when he hadn’t been looking, his little girl, with her gap-toothed grin, had matured into a beautiful, level-headed young lady. How the hell had he missed that? He really needed to pay closer attention, before he woke up some morning and found her graduating from college.

  Harley cleared his throat. It took a couple of tries before he found his voice. “I do want to ask her out,” he said, “but there’s more to it than that. There’s something special I want to do, but I need your help. Will you help me?”

  “Of course I will. What can I do to help?”

  “Take off those skates,” he said. “Put your boots back on, and I’ll show you.”

  Colleen

  Perched on the corner of her desk, a mug of steaming coffee in his hand, Rob said, “I’ll triple your salary. I’ll give you a private office next to mine. I’ll have a window put in so you can sit at your desk and watch the deer under the apple tree in the field out back. You can decorate it any way you want. If you want to paint the walls purple and hang swastikas, I promise I won’t let out a peep. You want a fancy title, I’ll give you a fancy title. Vice-President in Charge of Accounts. Hell, you want me to call you CEO, I’ll call you CEO. I’ll put you in charge of running things so I can concentrate on the music end of the business. All you have to do is say yes.”

  “No.”

  He looked pained. “Come on, Colleen, I need you. I need you to do the billing and keep the books. I need you to supervise Ali and keep the office running smoothly. I need you to advise me on the things I’m ignorant about. Like how to run a business. Marketing. Management. I know music. When it comes right down to it, that’s all I know. When I handed you the books that it took Ali eight months to screw up, you had the whole mess fixed in twenty-four hours.”

  “Look, I did what you asked on Saturday night, didn’t I? I sang with your wife. We even had a couple of touching moments of sisterly bonding. I did what you asked, and I didn’t even ask you for overtime.”

  “You,” he said, “are a hard woman.”

  “And damn proud of it. You don’t need me, Rob. You’re a smart guy. You pretend to be this lackadaisical, dumbass musician, but underneath that façade, you have a mind like a steel trap. Business is about using your noggin, and you have a good one. Whatever you can’t figure out, my sister can, because as smart as you are, she’s smarter.”

  He took a sip of coffee and narrowed his eyes. “Casey already has enough on her plate. With the new baby coming, she won’t have much time to spend on helping me run my business. Yeah, we’re still writing and producing together, but she’s also on the Mommy track. And she’s not an accountant. She’s never taken
a marketing class. She may be a whiz with numbers, but she doesn’t have the education to back it up. We’ve both spent most of our adult lives flying by the seat of our pants.”

  “Yeah, well, I’m not an accountant, either. Yes, I have a degree in business. Big deal. That just means I managed to stay awake in class long enough to regurgitate what I was told on exam day. It doesn’t make me any kind of expert.”

  “You can go back to school, get your MBA. I’ll pay for it.”

  “I don’t want an MBA.”

  “And you have business experience.”

  “I managed a frigging Pizza Hut in Boca Raton for eight months. That doesn’t exactly qualify me for CEO status.”

  “Look.” He stretched out long legs and crossed those bony ankles. “I know you weren’t planning to stay here. But where the hell are you going to go? Back to Palm Beach, where you can squabble with Irv’s kids over your inheritance? Even if you win the battle, then what? You want to spend the rest of your life in that great big house, all by yourself, swimming in dough, and bored to death? Or maybe you’re planning to drive that piece of shit car of yours to New York, where you can starve in some overpriced apartment and wait tables while you struggle to find a real job, making coffee for some hotshot CEO who plays grab-ass with you every time you come near. Have you even given any real thought to where you’re going when you leave here?”

  Mouth open, she stared at her brother-in-law. “Why are you doing this? Why are you harassing me this way?”

  “Because I don’t think you have a goddamn clue what you’re doing or what you want. I have this funny philosophy: If it’s not broke, don’t fix it. This isn’t broke. We work well together. Why take some demeaning job, typing and filing for some asshole CEO, when you can be the CEO and make ten times the money? I’m offering you an opportunity here. And I can guarantee I won’t grab your ass. That territory belongs strictly to your sister.”