A Conard County Homecoming

by Rachel Lee

  She used the side door of the house after her shopping, entering from her driveway through the mudroom. Nice that these older homes still had them. She couldn’t imagine how difficult it would be without one. Even as just one person, she tracked in plenty when it was rainy or snowy. Nice to confine it to one place and leave her boots there. Easy to clean when it dried.

  She unloaded groceries and the pumpkin, checked her messages, and then decided to give Julie and Trace a quick call just to see if they needed anything. Trace answered, sounding a bit tired. “Not much sleep. All’s quiet now, Julie is snoozing and I’m next in line. I thought babies slept a lot.”

  Ashley suppressed a laugh. “They do. Usually. Sometimes, though...”

  “Yeah, Julie thinks the baby’s aware of the big change from the hospital to here. Maybe it’s draftier or colder. I don’t know. Are babies that aware?”

  “Probably more than we want to think. No cussing, Trace.”

  It was his turn to chuckle quietly as he hung up.

  Then Ashley realized she had surprisingly little to do. Review sheets had been the work in class today, and they’d all been corrected on the spot, to help prepare for tests.

  She could evade herself no longer. Plopping down in her living room, she thought of Zane again. Of being on his lap, of his bold move that had left her weak with desire, followed by his declaration that she should stop him because he was no good for anyone.

  It bothered her that he felt that way, but he might be right to the extent that he wouldn’t be good for her. She was also aware of her own tendency to develop a strong emotional attachment with any man she had sex with. She’d figured that one out a long time ago and reordered her priorities accordingly. Relationship before sex.

  So what was happening to her now? She didn’t need all the problems with this spelled out for her. Definitely not. He wasn’t well because of his PTSD. His paralysis...well, she felt that wouldn’t necessarily be a problem for her. It hadn’t bothered her yet except for what it meant to him.

  But falling out of his wheelchair because he was diving for cover? A whole different ball of wax. That would be part of any relationship with him. Before she took a single step toward that, she had to check herself, to be sure she wouldn’t hurt him by being unable to live with his disability.

  That was hard to know. At best right now it would be a guess, but the only way to be sure would be to live with him. Ha! Talk about a recipe for disaster.

  Anyway, he’d said he wanted her, not that he wanted a relationship with her. Big difference. If he wanted a one-night stand, he was going to have to look elsewhere, because it wasn’t going to be her. Some women might be built that way, but she knew for sure she wasn’t.

  Sighing, she got up, changed into more casual clothes for cooking and decided to make herself a small casserole out of smoked turkey, boxed stuffing, green beans and leftover mashed potatoes. Thanksgiving in a bowl. With some turkey gravy from a jar, it was scrumptious and easy.

  Which got her to wondering what she was doing for Thanksgiving this year. One of the gals always invited her to join their families, and usually she accepted, bringing all the pies and a relish tray. Connie had three kids, so the spread was always big, especially if the rest of the Parish family was eating at her place. But sometimes they went to Micah Parish’s ranch for the dinner, and then she wasn’t invited. Nothing was meant by that. It was a huge family gathering, and there were so many members of the Parish family she often felt out of place even at Connie’s house.

  Maybe she should think about making the dinner herself. Marisa and Ryker had no one else except their baby. Julie wouldn’t have time or energy even to think about it. Yeah, she could do it here. She started thinking about how many of her friends to invite and how many she could fit in her snug little house. Man, they’d be shoulder to shoulder. It might be fun.

  She’d just finished layering her casserole and sprinkling some fried onion rings on the top when she heard a familiar noise at her front door. Nell.

  Wiping her hands on a towel, she hurried toward it, grabbing her jacket along the way.

  Yup, it was Nell, looking impatient yet strangely happy. Almost grinning. Surely she was misreading the dog.

  “What happened now, girl?”

  But there was only one way to find out. She followed the dog at a trot and entered the open door of Zane’s house.

  “Zane?” she called out.

  “In the kitchen.”

  She headed in there and found him to be perfectly all right. In fact, he looked about ready to start cooking. “You’re okay?”

  “I’m fine. Why?” Then he looked at Nell. “You didn’t,” he said to the dog.

  “She did,” Ashley confirmed.

  “She’s not supposed to do that, dang it. She’s never supposed to leave me unless I need medical help. What’s gotten into her?”

  “Beats me.” Ashley had a suspicion, though. Not that she’d say it out loud. She looked down at the dog, who was now sitting, grinning and swishing her tail hopefully. “Have you made dinner yet?” she asked.

  “Just starting.”

  “Well, stop. I made a casserole big enough for four, and I was about to pop it in the oven. Let me just bring it over and bake it here. Meanwhile, you can try to figure out why Nell is interfering with your life.”

  “Humph,” he grumped. “Maybe she thinks I need to change it.”

  “Don’t ask me,” Ashley said lightly. “Be right back.” And there she went, forgetting all her good resolutions about involvement and relationships. Sheesh. Maybe she needed a head doctor.

  * * *

  Zane stared in perplexity at Nell. She’d never gone off like this before. He guessed she liked Ashley, which made the dog a great judge of character, but he didn’t want her messing up Ashley’s life by running over to get her every time she felt bored.

  “Are you bored?” he asked the dog. As if she would answer. Well, he couldn’t blame Nell if she occasionally wanted a different face in this house. He wasn’t the greatest company. Or maybe he just needed to get her out for more walks. It would probably do both of them some good. He’d been confining his walks to the dark hours so he wouldn’t run into a lot of people. It was safer than facing the questions or concern and sympathy. Safer than listening to people recall the athlete he’d been so long ago.

  Considering he still hadn’t figured out all his triggers, the less he had to do with people, the better. He didn’t know if they still rode people out of town on a rail, but he’d sure as hell been evicted from his apartment.

  He didn’t want to make a scene in the street, upset people, maybe scare kids. He also didn’t want to become the dangerous hermit that kids crossed the street to avoid and eventually built horror stories around.

  He sighed, thinking he was going to have to parse things out before too much longer. And maybe that’s all Nell was trying to tell him. Figure it out, jerk. There are answers. Maybe he’d just given up looking for them. That eviction had hit him in the gut in ways that still surprised him.

  Ashley returned, bearing a medium-size glass casserole dish, covered in aluminum foil. “Nell,” she said. “Close the door.”

  Nell took the order like the champ she was. Ashley turned on his oven to preheat it. “I call this Thanksgiving in a bowl,” she said. “Some of my favorite holiday foods in it, including smoked turkey.”

  “Sounds great.” He hesitated, aware that he needed to be sociable. It got even harder when he was beginning to crave the woman with all of his body that was still capable of feeling anything. “You know, Ashley, I never heard about your parents. Did they move away?”

  She sat facing him and shook her head. “The weirdest thing. They went to the Texas coast for a vacation. Mom got caught in a riptide and Dad went to rescue her and... The riptide had just started, t
hey were beginning to put up the warning flags, but too late for my folks.”

  She looked away, and he hated himself for asking. “I’m sorry. Truly sorry. And sorry that I stirred it up.”

  “You didn’t. It’s been hard, I still miss them, but it was eight years ago, Zane. I’ve learned to live with it.”

  “It’s hard when it’s so unexpected like that.”

  “Maybe not as hard as watching your parents suffer from terminal illness,” she answered, thinking of his parents, both of whom had been claimed by different kinds of cancer just a year apart. “I don’t know,” she added. “I can’t compare. Maybe there is no comparison.”

  The oven beeped that it had preheated, and she went to put the casserole in. “Timer?”

  “On the counter, probably in the vicinity of the wine bottles. I haven’t used either of them.”

  She found and set the timer, then said, “Why so much wine? Especially if you don’t drink it?”

  “Mom loved to cook with it.” He smiled. “There was one period when I was young that I got awfully sick of every meal tasting like burgundy. I don’t know what got her started on that kick, but apparently she stuck with it after I left, because there are a few unopened bottles there.”

  “The others could be vinegar by now,” she remarked as she returned to the table.

  “It’s possible. I haven’t felt an urge to find out.” He shook his head a bit. “When did you buy the house next door? You decided not to keep the ranch?”

  “Wasn’t much of a ranch anymore,” she said. “Mom and Dad sold it maybe ten or so years ago to a neighbor. No son to leave it to—I wanted to teach—not ranch, and they started wanting to do a bit of traveling. So they bought that house.”

  He nodded slowly. “I hope they got more trips in than the one to Texas.”

  She smiled and he was relieved to see it. “Yeah, they did. Europe for three weeks, a cruise that Mom swore was the most relaxing experience of her entire life, Mexico...they stuffed in quite a bit once they were free to do it and had some extra money.”

  He smiled back at her. She actually sounded happy that her parents had done those things, even if the last trip had resulted in their deaths.

  “I suppose,” she said slowly, “that you’ve seen a lot of the world.”

  “Not the kinds of places you’d take a vacation.” Far from it. There were pockets of hell on earth. Places he’d never wish any human being to be caught in. Unfortunately, people were there. He yanked himself back from the edge. He didn’t want to flip out again, not in front of Ashley. She’d seen the results once, and he knew he’d disturbed her.

  He needed to stop thinking about her, anyway. Yeah, he wanted her. But he had nothing to offer anyone except a broken body and a broken mind. He should keep reminding himself of that before he hurt someone. However, there was no escaping the fact that being a hermit was going to be a little difficult.

  Nell had brought Ashley over here on purpose. Zane had absolutely no doubt of that. Then there was the Mikey kid, and his need for a service dog. Meeting that boy had pierced him. Imagine being that young and facing life with quadriplegia. He reckoned he was damn lucky himself.

  “Zane?”

  “Hmm?”

  “You were frowning. Is something wrong? Do you want me to leave?”

  “God, no!” His reply was vehement.

  Her brows had knit. “Did I do something wrong when I mentioned that you must have seen a lot of the world?”

  He shook his head. “Not you. It’s okay. I just started thinking about things I shouldn’t think about, so I put it away, thought a little about you, then about Mikey. I’m fine.”

  She smiled, evidently willing to move on. “Mikey’s something else, isn’t he?”

  “I know he’s awfully positive, or at least he was at Cadell’s place. And he made me feel that I was truly lucky.”

  Her face shadowed a bit as she nodded. “I can see that. Every time I try to have a pity party over some ridiculous thing, it doesn’t take long for some thought to pop into my mind to remind me how lucky I really am.” She smiled at him. “I have a Pollyanna brain.”

  He laughed at her description, and the laughter felt good, easing the windup he’d felt growing and had been stepping down on. As long as you can laugh... He couldn’t remember where he’d first heard that, but he suspected it was true. And he’d seen people laugh in the most god-awful circumstances imaginable. “So what do you have pity parties about?” he asked.

  To his surprise, she blushed faintly. “Well, that’s the thing. When I get that way from time to time, it’s usually because a lot of small stuff has gone wrong and I feel like the universe is piling up on me. Now you take each item individually, and it feels really stupid. But if Murphy’s been hanging around for a few weeks, making every blessed thing go wrong...” She shrugged. “I especially love the periods where I seem to be all thumbs and keep dropping things. Or the ones where I mess up every recipe I try to cook. I know I’m just distracted and not paying attention...”

  “Why do you get distracted?”

  She tilted her head to one side, just a bit. “I have students. Some of them don’t always do well. Some of them struggle. Some of them are living with abuse. Now that last one, the instant I get proof, I can do something. But the others? I worry.”

  “You have a gentle heart.” It was true, he thought. She had a bit of temper, which he’d seen on a couple of occasions, but mostly she was good-hearted. Gentle.

  He remembered her gorgeous hair from when they were in school ages ago, but the years between them had made it impossible to know her. Besides, he’d been busy with his own life, full of sports and a girlfriend, and she lived on a ranch, which kept her away from many school activities. Not that he’d have been much interested in someone so much younger. Years were a great separator at that age.

  But those years no longer mattered, and as far as he could tell she had grown up to be an exemplary woman.

  As he sat there with her, however, her presence kind of pushed him back in time to high school, to his life before.

  “You know, I’ve mentioned this before,” he said abruptly, “but I can hardly remember the kid I was before I left.”

  “I’m not surprised. That was a while ago. I don’t remember much of high school, either.”

  “I’m not thinking so much in terms of things that happened. Some events stand out in my mind, of course, but it’s more who I thought I was. What was going on inside my head.”

  “And how it took you to the SEALs?”

  “Bingo.” He shook his head a little. “That wasn’t my conscious intent, as I told you. Nope. I was offered a slick scholarship after I completed my training. Looking back, I sometimes wonder if that promise would have panned out regardless. Anyway, I guess it’s impossible to reenter my head all those years ago.”

  His change in course had been troubling him lately, mostly since coming back to Conard City. He remembered that when he’d passed all the testing and had been admitted to training—which had been an extreme test itself—he’d written home about it. The answer from his mother had said more than words. She’d congratulated him then added, “I hope you made the right choice.” That could have meant a lot of things, so he’d just assured her he had and then had lost himself in one of the world’s toughest training programs.

  By the time he emerged, he’d been cemented to his comrades and the SEALs as if they had been welded into one. Which they had been. The bonding had run deep. Being invalided out had left him feeling as if his skin had been ripped off.

  All those years, all those faces, all those voices—a brotherhood. Which was not to say some of the guys couldn’t be jackasses, but...they were still welded together. It had felt unbreakable. Then, bam! It had been broken.

  “I think,” he announced s
uddenly, “that I may never figure out why I changed my mind about what I was going to do in the navy, but I know what it cost me to have to leave.”

  “I can’t imagine.”

  He looked at her sweet face surrounded by those copper curls and said, “What if you couldn’t teach anymore? Suddenly. Without warning. No adjustment time.”

  He watched her face change, suffusing with horror or loss, he couldn’t tell which.

  “You do understand,” he said quietly. “It would just about kill you, wouldn’t it? Well, I’m dealing with that, too. It’s gotten a lot easier, but I’m still dealing with it. I guess that’s why I keep trying to figure out why I did it in the first place. Like that will answer anything.”

  Then she said something that reached his walled-off heart. “You know, I don’t think it would hurt me as much to have to give up teaching as it hurt you to leave the SEALs.”

  An ache he usually suppressed blossomed in him. “Why?”

  “Because I’d still have all my friends and other activities. You lost it all, Zane. All of it. That’s worse than I can imagine.”

  * * *

  Mercifully, the oven timer dinged and Ashley rose, turned it off and hunted for hot pads or oven mitts. She found the mitts, a very pretty pair, in a drawer near the oven.

  Where was this conversation going, she wondered. She was beginning to get uneasy. He was looking for an answer she wasn’t sure he’d ever find, but at the same time he was reaching out to her in a way that almost hurt. As if in some way his loss was becoming hers.

  She decided to change the subject quickly. “Halloween this coming week. Do you want to hand out candy?”