by Shirley Jump
“Why wouldn’t she tell me the truth?” he asked, his attention swiveling back toward his little sister, who apparently had a lot more wisdom than he did. “Why would she hide all that from me?”
“Maybe she wanted you to know her for who she was inside, rather than judging the outside,” Katie said. “If there was a way for me to lose this chair magically, to make people stop seeing me as the poor paralyzed girl, hell, I’d jump on it in a second.”
“I would too,” he said to his sister, his hand going to hers, thinking of the dozens of doctors they’d talked to, all saying the same thing.
“Hey, water under the bridge.” Tears lingered in her eyes, shadowed by acceptance. “I’m okay with it. Sometimes, you gotta move on and, if there’s one thing Allie taught me this week, it’s that I can still be a girl, still be me, no matter what my legs can or cannot do.” Katie drew in a breath, let it out, then gave Duncan’s hand a squeeze. “You need to give Allie another chance.”
“But she lied to me, Katie,” Duncan said, watching Allie as she talked to Jerry, wondering if he knew her at all. He thought he’d known Allison Gray pretty well. And he’d thought he’d known Allie Dean.
Turned out he hadn’t known either one of them. Not really.
But how much of that was his own fault? How hard had he really tried to see the truth? He’d known all along that something wasn’t exactly right with Allie Dean, that she was hiding something, and yet, he’d ignored that nagging feeling.
He’d never pressed, never tried to uncover the truth. Had he been afraid of what he might find? Knowing, as he did, what could be hidden behind the walls people erected?
People like himself.
“Yeah, well, we all lie, don’t we?” Katie raised her head to soak up some of the sun, such a striking oddity amid the fractured town left in the tornado’s wake. “Hell, I lie to myself every day and you know what? I’m tired of it. I’m tired of drinking so I’ll forget, because all I do is wake up with a hangover and twice the pain. It’s time I dealt with what happened.”
“You’ve done a pretty good job so far this week.”
“Yeah, that’s been a start. That’s why I invited Allie over tonight. To tell you both I think it’s time I went to rehab.” She exhaled, returned her attention to her brother. “I think it’s time we moved on, Duncan. This tornado’s like a sign.”
“What do you mean?”
“The houses are gone. But we have insurance. We have a chance at a new start.” Katie swallowed, then met his gaze. “Use some of that money to go after your dreams, wherever they might lead. You don’t have to be my keeper anymore.”
“Katie, no, don’t—”
She put up a hand to stop him. “It is way past time I grew up. I’m going to do my rehab, both the mental and the physical. I want you to use the insurance money to rebuild the farm so that when I’m done, I have a place to come home to. Let that downtown house go to Hell, where it should be.”
Duncan could only nod in agreement. He had no wish to rebuild it either.
“And you go be whatever you want, Duncan. I’ll be okay. Really.” She patted Ranger, then drew in a breath, before looking around the farm, or what was left of it. “Kinda ironic, isn’t it?”
“What?”
“That this place is gone. The house, I mean, or most of it. But that damned tree survived.”
A few of the oak tree’s branches lay scattered on the ground, but the tree itself stood against the stark landscape, as if flipping the bird to all of them. “Determined little thing isn’t it?”
“I think it’s there to remind me.”
“Of the accident?”
“No,” Katie said, and Duncan heard something new in her voice, something thoughtful, deep. “That Nature is more powerful than I am. That God has something in mind for my life. And just when I think I can control my future, He’s going to put that damned tree in the way and spin me in a new direction.”
Duncan swallowed, then lowered himself to his knees and caught his sister’s hand. She was ready to deal, she’d said. Maybe it was time he did, too. Asked the questions he’d never asked, filled in the gaping holes and found a little closure. For both of them. “What happened that night, Katie?”
When her gaze met his, tears pooled in her deep blue eyes and he wanted to take the words back. Closure was overrated, especially if it made Katie cry.
“You already know that answer, Duncan.”
And he did. He’d read it in the times she’d holed up at Aunt Mae’s, even after their aunt had died when Katie was ten. The despondency that had settled around her in that last year, the permanent sadness he’d hoped to shake by throwing her a party. “You were sick of him, weren’t you?”
The tears slipped down her cheeks, glistening on her perfect skin. “I was never good enough, Duncan. No matter how hard I tried, I was never good enough for him.”
“Ah, Katie, you were perfect. He was screwed up, not you.” It had never been either one of them, or anything either of them had done. John Henry had been his own worst enemy, disowning his sister Mae, pretending she didn’t even exist because she was quirky and had married someone he hadn’t liked. He’d demanded perfection, never realizing how that had cost him joy and love, and how much that had cost his children. “We kept trying to measure up to an impossible standard and you know what? It was our father who couldn’t be happy. He had everything, Katie, and yet he was never, ever satisfied. Not with a meal, not with the number in his bank account, and not with his children.”
She nodded, silent for a while, then another tear slipped down her cheek. “All I wanted to do was get away, to stop him from hurting me,” she said, her voice catching on a sob. “I was drunk and I thought—” She cut off the sentence, then shook her head, her fists pounding at her legs, as if beating them could undo the decision of that night. “I thought I could make it all go away. Instead I made the biggest mistake of my life. And in the process, I ended up taking another life. How stupid was that? How incredibly stupid could I be?”
“Katie—”
“No, Duncan, don’t try to soothe that over. I know what I did. I made a stupid decision, and when my friends tried to stop me from driving, I kept on going. I never should have gotten behind the wheel. Never should have…” She started to sob, her shoulders hunching and shaking, her whole body trembling with grief, remorse. “They were my friends.”
“I know, Katie,” Duncan said softly, going to her, wishing for the ten thousandth time that he could take that pain away, ease it for his sister, and knowing again that he couldn’t. “I know.”
“I was the one driving. I was the one, I was the one.” She cried for a long, long time, Duncan holding her, the pain tearing through them both, so long overdue. When she had no tears left, Katie looked up at her brother. “Do you know who tried to talk me out of getting in the car?”
He shook his head.
“Carlene, Allie’s sister. She and I had a huge fight over it. She tried to take my keys away, but I found them and I got in that stupid car anyway.” Katie sighed, then laid her other hand over Duncan’s. “It was never your fault, you know, for not being here.”
“I should have known better. I thought out here, far from anything, you’d be okay.” He’d had a date that night, one that had seemed so important at the time, but now, years later, he couldn’t remember the woman’s name.
“I should have known better,” Katie said. “And now that I do, I’ll do better. And so can you, especially with Allie.”
Duncan’s gaze caught Allie’s across the way, and unbidden, a smile crossed his lips, then hers, exchanging a moment between them. She’d lied to him, and years ago, he to her. Was his sister right? Could he change the future? Mend those rips in their past?
“I’m going to fix some of my mistakes right now. You need to deal with your history, too, big brother,” Katie said, sounding far wiser than her twenty-three years. Then she turned and wheeled away toward Carlene Gray, moving so fa
st, Ranger had to run to keep up.
Chapter 28
If Allie could have chosen her nightmare dinner guest list, it would have been the assembled party sitting around the makeshift table. Before leaving, her mother had made sure to grab all of Katie’s prepared dinner, along with a few pots and some foil. By improvising, she’d warmed the food over a backyard fire pit and then warmed up the garlic bread by wrapping it in foil and tucking it along the edges of the fire.
Allie had thought Jerry and crew would be out of here as soon as the winds died down, and had even given them directions to a ritzier-than-normal hotel in Indianapolis—one complete with room service—but to her surprise, they had come back for seconds of Ma and Katie’s dinner. Even more surprising, they lingered around the table, chatting and laughing, as if they’d been part of the family for years.
And then, Duncan had arrived.
Her heart had stopped the instant she’d seen him step out of Earl’s truck. It had taken everything inside her to keep from running up to him and into his arms. But there’d been spaghetti to dish up and—
And well, she still didn’t know where she stood with him, so she’d kept the spaghetti and the garlic bread and all that between them.
Katie came wheeling back from her conversation with Duncan and drew Carlene aside, the two of them quickly engaged in a conversation that seemed very serious, and long overdue.
Allie put down the plate in her hands and moved to talk to Duncan, but he’d been recruited to help her mother, and then was interrupted by the WTMT-TV van, which screeched into the driveway, or what Allie thought had been the driveway. With all the debris in the way, it was hard to tell what was land and what was house anymore.
Jim, the cameraman, jumped out of the van, a camera slung over his shoulder, his jeans and boots spotted with mud. “There you are, Dunk! I’ve been looking all over for you. Steve wanted to do some live shots of the town, you know, post-tornado report. You ready to go on air?”
“Sure.” Duncan put down the plates. “How’d you find me?”
“It wasn’t easy. Took a lot of talking to some people in town before someone remembered you had an Aunt Mae who used to live out here, and they thought you might have wanted to check on the place.” Jim looked over Duncan, his gaze dubious. “You don’t look camera-ready, dude.”
Jim was right, Allie thought. Like her, Duncan was covered in dust and dirt. He no longer resembled Indiana’s sexiest anything. He had a five o’clock shadow, his hair had lost its neat, combed look, and he had a smear of dirt on his left cheek. Allie crossed to him, wiped the dark smudge off his check with her napkin, then stepped back and smiled. “I think you’re perfect, Duncan. You look like yourself.”
And to her, he did. He looked like the Duncan beneath Duncan Henry. The man who wasn’t the perfect son of John Henry, the one who could get messy, pitch in and help out, who would serve up extra helpings with her mother and not have any qualms about a meatball dropping onto his shoes. He had the good looks of a man she could love.
A man she already did love.
But also a man she had betrayed, a betrayal she could still read in his eyes.
“If she says I’m ready, I am,” Duncan said, reaching for the mike in Jim’s hands.
Jim exchanged a quick conversation with the station via a bulky satellite phone, set up a few things in the truck, then moments later, gave Duncan the cue.
“This is Duncan Henry, reporting live from the outskirts of Tempest, Indiana, where the first tornado in fifteen years to hit this town first touched down. The downtown area was the hardest hit, but the people in Margie’s diner heard the warnings and were able to get to a safe place in time. Here at the Mae Grendell farm—my late aunt’s farm—an interesting crew of people banded together during this scary time. The director and a few key crew members from Chicken Flicks were here when the tornado struck, but all are okay, as are the members of the Gray family, who took shelter in the storm cellar.” He pivoted, to indicate the family. “Would any of you like to say a few words?”
Allie held her breath. Undoubtedly Ma would have a few to say and a few more to add on top of those. She pictured her father grabbing the mike and launching into an anti-Henry diatribe. Or worse, Carlene, making some inappropriate remark, just to set off the ladies at the Council on Aging.
Ma strode forward first. “I’m thankful to the Lord above and to my daughter, Allison Jean, for having the foresight to yank us out of our trailer and bring us here. If she hadn’t done that…” Ma shuddered. “I can’t bear to think of what might have happened.”
Behind her, Dad nodded, his eyes misty.
Duncan stepped to Carlene, extended the mike, clearly a man who liked to jump off a cliff without a parachute. “Glad I’m here,” Carlene muttered, her face screwed up with the effort.
“I’d like to say something,” Katie whispered to her brother.
His face curved up into a soft, caring smile, then he bent down, the camera following his movements. He held out the mike, and she took it, facing first him, then the camera. The sun glinted off the metal in her wheelchair, spiraling outward in an arc off the chrome circles of the wheels. “I’ve been given a second chance at life twice now. And I don’t intend to waste it. The things around me might be gone, but the sun is shining and I’m surrounded by the people who love me. And to me, that is gift enough. The rest can be rebuilt.”
Duncan rose, swiped at his face, then faced the camera again. “I think that says it all, Tempest. This is Duncan Henry, for WTMT-TV.”
Jim gave Duncan a nod, then lowered his camera. “You coming to do some live shots in town?”
“No. I’m staying here for now. With Katie, and Allie.”
Jim looked doubtful for a moment, then realized Duncan wasn’t kidding. “Man, Steve’s going to have a heart attack.”
“He’ll be fine. Besides,” Duncan said, his gaze meeting Allie’s, and the heat in it telling her something again brewed in the air, but this time it had nothing to do with a storm system, “I have some unfinished business here.”
“Unfinished…?” Then Jim looked to Allie, back at Duncan, and then gave a slow, knowing nod. “Okay. Back to the office for me then, to get Klein. I guess I’ll suffer through his intestinal stories. Apparently he spent the tornado stuck in a restroom. That man and bathrooms. He’s scarred for life.”
Duncan chuckled as Jim walked away, then headed over to Allie. “Think we can get away from this…zoo for a while?”
She looked over at her mother. “Ma, you need any more help?”
“No, I’m fine. I’m about to make s’mores, but Katie and Carlene already offered to help.” Allie heard no malice in her mother’s tone. Somewhere between the car ride and the tornado, all had been forgiven. They hadn’t solved everything—life, Allie knew, didn’t come with nice, neat Hollywood endings—but they’d made a start. “But, there is one thing.”
“One thing?” Allie asked.
Her mother set the bowl of spaghetti on the planks that formed the table, then crossed to her daughter. “I meant what I said on the TV camera. Thank you for taking care of us. I’m proud of what you did today and…” She hesitated only a second before she put out her arms and drew Allie into a hug, one that didn’t have a cookie or a piece of pie or anything in it except pure love. “I love you, Allison,” she whispered, her voice thick and soft. “Just the way you are.”
Allie let those words wash over her. Words she’d waited so long to hear, words that came as a balm, soothing a hurt soul, filling in the gaps better than any peanut butter or frosting ever had.
“And I love you, too, Ma,” Allie replied, the ringlets of her mother’s hair catching the words and her tears.
“What the hell is a s’more? And you think I could get a latte to go with one of those?” Jerry said, striding up to them, oblivious to the moment.
Allie and her mother laughed and broke apart. Ma swiped a couple of tears off her face, then turned to Jerry, clearly her newly
adopted son. “No lattes, but I can get you a glass of powdered milk. It’s good for your bones anyway. You Hollywood people are way too thin. You know, osteoporosis can start in your twenties.” Then she was off, lecturing Jerry about his eating habits and his lack of vitamin D. “S’mores?” Duncan asked. “How did you mother do that?”
“She never goes anywhere without snack foods and Carlene apparently had a stash of marshmallows. The family bonded together in a time of crisis,” Allie said with a laugh.
Chuckling, Duncan took Allie’s hand and led her around to the back of the house, away from the crowd. They walked for a long moment, absorbing the silence, a relief after the storm and its aftermath, the crazy afternoon.
“We need to talk,” he said.
“Yeah,” Allie said. It was time to come clean all around. She’d mended some fences this afternoon, and she knew she couldn’t return to L.A. without finishing all of them. Because if she did, all that undone business would follow her. “You were right. I shouldn’t have said what I did to Lisa. I feel terrible now, like I sank to her level. I mean, when I said it, I wanted to get back at her for every mean thing she ever said to me, but then as soon as I finished, I felt like—”
“Like you’d punched yourself in the gut?”
“Exactly.” She turned to him, surprised he could finish that sentence.
“I did the same thing once. Told my father off. Gave back a taste of all he had given us over the years. Those words had built in me good, because I’d had plenty of experience listening to them come out of him.” Duncan ran a hand through his hair and let out a gust. “We had a hell of an argument outside the hospital the night of Katie’s accident.”
“He blamed you?”
“Yeah. And rightly so, I’m sure. I didn’t buy the alcohol, but I did give her the key to Aunt Mae’s, told her to have a party. I should have known teenagers would do something stupid.”
“You didn’t have a crystal ball. And you couldn’t police everything your sister did, Duncan.”
