“Anything,” Taylor corrected, apparently selecting one grammatical error out of the hat and airing it. Steve wasn’t surprised when she was ignored.
“There’s millions of tire tracks out behind Mr. Hampton’s barn. Shoot, we probably walked right over ‘em and messed ’em up.”
“Pass the salt. Please.”
Steve handed one of them the salt and pepper.
“Ee-yuck, I hate pepper.” At a look from his mother he smiled brightly at Steve. “But thanks for the salt. I love salt.”
“Shoot, the killer coulda been right in the barn. We never even looked.”
“That’s too much, doofus. You’re gonna turn into a pillar of salt, just like that Bible dude’s wife.”
“How come she didn’t have a name, Mom? She’s just Lot’s wife. That doesn’t seem fair.”
“This is a really good dinner, Mom. You’re the best cook in the whole world.”
“Not just the world...the whole universe.”
“Do you like your dinner, Ranger Steve?”
Steve swallowed hastily. “Excellent,” he said in Taylor’s general direction. “And you can just call me Steve,” he added, despite rather liking the sobriquet.
“Cool.”
“Way cool.”
“Did you hear that, Mom? We can call him plain old Steve.”
Taylor choked a little and met Steve’s eyes and saw his appreciation of Jason’s gaffe. He was anything but plain and far from old. And she liked the way his features softened when he smiled. For a few seconds she could actually forget plain old Steve was a Texas Ranger, a man with a badge and her sons’ choice for a dad.
“So what happens next?” Josh asked Steve.
Steve looked momentarily blank as a slow flush stained his neck. Taylor wondered what he’d been thinking and then wished she hadn’t, for her own cheeks grew overwarm as she saw he was having difficulty looking at her. If he had been an old family friend, a person she knew, perhaps they would have wandered outside after a while. Perhaps they would have reached for each other in the dark.
As her sons would say, where was she going with this thought? She didn’t know this man, however well he’d known her husband. He was a Texas Ranger, lured to Almost by her sons’ lies, and he was all but forced to stay the night—or nights?—in her house. No matter how much his smile might intrigue her, no matter how much his deep voice might play on her spine, she couldn’t go there. Wherever there was.
She tried picturing him when he was younger, Doug’s roommate, a tall, gawky kid who would have served as the perfect foil to Doug’s antics. When had he developed the shadowed distrust in his eyes? Who had painted that coat of lacquer across his vulnerable soul?
And wasn’t she being ever so clever in her probably misguided deductions?
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see if your nearly dead guy shows up somewhere. Doctors are required to report bullet wounds, so if a doctor, say in Lubbock or Amarillo, calls in a report, we might have a lead. Beyond that...” He shrugged.
“We’ll help you investigate around here,” Josh offered.
“Yeah, we know every hidey-hole round these parts.”
“You’d be lost without us.”
Again Steve raised his eyes to Taylor’s and she felt a frisson of connection, of shared humor. She was grateful he didn’t make light of her sons’ statements. That afternoon they’d been truly frightened of the man they’d seen, and now, with the resilience of youth, they were masking any residual horror with boyish enthusiasm.
“Don’t forget you have community service,” she reminded them.
“Yeah, but see? We’ve been thinking.”
“That’s trouble,” she murmured.
“Yeah, but see? We can investigate while we’re working off the debt,” Jonah offered.
“The debt?” Steve asked, though Taylor suspected that from his eavesdropping earlier, he’d figured out most of their punishment system.
“Yeah. Whenever we do something wrong—like writing you that letter was wrong...”
“’Cause we told you lies about us thinking murder was happening here in Almost—”
“Even though it turns out we were right—”
“But we didn’t know it then, so technically we were lying then—”
“And we’re sorry—”
“Except we were right—”
“So anyway, we have to pay for breaking the law, like owing a debt.”
“Yeah, and we pay it back by doing stuff for people in Almost. Like taking out their trash and painting their porches and junk like that.”
Taylor felt Steve’s gaze on her but didn’t lift her eyes. Their community service system seemed somehow private, as if a bit of Doug still surrounded the plan. She’d often wondered if the plan might not have a backfiring effect, making helping others a personal albatross because it was linked with punishment. However, since her sons always embarked on whatever services the community required with enthusiasm and fervor, she had long ago accepted the belief that they would continue to help others in the far-flung future—without having to be punished to do so.
Feeling an unusual need to escape their chatter, she had the boys clear the table after reminding them to set the dishes in hot water to soak. She led Steve out to the back porch to escape the halfhearted arguments and clatter of plates against countertops, tables and other dishes.
Though Taylor’s house sat in between two others on a road slicing through Almost, there were no homes behind hers. With the clear, clean air and the ultraflat ground at some three thousand feet above sea level, she could stand on her back porch and see nothing but open plains and uncultivated fields. From her back porch to the nearest neighbor behind her was some thirty miles to the west, and even the unpolluted high plains didn’t allow her to see that far. The open land, stretching seemingly forever, made her feel at peace, at ease, as though endless possibilities lay before her.
One of her favorite luxuries—a puzzle to her energetic sons—was to slip outside after supper and simply sit in her rocker on the back porch and watch the last of the sunset.
And she’d taken Steve Kessler, a total stranger, a man who’d already made her angry because he’d doubted her sons, out to one of her favorite spots on earth. She didn’t want to question the reasons why.
She drew a deep breath, the rich summer air tasting far better than the “purty chops” Aunt Sammie Jo had sent over for their guest. And as she released her breath, she thought the day’s sunset was as spectacular as she could have hoped for. The horizon itself was a rose color, and long, purple shadows streaked up from the ground in a splendorous fan, touching the few wispy clouds drifting by and, as if embarrassing them, turning them a bright, vibrant red.
“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” she asked Steve, without turning around, forgetting for a moment that he was a stranger, forgetting everything but the need to share the sunset with someone. Anyone.
“Yes, it is,” he said. Something in his voice made her think he was mildly surprised to find it so.
The boys’ dogs, having heard their voices, raced across the broad expanse of back lawn and leapt around them as if the poor creatures hadn’t seen humankind in ten years. Even the boys’ cats—One, Two and Three—made an appearance, talking to one another and rubbing against Steve’s legs as if discussing the merits of this stranger’s presence on the porch.
“Goodbye,” Taylor said firmly.
“What?” Steve asked.
Taylor waved her hand at the dogs and cats. “Goodbye,” she said again, and grinned broadly as he watched, apparently amazed, when all three dogs reluctantly crept a safe ten yards away and the three cats leapt for the porch rails to groom themselves with utter disdain.
“The command to disappear,” she said, settling down in a large pine rocker. Her rocker. The one she’d bought just for this porch, this place. She gestured at the other empty chair, though to do so made her feel slightly offkilter.
“It�
�s their one and only trick. Though, of course, the boys would tell you otherwise. According to them, each of those three mutts are Lassie, Rin Tin Tin and Scooby Doo all rolled into one. And all the cats must be Cat Woman in disguise.”
She gestured again at the matching rocker and hid a smile as Steve sat down in it as if he were being sucked into a volcano. Reluctance didn’t begin to convey his obvious discomfort. The man, by his accent and easy manner, was from the Southwest, probably right from the high plains of West Texas. Why would he feel so out of place on a back porch? Or was it something about her back porch?
A thought struck her. “Are you allergic to animals?” she asked.
He shot her a look of pure shock. “Allergic? No. Of course not.”
She grinned.
“I mean it. I’ve never been allergic to anything.”
She chuckled outright and held up a hand. “I’m sorry. I wasn’t accusing you of a crime. You just don’t look very comfortable out here.”
He opened his mouth, as if about to tell her what was really bothering him, then closed it again. He shook his head, then asked, “Mind if I light a cigar?”
“Go ahead. I like the smell. My daddy smoked them all his life. I always keep an ashtray on the table behind you.”
He gave her another of his unreadable looks, then reached for the ashtray. He made a slow game of lighting his cigar, and a few seconds later Taylor could smell the sweet, tangy odor of a good cigar.
Taylor inhaled the scent deeply, closing her eyes, indulging in a half-formed fantasy. She heard the rocker next to hers creak slightly as Steve shifted his weight in the chair, but with her eyes closed, it could be her father sitting there. Or Doug. Either of them. Alive again, sharing the shadows and the cooling of the evening with her.
She opened her eyes, not with reluctance, but with a slightly pathetic need to recognize reality. Doug was gone. Her father was gone. And the man leaning back in the still rocker was a stranger who had once known Doug but now lived in Houston and would be returning there in a day or so. Another peace officer. A walking target.
“I like that community service deal you have with your kids,” he said after a few minutes.
Taylor smiled. “It seems to work.”
He was silent for several moments, then he surprised her with his next question. “Were you stunned when the doctors told you triplets were on the way? I only heard from Doug after the fact.”
Taylor wondered if she’d ever gotten to the place of “after the fact”? She smiled and answered honestly, “I was terrified.”
He chuckled. “And now?”
She gave him a long, steady look, realizing that no one—not even Doug—had ever asked her how she felt about having had triplets. People might talk around it, they might look horrified at the prospect of baby-sitting them for more than fifteen minutes at a stretch—all except her sister-in-law, Carolyn, and her aunt Sammie Jo—but no one had ever wondered how she felt about raising triplets.
“After Doug was killed, I was scared to death. I was afraid I’d screw up and ruin them somehow.” When he didn’t comment, she continued, “But then I rallied. Kids are just grown-ups with growing bodies.”
“Do they ever play tricks on you? Pretending to be a different one?”
“Not if they don’t want to clean out Mr. Harrigan’s pigsties.”
Steve chuckled. “What law would that be breaking?” he asked.
“Impersonating a son. Impersonation comes under the penal code governing fraud.”
He laughed outright. “I have to admit, to me they’re as alike as—”
“Don’t say peas in a pod...I know. But they really aren’t. For quick reference, Jason is about half an inch taller than both his brothers. Jonah has asthma—which is why the animals stay outside most of the time—and Josh is the ‘like, way cool’ one of the bunch, the echo.”
The back door banged open and her sons shattered the peace of the back porch. “Dishes are done.”
“Like, really done.”
“Yeah, we even dried ‘em and everything.”
“You guys looking at stars or what?”
“What’s that smell?”
“A cigar, doofus. Don’t you know anything?”
Taylor smiled. “And Jason says doofus a lot, even though he knows it’s wrong. And no, boys, we’re just talking.”
“Oh. Oh,” Josh said, and roughly nudged his slower brothers. “We gotta, uh—”
“Do homework?”
“School’s out, doofus!”
“Go to bed now?” Jonah supplied.
“Yeah,” Jason agreed, then yawned elaborately, blowing his ruse by adding, “That’s good, Jonah. Maybe you’re not such a doofus, after all.”
“You’re the doofus.” But Jonah imitated Jason’s huge yawn. “I don’t know about you guys, but I’m dead tired.”
“Yeah, like, we’re all dead tired. It’s okay, Mom. You don’t have to tuck us in or anything. You guys just stay out here.”
“Yeah. Talking.”
All three boys giggled delightedly.
She suffered three crushing hugs and kisses, then, before they could close the back door, she—and undoubtedly Steve—heard one of them say, “Now all he’s gotta do is kiss her and they’ll fall in love.”
The door slammed shut, leaving the two adults outside with the dogs, cats, night insects and a solid wall of embarrassment between them.
Darkness had stolen in completely in the short time since they’d come to the porch, and now the only light came from the millions of stars overhead and the window from the kitchen.
But the night was anything but peaceful. Crickets hummed, a dog in a neighbor’s yard desultorily barked, and tension crackled between Steve and her like downed electric wires.
The strange thing was that, while she didn’t want to consider the rest of her sons’ intended package, now that the boys had put it in her mind, she found she did want Steve Kessler to kiss her. A very real part of her wanted to feel his lips pressing against hers, warm, perhaps slightly curved in a smile. But nothing this side of a level four tornado would propel her to cross the few feet separating them.
Steve cleared his throat. “They miss their dad. Doug.”
She knew their father’s name. She smiled crookedly, trying to defuse the tension. “Yes.”
“It’s not really me,” he said.
Taylor tried reading his expression, but shadows hid his face. She saw the glowing ember on the tip of his cigar. “I don’t know,” she said finally. Honestly. “It might be.”
“No,” he said. Too firmly?
She sighed, at a loss to explain the pang she felt at his denial.
“Tell me about him.”
“Doug?”
“Yes.” And when she didn’t say anything, he added a soft, “I mean, we didn’t really keep in touch as much as we could have after graduation. Tell me about your life together.”
Was he asking her this as a balm to her sons’ embarrassing remark or as a possible deflection of the lonely widow concept.
“Please?” he asked.
From the safety of the darkness, she found she could talk about Doug to this man whom she’d wished would kiss her only seconds before. “He was a good man. Kind, resilient. Flexible.”
Her sons would take Steve’s asking her about Doug as a sign of his wanting to know about the competition. She told herself to take it as a bridge over awkward waters. “And, of course, he liked to play practical jokes.” She remembered the afternoon the state troopers had come to her door and she’d believed it to be one of Doug’s pranks. A sick prank, but a joke nonetheless.
Steve said, “He always had a picture of you in the dorm room. Tom—Tom Adams, I’m sure you know him, he’s with the FBI now—he and I were jealous, I think.”
Taylor didn’t know what to respond to that remark. She said something about the years flying by.
“How long were you two together, anyway? What... fifteen years?”
> Taylor suddenly felt old and tired. “Twenty, counting our courting days in high school.” Her twenty years with Doug somehow seemed to say it all and yet still managed to leave everything out.
“I went to his funeral,” he said.
She nodded, though she doubted he could see her. She’d felt so unsynchronized that day. She’d risen from her too empty bed, somehow gathered her sons and attended Doug’s funeral. It hadn’t seemed a farewell so much as a ritual to be survived.
“You look different in black,” he said.
She thought about that for a moment, not certain if he was complimenting her or merely making an observation. “It seemed like half the country was there in uniform. When they did the twenty-one gun salute, every armed officer drew for his gun.”
Steve made a sound between a grunt and a chuckle. “I know I did. Someday the brass is going to figure out that those farewell salutes send more guys to the shrink than...” He trailed off.
“Than attending a funeral does,” she finished for him. “The boys were impressed, though. It was the only thing that seemed to take their minds off the fact that Doug wasn’t going to come waltzing in the front door later that night and ask them what they’d been up to all day. Jason even asked me that night when Daddy was coming home, that he had a lot to tell him.”
Somehow she’d known he wouldn’t say that two years was plenty of time to get over the loss of a husband and for the boys to get over the loss of a father.
“Must get lonely sometimes,” he said.
“Lonely?” she asked, not admitting, even to herself, that his statement left her feeling that way for the first time in a very long time. So she lied to him. “Not with triplets and enough family scattered here and about to trip over every time I walk out the front door.”
“You lived here with...Doug...before...?”
“In this very house. We pretty well had our pick of any empty house in town. That was after the oil crunch and Almost practically folded up and blew away. This house seemed big enough to accommodate the boys. When they came.”
Steve felt the weight of her life with Doug settle on his shoulders. He tried telling himself that he felt sorry for her; she had several challenges to overcome if she was to try a second chance at marriage. She had three exceedingly precocious preteen sons. She lived in a dinky town in the middle of nowhere, dwelling in the same house she and her husband had chosen and fixed up for a life together. Nearly every man he knew would feel daunted by such a prospect.
Almost A Family Page 9
