“That’s right, Jonah. I’ve already done all that I can here. The case is linked to an FBI case that went down last spring. The one at your aunt Carolyn’s. If I stick around, I’ll be homing in.”
Taylor opened her eyes to look at him then, wondering if he was lying to spare her children or simply to hide from the truth their union had created.
As if he heard her mental question, he said, “Really. Tom Adams asked me yesterday to step out of the picture. This is an ongoing FBI investigation.”
“Yeah, but—”
“We asked you here—”
“So, like, it’s our case, right?”
Steve shook his head and raised his hands...hands that had brought life to her the night before, hands that now seemed to be taking that life away. “I wish it was, Josh, but it doesn’t work that way.”
“What way does it work?” Taylor asked hoarsely, then as he looked across at her, his eyes devoid of emotion, his mouth tightened into a rigid line, she wished she hadn’t asked.
He straightened, his hands falling away from the boys’ shoulders, a giant among three blond, adoring pygmies. “It’s an FBI case. The FBI should handle it from here on out. And besides, when I phoned my office this morning, Doris told me they want me back in Houston. A case I was working on needs my immediate attention.”
He looked half apologetic, half defiant. “Really,” he said again.
Taylor thought if she heard that word another time she would scream. Nothing was really like anything remotely real at this moment.
But she refused to look away, refused to let him off the hook. This was the man who had taken her to places she’d never dreamed of going, made her feel like a woman again, and who had promised, however drowsily, not to leave. All too aware that her sons were listening to every word they might exchange, she drew a shallow breath, managing to squeeze a bit of air into the space crushed by her heart. “I’ve always wondered about something,” she said.
He didn’t say anything, merely waited, tension radiating from him like excess electricity from an overcharged power transformer.
She fought tears of abandonment, tears of anger. And conquered the urge to fall to her knees and beg him to explain what was happening, why he was acting this way. “I’ve always wondered how some people can start something and go away without finishing it?”
Steve’s head reared back as if her words had been rapiers marking his cheeks. But the boys misunderstood her.
“Yeah...how can you stand not to be here when we find the killer?”
“That would be, like, boring.”
“You’re really going to go away? Back to Houston?”
Steve felt a shudder work through him. This was pure, unmitigated torture, he thought. He hadn’t lied about the FBI wanting the case. Hell, it was theirs to begin with. It was only the boys’ letter that had propelled him into it in the first place.
And he hadn’t lied about his Houston case demanding his swift return to the home office. He’d been working on cracking that pornography ring for a good three months now. Who would have guessed the thing would break now?
But neither of those considerations was the reason for his leaving. The simple truth was that if he didn’t leave right then, he knew he never would. And no matter how he might feel, a person didn‘t—couldn’t—fall in love in two days. It was impossible. A pipe dream. An illusion. And he’d bought two tarnished illusions twice before.
All they have to do is kiss, and they’ll fall in love. Isn’t that what the boys had said, or something very like it? He’d told Taylor they were wrong. They had to be. It didn’t matter that he felt they were right...he’d been proven wrong twice before.
“But you don’t have to leave right away, right?”
“Come on, Steve...say you’ll stay awhile.”
“Yeah, like you could just live here and commute or something?”
Steve felt impaled by their pleas, tortured by their faith that all could work out just the way they’d planned, the way they wished it could be.
The look of hurt in Taylor’s eyes and the triplicate looks of incomprehension on the boys’ faces flayed him like a whip on an already wounded and raw back.
“You don’t really have to go away, do you, Steve?”
Did he? The job said yes. And every safety factor in him screamed for him to go now.
“I’m afraid so,” he said. “Today, anyway.”
“But you’ll come back.”
“How come you have to go today?”
“Yeah, Uncle Pete said yesterday that you wanted to stay a couple of extra days. Aunt Carolyn told us.”
Something dawned on Jonah and he turned an accusatory look at his mother. “Did he do something wrong and you don’t want him around anymore?”
The tension in the room encompassed her children. Jason shoved Jonah in a rough push. “Doofus, we saw them kissing. He didn’t do anything all that wrong.”
Steve’s heart seemed to break as Taylor raised a hand in question, in denial...or was it in a wavering plea?
“No, he didn’t do anything wrong,” she said. And her voice caught on the final word.
What did she want of him? He’d told her he couldn’t go through another failed attempt at commitment. Maybe he hadn’t said the exact words, but the meaning had been perfectly clear. As perfectly clear as her words of love had been the night before. Words that meant absolute perfection... ultimate doom. She’d never know how deeply everything in him had craved the sound of those words on her lips. Her lips only. And she would never know how agonizing it was to leave her with those words unanswered, unacknowledged.
For a split second he considered canceling his departure, ignoring the summons back to Houston, letting other Rangers handle the pornographers. The thought flashed through his head that he could simply stay. Just stay. With Taylor, with the boys, with a town full of half-crazy, halfwonderful people. He could make a life there, live it fully and enjoy it. And the gullible side of him begged him to do just that. Just stay.
But the cynical side of him, the failed side, the part of him that could never reveal how much it hurt to see his wife leaving on a supposed vacation and knowing she was going less than two miles down the road to a local motel, demanded he leave now, his heart only partially bruised, not irrevocably destroyed. Leave now, that side of him urged, while any vestige of pride remained.
“I gotta go,” he said desperately, and pushed his way out of the kitchen before he gathered this precious family into his arms and begged Taylor and her sons to keep him with them forever.
Taylor felt as if her heart had acquired a terrible weight. That organ beat in her chest, still pumping life-giving blood through her veins, but every part of her felt so heavy, so tired, living, but only numbly. What had transpired between the loving, poignantly sweet good-nights and the hard-featured reality of the morning?
Unable to force herself away from the countertop in the kitchen, relying on it to hold her erect, she listened as Steve packed his gear and deflected a host of questions from her worried sons.
“When you finish your case, you’re gonna come back, aren’t you?”
“Your other case can’t be nearly as interesting as dead guys in maize fields.”
“You are coming back, aren’t you?”
“Doofus, he doesn’t know how long it will take.”
“Yeah, but, like, when he’s done...you will come back, won’t you?”
Steve mumbled something.
“Yeah, all right, but when?”
He mumbled something else.
“What if we’re not here? What if we’re out at Aunt Carolyn’s or over at Aunt Sammie Jo’s? How’ll we know if you came back?”
“Doofus, we never lock the door. We don’t even have a key.”
“Oh, yeah. Right. Well, then cool. You can just come in, and when we get here, you’ll be here already.”
“Home.”
“Yeah, like right at home.”
A betra
ying tear trailed down Taylor’s face. She rubbed it away with the back of her hand, staring hard at the action figures that had commanded Steve’s attention earlier. Angry at herself, angry at Steve, she felt humiliated and far more. A country cousin, she thought. That’s what she’d been. A princess who’d fallen in love with the dashing prince only to watch him ride off into the sunset—alone. In a rental car.
Oh, this prince had tried to warn her. I’ve been married twice. I’ve failed twice. And she’d been too naive, too caught up in a simplistic belief system to understand that the warning had been part of the game, that his words were merely part of the illusion he created before slinking away, getting what he wanted without having to stick around for the pain that came later, aftermaths like heartbreak and crushing hurt.
And yet, she couldn’t believe this. Not of Steve. Not of the man who had held her so fiercely in his arms the night before, held her as if his very life had depended upon it.
No, Steve was no love-‘em-and-leave-’em sort of man. One look at his averted face and pain-filled eyes told her he was in as much agony as she. She just didn’t understand his. If only he would talk to her. Just talk. And if only she had the courage to voice her fears, her questions. Her overwhelming doubts.
“Can I carry your bag?”
“I’m gonna carry it, Jonah. You got to sit in the front seat with Steve on the way back from Levelland.”
“Yeah? Well, you sat in the front seat on the way there.”
“That means it’s my turn,” Josh said.
Taylor heard a scuffle and closed her eyes. Steve brought this squabbling on with his leaving. Upset, not knowing how to contain their uncertainty, unable to analyze their confusion, perhaps even their anger at him, they were releasing those emotions on one another.
Steve would be leaving Almost as swiftly and unremarkably as he’d arrived there. But all of their lives had been touched by him in some indefinable way. The boys, because their fantasy had been transformed into reality. Her neighbors and family, because they all had felt more comfortable with the notion that she wouldn’t be alone. And Taylor herself, because she had still believed in love.
“Dang it, Josh! I’m carrying it!”
Her spine stiffened as she decided to let Steve diffuse the tension among the triplets. If he could. As if it were possible to diffuse separation anxiety and the loss of a dream.
Taylor watched as Steve slipped behind the steering wheel, tossed his cowboy hat into the back seat, adjusted his visor, cinched his seat belt and checked the rearview mirror before pulling out onto the deserted road. His every gesture displayed a methodical caring. He’d displayed that same consideration with her friends and family, the same concern with her children. And the same thoroughness with her.
He raised a hand in farewell, but didn’t look back as he settled into the right lane and accelerated. As if he couldn’t get away soon enough.
“He’ll be back,” Jason said.
“Yeah. He’s gotta,” Jonah murmured, his eyes still on Steve’s diminishing car.
Steve’s final words to her had been a mumbled, “I’ll call you.”
“He’s gonna come back, isn’t he, Mom?”
“I hope so, Jason,” Taylor responded automatically. “I...hope so.”
“He will. It’s, like, duty and stuff.”
“Yeah, like that.”
But the boys’ lack of conviction matched her own.
As if Steve’s departure sapped the boys’ energy—and she suspected that it truly had, for she felt lethargic and ready to crawl beneath the covers herself—they listlessly performed a scissors-rock-paper routine to decide what kind of soda they wanted from Aunt Sammie Jo’s machine.
“Can we go, Mom?” Jason asked, his voice lower than usual, his young face drawn in a way she hadn’t seen for almost a year.
“Sure,” she said, trying to force some measure of enthusiasm in her voice. She failed miserably. “You guys are off community service today.”
They all looked at her in dulled surprise and with an element of suspicion. “How come?”
“Because, thanks to you, they found the dead guy.”
They smiled, pleased, but it seemed to Taylor the smiles didn’t hold their usual boyish credulity. These smiles seemed adultlike in their knowledge that she was throwing them a bone to distract them from missing Steve.
As she watched them plod down the hot, dusty lane, she wished someone would throw her one.
Chapter 13
Every day that long week, the weatherman on television pointed to a large capital H, signifying a high system parked over the dot representing Almost on the weather map. Temperatures soared above the hundred mark by nine in the morning and reached one hundred and ten at the apex of the day.
The mercury continued to rise slowly and painfully until, by midafternoon, plants watered just that morning wilted and drooped to porches and sidewalks. Mothers wouldn’t allow their children outdoors between noon and four, and Sammie Jo’s Minimart did a land-office business in long-lasting PABA-free sunscreen.
The heat pressed down on the Smithton family as harshly as it did on the maize and sorghum fields, the cotton, the corn and the miserable cattle, lowing in their hot, dry corrals or out on the parched ranch land. Not allowed to go outdoors during the “funnest” part of the day, with nothing they liked on the only television channel Almost could receive, the three boys listlessly played board games in their air-conditioned bedroom, only occasionally coming out for something cold to drink or something cool to snack on.
For Taylor, the oppressive heat outside seemed an extension of her inner turmoil. She’d felt cold the morning Steve had left. Cold and cast adrift. But now, four days after his departure, the well of pain deep within her seemed to boil with conjecture, second-guessing and a too spicy dose of wishful thinking.
She’d even found herself wishing that something terrible would happen in Almost, another stranger’s body discovered, the killer revealing himself, anything that might draw him back into their circle. But day after day passed without a discovery.
The phone had rung as many as fifteen or twenty times a day. Carolyn, Sammie Jo, Tom Adams with the FBI, even an old friend from high school who had heard about the Almost happenings from her mother-in-law...but never Steve. And sometime in the past twenty-four hours, she’d quit jumping every time the infernal machine sounded the alarm that someone was calling her.
And the nights, without the phone ringing at all in the thick silence of an overwarm darkness, seemed even worse. Because then she couldn’t even pretend that he would call. As he’d promised.
Now, as she hung up the phone from a check-in call on one of Almost’s oldest citizens, Dorothy Bean, Taylor was suddenly acutely aware of the silence in the house. Even as depressed as they were, her three sons were seldom quiet. She rapped on their door, hesitated, then pushed the door open.
All three boys looked up from where they sat on their individual beds, notebooks in their laps, pens or pencils in their hands. Determination set each of their jawlines, and their blue eyes seemed steely with resolution. Strangely, they didn’t look so much like her or Doug; they resembled Steve on the morning he’d left their home. They all wore his “nothing you can say or do will make me change my mind” expression.
What an odd legacy to leave her children.
“What’s going on, boys?” Taylor asked, aware that the last time she’d caught them writing something, that something had brought Steve Kessler hotfooting it to Almost.
“We’re writing Steve some letters,” Jonah said, breathing heavily.
Even as her heart gave a slight leap of mingled hope and sorrow, Taylor realized that Jonah hadn’t suffered an asthma attack since the day he and his brothers had discovered the nearly dead guy. Or was it more closely connected than that? He hadn’t experienced the loss of breath since Steve Kessler’s arrival. And now that he’d departed...?
She shook her head. That thought was ridiculous. Jonah�
�s asthma was a physical condition. The doctor in Lubbock had stressed this to her and Doug when Jonah was first diagnosed with the troublesome ailment. No, his improvement had been a matter of less dust in the air, more moisture...not anything to do with Steve Kessler, Texas Ranger.
“Can we take ’em over to Aunt Sammie Jo’s to mail when we’re done with them?”
Taylor frowned, wondering what they were writing Steve, somewhat envious of their courage in doing so and wishing she could steal a measure of it. “It’s too hot to go out,” she said.
“Yeah, but if we wait, these won’t get out of Almost until tomorrow.”
“And besides, we’ve got community service at Almost Antiques this afternoon. We promised Jose.”
“You’ll be working indoors?”
The boys brightened. Taylor thought it was a pretty sad state of affairs when performing community service was preferable to sitting around contemplating the failure of their grand scheme.
Jason wheedled, “And Jose’s got air-conditioning. Kinda. He’s got an old swamp cooler anyway.”
“As long as you promise you’ll go straight there after dropping off your letters at Aunt Sammie Jo’s.”
“We promise!”
Those promises again, Taylor thought. She wished she could ask what the boys had written in the letters.
“Can we have three envelopes, Mom?”
“Yeah, and some stamps?”
“Aunt Sammie Jo has stamps,” Taylor said, “And why don’t you just put all three letters in one envelope.”
The boys looked at her aghast. Josh said, “Well, like, it wouldn’t be the same. You know, like we each wanted to send him a letter but were too cheap or something to send them out all by themselves.”
The logic escaped Taylor, but she fetched them the necessary three envelopes.
As her sons took off for Sammie Jo’s and then to Jose Caldrerros’s Almost Antiques, she found herself grateful for their absence. Their enforced tenure indoors combined with their depression over the loss of Steve Kessler only served to underscore her own restlessness and despondency.
Almost A Family Page 17
