“They have a wood-burning stove. Inside a trailer.”
Hunter looked shocked. “Is that legal?”
“I don’t know, and who is going to stop them? I guess protective services could take away her son and put him in foster care and let him grow up thinking his momma didn’t care about him.” She dropped her head onto his shoulder. “I’m not always sure she does. He and the baby she’s carrying are a burden to her, not a blessing. Can you imagine babies being a burden?”
He was quiet for so long she thought he wouldn’t respond, then he rested his cheek on the top of her head and sighed. “I think that’s probably what I was to my mother. I was a burden she wanted to get rid of. She sold me, for all intents and purposes. And then the McDermotts have carried the burden of not telling me the truth. It’s an uncomfortable position to be in from the child’s perspective.”
“I’m sorry.” She raised one hand to touch his face, sun-warmed and smooth-shaven, then his hair, soft and wavy, thick and in need of cutting. She pulled off his glasses and folded them into her hand, then tilted her head back so she could kiss him this time.
Out in the autumn crispness and brilliant sunshine, the air smelling of pine and drying leaves, the kiss was even better than before. She could have stayed there until she could no longer breathe.
But another car started up the hill, its engine straining to get the four-cylinder vehicle up the incline.
They drew apart as a Honda Civic struggled past them like the little engine that could. The driver didn’t so much as glance their way before turning into a driveway a hundred feet ahead.
“Not one of your patients?” Hunter observed.
“Dr. Tim White’s daughter.” Ashley’s upper lip twitched. “She is in med school and won’t give a mere midwife the time of day, even though her daddy is my supervising physician. Maybe once I’m in medical school, she’ll understand that I am a conscientious professional too.”
“Do you need recognition from someone who won’t talk to you now?”
“No, but—” She sighed. “Maybe.”
“Looks to me like you have plenty of respect and love and people paying attention to you already. Perhaps being a doctor will get you less of that.”
Ashley shot him a sidelong glance. “What do you mean by that?”
“Mary Kate didn’t listen to the doctors in the hospital who said she needs to be there. She at least lets you examine her and keeps her appointments, doesn’t she?”
“Well, yes.”
“I wonder if you will be able to be as helpful on a personal level as a doctor as you are as a midwife.”
“I can do a better job treating bodies.”
“But isn’t your job more than just treating bodies?”
She startled. “What do you know of it?”
“How I’ve seen you act with Mary Kate and on the phone and—” He shrugged. “I might have done a little reading.”
“Why would you do that?” She shook her head in confusion, then let out an embarrassed huff. “Oh, I am sorry. I’m forgetting your momma used a midwife.”
“She used it for the cost factor, I expect.”
“Or to stay off the grid.”
“What does that mean?” They reached the top of the first hill, and he turned to gaze behind them at the winding ribbon of road stretching between fields and trees. “I know what being off the grid means, but how do you mean it specifically? You don’t deliver babies you don’t report, do you?”
A coolness had crept into his tone, and Ashley hastened to reassure him. “No, we have birth records to fill out.”
Not that all midwives were honest about that, but she wouldn’t go there right then. None of that applied to her family. That was Sofie’s mother’s crime.
“But having a baby at home is far more private than going to a hospital. The midwife and whoever is in the house and a remote court clerk are the only ones who know about the baby’s birth at the time. In a hospital, dozens of people are around.”
“And a woman getting rid of her baby would want to keep a low profile.” A roughness had replaced the chill in Hunter’s voice.
Ashley increased the pressure of her arm on his waist. “You don’t know the circumstances of why she gave you up, do you?”
“Not much. An attorney arranged the adoption is all I know. The McDermotts didn’t tell me more.”
“Did you ask?”
“I didn’t really want to know, I guess.” He removed his glasses with his free hand and shoved them into his coat pocket. “I think I’ve been avoiding knowing more. With my biological mother dead and all, what can this woman who’s calling me tell me, even if it isn’t some kind of a hoax.” He rubbed his eyes and replaced his glasses. “The McDermotts might be right and I’m walking into some kind of unsafe situation and mention of a sister is just part of a lure.”
“But you must figure it’s worth the risk or you wouldn’t be here.”
“Perhaps.” He said nothing for a hundred yards down the road. When he did start to speak, a veritable traffic jam of three vehicles, two in one direction and one in the other, passed them on the road, drowning conversation. Once they resumed, he spoke in a voice that sounded half strangled. “For the past ten years, I’ve wanted nothing more than to go to work each day, write bids for the next job, travel, oversee the work. This time I couldn’t get away fast enough. There’s a restlessness inside me I’ve always put down to needing to make order of things. But right now I just want to do something reckless. Does that make any kind of sense to you?”
Ashley would have laughed aloud she understood so well, but she feared he would misunderstand her amusement. She rested her head against his shoulder instead and nodded. “Too much sense. Daddy says it’s the Lord prompting us to make changes in our lives. So I applied to medical school.”
“You put it down as needing a change in careers?”
“I—well, yes, I did. What else can it mean?”
“Wanting something more in life than career?” They reached her driveway and turned up the incline. “I grew up in a family where career is everything. We had half a day a week together as a family. The rest of the time I was turned over to nannies and teachers of one sort or another. Horseback riding, fencing, ballroom dancing. I never had a pet, unless one counts the horses. I never even knew what a homemade meal like chili or meat loaf tasted like until I was in college. I keep everything in order in my life because that’s what I know works. And I thought I was content, if not happy. Then someone videos me rescuing a little girl from running into a busy street and my world flips upside down.”
“You took off for Appalachia.” They reached the Tahoe, and she clicked the key fob to unlock it.
He nodded. “I took off for Appalachia without a clue about what I was doing and met you and learned my birth mother is dead when I didn’t even know she existed and I tried to return to my normal life and hated it. I want to be here with—” He removed his glasses, and his eyes were troubled.
With whom? Her?
Ashley held her breath, waiting for him to finish.
He slid his glasses back onto his nose and shoved his hands into his pockets. “I’m not sure if I’m here to find out about this strange woman who keeps calling me, or if I want to be here with you.”
Ashley’s heart performed a pirouette in her chest. With a lifetime of training to keep her personal feelings suppressed around others, she smiled and said in a slightly too bright voice, “I expect there’s only one way to find out. Let’s go find your mystery woman, ’cause you won’t know anything until you find out what she’s all about.”
CHAPTER 21
THEY WERE ON their way. Hunter laid the directions he had written out from the woman’s voice mail on the console between him and Ashley and gripped his knees so he didn’t grab hold of the door handle and bail out of the Tahoe.
Beside him, Ashley took a different route than the one that led to Mary Kate’s trailer. This one was farther north, a b
lip on the map off of I-81 that circumvented a rather nice-looking subdivision of McMinimansions, then seemed to die in a dead end. Except Ashley kept going. She found the sweep of gravel track around a park and through seemingly impenetrable trees beyond.
“Is this an official road?” Hunter asked.
“Sure is. Gosnoll Gap. The county takes care of it and all.” She gestured out the windshield. “See, there’s a fresh layer of gravel laid down.”
Indeed there was, gravel that looked hardly driven upon lay across another road one and a half lanes wide.
“Don’t tell me you don’t have these kinds of roads up north. I’ve been on a few in Clarke County up there.”
“I grew up in Fairfax County and live in Arlington now. We are all about pavement and civilization.”
“Except you need to dig up the dirt in remote parts of the world.”
“It’s to make up for all the toy trucks and bulldozers I wasn’t allowed to have as a kid.”
“No digging up Momma’s garden?”
“No way.”
The road began to climb and curve at the same time. Hunter moved one hand from his knee to the door armrest. The temptation to close his eyes pressed upon him. He’d seen the drop-off on one side and the lack of a sufficient guardrail. No problem if he was driving, but Ashley was at the wheel, relaxed and calm, as though she drove these roads every day.
Probably because she did, practically.
“Relax.” She shot him a quick smile. “I learned to drive on these roads.”
“Did your father turn gray in the process?”
“He was already gray thanks to my brothers.”
The road leveled off, and Hunter began to breathe normally again. He wanted to ask her how growing up in a place like these mountains had been. He wasn’t sure what to inquire about first, how to phrase his questions so he didn’t sound ignorant, as in a northern Virginia city snob again. But blurting out something was better than the silence that gave him time to think about where he was headed and why.
“Did the lady from the diner really whip you when you were a child?”
As an opening salvo, it was pretty bad. Ashley, however, grinned. “She sure did. I took a dare and ran into her kitchen and scooped a mess of meringue off the top of a pie cooling on the rack. She caught me before I got back out the door and hauled me into her office with one hand and a wooden candy spoon in the other.”
“Your parents didn’t mind?”
“Mind? They probably would have given me more of the same if they ever knew about it. But she laid down the law about messing with her kitchen. Then she hugged me and told me to get better friends.”
“Did you?”
Ashley pulled into a lay-by and picked up the directions. She studied them for several moments before pulling back onto the road and answering him. “Not really. It was kinda hard being the pastor’s daughter and the daughter and granddaughter of midwives. Using a midwife now is acceptable, even kind of fashionable. But it wasn’t twenty years ago. We were weird. I was weird. And some kids thought I had access to drugs.”
No wonder she seemed shy and a little insecure, unusual in such a pretty woman.
“My brothers had each other,” she added. “But I have Heather now.” Her lower lip quivered.
Hunter touched her arm. “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Everything.” She heaved a deep, shuddering sigh. “I’ve failed her too. It’s—she—Sometimes I just hate confidentiality laws. They are kind of nonsense in a community like this, and with Momma and Daddy so far away . . .” She trailed off and slowed the Tahoe to a crawl.
“This next road is gonna be bad after all the rain unless the county’s laid down gravel there too.” She turned onto a surprisingly visible road that wound between stands of trees that must have been a hundred feet tall. It was pretty in the late-autumn sunshine. In summer, with all the leaves on the trees, it would look positively cathedral-like. Hunter wanted to see it.
Right then, he wanted to see Ashley smile again. With the road freshly graveled and relatively straight and flat, running along the top of the Ridge with only a minor drop-off on the far side, Hunter picked up the conversation.
“Is Heather a patient as well as a friend?”
“Not technically, I suppose. I haven’t examined her yet or filled out a chart.” She glanced in the rearview mirror and pulled off to the side of the road. “There’s a truck coming, and a downhill section coming up, so I’d rather let them pass. My rule of driving in these mountains—let trucks go ahead of you going downhill and keep them behind you going up.”
“That makes sense to me.”
The truck that sped past them was no pickup, but a tractor trailer hauling logs.
“I wouldn’t want that behind me if its brakes failed.”
“No sir.” She resumed driving, fingers tapping on the steering wheel for a few moments. “I didn’t realize how unhappy Heather was in her marriage and now her husband has left her.”
Hunter blinked at the spate of words, then made the connection to their earlier conversation and one eyebrow shot up. “And you’re responsible for this how?”
“I’ve been so focused on getting Sofie certified so she can take over my practice, and getting into med school, I wasn’t paying attention to how much Heather was hurting. I didn’t even know Ian wanted babies so badly and she was stalling about it.” She bit her lower lip.
Hunter looked at her instead of the road that dipped and curved and dropped away to a valley far below on his side. “Did you not see her for a while?”
“Not as much as usual.”
“No calls or texts?”
“Almost every day.”
“Then isn’t it her responsibility to have told you?”
“I should have known. Just like I should have realized Mary Kate is so scared of not having any money she’ll work herself into early labor at best.”
“You can’t do everything for everyone, you know. You’re not even supposed to.”
“And then there’s that girl who gave birth at my house. I failed her—”
“Ashley, are you listening to me?” He wanted to touch her, to gain her attention. On that road, he dared not distract her further than with dialogue. “Who appointed you God in charge of everyone’s life?”
“No one, but—” The road widened onto what looked like a genuine state highway.
“Why didn’t we take this out here?”
“This way was faster.”
“Hmm. Can we take the long way home?”
“Sure. Are you all right?”
“I keep hearing my family, the McDermots, telling me I could be in danger.”
“Danger is always possible, but I doubt it. She probably wouldn’t keep calling you for this long if she’s just scamming you.”
She dropped her hand onto his and squeezed. “You’re not alone. I’m here.”
And if something bad did happen, she would hold herself responsible.
That, if nothing else, nearly made him change his mind about continuing on their quest. He didn’t want to risk burdening her further. He wanted to protect her from harm and hurt. He wanted to remove the hurt she was already feeling. He wanted to know what made her think she needed to carry the burdens of the world on her slender shoulders.
And he had added to those burdens with his pursuit of an anonymous woman claiming to be his mother.
He opened his mouth to tell her to go back, forget finding the woman, but she had already shot across the highway and started up another hill, a gentle one that fronted a precipitous drop into a valley, through which ran a bright ribbon of water.
“The New River,” she said. “It flows north.”
Hunter merely nodded.
“Once upon a time, the Brooks family ran a ferry across.” She turned south but gestured north. “The Tollivers and Brookses also owned a lead mine. They’d have made a fortune during the War Between the States if Confederate money had been any good.”
Hunter just looked at her in awe. “I can’t imagine having that kind of a history, roots that deep in a community.”
“But apparently you do.”
He shook his head. “I can’t comprehend having roots here. Or roots at all. I’ve never been much of one to think about history. My work looks to the future. We build tunnels to connect people to one another, to improve communication, to move commerce more smoothly and economically from one point to another. This place seems to divide with these ridges and roads and hollows keeping people apart.”
“I never think of it that way.” She pouched out her lips in an enticing way, an unconsciously enticing way. Her fingers drummed on the steering wheel. “I am in these hills so much, I feel like everyone’s connected.”
“You are the connecting glue, Ashley Esther Tolliver.” Unable to resist touching her, making a connection with her, he smoothed a lock of her hair away from her face, loving the silkiness, the warmth. “You are what connects people to one another here. You bring the women together for your clinics and you travel from one home to another.”
“That’s such a sweet thing to say. I never thought of it that way. I just do my job and care about others’ needs.”
“That’s just it—you care.”
And with that, a missing piece in his life fell into place.
“My work is about people in that I make life easier, or at least travel easier. But I really have nothing to do with them in the building of the tunnels or the aftermath. It’s isolating.”
“I’d hate to be isolated.” She slowed the Tahoe at the junction of two roads and glanced his way. “This is the road on the directions. Are you absolutely sure you want to go?”
“We’ve come this far.”
“That’s not really an answer.” She drew to the side of the road and waved a minivan, of all things, around them, then faced him, her hand closing over his. “We can keep driving on this road and go back to town. You’re under no obligation to find this woman, since she can’t be your mother.”
“Perhaps not, but I can’t imagine turning back now would make me feel like anything but a coward.” He flipped his hand over and laced his fingers with hers. “It’s easier with you here. Thank you.”
The Mountain Midwife Page 21
