Stryker's Wife (Man of the Month)

by Dixie Browning

  They headed toward Swan Inlet, the camper loaded with groceries that consisted mostly of potato chips, peanuts, store-bought sweets and canned drinks. Kurt had insisted on buying some apples and bananas and a gallon of milk, too. One of these days he was going to have to get serious about this business of nutrition, but not when he was under a load of stress. At a time like that, a man needed his full ration of empty calories.

  After a while, Frog said, “I still don’t know what you want with a house, though. It’s a real dump, man. You wanna know what I think? I think we oughta ’doze the house, dredge us out a bunch of slots an’ a good channel an’ build us our own marina. We could put us a franchise burger place where the house is, an’ a bait an’ tackle place right on the wharf. Betcha we could get twice what old Etheleen charges for moorin’, power and all that junk.”

  Kurt downshifted and passed a church bus on the narrow two-lane highway. “Which one are you planning on managing, the fast-food place or the bait and tackle?”

  “Me, I figure I can make more in tips on board the boat, but when we don’t have no charter, I could manage ‘em both. Or you could run one an’ I could run the other. Hey, whatever you want, man—I’m cool.”

  “Remind me to sign you up for a business course after you graduate from high school.”

  Which brought on the usual “Aw, man!” Plus a few remarks that translated roughly to a comparison of the leading-edge wisdom of youth to the cast-in-concrete stupidity of age.

  On the whole, Kurt was encouraged. At least the kid seemed to be considering hanging around for a few more years.

  Three weeks passed. They had four charters and found enough big stripers, yellowfin tuna and wahoo to ensure Frog some substantial tips and Kurt a few repeat charters. Life was good.

  Life was lousy. Oh, sure, Oyster Point was swarming with carpenters, plumbers, electricians and their ilk, but every time he worked up his courage to place a call, either Deke was out or something came up and he didn’t get back to the phone booth until too late to call.

  Kurt knew damn well he was manufacturing excuses by the bushel. He told himself that what he ought to do was put it to her in a letter. Spell out his situation, his prospects, lay out his proposition and wait for her decision.

  And wait. And wait. And sweat a little blood while he was waiting for her to make up her mind. And sweat a little more wondering if she’d even got the letter. For all he knew, the letter might fall out of a mail pouch and get chewed up by a dog in lieu of the postman’s leg.

  Or maybe she’d get it and trash it without even opening the envelope. The way he’d left her—the way she’d gone tearing out of the parking lot, spraying what little gravel the tide hadn’t carried off…

  Kurt swore a little and sweated a lot, despite the weather that had turned cold. He took apart his bilge pump for the third time, and it still wasn’t working right. He’d evidently lost his touch.

  Or his concentration.

  Frog passed his English test—barely—and aced the math test. To celebrate, Kurt sprang for the CD player the kid had been wanting, thinking he might enjoy a little Haggard and Jennings, himself.

  Instead, he got hard rock. Loud hard rock.

  He wondered what kind of music Deke liked. She’d said she had an organ. He’d never even heard one outside a church. She hadn’t struck him as particularly religious, but then, you never could tell about things like that.

  God, he missed her. The day after she’d left, he’d found her yellow sweatshirt hanging behind the door to the head. It had her scent—sort of soapy and warm and corn-tasselly. Two days later, rummaging through the locker where he’d dumped everything that might wash overboard or blow away before the storm, he’d come across her light meter.

  Funny thing, the way a woman could burrow under a man’s skin. It wasn’t like he loved her or anything like that. Oh, hell, no! He was too old to play that game again. Still, he couldn’t deny he was looking forward to seeing her.

  And he was going to see her, too, if he had to track her all the way to Virginia. Church Grove couldn’t be all that big a town. He’d traveled all over the world, and he’d never even heard of Church Grove, Virginia.

  A thought occurred to him. What if she was pregnant?

  He swore some more and mentally started rearranging the bedroom allocation on the second floor of his new-old house.

  Between the morning feeding and opening the day-care center, Deke started her days before the sun was even over the horizon. At four in the afternoon she left the children who hadn’t already been picked up with Daisy and Miss Hazel, hurried to Biddy’s for another feeding and by the time she had cleaned up after that, she was almost too tired to go apartment hunting.

  Her writing was going nowhere. She had toyed briefly with an idea about a boy named Frog who lived on a boat. It had lacked spark. So she’d tried out another idea, this time about a girl who rescued a talking frog and a one-eyed sea captain from a series of disasters, starting with a hurricane. It had had plenty of spark, but she couldn’t come up with an ending.

  The trouble was, she was hung up somewhere on the other side of reality. The reality of trying to sell an idea in an extremely crowded field. The reality of making a living with no particular marketable skills in a town with no industry. The reality of trying to convince herself that she was on the verge of forgetting Kurt Stryker.

  Any day now, Deke told herself, she’d be able to go for hours without thinking a single time of the way he had looked standing up there on the flying bridge, with the wind stirring his thick, sun-streaked hair and blowing his thin khakis against his powerful body. Of the way the muscles in his legs flexed with the roll of the boat.

  Of the way he looked when he was amused and trying not to show it. When he was worried and trying not to show it.

  Or when he was hurting and trying not to show it.

  Darn it, she hadn’t asked him to do all the driving! She hadn’t asked him to climb all over the R&R, tying things down, covering things up, straining wounds that, from the look of the scars, might never fully recover.

  She certainly hadn’t asked him to make love to her, which must have been excruciating under the circumstances.

  She was still pounding her head against an all-toofamiliar stone wall when the phone rang. Her heart went into double time, and she nearly tripped on her discarded shoes. It was—

  It had to be! She’d known in her deepest heart that it couldn’t just end that way.

  It wasn’t. It was Ambrose Anderson, a nice man she had dated a few times, wanting to know if she would like to drive to Norfolk for dinner tomorrow night.

  Ambrose was a pharmacist. He worked in Church Grove’s one and only drugstore and was a terrible gossip. If you had a rash, the whole town would know where and how bad. If you had trouble sleeping, if your sinuses were clogged, if you needed a laxative, trust Ambrose to recommend a cure and then tell the whole town about it. There wasn’t a malicious bone in his body, he simply liked to talk, and as he had no interests outside his work, he talked about that.

  “Ambrose, it sounds wonderful, but between trying to do two jobs and finding someplace to live, I’m bushed.” She waited to see if he knew of any possibilities. A couple of rooms in a private home. Even one room—she was that desperate. “Honestly, by the time I get home in the evening, I don’t have the energy to move. It’s all I can do to nuke my dinner and crawl into bed.”

  Ambrose recommended a herbal remedy that was guaranteed to restore her energy, put fresh sparkle in her eyes and make her hair grow faster.

  She had to laugh. “If it will turn me into a blonde or a redhead, preferably one with natural curls, then I’ll take a truckload.”

  So he told her about his store’s line of rinses and home permanents, and she laughed and told him she’d be in in a day or so for her multivitamins, and thanks for the dinner invitation, but no thanks, and then she hung up.

  And sighed. If she’d had to go and fall in love again, why
couldn’t it have been with a nice, safe man like Ambrose? Why did she have to throw her heart away on someone like Kurt Stryker? A man who was technically homeless and who had no interest in settling down again—he’d more or less admitted as much.

  On the other hand, he had made room in his life for a boy.

  A boy who was going to grow up and leave him in a few years. And then he’d be all alone again, only he would never admit to being lonely.

  But he was. Deep down inside, she was convinced that Kurt was every bit as lonely as she was. Deke knew loneliness. She had grown up the center of a loving family, despite the fact that she had lost both her parents at an early age.

  She’d still had Granna and her great-aunts. Later on, she’d had Mark. For a little while, at least.

  But then, in less than two years, she had lost everyone in her life and had discovered that she was totally without defenses. No antibodies. No immunity from the kind of quiet, desperate loneliness that could stalk a body and hit hurting hard when least expected.

  The children at the center had been a godsend. Still were, but it was a shaky operation. She had a feeling it would be closed down before much longer. Not that the care wasn’t great, but the facilities fell woefully short of standards.

  Even the birds helped a little, but with so many volunteers wandering in and out, some coming from as far away as Norfolk, Biddy didn’t really need her.

  Kurt did. He needed her. He just didn’t know it. He needed her even more than she needed him, because for all their physical strength, men were the weaker sex. They lacked a woman’s natural resilience, else why did women statistically outlive men? Why did married men statistically live longer than single ones?

  Still lying flat on her yard-sale sofa, Deke pondered statistics. And then she pondered the few days that had changed her life. And then she made up her mind that someone was going to have to rescue Captain Stryker.

  So…as long as she had to move anyway, why not look for a place near the water? A place with room for three people and a good school nearby. And a fast-food place and a supermarket.

  The trick was going to be persuading Kurt to move to Virginia. To throw in his lot with a pea-poor widow whose earning skills weren’t all that great but who was willing to work long and hard to make a home.

  Horsefeathers! Maybe she’d better stop trying to write children’s books and try her hand at romance. Feisty heroine tackles life head-on, overcomes world-class obstacles to win worthy hero.

  And foul-mouthed, ill-mannered, adolescent boy.

  Oh, yes, indeedy, she was a master of fiction, all right.

  Nine

  Kurt found the place finally. It was actually on the map. But if there were any street addresses, they were a well-kept secret. He drove slowly through the center of what could scarcely be called a town and then tackled the side roads. He read names on mailboxes, then remembered that she lived in an apartment. So he drove around some more, looking for something that resembled a multiple-family dwelling.

  He’d tried to call her, first from the marina and then from half a dozen stops along the way. There’d been no answer, not even a recorded message on an answering machine. At that point he almost would’ve settled for that—just hearing the sound of her voice.

  The next time he stopped he put in a call to the marina and asked Etheleen if Frog was anywhere around. The kid might’ve remembered something Kurt had forgotten.

  Although there was damned little he’d forgotten about her. In fact, the more frustrated he was in his search, the more he remembered every single detail of the way she looked. She was the only woman he’d ever met who could look desirable when she was sick as a dog from champagne and a choppy sea.

  And the way she laughed. And her scent—that sweet, clean, feminine scent that was unforgettable without being at all overwhelming. The way she had of using her hands when she got excited, as if they were small batons orchestrating her thoughts. He thought about the way she had taken to Frog, treating him as an individual and not just a generic kid, even when he was acting up.

  Dammit, he had to find her. This was getting ridiculous!

  Frog had come on the line while Kurt was still recounting all the reasons he was somewhere near the Virginia line in a gas station that advertised beer, collards, red worms and Wolverine shoes instead of in Swan Inlet minding his own business.

  “‘Sa matter, change yer mind?”

  “No, I haven’t changed my mind. Look, Frog, do you happen to remember anything Deke said about this place where she lives? Like what it looked like or whether it was in town or out in the country?”

  “Lost, huh? I toldja ya shoulda took yer compass. I toldja ya shoulda never gone after ’er,” the boy declared.

  “Right. And I should’ve known better than to ask you for help.” They’d gone a few rounds when Kurt had first announced his intention of taking a couple of days off in the middle of the week between charters to drive to Virginia. Frog had fired up like a threeyear-old being told he had to share his favorite toy.

  It hadn’t done much to improve matters when Kurt had heard himself sounding just like his own father.

  “Kurt, have you split all that kindling yet?”

  “Notyet, Pa.”

  “I should’ve known better than to ask. Great big football hero like you, you got better things to do than split your mama’s kindlin’ wood.”

  Pa hadn’t really meant anything by it, but Kurt had had a bad case of thin skin back then. Partly because his words didn’t always come out right, but mostly on account of hanging out with guys who didn’t know what it was like to have to do the milking, feed up, split kindling and crack the ice on the chickens’ water before they caught the bus to school.

  With the first money he’d ever earned, he had bought his mama a secondhand electric range. His father had blustered, claimed Kurt was only trying to keep from splitting kindling every morning before he went to school—accused him of being too proud to live in a house where the cooking and the heating were still done with wood.

  But his pa had been sort of proud, too. At least, Kurt thought he was. Years later he’d discovered the old man had followed every game he’d ever played, both in high school and at State, and what’s more, he had the clippings to prove it.

  He thought again of the ballerina music box on his mama’s dressing table. The first time he’d ever laid eyes on Deke, she had reminded him of that tiny pirouetting figure. More doll than real woman, he remembered thinking at the time.

  Man, had he evermore been wrong.

  About four in the afternoon, Kurt ran flat out of patience. Having chased down every cow path and dead-end street in the county, he gave up and pulled in at a place called Anderson’s Convenience and Pharmacy.

  There were two old women thumbing greeting cards just inside the door and a balding gentleman in a white coat behind the counter. Kurt approached the man. “Would you happen to know where I could find a Ms. Kiley around here? I can’t seem to locate the right address.” For Deke’s sake, he almost hoped the guy wouldn’t tell him. It wasn’t safe, giving out information to strangers.

  Hell, it wasn’t even safe asking questions!

  “That would be Debranne Kiley. She’s the only Kiley around these parts, at least since her husband died. They used to live in that fancy new section, place called Willow Hill, but he died and the house got sold out from under her.”

  “So where did she go? Where does she live now?”

  One of the two women wandered over, a greeting card in hand. “Did I hear you asking about Debranne Kingsly? She was a Kingsly before she married that developer from over to Norfolk, you know. Kingslys lived in these parts since the second supply ship to Jamestown. My third cousin on Mother’s side married a—”

  “Thanks, ma’am. She’s the one I’m looking for, all right. You happen to know where I can find her this time of day? She doesn’t answer her phone, and I was sort of worried.”

  “Oh, no need to worry about
Debranne,” put in the pharmacist. “She’ll be finishing up over at Biddy’s most any time now. Once she leaves there, she’ll stop by the post office to pick up her mail, might even stop in here. She does her grocery shopping on Thursdays, isn’t that right, Miss Cammy?”

  Kurt wasn’t interested in when she did her grocery shopping, he wanted to know where he could lay hands on her right now. “Yeah, well—I don’t have much of a sense of direction, and Church Grove’s not real good about maintaining street signs, so…”

  “Lawsy, who needs street signs? Everybody knows where everybody lives. Debranne lives in that new apartment place out on Chesapeake, over by the cemetery.”

  The second woman joined them, a can of antifungus powder and a bottle of Tabu toilet water in her hand. “New? Camilla Stevens, that place was built the year Maude Hobbs married Old Man Adams. You wore your red coat to the wedding, remember? And I told you, I said, Cammy, you look just like one of those—”

  A wattled chin wobbled indignantly. “I remember what you said. I’m not likely to forget it.”

  “Well, it was the truth! That was the same year Lula Stamp’s youngest was killed in that war over in Korea. You remember, I told you at the time—”

  “Can’t thank you ladies enough,” Kurt said dryly. Now all he had to do was find a blasted cemetery.

  Oh, God, he’s here, Deke thought as soon as Ambrose told her about the stranger who’d been asking about her. It was Kurt. It had to be Kurt. Ever since she’d got the wild idea of finding herself a place by the water and inviting Kurt and Frog to move in with her, she’d been quivering in her boots, afraid of actually bursting out in a fit of assertiveness and doing something embarrassing. Like calling him and asking him what he thought about moving to Virginia.

  Or what he thought of meeting her halfway between Swan Inlet and Church Grove for a night of wild, passionate sex.

  But what was he doing here? He couldn’t be just passing through town on his way to somewhere else, because Church Grove wasn’t on the way to anywhere, at least until the new highway got finished.