He exhaled deeply, ducking his head, squeezing his eyes shut. He’d never told anyone that story. Everyone in Tina’s family and those involved with the trial knew all about it, but after coming back here, he’d intended to take the details to his grave…until Lilah’s birthday had come around. Until she started visiting his dreams. Until he couldn’t ignore the big, empty hole ripped out of his life any longer.
He dragged in another deep breath and forced himself to meet Marti’s gaze. “Lilah’s mother is dead, and I’m the one responsible for it, and I haven’t seen my little girl since.”
* * *
Elliot was feeling pretty damn weak when he got off work Thursday afternoon. He’d snagged an Italian loaf he’d made that morning, stopped by the grocery store to pick up other ingredients, and was trying to talk himself out of going to Fia’s house. He’d managed not to call her all day. Patricia and Lucy had both just shrugged and said she was probably tied up with end-of-month work for the gym, but Lucy had quickly looked away when she said it. God love her, he appreciated a woman who couldn’t tell a lie without cringing away from it.
Though maybe it hadn’t been totally a lie. It was the beginning of May. Maybe Fia was just tying up all the loose ends of April for her boss. She didn’t love paperwork, so maybe she’d just been too tired to pick up the phone when she was done.
Yeah, like the girl who ran 10Ks would be worn out by schedules and salaries and taxes.
In the end, he lost the argument with himself. He took the back streets from the grocery store to the apartment complex, turned onto her block, and pulled into the driveway. Her car sat in the same place, and the blinds were still closed. He knocked at the door a couple of times, then considered leaving a note for her. That said what?
Feeling grim, he returned to the truck and drove home, telling himself there was no reason to be down. His plans really hadn’t changed. He was going to make muffaletta sandwiches for dinner, maybe watch a little TV, then go to bed early. He’d just be sharing the sandwiches with Mouse instead of the date he’d hoped to have, and that was okay.
He parked in the lot behind the building, gathered the food, and circled through the grass to the front. The building had a back door that was more convenient to the parking, but the owner had boarded it over. Probably his lazy idea of tightening security.
Walking around the corner to the broad steps, Elliot came to a sudden stop, and that grim feeling disappeared—poof!—like that.
“Hey.” Fia was sitting at the top of the steps, wearing shorts and high-top shoes, a T-shirt from one of those races she’d run, and a hoodie, and she was shifting a little nervously, her gaze making contact with him only for seconds before moving away, then back.
“Hey.” He smiled, brushed his hair back, and wished he’d had a chance to shower and change and maybe shave again.
“Are you mad?” she asked in a little voice.
“Mad? No, of course not. Maybe confused, but Emily will tell you I’m easy to confuse.” What he really wanted to do was scoop her up and plant one hell of a kiss on her, but instead he set the bags to one side and crouched a few steps below her. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah. I just…” Finally she fixed on gaze on his. “I just needed a little time.” Her expression was a little sad, a little nervous, a little anxious, a little…worried.
He touched her knee the way he would a skittish animal, gentle and tentative. “You can tell me that. I mean, I got the hint after the first few calls, but seriously, you can just tell me and I’ll go away for a bit. I know this is all kind of…” Sudden. Intense. Surprising. Moving way faster than either of them had expected. Getting way more serious than he had expected, and he’d fallen in love at least a dozen times.
“I know. It’s just all so new.” She shrugged her slender shoulders. “I don’t want to make a mistake.”
“You? Nah, I thought you were perfect.”
A small laugh escaped. “That’s what Lucy and I agreed about you. By the way, that brown bread of yours was incredible.”
So that was who Lucy had taken lunch to. Checking on her? Making sure he hadn’t done anything stupid or wrong? He didn’t mind. Lucy had known Fia far longer than he had, and she was such a mothering sort.
He nodded toward the bags. “My Italian loaf is just as good. Add salami and cheese and olives, and you’ve got the best sandwich you’ll find in Tallgrass. Want to share it with us?”
Finally her regular smile appeared, and his day brightened considerably. “I’d like to.”
He grabbed the bags, stood, and offered her a hand. She was so slender that pulling her to her feet required practically no effort. She winced a bit when she was standing, and he scanned her legs. “What’d you do to your knee?”
She looked down at the scrape, and her face flushed. “I, uh, tripped. Bare skin doesn’t slide on wood floors like clothed skin does.”
“Want me to carry you up the stairs?” He expected an automatic no, but she studied him instead.
“You’d really do that, wouldn’t you?”
“Sure. Well, this time it would have to be a piggyback ride. Emily’s kids say mine are the best ever, but they’re not always honest. They can be bought for a candy bar and a trip to the park.”
“I can climb the stairs,” Fia said, but even as she spoke, she slipped her hand into his free one.
It sent a rush of warmth through to his gut, but he played it cool as they climbed the stairs, then walked through the door. “This building reminds me of the school I went to down in Texas.”
“Grade school, middle school, or high school?”
“Uh-huh.” He laughed when the answer caught her off guard, making her blink. “The kids in our school came from all the surrounding communities, and there still weren’t enough of us to need more space than this. Do you remember Garth Brooks’s song, ‘Nobody Gets Off in This Town’?”
“The Greyhound stops and somebody gets on,” she sang.
“But nobody gets off in this town,” he finished for her. “That’s my town. Right down to the old, mean dog and the high school colors being brown.”
“Really?”
His grin widened. “Nah. We had a couple mean dogs, and our high school didn’t have colors.” He paced his steps to hers, watching for any sign that her knee was hurting. The more they climbed, though, the more fluid her movements were. Must have just gotten stiff while waiting for him.
Waiting for him. He liked that.
On the second floor, he opened the door to find Mouse sitting politely, tail wagging, ears pricked. “She likes to pretend she’s been waiting here for me all day, but if you go over and feel the middle of the bed, it’ll be as warm as a heating pad.”
“Hey, Mouse, pretty girl.” Fia bent and scratched between her ears, then along her spine as the pup wriggled happily.
He set the bags on the kitchen counter, came back, and picked up the leash. “I’ve got to take her out for a quick run. You want to come or wait here?”
“I’ll wait here.”
“We’ll make it quick. I don’t often get to come home to a pretty female waiting.”
She loosely laid her hands over Mouse’s ears. “Don’t say that. You’ll hurt Mouse’s feelings.”
“A pretty woman,” he corrected. “We’ll be back however quick she chooses to take. Make yourself comfortable.”
He and the dog ran down the stairs, burst out the doors, and turned toward the park. “Okay, Mouse, I did you a solid last week. You do me one, will you? Don’t take forever with this.”
* * *
There were only two options for making herself comfortable: sitting in one of the two camp chairs, the kind that folded into a long tube of a bag that could be slung over one’s shoulder, or on the bed. Since the bed felt just a little bit bold—something pre-Scott Fia would have done—she chose one of the chairs, the canvas shifting and adjusting beneath her. It was as comfortable as the fat armchair in her living room, at least for sitting. Curling
up in it was out of the question.
Coming over here had been a big deal for her: leaving her car at home, walking the broad sidewalks, trusting her feet to stay flat and her body not to give out. She hadn’t gone for a walk by herself in so long that she couldn’t even remember it. Of course, whenever it was, she hadn’t expected it to be the last time or she would have paid more attention.
But right now she felt great. She’d kept her pace easy but steady, pretending that she was taking in the lovely weather and newly leafed trees and lush lawns and bright-colored flowers. She hadn’t pushed herself, and she’d kept her cell phone in hand in case she needed to call one of the girls. It had given her a rush, even more than driving herself to the pharmacy last Friday night. She didn’t get to make many stabs at independence, so this was an accomplishment.
Though the place still looked a little bare, Elliot had unpacked. A television sat on two stacked boxes marked Books, and a dozen photographs hung on the walls, along with a couple of citations from his Army days. His clothes were neatly stacked in laundry baskets in the corner, and a guitar case leaned in another corner. Books lined the front windowsill: a few cookbooks but mostly biographies—George S. Patton, Omar Bradley, Norman Schwarzkopf. A fat binder, worn from heavy use, sat beside them. Grandma’s cookbook?
The man traveled light. Necessary, she guessed, when he didn’t stay anywhere for any great length of time. He seemed to really like Tallgrass, though—the town, his job, the people…her. But had he felt like that about other towns in the beginning? Had there been other jobs he loved, other friends, other women like her?
Women, yes, obviously. People in general were programmed to want those close relationships. Women like her? She preferred to think not for good reasons. Not just because she had this beast of an illness inside her.
His footsteps on the stairs began sounding about halfway up. Just before he reached the door, the click of Mouse’s paws joined in. The door swung open, and the dog ran inside, sliding to a crouch in front of Fia, lifting her front feet to Fia’s knees. “Were you a good girl?” she asked, grasping the dog around the middle and lifting her onto her lap. Mouse licked her face, turned once, and sat down.
“She’s looking at me like she won the prize and I lost.” Elliot hung the leash on a hook near the door, then grabbed some clothes and disappeared into the bathroom. Mouse leaped down to follow him. A couple minutes, and he was back in fresh jeans and a T-shirt that he was pulling over his head as he walked. Sometimes Fia had teased that she’d become a personal trainer because she so deeply admired the torsos of hard-bodied men. Shoulders, chest, abdomen, hips, spine, arms…Wasn’t it amazing the way the skin flowed so silkenly over the ripples and hard angles of rib bones, clavicles, the humerus and collarbones? Pure art.
And if all those buff men she’d worked with over the years were works of art, then Elliot was the work of the grandest artist of all.
His head poked through the neck hole, and he grinned at her. “Did you see enough, or do I need to pull it off again?”
“I’m good for now,” she assured him. Rising, she carried her chair closer to the kitchen, where she could watch him work.
He washed his hands, then emptied the shopping bags on the counter. With a flourish, he presented the paper-wrapped bread loaf to her, and she breathed deeply of its warm tantalizing taste. “Yumm. It’s so pretty. I’d hate to cut into it.”
“After you taste it, you won’t care about the cutting. You been to New Orleans?”
“Scott and I spent a few days there on our way to Oklahoma.”
“Have a muffaletta?”
She shook her head.
“It’s spicy meat, cheeses, lots of olives and pimientos. Sound like too much? ’Cause I can make you something else. I saw some nice turkey breast at the deli, or I have eggs in the refrigerator.”
Fia went to look at the meat—salami and ham—and the mozzarella and provolone cheeses. “They’ll be fine. Sometimes I’ll get a headache where just the thought of spicy food makes me queasy, but tonight I’m fine.” That was the truth, as far as it went. And that was as far as she was willing to go right now.
He rewarded her with his cowboy charmer grin. “Just for that, I’ll make us a small dish of bread pudding for dessert. We had some of yesterday’s chocolate pastries left over, so I thought I’d see how they work in bread pudding.”
“Can I help?”
“Yep. Just sit there where I can see you and look pretty.”
“I’ll do my best.” She settled in, fluffing her hair, crossing her legs. “How was your day?”
“It was already good, but it got great about twenty minutes ago. How was yours?”
“Meh. I’m not in love with paperwork, but someone’s got to do it.”
He glanced up from dicing black and green olives along with pimientos. “Do you plan on going back to training at some point?”
If I ever get well. But that wasn’t an answer she could give him—soon, she promised herself—so she shrugged. “I really don’t know what I want to do. Becoming a trainer was really a case of me getting in shape and going all gung-ho with it, not something that I’d always thought, ‘Hey, I want to be that when I grow up.’”
“Sort of like the newest Christian preaches the loudest.”
New knowledge, new life, great desire to spread the word. “Yeah, I think so.”
“What did you want to do when you were little?”
It was a shame she had to consider the question so long. Didn’t everyone remember at least one thing they’d wanted to be when they grew up? But she could recall only one, and it wasn’t a thing but a place: away from her family.
“I wanted to be a championship bull rider,” he said while waiting for her. “I did some bull riding and won some prizes. Then I figured that so far I’d been damn lucky in walking away unharmed, and I didn’t want to be there when the luck ran out. Beyond that, I wanted to do my stint in the Army, and then I wanted to go back to the ranch, work with my dad until he and Mom retired, then run the place with Emily and Bill. But life had other plans.”
That could be her personal motto: Life has other plans. “What do Emily and Bill do now?”
“She works in hospital administration, and he works for the Department of Fish and Game.”
“And they’ve got three kids?”
“Amelia, Cecilia, and Theodore.” Elliot made a face, and she felt the ouch herself.
“Do they at least call him Teddy?”
“Nope. No Theo, either. The first full sentence he ever said was, ‘It’s Thee-o-door.’ And believe it or not, there’s another Theodore in his class this year.” Switching knives, he pulled out the round loaf of bread and sliced it horizontally before laying it on a baking sheet. “Schoolteacher?”
She looked up from the pillowy softness inside the loaf. “Me? A schoolteacher? Oh, hell, no. I hated school. In my neighborhood, it was more of a prep school for prison.”
“Nurse?”
“Don’t like needles.”
“Astronaut?”
“I get airsick.”
“Lawyer? Skydiver? Circus clown?”
Laughing, she made a ding-ding sound. “You got me. My dream was to run away and join the circus. Travel, fun, good food, meeting strange and interesting people…What could be better?”
He spread the meats, cheeses, and olive salad on the bread, then slid it into the hot oven. Wiping his hands on a towel, he came toward her, pulling her from the chair, wrapping his arms around her. “I have to say, I’m glad you didn’t. I was startled by a clown at a rodeo when I was little, and ever since, red noses, wigs, and big feet have freaked me out.”
“I’ll make a note of that for next Halloween.” Then she heard herself, felt a squeeze around her heart, and said, “If you’re…”
“If I’m still here?” He grew serious, brushing his hand gently across her hair, his gaze softening in a tender way that threatened to melt her in his arms. “Darlin’, I can’t im
agine being anywhere else.”
* * *
Sunday was Elliot’s first day off, and he rewarded himself by sleeping in until six, then taking Mouse for a run. It wasn’t by design that he found himself in a familiar maze of apartments and duplexes, but he didn’t turn the other way at any of the opportunities he had. Fia’s street was quiet, the only noise the occasional flapping of a flag in the breeze. He didn’t need to ask to know that a lot of soldiers lived in the complex. He’d lived in similar places himself: manageable on an Army salary, close to the fort, a good place for people who shared common interests and obligations.
As they jogged past Fia’s house, Mouse’s nose began twitching and she tried to turn into the driveway. “You’re a sucker for her, too, aren’t you?” he asked, keeping her moving despite her desire to stop. “We’re gonna see her later today. Lunch, remember?”
She’d offered to fix the meal this time at her place—said she would even buy a banana and some caramel sauce to put on his peanut butter—but he wanted to take her out instead. His savings had dwindled past the point where he would normally put himself on a very strict budget, but he’d decided to indulge in this one splurge. After all, he had a job, a paycheck due in a week, and if things got really tight, he could live off the recipe tasting he did and the leftovers at the bakery.
Though things wouldn’t get that tight. God willing and the creek don’t rise, Grandma would have added to that.
A Summer to Remember Page 15
