* * *
The ice cream shop Cadence had so quaintly referred to was Braum’s, sitting at the back of a crowded parking lot with cars lined up eight deep for the drive-through and families and friends crammed into booths or sharing tables. If Dillon were home, he would be getting ready to take his last walk around the barns and the pastures with Oliver, then going to bed. Town people didn’t have the same concept of bedtime and late nights as he did. They didn’t get up the same time he did, either.
They joined the line to order ice cream, Cadence stretching on her toes to see the various flavors in the freezer case. “Ooh, Aunt Marti, why haven’t we been here before?”
“Because if I come here very often, I’ll have to take up real exercise, and you know I just can’t do that.”
Dillon’s gaze slid over Marti, from her sleek hair to her sleek outfit, all creased and pressed and showing a whole lot less skin than that yellow dress had. “You don’t need real exercise.”
“You haven’t seen my butt after a few quarts of cherries, pecans, and cream or birthday cake ice cream,” she retorted.
“The blue stuff?” He snickered. “That’s such a kid flavor.”
Her left brow arched as she looked at him. “I see you know it, too.”
“Yeah,” he admitted. On the rare occasions he and Tina had made it to Braum’s, it had been Lilah’s favorite. Tina had taken a picture once, snapped on her cell phone, of his baby with a blue-smeared grin, her expression pure delight. He supposed her family had it now. Why not? They had everything else.
They got their ice cream cones and were on their way to a table when a chorus of voices called Cadence’s name. Looking pleased, she waved to the kids grouped around a table, then her gaze turned pleading. “Aunt Marti, can I sit with my friends? I’ll be right in the same room with you. I’ll never be out of your sight.”
“Go on.” They watched her walk to the table as casually as if she’d done it a hundred times, then Marti pointed to a table for two against the wall. He nodded, and she made a beeline for it, getting there ten feet ahead of another couple. There was a tinge of triumph to her smile as she took a seat. She moved with an easy grace, every movement flowing naturally, as if she didn’t even think about it, as if it was pure muscle memory, inborn, smooth. Impressive.
“Cadence’s parents don’t give her a lot of freedom, do they?” Dillon sat opposite her, laying a handful of napkins on the table between them, swiping a lick of his chocolate chip ice cream.
“I don’t think so. Her life is pretty tightly scheduled at home: prep school, dressage for a long time, dance, gymnastics, violin lessons, language immersion, cultural outings.” She rolled her eyes. “Her mother is rigid about taking Cadence to museums, the theater, the opera, twice a month. It may not show, but my mother put me through the same stuff, only she didn’t go, too. She sent me with other people. I had more culture growing up than a yogurt factory.”
He smiled—at least, his best attempt in a while. “The first time I set foot in a museum was on a field trip our sophomore class took to the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, and the only way you’d get me to an opera or symphony is to hog-tie and drag me.”
“Did you get kicked out of the museum?” At his look, she shrugged. “I hear you were a little, um, unruly when you were a kid.”
“Just because I got thrown out of Bubba’s a few times? Had a few suspensions from school? Spent a night or two in jail?”
“Oh, no, my sources were wrong,” she said agreeably. “You weren’t unruly at all.”
“I prefer the word spirited.” After a moment, he relented. “No, I didn’t get kicked out of the museum, but my friend and I had to stay at the teacher’s side for the last hour of the tour. She wouldn’t even let us go to the bathroom by ourselves.”
“You probably would’ve set it on fire.” Marti sighed. “I never got in trouble in school my whole life. I was such a good girl. Really, the worst thing I did was negotiate with my mother: time at the beach for every time she sent me off for culture’s sake.”
She took a bite of her ice cream, swiping a cherry from the cone, her tongue licking the last bit of cream from her lip. Dillon watched a moment longer than he should have, realizing with a start that this was the best Saturday evening he’d had in years: ice cream, conversation, and a beautiful woman to look at. Ten years ago he would have been partying hard, lots of booze, maybe some fighting, plenty of women before settling on the one he would go home with. Was this an improvement or a sorry commentary on his life?
Marti glanced up and smiled, and the question answered itself: definitely an improvement.
“So how did a rich girl from back East with tons of culture wind up in Tallgrass?”
“I married a soldier. Some younger wives go back home when their husbands deploy, but I wasn’t that young, and I had a house, a job, some good friends. Then Joshua died, and…” She shifted her gaze out the window.
He didn’t regret asking the question. Joshua was a major part of her life, just as Tina had been a major part of Dillon’s. Blocking them out, pretending they didn’t exist, wasn’t normal or healthy. He’d been doing it long enough to know that for a fact.
“I didn’t really have anywhere to go,” she finally continued. “I wasn’t the same girl who’d grown up in Connecticut, so it didn’t feel like home anymore. By then, my mother had moved to Florida, but I’d been too independent to move back under her thumb again. None of the places I’d lived were home, but Tallgrass came closest. And since I did have a job, a house, and friends, I decided to stay for a while. ‘A while’ became eight years and counting, and now it really is where I want to be. Where I belong.”
Funny. When she’d faced trauma, she couldn’t go home. When he’d faced it, he’d had nowhere to go but there. If he hadn’t come back to Tallgrass when he did, if he hadn’t met Jessy and Oliver, then seen Dalton and their mom, he didn’t know what would have happened to him.
“What are you doing in town alone on a Saturday night?” Marti asked before taking a crunchy bite of her cone.
“I could ask the same of you.”
“I’m not alone. I’m with Cadence. Besides, I am determinedly single. All my margarita sisters might be falling in love and getting married again, but I’m content exactly the way I am.”
Contentedness wasn’t happiness, he wanted to point out. Being content sounded an awful lot like settling for what life had chosen to give her. He knew because, other than his desire to find Lilah, he’d done the same thing.
And settling could be awfully lonely.
* * *
If Elliot hadn’t spent so much time kneading bread over the past days, he was pretty sure kneading Fia’s muscles would have worn out his hands and biceps long before he saw results. He didn’t know how long it had been—since he’d found her on the floor, given her the medicine, called Patricia. He just knew at least some of the meds had kicked in a while ago, putting her into a deep sleep even though her limbs were still crampy and drawn taut.
Now, finally, Patricia stood and stretched out the kinks in her back. “I think that’s the best we’re gonna get tonight. Want a cup of coffee?”
Not particularly. In fact, the nerve-numbing provided by a bottle or two of whiskey sounded much more appealing. But the liquor stores were closed, and he wasn’t going to go looking for a bar to drown his sorrows. “Okay.”
She left the bedroom. He gazed at Fia, her breathing deep and steady, her T-shirt twisted a little around her shoulder, a strand of hair fluttering against her cheek. She looked peaceful, but he knew that was an illusion. Her sleep came from drugs and exhaustion.
He shared the exhaustion.
Quietly he went out, leaving the door halfway open. He found Patricia in the kitchen, coffeepot in hand, cups on the counter. “This isn’t the first time you’ve done this,” he said as he slid onto a barstool.
“Made coffee?” Her laugh was throaty and deep, but she sobered quickly. “Fia calls
Jessy or me usually. Ilena’s got the baby, Therese has her kids, Carly and Bennie are pregnant, everyone has a job. Well, me, too, since I joined Lucy at the bakery. We’ve all spent our share of time here. We all have a list of Fia’s medications, which one’s for what, how many.”
He opened his mouth for a simple question, four words. He’d been wondering for nearly a week, had wanted to ask her and everyone who knew her, but now that he could, he had to force the words out. “What’s wrong with her?”
Patricia started the coffeemaker, and within seconds, a rich aroma drifted onto the air. She took cream from the refrigerator, sugar from the cabinet, and set them with spoons on the counter in front of him. “We don’t actually know.”
“Don’t know? She’s on five medications—some powerful stuff. How can she be taking all that if they don’t know what’s wrong with her?”
“They treat the symptoms. As far as her diagnosis…” She shrugged, palms up. She went to her bag on the sofa, pulled out a plastic container, and came back. As she opened it to reveal fresh apple turnovers, she explained. “I didn’t know Fia when all this happened. I just met the margarita girls, except for Lucy, at George’s funeral about a year ago. When I met Fia, she was already having problems. They’d started over the winter. Little injuries, clumsiness, pulled muscles, that sort of thing. She was a personal trainer; she could run circles around most of the soldiers in town; the doctors said it was a hazard of her job. Take it easy, be more careful, rest more.
“Then it began getting worse. She started having migraines, trouble seeing, walking, and talking, and those awful muscle spasms. She went to the ER, and they did tests and ruled out pretty much everything they’d expected it to be. She did follow-ups with Neurology, same thing. She saw different doctors; each one just echoed the same response. ‘I don’t know.’ After a while, she got so tired of it all that she stopped going. You’re so darn healthy, Elliot, I doubt you’ve experienced the frustration of trying to get a diagnosis when everyone’s stumped.”
She put two of the turnovers in the microwave for half a minute, plated them, then filled two cups with coffee. Ordinarily, he would have offered to do all that—after all, this was as much his home as anyplace else, and he always did the work in his own kitchen—but he was too numb to get up from the stool. After setting the pastries and coffee on the counter, she came around and slid onto the stool next to him.
“After a while, Jessy and I began going to her appointments with her. We thought she needed an advocate who wasn’t shy about demanding results. Jessy, as you know, has never been shy a day in her life, and I learned to be pretty commanding as a colonel’s wife. We asked for a new doctor, and she got it. He started from scratch—new tests, more advanced ones. He was more proactive, but she still didn’t get answers. Now, he’s been transferred, and she’ll be starting over again.”
Elliot automatically picked up his fork and took a bite of the turnover. The baker inside him acknowledged that it was every bit as good as his own—maybe even better—but the rest of him was focused on the conversation. “So…” He didn’t know what to say. He knew more now, probably as much as any of the others did, but he still didn’t know a damn thing.
“Sounded like a better sentence starter when you said it, didn’t it?” Patricia patted his arm before picking up her coffee and blowing lightly on it. “So she’s been sick a year and a half, and no one knows why. She has a lot of good days. She has a lot of bad days. She gave up driving for the most part because she was terrified of what would happen if she had an attack in the car. She had to give up the training stuff, too. Luckily, her boss is a good man who kept her on staff. She doesn’t love paperwork, but she hasn’t hurt herself doing it yet.”
Elliot ate more turnover, drank coffee, and let more questions tumble around in his head. How could they not find a diagnosis? They were doctors; they had all the tools of modern medicine to help them. Was it something that would get worse? Would the bad days start to outnumber the good days until the good days were completely gone?
Would there be more symptoms yet to come? Would she wind up bedridden? Would they ever be able to help her, or was she doomed to go on the way she had been? Would she ever have a normal life again?
Or God help him, would she die young and in pain?
Again, Patricia patted his arm. “I know it’s a lot to take in. She should have told you when she realized that things were getting serious—at least enough so you’d know what to do on a night like this one—but…”
“Things started getting serious about five minutes after we met.”
“Ah, the magic of love. My granddaughter says that when God chooses two people who are meant for each other, He puts a tiny piece of her heart into his, and a tiny piece of his into hers. And when they meet, they may be totally clueless, but their hearts recognize that their missing pieces have come back. Mind you, she’s checked her own heart, and it’s one hundred percent hers, so there won’t be any icky boys coming around her house soon.”
He smiled despite his mood. He loved kids and their logic and their faith.
Loved them. Wanted some. Fia was amenable to both marriage and kids, she’d said. But could she have a baby? Could she be a mother?
“I can see where it would have been hard for Fia to bring up the topic when we met. In the first five minutes, she caught me standing in the rain holding an umbrella for a dog taking a leak, talking to myself, found out I’d once chased my sister with an umbrella but didn’t have a chance of catching her because she’s got all the height in the family.” He shrugged. “She was probably too busy trying to figure out if she should get in a truck with someone who was just crazy or was bat-shit crazy.”
After a moment, he added quietly, “But there were plenty of other chances.”
“You know about her background?”
“Yeah. Her parents should be—” Too late he remembered a few details about Patricia’s life—how she’d fallen in love with her second husband while still married to her first; how she’d disappeared from her children’s lives without warning and stayed away for the better part of twenty years.
“It’s okay, Elliot. They should be whipped. And I should have been, too. I thank God and my family every day that my kids were able to forgive me. Forgiving someone doesn’t sound so hard, but I think it’s the hardest thing some people ever do.”
He took the last bite of his turnover, got up to top off his coffee, and refilled Patricia’s, too. When she slid off the stool to stand, he followed her into the living room, taking seats at opposite ends of the couch, where she took up the conversation again.
“Probably the single biggest lesson Fia took away from her parents, other than the fact they didn’t love her, was that they didn’t want her. She was a stupid mistake they would be burdened with for eighteen years. They’d done nothing wrong, nothing to deserve her. Why should they suffer when it was all her fault for being born in the first place?”
Forget whipping; it was too good for them. The state should have taken Fia before the damage was done, put her in a good home, and shot the parents. They would never have caused any more harm, would never have brought any other children into the world to abuse and neglect, and Fia wouldn’t remember a damn thing about them. She would only know the love and support of her second family.
Nice fantasy, El. It’s shameful that even today it probably wouldn’t come true. Twenty-plus years ago…Poor kid didn’t have a chance.
He shoved Emily back, then dragged his fingers through his hair, tugging hard enough to pull a few strands free. Mouse jumped onto the sofa, putting her front feet on his legs so she could lean close and sniff. For a long moment she stared at him—a silent accusation for not sharing his apple turnover?—before she stepped back and curled so her head rested on his knee. He moved his free hand automatically to the pup’s head, finding the favorite scratching spot right between her ears.
“You’re a good man, Elliot,” Patricia said quietly. “Fia reco
gnized that from the beginning. She couldn’t bring herself to tell you right up front that she had problems. She’s been alone a long time. She needed to feel like a woman again and not just a patient. She needed someone who was smitten with her, who could bring the sunshine back into her life. I don’t think she intended to let it go this far, but she liked you too much to end it.”
“She didn’t have to end it. All she had to do was tell me.” Even to himself, he sounded like a petulant kid.
“What would you have done? Would you have thought you hadn’t signed on for that kind of burden? Would you have stayed around of your own free will? Or would you have stayed because that was what a good guy would do?”
He opened his mouth automatically, because the answer was obvious. He’d never walked away from someone he really cared for, and he’d never turned his back on someone who needed him.
But the words didn’t come out. If he’d known the truth from the start, in those first few days when they were getting to know each other, when he liked her, was attracted to her, but could have gone on without her…Would he have done so? Would he have thought, She’s a great woman, and we could probably have something awesome together, but I’m not interested in taking on that kind of problem?
All the confidence he’d claimed his whole life had deserted him. He couldn’t say whether he still would have been gung-ho for the relationship or if he would have refused to give it a chance, if he would have moved on—another town, another woman—and thought of her from time to time with fondness and/or regret as the one he couldn’t have.
Restlessly he dislodged Mouse and got to his feet. “I, uh, I need to go out for a while. Will you stay? Watch her?”
“Of course. I brought my jammies just in case.”
At the door, he looked back. “I’m sorry. I just, uh…”
Patricia’s smile was tinged with sadness. “It’s all right. Go. Think. Be careful.”
He nodded, walked outside, and climbed into his truck. As he started the engine, he felt like a jerk for leaving but couldn’t find it in him at the moment to stay.
A Summer to Remember Page 25
