by Maggie Marr
“Tulsa’s seen more than most people who live in Powder Springs, is more educated, has more money, more class—”
“Right,” Wayne said. “And why do you think she tries so hard?” Wayne stripped off his shorts and his shirt and wrapped a towel around his waist. “Not easy being on the outside in a town like this.” Wayne pushed open the steam room door. “Especially when the closest friends you have are on the inside looking out.”
Cade followed Wayne into the mist and took a seat on the porcelain-tile bench. Maybe once upon a time he’d cared. Maybe once upon a time he’d even tried to understand Tulsa’s fears and her concerns. But now? Now all he had to do was help a man regain custody of his daughter.
“Not my problem,” Cade said and leaned back onto the bench. He scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve got a job. And that’s what I’ll do.”
Wayne humphed and Cade turned his head toward his brother. “What? You think I can’t do it?”
“Oh, I know you can do it. You’re half Hudd.”
“What’s that mean?” Cade asked without really needing the explanation from Wayne.
Heartless.
Wayne was calling him heartless and stubborn with a questionable sense of morality.
“You don’t need me to elaborate. You live with the old man.”
“Somebody’s got to. He nearly burned the ranch down twice before I moved back.”
“I offered.” Wayne wiped sweat from his brow. “He didn’t want anything to do with me.”
“Nice to see you’ve chosen a side,” Cade said. “You know, as much as you might try to deny that we’re related, we do have the same mother.”
“I don’t take sides, brother. But if I did I wouldn’t be on the side of a man the likes of Bobby Hopkins and against Savannah McGrath.”
“What do you want me to do, Wayne?” Cade’s temper was hotter than the steam room. “Wilder will have me disbarred if I even appear to go easy on Savannah. It’s the law. Surely you understand that?”
“Oh I understand the law,” Wayne said. “I just don’t have to like it.”
Cade rested his head in his hands and realized that neither did he.
*
Ash’s room looked like an explosion at a Forever 21 store. Big piles of jumbled clothing lay spread out across her bedroom floor. The layer of clothes was so thick Tulsa could barely walk without stepping on a sweater or pair of jeans. Organizing Ash’s room was exactly the kind of long, tedious distraction Tulsa needed after her liplock with Cade.
With her long coltish legs, full mane of curly black hair and McGrath blue eyes, Ash looked like her mother and her aunt. The only evidence of Bobby on Ash’s face was her nose—instead of the upturned button that both Tulsa and Savannah shared, Ash’s nose was straight and aquiline like her father’s.
“Do high school boys think about anything other than boobs?”
Tulsa whipped her gaze away from the purple shirt she held in her hands and looked at her niece. “Uh… maybe?” She picked her way across the room to Ash’s dresser and slid the purple shirt into a nearly empty drawer. Adolescent boys and boobs—such a great topic when shared with your girlfriends, but not so great when you were an adolescent girl’s aunt, trying to field the question.
“Did Grandma Margaret make you clean your room?”
“And everything else,” Tulsa said, thankful for the non sequitur into the safer subject matter of family.
“Wish Mom was more like Grandma Margaret,” Ash mumbled and dug through her duffel bag, pulling out her kneepads, practice shorts, and a wet towel. Tulsa wrinkled her nose—the bag stunk like sweat and hormones.
“No, you don’t.” Tulsa grabbed a periwinkle long-sleeved sweater from the floor. “She was amazing in a lot of ways, but Grandma Margaret could be a little bit…” Tulsa searched for a word that wasn’t harsh. “…stern.”
Ash tossed her practice uniform on the top of the ever-growing mountain of laundry and turned to Tulsa. She set her jaw and planted her hands on her hips as though bracing herself for a storm. “Are you going to tell me what’s going on with my mom and dad?”
A tingle sliced through Tulsa. She turned away from Ash and back toward the dresser. Boobs and boys might be easier, because this was one hornet’s nest that she didn’t want to shake. On the best of days Tulsa walked a tightrope with Savannah—never certain if she would teeter and fall into the abyss of sisterly anger and recrimination. Tulsa reached for another shirt to fold and turned back to face Ash.
“What does your mom say?”
“Absolutely nothing.” Ash’s voice bore a quiet sadness laced with frustration. She sat on the edge of her bed and stared intently at her pointer fingernail. A sigh radiated through Ash’s shoulders and her head jerked upward. Ash latched her blue eyes onto Tulsa. “She won’t tell me anything. She didn’t even tell me she got arrested for shooting at Grandma’s house.” Ash looked away from Tulsa and again stared at her fingers. She picked at the skin around her nail. “I heard about it in school.”
Tulsa’s heart crumpled in her chest and sadness grasped at her throat. She remembered being broadsided by her own mother’s bad behavior in the hallways of Powder Springs High School. She wanted to save her niece from those shame-filled feelings.
Ash’s jaw locked and the corners of her mouth pulled down. She reached for a crimson sweater on the corner of her bed.
“I’m sure she’ll talk to you about it—”
“When?” Ash turned her head toward Tulsa. Her eyes contained dozens of questions—questions that Tulsa couldn’t answer and dared not try. Ash’s brows pulled together, her face balanced between confusion and hopefulness. Hopefulness that some adult—perhaps her aunt—would listen to her, listen to her and really hear all that she needed to say.
“Maybe, you could try again—we could try again. Maybe she was surprised that your father came back from Alaska.”
The longing in Ash’s eyes stilled Tulsa’s words. She understood what Ash wanted. All through school Tulsa had watched her friends with their normal families.
Ash dropped her chin and stared at the now-folded red sweater she held in her hands. Her voice barely a whisper, she said, “I saw him.”
Tulsa’s throat tightened and her jaw flinched. Her molars ground together. She willed a practiced placidity to her face—an openness to her eyes and a softness to her lips. Ash didn’t need another closed-off adult judging her and judging her actions. Tulsa couldn’t risk demolishing the line of communication with her niece by giving away her own fears.
“Ash,” Tulsa said slowly, picking her words as if carefully stepping through a minefield. “There is a whole past between your mother and your father. There’s a lot you don’t know—”
“I know enough,” Ash shot out, her eyes now filled with fire. “I know Mom drove him nuts and he left. He left her and he left me. Mom can be a handful. She gets emotional, she cries, she yells, she—”
“Ash,” Tulsa interrupted, her voice soft, “everyone gets emotional. Your mom does the best she can. We McGrath women are sometimes prone to—”
“Craziness?”
“Passion.” Tulsa finished Ash’s sentence. It was the kindest word she could say.
Ash leaned against her headboard. Her lips were tight and her eyes stared at the ceiling. Her expression was so appropriate for fourteen. Who was this woman-child sitting before Tulsa? Ash didn’t seem like a little girl anymore; instead, she seemed close to being a woman.
“Whatever.” The harsh bite in Ash’s tone stunned Tulsa. A bitterness and anger toward not just Savannah, but the world. “Mom wants everything her way and she always gets it. If she doesn’t want me to see Dad, then I probably won’t, but it’s only four years until I turn eighteen and then she can’t do a thing. Not one thing. Once I graduate I’m going to be just like you, Aunt Tulsa.” Ash locked eyes with Tulsa.
A tremor tumbled down Tulsa’s spine. “How so?”
“Once I get my diploma, I am out of
here. Gone. The very next day.”
Chapter Seven
Cade’s leg muscles ached as he tromped up the steps to the ranch house. A wide, slatted-wood porch of mahogany circled three sides of the house. The home was well-kept and clean, but there were few female touches. Cade supposed all those extras, the lovely little things women did to a home, had ended when his mother passed.
Once and again their housekeeper, Lottie, put out a pot of flowers, but now as the Colorado days grew short and the nights grew cold, nothing adorned the porch but a heavy scrub welcome mat on which to wipe your boots. A dull throb thumped along his chin and gathered into a tight-fisted ache at the base of Cade’s skull.
He opened the ranch-house door. A fire crackled in the fireplace. His father sat in his recliner with a stack of legal files on the coffee table. Half of his dad’s face lay like melted wax, the result of his first stroke. Hudd’s eyes traveled over his son as Cade pulled off his boots and set them beside the door.
“Your brother give you that?” his father asked, referring to the bruise along the rim of Cade’s jaw. Cade had seen the deep purple setting in before he left the gym. “Don’t need enemies when you’ve got a stepbrother like that.”
“Half brother,” Cade said and hung his jacket in the closet. “There’s a difference.”
“There certainly is,” Hudd mumbled and flipped the page of a deposition.
Cade moved to the fire and held out his hands. The heat chased the ice from his fingertips.
“You see your opposing counsel on the Hopkins case?”
“I did.” Cade’s gut clamped tight.
“She’s done better than any McGrath I ever knew. Especially her damn whore of a mother.”
Cade locked his jaw and let any hint of emotion fall from his face. His father might believe what he said, then again he might not. His father was testing him. A game from Cade’s childhood that long ago he always lost. Now Cade let his father’s unkind comments wash over him, drop away, leave no mark, like a wave touching the shore. After years of this game, Cade’s skin was thick as a buffalo hide.
“Lottie leave any dinner?” Cade asked. Most nights their housekeeper put a roast or casserole in the oven before her departure.
“Maybe wasn’t such a bad thing for those two girls when they found Connie dead in that ditch.”
Hunger slid from Cade’s stomach.
“Dad, don’t.” The tight ache at the base of his skull spread down through his spine and tightened in his back. His father pushed his limits.
“Margaret took damn good care of those girls, better than their mother ever would’ve.” This wasn’t an argument, but the unkind, bitter words of an angry old man. Perhaps a piece of Hudd’s brain the thrown clot had damaged.
“That family never did amount to much. Those women run off men like they’re wolves chasing rabbits. Tulsa still single? Can’t even find a man in a city big as Los Angeles?” Hudd shook his head, incredulous that a woman, any woman, might be without a husband.
“You know, Dad, some women don’t want to be married.”
His father squinted his eyes. “Seems like you’ve met a couple of those.”
“I have indeed,” Cade said.
“No worry, son.” His father flipped the file on his lap closed. “Some men just can’t pick the right one when it comes to women. Look at Wayne. He married that trollop and let her run around. And then you. With that woman who wanted a career and not a family. Would have thought you’d have figured that one out before the wedding. But hell, you’re out of it now.”
Cade scrubbed his hand over his eyes. “You need anything, Dad?” Cade asked.
“Me?” Hudd cocked his head. “No, son, I’m all right. But you? Well, boy, looks like if you want to win this case you’re gonna need a better poker face.”
A heat rose in his belly, an anger he couldn’t indulge. Nothing good came from anger directed at his father. Cade stopped short, always, from saying the unkindest of words to his dad, but his father fought all out. Slash and burn. Whatever Hudd thought, Hudd said, and if he’d ever had the slightest hint of discretion, the stroke had blown those neurons and synapses out of his brain. When Hudd wanted to spar, it was better to duck and weave than to try to land the heavy blows. Cade turned to the fireplace and took the wrought-iron poker from the tool rack. He squatted in front of the fire.
“Written all over your damn face. You’re still in love with that McGrath girl.”
“Is it?” Cade gave the bright red log a rough poke and embers sprayed upward toward the flue.
“Can’t go into a courtroom in love with opposing counsel. That woman will chew you up and spit you out. Make a fool of you, son. Just like before.”
The log burst into flame. The heat on Cade’s face matched the fire burning deep in his gut. A fool? His father thought he’d been a fool over Tulsa McGrath? He’d been a heartbroken teenager, in mad love with a girl. Cade’s left knee popped when he stood. He placed the poker back in the rack and turned slowly toward his dad. The right side of Hudd’s face hung limp and his arm curled in and rested on his lap. Why fight with a man who could barely walk?
“You’ll make sure the fire’s out when you go to bed?” Cade said.
His father grunted and dropped his gaze to the file. “Go on then if you don’t want to face the truth. Go on and run your little ol’ self off to bed.”
*
The cold night air worked its way deep into Tulsa’s bones. A hot shower, flannel pajamas, and fleece socks couldn’t chase away the chill. She shivered and snuggled deeper under the handmade block quilt, above her a multitude of glow-in-the-dark stars covered the ceiling of her childhood room.
The first time she snuck Cade Montgomery into her room he’d paused just inside Tulsa’s bedroom window and stared up at the glowing stars. With an impossible grin that matched her own because they’d actually pulled off him climbing the pine tree beside the house and shimmying through the window without being caught, he’d climbed into her bed wearing only his jeans. The zipper beneath her fingertips had slipped down with ease and he’d shucked off his Levi’s. There’d been no need for a quilt to keep warm that night.
Damn.
What if… Why play that game?
For most of her adult life she had managed to evade two things she feared most: Cade Montgomery and Powder Springs.
“Aunt Tulsa?”
“Hmmm?” Tulsa turned toward the doorway where Ash stood backlit by the hall light. There stood the reason that Tulsa had braved Cade Montgomery and all her memories of Powder Springs. Ash. Ash’s safety. Ash’s future.
“Can I come in?”
“Of course, honey.” Tulsa threw back the covers and patted the spot next to her on the bed. Ash scampered across the room, looking more like a seven-year-old little girl in her nightgown than an adolescent.
“You put up the stars, didn’t you?” Ash tucked herself under the covers. She smelled fresh, like lavender soap. Her long dark hair spread out over the pillow.
“I did. The summer before high school.”
“I wondered how old you were when you did it. Did you like junior high?”
“Hated junior high. I was a walking hazard. The worst two years of my life.”
“But you liked high school?”
“Most of it. I had more fun than should have been allowed, but your great-grandma was really good about knowing what to get upset about and what to let slide.” Tulsa spread her fingers out over the surface of the quilt, hand-stitched by Grandma Margaret. “She took good care of us when… well…” Tulsa’s heart dropped in her chest. “…when there wasn’t anyone else.”
“Do you miss her?”
“Grandma Margaret? Sometimes, I miss—”
“I meant your mom.”
Tulsa’s heart clutched with the word. Her rib cage tightened and an achy feeling etched with pain lay just behind her lungs. Mom. Connie. Her mother was a shadow that drifted in and out of her childhood. How could Tulsa mis
s what she barely knew?
But she did.
She missed what a mother was supposed to be to a girl. Tulsa opened her mouth to speak, to answer, to respond to her niece in some intelligent way, but a hard lump lodged in her throat and tightened its grip, a stranglehold on her words. She couldn’t begin to explain to Ash all that Connie was and all that Connie couldn’t be—hell, Tulsa couldn’t explain it to herself.
In the dark of the room, Tulsa closed her eyes and breathed deep. With a steady breath the pain loosened in her heart. With a steady breath the grip on her ribs relaxed. With a steady breath the lump in her throat dissolved. Tulsa opened her eyes and turned her head toward Ash. She couldn’t discuss her own mother… not now… quite possibly not ever.
Finally, softly, Tulsa said, “You know your mom tries awful hard to do right by you.”
“Like getting arrested for shooting a shotgun at Dad?”
“That’s not exactly what happened. I believe your father never came out of the house.”
“And that makes it okay?”
“It most definitely does not make it okay, and I bet if you asked your mom she’d say that shooting at your Grandma Hopkins’s house was perhaps the dumbest thing she ever did.”
Ash shook her head back and forth and her long hair whispered across the pillow. “She’d say it was the second dumbest.”
“Really? And what was the dumbest?”
“That’s easy.” Ash stared at the stars on the ceiling. “According to Mom, the dumbest thing she ever did was sleep with my dad.”
Tulsa’s heart cracked with Ash’s words. The sweet girl was right. Savannah would say her relationship with Bobby Hopkins was her biggest mistake, but Ash left out one very important fact.
“It’s ironic then that the best thing to ever happen to your mom came out of the stupidest thing she ever did.”
Even in the dark of the room, Tulsa witnessed a tiny smile spread out over Ash’s beautiful face even while the girl’s bottom lip began to tremble.
“You know when I look at you, I don’t see your mom or your dad. When I look at you, I just see Ash McGrath. Like this wholly original creature that took the very best bits that two people had to offer and meshed them up to make the very best person those two people together could ever make.”
