The You I Never Knew

by Susan Wiggs

  For his troubles, he received a minuscule stipend from the BIA and, if circumstances permitted, an hour of athletic, no-strings-attached sex with a woman named Candy who lived at the north end of the settlement in a Pan-Abode cabin.

  Today at the free clinic he’d done a four-month well-baby checkup and booster shots on a perfect baby boy. Moments later he’d seen a diabetic seventy-year-old who wouldn’t stop drinking. He had delivered the usual warnings and produced the usual pamphlets and brochures, he’d written a prescription and sent the old guy, who moved with a curious dignity, on his way. If the man lasted the winter, it’d be a miracle.

  He treated a shame-faced teenage girl for chlamydia, and extracted a pinto bean from the nostril of an inquisitive three-year-old. He’d seen Linda Wolf, not for the first time and certainly not for the last. She claimed to have a problem with clumsiness. Sam could tell she was too weary and in too much pain to work hard making up a lie. She’d mumbled vaguely that she’d fallen; then she’d wept silently as Sam taped her up and prescribed something for the pain. It was torn elbow cartilage this time, but over the years he had treated the funny, caustic, and ultimately pathetic woman for cracked ribs, lacerations, a detached retina, countless contusions.

  When he questioned her, she always gave her usual reply. “I’m a big girl, Dr. McPhee. I know what I’m doing.”

  And there it ended. Her husband would abuse her until he stepped over the line and committed murder, or until she wised up and left him.

  Each time he saw Linda, Sam did everything short of kidnapping the woman to convince her to leave her husband. He talked to Social Services, urged the tribal police to pick up the scumbag on another charge—running a red light, illegal waste disposal, expired tags. But Randy Wolf was, oddly enough, a model citizen, working in the timber industry. His only crimes were against Linda, and she refused to press charges. Once, a few years back, Sam had confronted him. And Randy had gone home and beaten the crap out of his wife.

  At the end of the day, Sam parked at the back of a cabin north of the village. Candy opened the door, letting out a herd of cats as Sam stepped inside. She wore a smile and a hand-painted silk kimono. “Hey, Doc,” she said. “Long time no see.”

  He grinned, nodding his thanks as she handed him a cold beer. “Ditto,” he said, taking a swig and then setting down the bottle. He kissed her hard, walking her back to the bedroom without lifting his mouth from hers. In a matter of minutes they were naked, straining together, twisting the bedclothes every which way. He liked her softness, the beer-and-perfume taste of her, and the way she used her hands and mouth.

  But afterward, he never wanted to stay for long. He got dressed in a hurry, handed Candy her kimono, and went out to his truck. Wrapped in a wool coat, she stood watching him, her face thoughtful. “You’re in a hurry today, Doc.”

  “Uh-huh. I’ve been busy.”

  “You want to stay for supper? I got a pot of beans on.”

  “Not tonight, Sugar-Candy. I’d best be going.”

  “You take care now,” she said, shivering as he got into his truck. Her cats darted in from the woods, swirling around her ankles as she stood watching him.

  Sam waved and pulled away, vaguely disgusted with himself for being able to dismiss her so casually, vaguely annoyed at her for letting him. He came away from the encounter with a hollow sense of futility. Sam knew he was deliberately shying away from commitment, even though a part of him ached for it. He snapped on the radio for the drive home. He thought about the four-month-old. Even now he could feel the creamy texture of the baby’s skin, the downy fluff of his black hair. He could picture the crooked toothless wet grin when the baby focused on his face.

  His gloved hands tightened convulsively on the steering wheel. What had Cody been like as a baby?

  Just start where you are, common sense told him.

  Start with an angry teen who was probably more at risk than his mother dared to believe. Start with a kid who was well past the age of giving a rat’s ass who his father was. Start with a kid Sam knew he’d have to work at liking.

  Christ. What sort of father had to work to like his own kid?

  Sam stopped his truck in front of the yellow-trimmed bungalow at the edge of town. Late-afternoon sunlight spilled across the ripples of snow in the small yard. He knew she’d be waiting for him inside. She always was on Tuesday afternoons, her half day off. Ever since he’d moved to Crystal City, he’d saved Tuesdays for her.

  He sat at the steering wheel, unloading the invisible burdens, mentally leaving all the baggage from the long, trying day inside the truck. Then he slammed the door behind him and walked across the yard to the front porch.

  He knocked lightly and let himself in. The familiar smells of vanilla-scented candles and cigarette smoke greeted him.

  “Hey, Mama,” he said, stomping the snow from his boots onto the doormat.

  “Hiya, son.” Tammi Lee Gilmer tucked a bookmark into the paperback novel in her lap. Late in life, she had discovered something she enjoyed almost as much as she used to enjoy drinking and partying. She read voraciously: detective novels, romance novels, thrillers, memoirs, and her beloved National Enquirer and Country Billboard. Sam had no memory of books among their possessions. It was as if Tammi Lee was making up for lost time.

  She got up from her lounger and crossed the room, giving him a brief hug and a kiss on the cheek. Her scent of cigarettes and Charlie perfume clung to the sweater she wore. She was a thin, angular woman whose body had miraculously survived years of self-abuse. Though attractive in an old-fashioned Patsy Cline way, her face bore a delicate webbing of lines and creases, a busy road map of her past.

  “You doing all right, Mama?” Sam asked her.

  “Sure.” She went to the kitchen and poured two cups of coffee, handing him one. “Just made it fresh.”

  “Thanks.” He had a seat at the table as she rummaged in the refrigerator for something to feed him. Though he wasn’t hungry, he knew better than to stop her.

  This was the woman who had raised him in a beat-up Plymouth Valiant, who had parked him in a playpen while her band laid down the tracks of her one whiskey-voiced hit, who had taught him to buy cigarettes from a machine before he was old enough to count, who had used him to wrest suspended sentences from disapproving judges, who had made him leave the only girl he’d ever loved. She had taken from him any chance of a normal upbringing.

  Yet when Sam looked at his mother, he felt only one emotion, a feeling that radiated out from the middle of him and reverberated through his soul. And that emotion was love.

  Because in the middle of all the travels, the running, the ducking, the hiding, the arrests, the arraignments, the shouting and the pain when he’d grown old enough to force her into treatment, she had loved him with all that was in her.

  Sometimes that wasn’t much. Sometimes looking for love from her was like going to the auto-parts store for milk. But during her brighter periods, she’d managed to give him enough to get by on. She used to touch his cheek, tell him she was sorry for missing a parent-teacher conference or forgetting to buy groceries or running out of money when he outgrew his clothes. Without really intending to, she had taught him to dream.

  These days, at LaNelle’s shop, she listened to the local gossip and snipped fabric for curtains and quilts. It was a quiet life compared to her raucous past, but she didn’t complain. She did a lot of serenity work with her AA sponsor, and it seemed to sustain her.

  She set down a plate of processed cheese and crackers. “So how are things with you? How’s my son the doctor?”

  “I’m having an interesting week. Started off by winning a rodeo purse Saturday night.”

  Tammi Lee wrinkled her nose. “I don’t understand why you keep on with that, hon. You’re going to hurt yourself.”

  “Going to? Mama, I’ve hurt myself in so many places, there’s nothing left to hurt.” He spread his arms. “Rodeo’s my sport.”

  “Doctors are supposed to be
into golf and skiing.”

  He laughed. “Now, where did you read that?”

  “Some magazine I found in your office.”

  “I reckon I’m not that kind of doctor.” With his practice, his service in a public hospital, and the indigent patients he treated, he’d never get rich.

  His mind flashed on Cody. The kid’s leather jacket alone was probably worth a week of malpractice insurance. Everything he wore was expensive. Was it just his age, or was he the sort of kid to whom status symbols mattered?

  Tammi Lee drummed her fingers on the table. He knew she wanted a cigarette, but she tried not to smoke too much around him. As a kid, he’d probably inhaled enough secondhand smoke to choke a moose. He ate a cracker, sipped his coffee. “I ran into someone at the rodeo,” he said carefully. He’d learned early to insulate his fragile mother whenever he could, but this wasn’t something to hide from her.

  Tammi Lee’s hands fell still, and she regarded him with a sharp-edged, penetrating look. “Yeah? Who?”

  “Michelle Turner, Gavin Slade’s daughter.”

  His mother leaned back in her vinyl-covered chair and let out a low whistle. “Theda Duckworth was in the shop this morning, and she mentioned something about that. She here because Gavin’s sick?”

  Sam nodded. He didn’t want to discuss details with his mother. In a town the size of Crystal City, Gavin’s illness could hardly be kept a secret, but it wasn’t Sam’s place to divulge the progress and treatment of the disease.

  “So… how’d your old girlfriend turn out?” Tammi Lee asked. She’d known Michelle only vaguely as the blond actor’s spoiled daughter Sam had been seeing as a teenager. He suspected his mother knew how far the relationship had gone, but Tammi Lee had never said much. Once, he recalled, she’d tried to warn him about Michelle.

  “That girl’s going to be nothing but heartache for you, son,” Tammi Lee had said.

  He remembered the day she’d said it. She’d come home from waitressing all afternoon at the Truxtop Café. In her white polyester uniform, she’d sat in a stained easy chair and unlaced her white leather Reeboks, massaging her aching feet as Sam got ready to meet Michelle at the boathouse. He’d been in a great mood.

  “You hear me, son?” Tammi Lee had repeated. “Nothing but heartache.”

  “Give me a break, Mama,” he’d said, toweling his hair after his shower. “We have a great time together.”

  “You do now. But you can’t let yourself forget who she is, and who you are.”

  Sam’s patience had worn thin. “I’ll see you later.” He’d left her sitting in the rickety rental house, an old wood-frame dwelling on the wrong side of the tracks, with a caved-in garage attached by a shotgun corridor to the main house. It was all they could afford on Tammi Lee’s tips and Sam’s paycheck from the ranch.

  When Sam had first returned to Crystal City to start up his practice, he’d driven past the house, finding it abandoned. The windows had been blown out, probably by kids with BB guns. The roofline sagged like the back of an ancient horse, and the siding had weathered until it was the color of the dusty, sage-choked yard. He’d battled an urge to set fire to the place and watch it burn to the ground.

  “Well?” his mother prompted. “How’d she turn out?”

  “She’s a commercial artist in Seattle.”

  “I recall she was some kind of artistic prodigy.”

  “And… a single mother.”

  Her tweezed eyebrows lifted. “Guess she and I have something in common after all.”

  Sam thought about that for a moment. Like Cody, he too had rarely asked about the man who’d fathered him. “Some old guy,” Tammi Lee had always replied, pulling a name out of thin air. “Some old guy, name of… McPhee.”

  Sam had made no attempt to learn more. Because when he’d grown old enough to know how to track someone down, he’d also been old enough to understand just how little it took for a man to father a child. And because, in Sam’s mind, no man could equal the fantasy dad he’d created for himself.

  He wondered if Cody had done that. Lacking a father in his life, had he fashioned the perfect dad out of wishes and whimsy? Had he imagined someone big and strong, someone who laughed and tossed a football to him and took him fishing? Someone who turned on the hall light at night and checked on him?

  The elusive father had been a powerful figure in Sam’s life, and he had been wholly imaginary. Sam tried to decide how he’d feel if he had the chance to know the actual guy.

  He was bound to be disappointed.

  “Michelle’s son is sixteen, Mama. She was pregnant with him when she left Crystal City that winter.”

  Tammi held herself very still, though her pale gray eyes filled with amazement. Finally, she said, “He’s your son, then.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you never knew about him?”

  “No. We left town before Michelle told me.”

  “She never tried to contact you?”

  “No.” Sam didn’t want to get into it with Tammi Lee. Didn’t want her to feel guilty for dragging him along her rocky road. Her sobriety had been hard won. She had gone off a few times before; an emotional upset could push her unmercifully toward that next drink.

  “So what do you make of all this?” she asked.

  “I’m still getting used to the idea. The kid’s name is Cody, he’s sixteen, and pissed at the world.”

  “Sounds like a typical sixteen-year-old.”

  “When I was sixteen, I don’t remember being pissed at the world.”

  She stared down at her lap. “You were too busy trying to hold down a job and stay in school, son. And you had to give up school when we kept moving. I’m sorry for—”

  “Don’t be sorry, Mama,” he cut in. “You kept me from being a rebellious little shit, so I ought to thank you for it.”

  “So this guy’s a rebellious little shit?”

  “Pretty much, yeah.”

  “What’s he think of you?”

  “Michelle never told him I fathered him. But she said she’d tell him soon, maybe today. And then… we’ll see.”

  “Any boy’d be proud to call you his dad,” Tammi Lee said. She credited him for saving her life, dragging her kicking and screaming into rehab again and again. No matter how many times he explained it was her strength, not his, she insisted on giving him credit.

  “He might want to meet you,” Sam suggested, and he couldn’t resist adding, “Grandma.”

  Tammi Lee froze for a moment. Then she stood up. “I need a cigarette.” With quick, jerky movements she grabbed a pack of Virginia Slims from a cupboard and lit one, turning on the exhaust fan over the stove and leaning against the counter.

  “He’ll hate me.” She blew out a stream of smoke.

  “If he does, it won’t be your fault. I told you, the kid’s trouble. Michelle’s dealing with it the best she can.”

  Tammi Lee eyed him through a thin veil of bluish smoke. “Any chance the two of you will start seeing each other again?”

  Even though the possibility was as remote as the moon, Sam had been seared by it from the moment he’d seen her in the arena parking lot.

  “No way,” he said quickly. “She lives in Seattle, and she’s… involved, I guess. My life is set, Mama. I don’t gamble. I tried marriage once, and you know what happened. I’m not about to screw around with an old flame.”

  Tammi Lee nodded. “Nobody ever ends up with their childhood sweetheart. Or if they do, they wind up dead, like Romeo and Juliet.”

  Sam laughed. “I guess you’re right, Mama.”

  “So what happens next?”

  “I suppose, next time I see Cody, he’s going to know I’m his father.”

  She ground out her cigarette in a fluted aluminum ashtray on the stove. “You scared, son?”

  “Hell, yeah, I’m scared, Mama.”

  Chapter 16

  It was insane, thought Michelle, mooning over Sam McPhee like a lovestruck schoolgirl. But she couldn’t see
m to stop herself from thinking of him, picturing his big hands, and how delicately they had handled Cody’s stitches. She couldn’t keep from remembering the color of his eyes or the look on his face when he was watching her from the hospital-room doorway. She had an almost-grown son, a sick father, a significant other in Seattle. She had no business speculating, even to herself, what it would be like to know Sam again.

  “So you never did tell me about the foaling,” she said to Cody on the ride home, as much to distract herself as to get him to talk.

  “It was way cool. There was a dys—dyst—um, a difficult presentation, and the vet couldn’t make it on time, so we all pitched in. Sam, me, and Edward. The mare kept getting up when she wasn’t supposed to, so that was kind of bad. I had to get my hand right up inside her to bring the foal around.”

  “I’m getting this incredible mental picture. So you didn’t gross out?”

  “Nope. Like I said, it was kind of cool.”

  Maybe it was the blow to the head. That had to be it, Michelle thought, because no son of hers would think sticking his hand up a mare’s birth canal was cool. But on the other hand, horses had once filled her life and made it beautiful. She wondered if a horse could do that for Cody.

  Dooley had been four years old the summer she’d moved to Montana. A trim quarter horse with a splash of white on his forehead, he had snagged her interest when she’d seen him kicking up his heels in the paddock. Her father, eager to spoil her during the year she’d given him, had offered the gelding to her.

  Everyone at Blue Rock Ranch must have thought she was a snooty city girl, with her tight buff-colored riding pants and tall English-style boots, an array of dressage ribbons and trophies spread out on her bedroom bureau.

  Dooley had no patience for a dressage rider who wanted him to skip over little ivy-covered jumps and arch his neck and trot prettily around a ring. It took a lot of spills—and a lot of coaching from Sam—for her to figure that out.

  They rolled up to the house and she cut the engine, turning to Cody. That haircut! She tried not to smile, looking at it, but it made her ridiculously happy to see the last of that obnoxious dual-colored ponytail hanging down his back.