I Promise

by Joan Johnston

  Which didn’t explain why he had seen so little of Billie Jo in the years since his divorce. The reasons for staying away were harder to justify. Fathers were supposed to keep on being fathers. It hadn’t taken him long to learn that the pain of parting each time—when Billie Jo clung to him and begged him not to leave—was worse than not seeing her at all. He supposed that was a cop-out. It was also the truth.

  There had been no time to prepare himself when Ginny had been killed so suddenly. Either he took Billie Jo or sent her away to some boarding school for girls whose parents didn’t want them around. Even though they were no longer close, he couldn’t do that to his daughter. He knew too well what it felt like not to be wanted.

  For Billie Jo’s sake, he had tried staying in Ginny’s Boston condominium. But he would rather leave his hide on a fence than stay in a corral—and that high-rise box had felt like a jail cell after roaming free for so many years. Carting Billie Jo around the world with him wasn’t practical. So he had opted for the wide open spaces of southwest Texas—specifically the North Ranch. At least there he knew he wouldn’t feel so hemmed in.

  Billie Jo had balked at leaving all her friends behind, but he had been adamant. They were both going to have to give a little for this to work. She would have to give up Boston. He would have to give up the rest of the world.

  She was still angry about the move, and he couldn’t really blame her. He was fighting his own share of resentment at having to deal with a hostile stranger who happened to be his daughter. To tell the truth, he was about at the end of his rope.

  Before he had moved back into this old ranch house, full of creaky floors and disturbing memories, he would have said he had learned to control his feelings. But it seemed Billie Jo knew all the right buttons to push. She had been on him like a roadrunner on a rattler ever since the two of them had been forced willy-nilly into the father-daughter role. The fight wasn’t over by a long shot.

  He consoled himself with the thought he only had to get her through another year of high school after this one, which was, thank God, half over. Then he could send her off to college with a clear conscience and go back to the work he loved best.

  His editor at The Chronicle, Lloyd Harrison, had been furious when Marsh had left the tiny African nation where he was reporting on one of the many uprisings over the past decade and flown home to take custody of his daughter.

  “I need you, Marsh,” Lloyd had ranted.

  “My daughter needs me more,” he had replied. Luckily, he had put most of what he’d earned over the past fifteen years in the bank, so money wasn’t a problem. When Lloyd continued haranguing him, he had hung up.

  Lloyd and The Chronicle were simply going to have to wait until Marsh could get his life in order. That meant getting his daughter through high school, the prospect of which seemed more iffy by the minute.

  When Marsh arrived in the kitchen he discovered Billie Jo had grabbed a piece of toast from the wholesome plate of breakfast he had prepared for her and was making a beeline for the kitchen door.

  “Where do you think you’re going, young lady?” he said, stepping in front of the screen door and blocking her way.

  “Daddy, I’m going to be late,” she protested.

  “Haven’t you forgotten something?”

  She looked up at him, the soul of innocence. “I don’t think so.” A pause, and then, “I don’t need a sweater. It’s going to be warm today.”

  He hadn’t even thought about that. Another sign of his shortcomings as a father. She was probably right. It was going to be another warm January day. He stared down at her, watching her chew worriedly on her bottom lip. He felt a jolt of recognition. Ginny used to do the same thing.

  Marsh realized he had let himself be distracted from the matter at hand. He pulled a folded paper from the back pocket of his jeans and shook it open in front of his daughter’s pretty young face. “What is this?” he demanded.

  Billie Jo’s cheeks flamed. She shot a guilty look at him, but that didn’t last long before her dark brown eyes—her mother’s eyes—flashed with anger. “Where did you get that?”

  “I found it on your floor when I—”

  “You were in my room? My room is private. How could you!” Angry tears spurted from her eyes as she retreated to the sink, where she hunched her shoulders against him and stared out onto the backyard.

  He felt a little like crying himself. He hadn’t meant to confront her like that. He had meant to have a quiet, civil discussion of the matter at the breakfast table. Only, she had never made it to the table.

  Silence reigned while she stared out the window. There wasn’t much to see, some prickly pear cactus and a few scrubby mesquite trees on flat, rocky ground. It was supposed to be grassland, but the drought had taken its toll. There wasn’t much grass out there, which the feed bill for the few remaining Santa Gertrudis cattle on the North Ranch attested to. Neither were there any vestiges of the vegetable garden his grandmother had maintained. Nature had long since reclaimed the land.

  He conceded that Billie Jo would likely stand there all day rather than give in. She looked sweet as mother’s milk, but she fought his attempts to father her like a bronc with its teeth clenched against the bit.

  “You haven’t told me about this paper,” he said.

  “You went into my room to get it,” she muttered, her back still turned to him. “You must know what it is.”

  “It looks like a suspension from school.”

  “Right the first time,” she quipped, turning to face him.

  “Damn it, Billie Jo—” He cut himself off. She was doing it again. Pushing buttons. “I want an answer.”

  Her lips flattened mulishly, and she glared at him, hugging the worn, leather-trimmed hiker’s knapsack he had left behind one trip because he thought it was worn out, and which she was using as a bookbag, protectively against her chest.

  “This requires a parent’s signature,” he said. “It’s already been signed, but I never signed it. Who did?”

  She dropped her eyes to the floor, tightened her grip on the knapsack, but said nothing.

  “Look, Billie Jo, we have to talk about this.”

  Her lips remained sealed.

  “It says here you were suspended for fighting with another girl. What kind of fight? About what?” He hadn’t known high school girls resorted to tearing hair. At least, they hadn’t in his day. On the other hand, he had seen enough violence by kids in his travels to convince him they could be brutal.

  “It also appears you only get a suspension after you’ve had three warnings. Why didn’t you say something to me if you were having trouble in school?”

  She shrugged, a small, vulnerable gesture that tore his heart out.

  He had blithely, naively, assumed Billie Jo had fit right in at her new school. It was considerably smaller than the school in Boston. She never talked much about activities at school, but she hadn’t complained, either. It was upsetting to realize how blind he had been. There were problems he hadn’t even suspected.

  “What happened to the warning notices?” he asked. “Did you sign them, too?”

  She sneaked a chagrined peek at him, looked down again, and nodded her chin slightly.

  “Is that a yes?” he demanded.

  “Yes!” she shot back. “I got into a fight with Eula Hutchins because she said you . . . she said . . . It doesn’t matter what she said. She won’t be saying it again.”

  Marsh wondered what Eula Hutchins had said about him. He could make a pretty good guess. It wasn’t a secret that as a kid he had been accused of rape. Even though he hadn’t been found guilty of any crime, there were plenty in Uvalde who believed he was. It was a lot of the reason he had never come back to his father’s house after he had left, even when things had been resolved with the law so he could.

  It was also why he had never brought Ginny here to meet his father before the old man died. There was too great a chance she would hear the rumors that persisted ye
ars after the charges against him had been dropped. He should have told Ginny the truth from the beginning, but he could never find the right moment to speak. The daughter of the American ambassador to West Germany, who had willingly consented to marry a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, might have balked at the notion of wedding an accused rapist with a drunk for a father.

  Those two secrets had sat between them their entire marriage. It meant he could never fully confide in Ginny, never let down his guard with her, because the truth might come out. In later years, when the marriage was failing, he wouldn’t have cared, but by then he had learned to keep everything to himself.

  Maybe he should have sat Billie Jo down the day they got to the North Ranch and told her the whole story. Maybe then this wouldn’t have happened. But old habits die hard. Being a journalist had taught him to be wary of spilling his guts. He had seen too much, knew too much that could hurt other people, told to him off the record.

  He opened his mouth to ask if Eula Hutchins had accused him of being a rapist and snapped it shut again. Things were bad enough between him and his daughter. He wasn’t sure she was old enough—worldly enough—to understand even if he explained what had really happened. There was always the chance her fight with Eula had been over something else entirely.

  Marsh shoved a frustrated hand through his sun-bleached chestnut hair and realized he needed a trim. Because he was always in some godforsaken place without amenities, he was used to getting along without a haircut and a shave. Which was a good thing, because there had been so much to do around the dilapidated ranch he hadn’t found time to get to Red White’s Barber Shop in town.

  “Where were you going this morning, if you’re suspended from school?” he asked.

  Billie Jo frowned at him, lipstick-red lips pursing. “To school, of course.”

  “But you’re suspended for three days.”

  “It’s an internal suspension.”

  “What the hell is that?”

  “You go to school, but you stay in a room separated from the other kids. If you don’t let me leave soon, I’m going to miss the bus.”

  Marsh pursed his own lips, unsure whether to believe her. She had shown she was capable of deceit by signing all the warnings and the suspension. But what she suggested made sense. He took the suspension notice and leaned it against the refrigerator, got a pen from the collection in the Yellowstone Park coffee mug by the phone, signed his own signature above her forgery, and held the paper out to her.

  “Daddy! Oh, no! Look what you’ve done!”

  “I’ve signed my name, like I was supposed to.”

  “Now they’ll know I signed the other notices myself,” Billie Jo wailed.

  “Tough.”

  “How can you—”

  Marsh held a thumb over his shoulder aimed at the door. “Get going before you miss the bus.”

  She scurried for the door, snatching the suspension notice from him as she went.

  He caught the screen door on the mud porch before it could slam behind her. “Billie Jo,” he called after her. “Don’t bother throwing away that notice. I’ll be calling the school to let them know I’m aware of the situation.”

  She gave him an outraged look over her shoulder, mumbled something he was glad he couldn’t hear, and ran for the iron gate, where the school bus had screeched to a halt and was honking for her. She tiptoed over the wide-spaced bars of the cattle guard, then stomped her way up the stairs onto the bus, and headed down the aisle. He caught a glimpse of her staring back at him forlornly from a window near the back of the bus.

  He was a failure as a father. Just as his own father had been.

  Marsh let the screen door go and crossed back to the clutter of dishes in the kitchen as it slammed behind him. He wasn’t doing too well as a substitute mother, either.

  There wasn’t time to clean up the mess. He had somewhere he had to be. He grabbed his Stetson from the deer antler rack by the refrigerator and tugged it down before shoving his way out the door. It felt good to be wearing a hat again. He had given up wearing one on assignment, because the damned things kept getting lost, stolen, or left behind when he had to get out in a hurry.

  He left the kitchen door unlocked. There wasn’t much to steal, and no burglars around this far from town to steal it. Besides, people still left their doors unlocked in the West as an age-old gesture of range hospitality.

  Marsh stepped into his pickup—the same rusted-out ’57 Chevy he had driven as a teenager—and headed down the dirt road leading to the highway. The truck rattled over the cattle guard, and he turned right onto U.S. 83 headed north to Uvalde.

  The town seventy miles southwest of San Antonio where Marsh had grown up had few claims to fame. Former Texas Governor Dolph Briscoe had declared it home and might be seen during his term as governor emerging from the local 7-Eleven on a Saturday night and stepping into his pickup with a six-pack—of Coke. The governor was a teetotaler.

  More importantly, one of Roosevelt’s vice presidents, John Nance Garner, had been born there. His home on Park Street was a carefully tended Historic Landmark. The nineteenth-century opera house on the square had been donated to the town by the Garner family.

  Uvalde was the kind of town most Americans yearned to live in, with tidy pecan and live oak-lined streets. Getty Street featured stores that had been owned by the same families for generations. But Uvalde had a modern high school, a junior college with strong programs in shop and auto mechanics and cosmetology, not to mention one of the best rodeo teams around. Very little serious crime occurred, and the few existing pockets of poverty were hard to find.

  On the downside, there wasn’t much entertainment available for teenagers, or adults either, for that matter. The local pool hall had video games, if the current owner wasn’t bankrupt, and the Forum Four on Highway 90 had replaced the old El Lasso theater on Getty.

  In the fall, everyone in town attended the high school football game on Friday nights. On Saturdays they enjoyed the Texas two-step and the cotton-eyed Joe at the Hermann Son’s Hall in Knippa, while the Dallas Cowboys and Houston Oilers kept everyone glued to the TV on Sunday afternoons.

  Marsh could two-step with the best of them, but he wasn’t about to brave the stares—or a refusal—if he asked some local lady to dance. While he loved the Dallas Cowboys, he hadn’t seen much of them in the places he had been. It might be nice to start watching again, once he got a living room chair to replace the one his dad had sat in.

  There was dove, quail, and deer hunting in season. Every pickup in town boasted a rifle rack in the back window, sort of like fans in the big city who put a team sticker on their bumper to remind them of their favorite sport year-round. Marsh had done his share of hunting as a kid, but he had seen enough of death and dying—animal and human—over the past twenty years to last him a lifetime.

  Parties in private homes took up the slack. Marsh had been invited to a score of them since he had arrived back in Uvalde. He had refused all invitations, citing the need to spend time with his daughter. But it really had more to do with disliking hypocrisy.

  The grown-ups who were inviting him to their homes as the prodigal son were the very same teenagers who had been the first to believe him guilty. He supposed the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting washed away a lot of sins.

  Marsh pulled into the Memorial Hospital parking lot and keyed off the ignition. The pickup ran another few seconds before it died. It needed a tune-up. He took a deep breath and let it out while he worked up the courage to go inside.

  Marsh hated hospitals. In his experience, nothing good ever happened in them—the one exception being the birth of his daughter. His nose curled. He was smelling blood and the stench of gangrene in a filthy field hospital. Hearing the shrieks of pain, the moans of agony as doctors treated patients without anesthesia. It could have been in Africa, or Asia, or South America, or Eastern Europe. Mankind had a way of repeating its mistakes.

  This hospital would likely be
antiseptically clean, the pain and suffering eased by medicines. It didn’t matter. His stomach clenched, anyway. But he had to go in there.

  He had called early this morning and learned that Hattie Carson was scheduled for heart bypass surgery at 10:00 A.M. Delia Carson would be there and maybe Rachel, too. He didn’t know how he could face them.

  He had nearly killed Hattie Carson yesterday.

  Or, rather, he was responsible for the heart attack that had nearly killed her. He had known she was going to be upset when he confronted her. He just hadn’t realized how frail she was. She had acted as tough as ever.

  He had come unannounced, afraid she wouldn’t see him if he called ahead of time. It was a reporter’s trick that often worked. He saw the surprise on her face when she opened the door. He had stuck his foot inside to keep her from slamming it in his face.

  Coming to the front door instead of the back had signaled he wasn’t there as a friend. Her scowl made it clear she had gotten the message.

  “Hello, Mrs. Carson,” he said. “I’d like to talk to you.”

  “There’s nothing we have to say to each other.”

  When Hattie tried to close the door, he put his palm against it. There was no contest. He was six-foot-four and weighed 212 pounds. She was five-foot-two, her blond curls bleached white with age, and had the kind of wiry strength common to sixty-year-old ranch women used to hard physical labor. But her 103 pounds wasn’t going to keep him out.

  She realized it at once and stepped back with a quiet dignity that surprised and humbled him. “Come in,” she said, “since there doesn’t seem to be anything I can do to keep you out.”

  He took off his gray felt Stetson and stepped inside. His boots made a hollow sound on the hardwood floor that echoed off the high ceiling.