by Rachel Lee
“How’s everyone?” she asked finally.
“About the same.” He didn’t even glance her way. Then the first prick. “’Course, you been away awhile.”
“Yes.”
He made up the plates with eggs, toast and bacon and brought them to the table, placing one in front of her. She realized she still wore her coat, so she slipped it off and hung it over the back of her chair while her dad grabbed some flatware.
He sat across from her and bowed his head, saying grace. He didn’t ask her to join him, though once he would have insisted. These days she didn’t feel like giving thanks for much of anything.
Her dad spoke as he spooned marmalade onto a slice of toast. “Jody said you should stop by.”
Jody, her best friend during all the growing-up years until Nora had finally left town for good. Once they had dreamed together of escaping to the larger world. Only Nora had escaped. “How’s she doing?”
“Pretty busy with four kids.”
“Four?”
Her dad let his gaze skim her way. “Two boys, two girls. Married Dave Anson.”
“I remember Dave. That’s a lot of kids in ten years.”
No reply from her father. Fred Loftis had pretty much let his attitude about women’s roles solidify in the Stone Age.
“Why did you send Jake?” she asked. Jake, the guy she had so brazenly offered herself to right after high school graduation only to be scorned in a way that had left a permanent scar.
“He could get away.” A simple response. She wondered if it was really that simple. Fred Loftis wasn’t tone-deaf, he just didn’t listen.
Great. “And Beth?” The girl Jake had scorned her for.
“They divorced. No kids.”
“Oh.” Could she be excused for feeling a twinge of vengeful satisfaction? Of course not. She didn’t have to become an ugly person just because the world was full of ugly people. But that probably explained what Jake had meant about things changing.
Her dad finished his first slice of toast, then used the other to dip in his egg. Nora forced herself to eat a few bites, even though her stomach was so tight there didn’t seem to be room for even a mouthful of toast.
“Not much has changed,” her father said after a bit. “Folks are hoping a new ski resort will liven things up. I’m not sure about that.”
Of course he wasn’t sure about that. Owning the only pharmacy in a hundred miles had made him a secure man, if not a wealthy one. Why should he care that others needed more and better jobs? Besides, growth could bring in one of those chains to compete with him.
She knew all the arguments. She’d grown up with them, and a whole lot of others besides. Arguments about her, mostly, but some about her mom, too. Maybe the ugliest ones about her mom.
She watched her dad wipe his plate clean with a final piece of toast. Only then did he look at her again.
“You need to eat,” he said flatly. “You’re all skin and bones.”
“I just got out of the hospital. It’ll take time.” She didn’t mention having been in jail, falsely accused. She still couldn’t bring herself to say that out loud.
Eventually she managed to choke down the two pieces of toast. The sight of the eggs and bacon sickened her.
And for once he didn’t expect her to do the dishes. He picked them up himself, rinsed them and put them in a dishwasher.
“You have a dishwasher!” She couldn’t believe it. Her mom had wanted one for years, and he’d always refused.
“Don’t have time to wash up myself.”
The bile of anger filled her mouth. Didn’t have time to wash up after himself? Just one person?
Jumping up from the table, she decided to get her bags from the porch. It would have been nice to stomp out and never come back, the way she had ten years ago after her mother’s funeral, but there wasn’t a place she could go. She was stuck. Stuck.
“Your room’s ready,” he called after her.
“Big deal,” she said under her breath, between her teeth. One by one she grabbed her bags and wrestled them to her bedroom off the kitchen. He didn’t offer to help.
Of course not. He never had. Instead he plopped himself down in front of the television and turned on a football game.
No, nothing had changed. Except a dishwasher.
And her entire life.
* * *
A few hours later she woke from a nap feeling a bit better. The trip had evidently taken a lot out of her, but now it was nearly 10:00 p.m. and she felt wide-awake. Her dad would be in bed already, so that meant she could get up, find something to eat that she could manage to swallow and maybe take a short walk. The doctors had insisted on walks to rebuild her muscle strength.
It would be cold out there; it always was at night this time of year, and as winter crept closer the chill would begin to really bite.
She found a bag of pretzels and ate a few. Then she grabbed the spare house key off the peg by the side door and slipped out, wrapped in her coat and scarf, to walk streets that would be quiet now. Utterly quiet, as long as she stayed away from the saloon.
How many nights as a teen had she walked these very streets, troubled by a sense of alienation that had arisen from a lot more than her age?
She tucked her hands into her pockets, and as she strolled under a streetlight realized she could see her breath. Some of the houses she passed had gone totally dark. Others displayed life in the form of flickering light from TV screens. That hadn’t changed.
But she had changed, in ways she had barely begun to understand.
The purr of an engine crept up behind her, and the back of her neck prickled. She turned and saw a police car pulling up beside her. She waited until it stopped, and the passenger window rolled down.
“Cold night for a walk,” said the now-familiar voice of the older Jake. “Want a lift?”
With him? “No. Thanks.”
“Coffee,” he said. “I’m going for coffee, and maybe a roll. Look, Nora, I’m not exactly the same ass I used to be.”
“You’re a new kind of ass?”
Silence issued from the car, then a laugh. “Aren’t we all? Come on. Get in. I don’t bite, and I hate to imagine how alone you’re feeling right now.”
As if he would care. And then there was the whole police-car thing. Her fists clenched as her heart began to pound. “I...can’t,” she said finally.
Silence, then the sound of the motor changed as he put the car in Park. He climbed out of the driver’s side and looked at her across a short distance, but a chasm of years. “I heard about it, Nora. You can sit in the front seat. I swear, we’ll just go to the diner and then I’ll bring you home.”
Why was he pressing her this way? But as much as she wanted to turn her back on him, she realized something else: he was going to keep after her until he got whatever it was he wanted. And he must want something or he wouldn’t be after her like this.
Almost closing her eyes so she could pretend this wasn’t a police car, she walked around the vehicle, reaching for the door handle then sliding in by feel.
At once she wished she hadn’t. Scents had always triggered impressions in her, and in this car she could smell fear, anger, anguish and alcohol, each scent bringing to mind imaginings of earlier passengers in this car. She clenched her teeth, battling down the torrent of feelings.
She kept her eyes closed, seeking the quiet mental sanctuary she had created for herself, a place she visualized as utterly empty and still. A place where the hyperawareness of odors usually couldn’t reach her. Where nothing could reach her.
Jake said nothing as he drove the three blocks to the diner. She couldn’t get out of that damn car fast enough, and she was walking through the door of Maude’s before Jake had finished locking up.
Maude stayed open until midnight, the only place in town that did other than one convenience store and the truck stop. She was by herself, behind the counter, taking care of paperwork. All day long this place was full, but Nora cou
ldn’t help wondering why Maude bothered to stay open this late in a place where the sidewalks rolled up by 9:00 p.m.
Maude straightened on the chair she had pushed behind the lunch counter, blinked as she saw her, then actually smiled. For Maude that was as unusual as Mount Rushmore moving to another state.
“Well, ain’t you a sight for sore eyes, Nora.”
She managed a smile. “Hi, Maude. Keeping busy?”
“Enough to get by, which is more than some can say.” His eyes shifted as Jake entered behind her. “Evening, Chief.”
Chief? In spite of herself, Nora turned to look at Jake. “Chief?” she repeated.
“The town took a wild hair recently. Before you know it, we have a city police force,” Maude answered, her voice souring to her usual grumpy mood. She sniffed her disapproval.
“Really.” Nora slid into a booth, absorbing this information, wondering if she had lost what was left of her mind. Having midnight coffee with a man who had crushed her ego and was now a police chief to boot? Yes, she must have lost the dregs of her sanity.
“It’s no big deal,” Jake said. “The city council decided they needed a little more authority or something. I don’t know. I have six officers, is all, and we spend a lot of time cooperating with the sheriff.” He shrugged.
“I thought you were a rancher.”
“I still am. At the rate things are going, I may be back at it full-time soon.”
“Why?”
Jake smiled faintly. “It was a power grab by the city council. They didn’t like feeling that the sheriff was running everything, the town included. I sometimes think we’re a sort of auxiliary.”
“Useful as teats on a bull,” Maude grumbled.
Nora figured he was minimizing it but didn’t know why. “It must be expensive to have a police force.”
“Not with federal grants. It helped swell the city budget. Maintaining it may prove to be different.”
“So why did you do it?”
“I was already a part-time deputy. This pays a little more. Ranching isn’t what it used to be.”
Little was what it used to be. “Are the politics of it hard?”
“Nah. Gage Dalton is a good man. He doesn’t mind that we help him patrol the streets in town. His budget is tight, too. And I give him someone else for the city council to holler at.”
Maude brought them both coffee and thick slices of apple pie heavily laced with cinnamon. Nora looked around the diner, mostly to avoid looking at Jake, and felt the intervening years slip away. If it hadn’t been for some wear and tear around the edges, she could have believed she was still in high school. Red vinyl booths, a couple of battered wood tables, stools at the counter, some of which had been patched with duct tape.
But finally she couldn’t avoid looking at Jake any longer. God, he was handsome, more handsome by far than in their youth when she had often been content to just stare at him. The years had favored him, and experience, good or bad, had etched a few faint lines.
By contrast, she knew how she must look to him: emaciated, too pale, her once-thick blond hair now thin and lifeless. Stress and mistreatment could do that to a person. Her blue eyes, unfortunately like her dad’s, were three sizes too big for her shrunken face.
“You’ve been through hell,” he said bluntly.
“I don’t want to talk about it.”
“I can understand why,” he answered. He picked up his mug and sipped his coffee. Apparently he still liked it black.
She reached for a little container of half-and-half and poured it into hers. Then she added a second for safety’s sake. No telling how her stomach would react to the assault of Maude’s strong coffee at this time of night, especially when she was feeling wound as tight as a spring.
Her hand was shaking, and Jake took the second creamer from her hand and poured it for her.
“Look,” he said as he dropped the container on the saucer, “I know you have plenty of reasons to hate me. Hate this whole town, I guess, but most especially those of us you grew up with. We were merciless. But we’re not kids any longer, Nora. And most folks think you got a hell of a raw deal.”
“Thanks,” she said shortly.
From the corner of her eye, she saw him tilt his head. She didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to feel again the impact of his good looks.
He sighed audibly. “All I’m trying to say is that you may find folks here are easier to get along with than it must have seemed to you back in our school days.”
“Really.” She tried to keep the tone noncommittal, even though she wanted to ask him what made him think she wanted to get along with anyone in this town. Funny how painful even the oldest scars could become when faced directly with their source again. In just this short period of time, her distant past had reared up to claw at her nearly as strongly as her recent past.
But then, it all came down to the same source, didn’t it? Everything bad that had happened to her, far past and near past, had happened because she was different. Cursed, as her dad had said more than once.
Jake sighed. Apparently the tone hadn’t been as noncommittal as she had hoped.
“You’ve been hurt,” he said finally. “Badly. And I get as much blame as anyone. I’m sorry.”
She glanced at him then and wished she hadn’t, because with that one look she remembered something she hadn’t allowed herself to think about in more than a decade: Jake had been one of the few kids she had grown up with who hadn’t picked on her throughout her childhood. In the end he had proved to be no better. But for many years he had refrained from the name-calling, the nasty pranks, the ugliness that had framed her days. Not until the very end had she realized that he’d thought the same hideous things about her.
She said nothing, because she wasn’t going to ease his conscience and accept his apology. After what she had been through, apologies seemed like empty words.
“Nora.”
Her gazed skipped back to him, then away.
“Nora,” he said again. “What would you think of me if we didn’t have a past? If we were meeting for the first time?”
“I’d hate you,” she said flatly. “I’d hate you just because you’re a cop.”
* * *
Jake supposed he deserved that. Even without all that had happened to her in the past months, he would have deserved that. But leaving the past out of it, given what she had endured from the police in Minneapolis, he could well understand her reaction.
He left her alone and began to eat his pie, trying to think his way through this, something he should have done before impulsively picking her up and bringing her here.
He’d been a bastard twelve years ago. He knew that. He could still cringe inwardly in shame at the way he had thrown all those epithets she’d been hearing for years in her face when she’d been utterly vulnerable, counting on him, at least, to be a friend. He still didn’t know exactly what had possessed him to be so cruel, but who could understand the mind of a twenty-year-old male anyway? Not even the male involved, evidently. There was more than one stupid act in his youth, although his treatment of Nora probably topped the list.
He ate another mouthful of pie, hardly tasting it, wondering what he could say to start building a bridge he never should have destroyed in the first place. It was clear she didn’t even want to hear an apology.
Finally he said the only thing he could think of. “I wouldn’t have suspected you.”
Her face lifted and she looked straight at him. He felt a pang as he once again saw how thin and pale she had become, how worn she looked. Even her beautiful blond hair seemed to be on the brink of death. He didn’t know, might never know, all that had been done to her.
“Really?” she asked, her voice brittle. “Even my defense attorney wouldn’t agree with you.”
His head jerked a bit, as if she had slapped him. “What do you mean?”
“He agreed with the cops. I’d worked with the guy’s kid, so I must have known him. Must ha
ve had an affair with him. Must have tried to conceal his identity to hide the affair. Must have obstructed justice. Never mind that I never met him, only his wife.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Sure. Everyone was sorry afterward. But that didn’t get my job back. It didn’t protect me from the endless hounding of the press. It didn’t spare me from people who believed that simply because I was arrested I must be involved somehow. Do you have any idea how that felt?”
“I can’t begin to imagine.” And he honestly couldn’t, although he was trying.
“So they finally let me out, and the D.A. said something to the press about how they had proved unequivocally I was in no way involved with the man before the attack. People avoided me like the plague for all of a week, and then the media were all over me all over again, demanding to know my relationship with the man, what I’d done to make him so mad at me and then...and then...” She stopped, breathing hard, her voice breaking.
“And then he threatened you.”
She looked down, her long hair veiling her face. “Don’t go there,” she whispered. “Don’t go there.”
“You should have had protection.”
“Well, I didn’t. He was an upstanding member of the community, no flight risk... Yeah, I heard it all. Even I didn’t think he’d be stupid enough to make those threats.”
He wanted to reach across the table and take her trembling hands, wanted to promise her a safety no one could promise her.
But before he could say or do anything, she pushed herself out of the booth. “I’m going home. Now.”
Home. The place that had been part of her misery when she had been growing up her. To a dad who had been less than a dad. A dad who had treated her as harshly as her schoolmates.
Maude caught his eye and he saw a frown there as Nora hurried toward the door. Okay, he’d been stupid again, and Maude had heard it all.
Jake hurriedly tossed bills on the table, then followed Nora into the night.
“Wait,” he called after her. “Wait. I said I’d take you home.”
