“Can’t I just grow up and work all by myself like Sawyer?”
Molly pondered how to answer that until an idea came to her. “Think about Pastor Newton. He has to work with all kinds of people, sometimes when they are very mad or very sad. Does he seem happy to you?”
“Well, yeah. But he’s s’posed to be.”
Molly could go into all the ways she felt happiness was a choice more than a personality trait, but that wasn’t the argument to have with someone with Zack’s anxieties. She knew Zack would choose to be less anxious if it really was a choice. She always had to remind herself that, for reasons she didn’t understand, God had wired Zack with a collection of fears other people didn’t have.
“And Sawyer,” she went on. “He’s all by himself, just like you say. Does he seem happy to you?” It would do no good to have Zack idolize Sawyer’s self-imposed exile.
“Not happy like you,” Zack said. He sounded way too much like a teenager mortified by his mom. She knew those years were coming, but they didn’t have to show up now.
“Sawyer is a sad man in lots of ways that don’t have anything to do with how many people are around him. Just like Pastor Newton is a happy man, which doesn’t have anything to do with how much time he spends with people from church.” She felt compelled to drive the point home. “So quitting school to play golf all by yourself won’t solve your problems.” Inspired, she added, “Most people play golf in sets of four, you know. It’s not a by-yourself kind of game.”
Sawyer clearly hadn’t told him this. Zack looked betrayed. Of course, Mrs. Hollings had envisioned it as a solo sport right now for Zack’s purposes, so why would Sawyer bring up golf leagues or the fact that many high schools and colleges had golf teams?
“I just wanna play the way Sawyer and I play.”
“And you can,” Molly replied. “Just not as a replacement for second grade. After-school lessons are fine, but they’ll stay after school.”
“I like ’em,” Zack said. His steps picked up again, and Molly breathed a sigh of relief that maybe this dark moment had passed. For now. “They’re not lousy anymore. Or new.” He looked up at her. “I won’t have to stop ever, will I?”
And there it was: that question Molly had feared from the beginning. Sawyer had never struck her as the kind of man to stick around. Once whatever he was running from caught up with him—and it would, because things like that always do—he’d be gone.
She left the question unanswered. The last thing Zack needed was another man disappearing from his life with barely a trace.
For that matter, it was the last thing she needed, as well.
Chapter Thirteen
“Killer hippo?!” Sawyer wanted to go find that Jacobs kid and give him a piece of his mind.
Molly took her hands off the cart. They were getting ready to push it out of her garage Wednesday onto the flatbed truck for him to take it back to the resort. “I knew it was a mistake to tell you. It’s almost funny. Now.” She stepped back and eyed the hippo face. “If we just paint a set of angry eyebrows over here...”
“All kinds of wrong,” Sawyer shot back in defense of the hippo’s goofy happy face. No way was he having any part of dismissing this kid’s mean remark. “Where was the teacher during all this?”
Molly’s sigh spoke volumes. “Kids like Davey Jacobs are always really good at slipping cracks like that in when the teacher can’t see or hear them. And it just gets worse if Zack tells on him. But I won’t say I don’t have a dozen unsent mean letters to Doris Jacobs sitting in my bureau drawer.”
Sawyer could just imagine. “You don’t send them?”
She sat back against a beat-up filing cabinet that stood against one wall. “Doris isn’t the problem. Well, the fact that Doris won’t stand up to her husband—who’s just a Davey in grown-up clothes if you ask me—that’s the problem.”
Sawyer had met guys like Davey’s dad back on the force. Multiple times a week. Quick to build themselves up, and always at someone else’s expense. It burned him that this crack had been at Zack’s expense, and that Molly had been hurt by it, as well. “The guy sounds like a real prince.”
Molly looked him right in the eye. “Not all men are.” She held his gaze for a long time—way longer than his gut could stand. Her eyes said things that called to him, things that didn’t match with all the “keep your distance” commands she’d given him earlier.
Sawyer leaned back against the opposite wall and shifted to another subject. A question that had been bugging him for a while now. “Does Zack miss his dad?”
The woman wore her heart on her sleeve. Pain and disappointment pulled her features down, draining all the fire out of her eyes. It made Sawyer want to give Steve Kane a bigger piece of his mind than the one aimed at Jacobs.
“Of course he does.” There was so much resignation in her voice. And from a woman who seemed unlikely to resign to anything.
“Does he tell you that?”
“He tries not to. He asks me questions he thinks will hide it.” She sighed and wrung her hands, a gesture just a bit of an echo of Zack’s fidgeting. “But it’s so obvious he wants Steve’s attention that I yell into my pillow some nights.”
He couldn’t picture sweet Molly Kane yelling at anybody, even though it sounded like this Steve deserved it. Sawyer’s gut twisted at the idea that some jerk like Davey’s dad paid all kinds of attention while Steve couldn’t muster up a shred of attention for a kid like Zack.
It didn’t take a shrink to connect the dots. At least some of Zack’s anxieties had to stem from having no dad to count on. And perhaps—even though the thought made him gulp—why Zack had glommed on to him so hard and fast. And Molly? He looked at her and saw a loneliness alike and yet totally different from his own. That made him gulp, too.
“Hard on your own?” he asked, finding the words awkward and way too simple for a huge issue like that. Some people, like him, were wired for isolation. Molly was wired for people, and lots of them.
She paused before answering, and the silence told him just how hard it was. He watched her try to find some sunny way to put it, some optimistic Molly-esque answer with a silver lining.
She couldn’t. Her swallow was as hard as his, and Sawyer realized what a painful question he’d asked.
“I’m sorry.” Again, the words were so insufficient to what he wanted to say.
She sniffed and pulled in a breath big enough to make Sawyer wonder how close she’d been to crying.
“I think you’re doing an amazing job with him. Really.” He watched how the compliment struck her, soft and startled, as if she didn’t get many of them. How could people not be piling on the praise to someone like her, handling Zack’s complexities the way she did? What kind of idiot discarded a woman like her and a boy like Zack? Steve’s a fool, he wanted to shout. You’re wonderful. You deserve so much better.
In that moment, staring at how she blinked back tears, a foolhardy part of him desperately wanted to be that so much better. Which was, of course, desperately utter nonsense. Even if Molly hadn’t drawn that big fat line in the sand between them, Sawyer was smart enough to know she was way out of his league. Zack deserved a dad with his act together, and that wasn’t him. Molly deserved someone good and kind and noble and filled with faith, and that wasn’t him. He’d just have to content himself with being allowed to linger in the glow of her light for a little while. Only linger, because he wasn’t dumb enough to think he could stay.
Molly looked at him with such compassion that for a second Sawyer worried he’d spoken his thoughts aloud.
“You’ve been doing a pretty amazing job with him, too, you know. He’d never have even tried to build the hippo if you hadn’t helped.”
“And look what happened.”
“What happened?” she asked.
“You were there, you know what happened.”
Sawyer had been dreading the moment she asked. And she chose to ask him now? He couldn’t bring himself to answer.
Molly hugged her chest. “It’s something awful, isn’t it?”
Tell her, some dark voice said. Tell her and it will all be over. Only he couldn’t bear for it to be over. Not just yet. Now it was his turn to hesitate on an answer. From somewhere way down below all that yearning he found the hard wall he put around himself and yanked it back up between them. “I’d better get this back to the resort.”
He began to push the golf cart toward the truck, forcing himself not to look at her. He’d gotten the thing another two feet before he felt her hand on his shoulder. The tender touch seared like a burn.
“What happened, Sawyer?”
It was the way she said his name that did him in. Filled with kindness, as if he was redeemable. Nothing was less true in all the world.
“Something terrible.” Sawyer made himself promise not to say any more than that.
“I don’t think terrible things make terrible people.”
He didn’t reply. What reply was there to an upstanding thought like that? Even before the accident, he’d never been that glass-half-full kind of optimist. He certainly wasn’t now. Knowing she was expecting an answer, he gave her a murky grunt that let her know she wasn’t going to get one.
“That’s the whole point of mercy,” she said. “We never deserve it. And the whole point of God is that He gives it anyway.”
Now who’s the idiot? he chided himself silently. Look at you. So ready to think she’s thinking about you as a man, and she’s just thinking about you as someone who ought to be in church.
“I’m not somebody you can fix,” he said more bitterly than she deserved. He turned and pushed the cart up the ramps onto the flatbed.
“Sawyer...”
Stop saying my name like that, he pleaded silently as he tied down the cart as fast as he could.
“Zack and I won’t give up on you.” The defiance in her words snuck in under the thick wall and made him want to believe things he had no business believing.
You should, Molly. You should.
* * *
Tessa looked concerned as she sat in Molly’s kitchen the next day. “Are you sure you want me to do this?”
Molly looked out the window where Greg and Zack were celebrating the end of the school year by goofing around with the three golf holes in her backyard. “Yes. I have to know what happened to Sawyer. And he’s not saying.”
“I’m not a private investigator. If you didn’t find anything doing an internet search, I may not come up with anything, either.”
Molly sighed and put Zack’s backpack away in the top of the closet. She’d had Tessa and Greg come over on the pretense of the end-of-school celebration, but it really was just to ask for Tessa’s help. “You’re a reporter, so that’s the next best thing, right?”
Tessa smirked. “I’m a reporter for a dinky little community newspaper. Don’t overestimate my skills here.”
“What I won’t overestimate is your heart. If there’s something to find, you’ll find it.”
Tessa stacked folders and notebooks and put them into a box on the kitchen table. “Maybe it’s your heart I ought to be worried about. He’s getting to you, isn’t he?”
“No,” Molly answered quickly.
“Come on. Everything he’s done for Zack? The golf holes and that amazing cart?” Tessa leaned in. “And a musician! I always knew you’d fall for a musician.”
“I am not falling for him. I’m grateful to him.”
Tessa laughed. “And I’m the Queen of England. Don’t ever play cards, Molly. Your eyes give you away every time. Mysterious and handsome can be quite a combination.”
Molly walked away, suddenly needing something in a kitchen drawer.
“Look, he’s been helpful and you’ve been holding everything up on your own for a long time. Nobody would fault you for liking someone who’s great with Zack. You’re being smart and checking the guy out. We both know he’s hiding something, so best to know what that is.”
Molly turned back to Tessa. “What if it’s awful? Really ‘don’t ever go near my son ever again’ awful?”
“Are you asking me if I think Sawyer is a serial killer?”
“No. Well, maybe.” It felt absurd to admit that.
“The thing about digging up someone’s past,” Tessa said, “is that you have to be ready for what you find. You asked him if it was terrible and he said yes. Maybe he just thinks it’s terrible, but maybe it really is.”
“Which is why I have to know,” Molly insisted.
Tessa planted her hands on her hips. “So ask him.”
“I did.”
“Ask him like you really mean it. Come on, Molly, I’ve seen you be relentless about things way less important. Don’t you think whatever it is would be way better coming from him?”
“He’s not going to tell me.” After a pause she admitted, “And I have to know.”
That brought a raised eyebrow from Tessa. “Because...”
Was she ready to admit it? Especially to Tessa? That was probably a moot question, because the look on Tessa’s face showed she had already guessed. “I need reasons not to like him.”
“Are we talking Molly ‘friendly person’ like? Or Molly ‘lonely woman who deserves someone who truly cares’ like?”
“That isn’t a real question. I don’t even know what that means.” Molly tried to make it sound like a snappy comeback, but it fell short.
Tessa leaned her elbows on the counter. “Oh, I think you do. Totally. So are these feelings that we’re pretending don’t exist mutual?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t buy that for a second. You have more intuition about people than anyone else I know. Which means it is mutual, and that scares you.”
Maybe talking about it would tamp down the low hum of connection she felt to Sawyer. The low hum that wasn’t staying low at all. These days it felt as if it were roaring in her ears. “He’s so good with Zack. He gets him in ways I can’t. How is that possible? I’m his mother.”
“Don’t make this about Zack. How is he with you? I heard you the other day, you know. I had to pick up some papers from the church office after choir rehearsal and I passed by the sanctuary on my way out. I heard you singing. That wasn’t about church. And it wasn’t about Zack.”
Molly felt her cheeks flush. “You heard that?”
Tessa’s voice grew tender. “I did. And it was stunning. Beauty like that doesn’t come out of nowhere.”
Molly sat down on one of the counter stools. “He looks at me like I’m...important. He treats the simple act of my getting his coffee every morning like some kind of enormous gift. I like to think I’m nice to everybody, but Sawyer treats me like I’m the only person who is ever nice to him. As if it means everything to him. As if I mean everything to him.” She grimaced at Tessa. “I can’t mean that much to him, can I?”
Tessa joined her at the other stool. “Maybe you are the only person who’s kind to him. He works at Mountain Vista and I’ve never seen him talk to anyone else. Well, he does a little bit now, and somehow I think you had a lot to do with that. And the piano thing? No one knew he was so talented until you figured it out and put it to use. You’re changing him. You do that to people, if you hadn’t noticed.”
“I touched him.” It blurted out of her, awkward and sudden. “Last night as we were putting the golf cart on the truck while Zack was at the church kids group. There was so much pain and loneliness in his face and he’d told me I was an amazing mother and I put my hand on his shoulder.”
Tessa’s eyes widened. “And?”
“Zing. High-voltage, ‘all the way down to your toes’ zing. Him, too. Scared the liv
ing daylights out of both of us.” She felt an echo of the sensation just remembering the moment. “That’s why I have to know.”
“It’s no crime to be attracted to a handsome man who pays attention to you,” Tessa replied. “And if it’s that strong, you’re smart to want to know what’s behind all that mysterious, brooding pain.” She gave the last words a dramatic emphasis. “I’ll admit, he doesn’t seem your type, but then again I thought Steve was perfect for you and look what happened there.”
Molly looked out at her son playing with Greg. They were now devising some sort of golf ball race, knocking them around the three holes like barrel racers at the rodeo. “I can’t let Zack get hurt again. I can’t get hurt again. I need to be way more careful than I feel.” She put a hand on Tessa’s shoulder, unnerved by the reminder of how she’d done that to Sawyer and the feelings it created. “You’ll help?”
Tessa pulled her into a hug. “Of course I will. I’ll find out everything I can.” She pulled back and gave Molly a look. “But is it okay if I say a prayer that whatever it is isn’t enough to blow up what’s cooking between you two?”
That was Tessa, always seeing through right to the heart of things. “Go ahead. I’ve actually been praying the same thing.”
Chapter Fourteen
Molly told herself to treat Sawyer like every other customer Friday morning. She hadn’t seen him since their last meeting, and Zack had his first post-school lesson with him this afternoon. While part of her knew you couldn’t exactly press Rewind on something like this, she was going to try.
“Good morning,” she called too cheerily to Sawyer as he pushed through the door.
He looked awful. Weary and tense. “Can we put an extra shot in there this morning?”
Three shots of espresso was a lot, even for a guy his size. “Sure,” she said. She might have added, “What’s wrong?” for any other customer, but she didn’t for him. “Extra jolt, coming right up.”
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