Hometown Hero

by Anders, Robyn

  It was surprisingly faint praise for the woman he intended to marry, but Cynthia had to keep reminding herself that Russell didn’t remember all of the moments he and Heather had shared, all of the commitments they’d made for each other. The really painful thing was that he’d come to her to help him recover exactly those memories.

  Since bursting into tears didn’t seem like a great option, Cynthia turned her attention to the food, which fortunately arrived in time to save her.

  It was delicious.

  Cynthia cut into a filet mignon so tender she didn’t really need the sharp steak-knife, then savored a vegetable dish decorated with a rich cream sauce. She’d definitely have to put in a couple of extra miles on her run tonight.

  Russ took a few bites of his own steak, then put down his fork. “I know I don’t have a two hundred and whatever I.Q., but I did notice you managed to avoid my question. Are you going to tell me why you don’t like this place, or are you going to tell me it’s none of my business?

  She shrugged. “I don’t hate this place. Really.”

  “But?”

  He wasn’t going to let her off the hook. “But it’s a place for rich snobs. I’m a working person, Russell. I don’t own the newspaper, I don’t even own my apartment. For me, a splurge is super-sizing my meal at McDonalds, not blowing a hundred bucks on a lunch.”

  “So what I meant as a treat backfired?”

  Her pulse pounded in her temples. “Why would you want to treat me?”

  “I’ve got a lot of hard questions for you. I figured some good food might soften you up.”

  She bit back her irrational urge to ask him if he had anything else hard for her because she was plenty softened just by looking at him.

  She couldn’t do it, though. Not even as a joke. He was practically married for one thing, and he wouldn’t be interested in her for another. And she didn’t do things like that for a third.

  “What kind of hard question?” She speared another piece of her steak.

  Russell picked up his iced tea, took a sip, then slowly put it down. A drop of liquid shimmered on his lip and she gripped the arms of her chair to keep from reaching over and touching it, touching his lips.

  “I want to know who my enemies are.”

  His question caught her with her mouth full. She swallowed, then coughed when a piece of meat went down the wrong pipe.

  “Easy.” He was out of his chair, patting her back before she noticed he’d moved.

  She grabbed her water glass and downed a few swallows.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Hey, I was the one who asked a tough question. Are you all right now?”

  “Sure.” Or at least she would be if she didn’t have this irrational desire to tell him to keep patting her on the back, move that hand on her shoulder down a little to where desire was tightening in her breast, or maybe to grab him, sling him over her shoulder and take him off somewhere with him and have her will with him, letting the consequences take care of themselves.

  He looked relieved and reclaimed his chair. “Now, about my enemies.”

  * * *

  Russ grasped his chair’s arms with both hands. Every time he touched Cynthia, some sort of instinctual reaction went off inside of him, made him want to keep touching her.

  The few pictures he’d seen of Cynthia when she’d been in high school answered his question about why he hadn’t dated her in the years before Heather came onto the scene. Cynthia had been pudgy, had skin the color and consistency of the Pillsbury Doughboy, and wore huge black glasses that hid and disguised her striking brown eyes.

  All that had changed. Her new eyeglasses were stylish, she’d slimmed down into a figure that had just enough curves to give a man’s imagination something to work with, and her eyes were way special.

  But none of that could explain his strange fixation on her. After all, he had Heather now, and Heather was the most beautiful woman he could ever remember seeing, or even remember seeing pictures of.

  His analytical mind gave him the answer. He was interested in Cynthia because she was the kind of person who would notice things. Her intelligence, her reporter instincts, her behind-the-scenes way all conspired to make her the perfect source in his attempt to recover his past. He was mistaking a personal interest for a sexual one.

  Cynthia’s personality made her perfect for what he needed. Which was lucky, because no matter how much he wanted to believe his parents and Heather, it simply wasn’t credible that he had been the perfect child, the perfect boyfriend, the perfect soldier they claimed he’d been.

  Everyone had their imperfections, their flaws. And sometimes, the best way to discover your problems is to ask your enemies rather than friends. Especially friends who were worried about you and protecting you because of your war injuries.

  Everyone else in town treated him like he was some sort of prince. Only Cynthia seemed to see him as something else. Either she had been his enemy, or at least she knew secrets that no one else had uncovered. Either way, she was a key to his discovering his past—in ways that went far beyond simply being the author of countless articles about his scoring the winning touchdown, pitching another no-hitter, or guiding the Student Council to another unanimous decision.

  “I was the fair-haired youth,” he reminded her. “I must have stepped on toes. There must have been someone who didn’t like it.”

  She considered, then shook her head. “You didn’t have enemies, Russell. You had a magnetic personality that made people want to be around you.”

  “Russ.”

  “Pardon?”

  “Call me Russ.”

  “But you never—“

  He shrugged. “Maybe when my memory comes back, I’ll want to be Russell again. I’ll let you know. For now, though, I think I’d like it if you would call me Russ.”

  “Just as long as you don’t insist on calling me Cyn.”

  “Is that what I called you in high school?”

  She shook her head. “Mostly you called me ‘hey, you.’”

  He laughed, then realized she wasn’t laughing with him. Could he have been that insensitive? A mousy girl with a sky-high I.Q. and off-settingly low sense of fashion would have had enough problems in the emotional Petri dish that was an American high school. Being treated as an object, unworthy of a name, would have been excruciating.

  “Okay, ‘hey-you’ is one good reason not to like me. What else about me didn’t you like?”

  She blinked, then gazed at him with those large brown eyes. “I don’t think I ever named myself as your enemy, uh, Russ.”

  His touch actually reached her hand before he caught himself. He yanked his arm back.

  “Maybe I pretended to be oblivious when I was younger, but I’m not completely unaware of what’s going on around me, Cynthia. It’s obvious that you have some issues with me. Since I only met you yesterday and I don’t think I’ve said anything too offensive, I suspect those issues go back to the times I don’t remember.”

  His hand was sneaking forward again and he forced it to grip the chair’s arm with knuckle-whitening force. “Don’t you understand? Those are the types of memories I need. It doesn’t help me to hear that I used to hang around with the guys from the football team and we’d talk about girls and rafting on the Missouri river. That’s superficial. That doesn’t make me different from anyone else in the town, hell, in the entire state. But you know better, Cynthia. You know my dark side. And I need it.”

  He wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d gotten up and walked out on him. He was pushing too hard, being too intense. But she was a newspaper reporter. She was tougher than he’d guessed. She stayed.

  “I have an I.Q. of two hundred and thirty-seven,” she said.

  “Impressive.”

  “When I told you that in high school, you suggested that I might have the highest combined weight plus I.Q. of anyone in the state.”

  “That wasn’t very nice.” But it probably told him more about himsel
f than a week’s worth of hearing he scored the winning touchdown in the state football district championships.

  “No, it wasn’t. It hurt me a lot.”

  “Would it help if I told you I’m sorry I ever said that?”

  She considered, then shook her head. “I was pudgy back then. It wasn’t until I discovered running that I got my weight under control. But that’s not the issue. Being smart was my whole claim to fame. You were the best athlete, the most popular guy, the best looking guy, the guy every girl in the school was hoping would ask her out, would take her virginity. Girls would line up to go out with you even when they knew you had another date set up for later in the evening, just so that they could snuggle up close to you and then go home and brag to their friends that they’d been with you.”

  Russ grimaced. That wasn’t an especially attractive picture, which made it seem honest. Still, while he didn’t remember his own high school days, he knew that high school males were not exactly known for their charm and empathy. He’d been a jerk, like most everyone else. In a way, he was even happy about it. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a saint, just human.

  “Got it. You were smart and I was all the other good things. That led to a rivalry?”

  Cynthia snorted. “Oh, yeah. There was a rivalry all right, but only in my mind. I wanted to do better than you because I knew I was smarter. But of the two of us, I was the only one who noticed.”

  Something about this conversation seemed wrong. Then he remembered. “According to the school newspaper, though, I was the class Valedictorian. How come?” A horrible thought came to him. “Did I cheat?”

  “Why would you cheat? You didn’t care. I got a B in P.E. one semester. Since we both had straight A’s in our academic classes, they decided to use non-academic as the tie-breaker.”

  “Oh.” He could certainly see how it would grate on anyone to see the person who had every advantage succeed at the one thing they knew they were better at. “Is that all?”

  She yanked her hand back from the table where, inexplicably, his hand had covered it. Had he always been this out of control? Maybe he shouldn’t have walked out of that Army shrink’s office on his second appointment. He’d felt justified at the time after a fresh-out-of-med-school psychiatrist had tried to get him to open up about his mother—a mother he had no memory of at all and was only now getting re-acquainted with.

  “Is that all? Believe me, it’s plenty. I lived in terror of you for four years. You thought I was fat. You just coasted to straight A’s, mostly because your teachers liked you so much, they gave you the grades whether you deserved them or not. People always listened to your ideas. Whenever I had an idea, nobody would even bother listening to it unless you decided to pick it up. And then they’d give you all the credit, as if I hadn’t been saying the same thing for however long.”

  It made him wince to think that he’d ridden, roughshod, over Cynthia. “Was I mean? Do you think I did it on purpose?”

  “Is it mean to step on an ant that you don’t even notice on the sidewalk?”

  He considered. “Only if you should notice it.”

  * * *

  Lunch had been an experience.

  Cynthia rolled down her window to let in a little of the cool March air.

  Russell, Russ, she mentally corrected herself, could have been a decent reporter if he hadn’t chosen a career of having money just shower over him. He had the knack of asking the kind of questions that got people talking about themselves, revealing secrets they never guessed they would tell anyone, had never intended to expose to the world. Even though Cynthia knew the tricks, she’d still fallen into his trap. She’d told him her most shameful secret.

  At least he hadn’t laughed.

  He probably thought she was an idiot, still harboring grievances over hurts that Russ hadn’t intended even at the time and would have forgotten even if he didn’t suffer from an amnesia so total that it cut him off from his past like a blade. But he’d taken her fears and anxieties seriously—something he had never done in high school and, as far as she could remember, wouldn’t have done as an adult, either, before his National Guard unit got shipped overseas and he’d lost his memory.

  “I’ve got some assignments I have to cover this afternoon,” she said when he pulled his Jaguar back in front of his office. “I think I’ve got enough to go on for my story.”

  “We still have a huge stack of Shermies to go through.”

  “I trust you, Russ. Go ahead and look through them. Get them back to me whenever.”

  She’d told herself she was using the papers as leverage to get an interview for the feature, but now she wondered. Could she simply have been torturing herself, making herself relive the horrors of high school?

  “I feel like I’m finally getting somewhere, discovering something about myself. I need your help with this. The newspapers aren’t going to do it alone.

  “I work for a living, Russ. Reporters don’t get to spend days working on a feature that will run maybe twenty inches. I’ve got to cover the news. The Junior League expects me to cover their meeting. The FFA is having their spring-thaw show this evening and I’ve got to cover that. A bit later, Tina Jones and Herb Wilton are having their rehearsal dinner and I’m going to swing by that and snap some pictures for the Advertiser.” At least she didn’t have to cover Shermann High ‘Snakes’ sports any more. They’d hired a student intern to cover tonight’s basketball game.

  “How about if I pay you. You can be a full-time researcher on the first life of Russ Lyon.”

  “How about I pretend you didn’t say that so I don’t have to hate your guts.”

  He blinked. “That would work.”

  “Good. I’ll see you tomorrow evening. If you’ve got any questions, you can ask me then.”

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “Your parents' anniversary, of course. Don’t tell me you’d forgotten.”

  “My mother said I had to be there. She didn’t tell me she’d issued a press release.”

  He seemed so fully there, it was hard for her to remember that he didn’t really know this town, the habits its people had developed over the years, the little things everyone in town knew. Like that Dr. and Mrs. Lyons always had a big anniversary bash—and invited half the town.

  “Did she tell you it’s semi-formal? Tuxes and gowns?”

  He looked dismayed. “Did I like that kind of thing?”

  “Nobody likes that kind of thing.” Except maybe people like Heather Cochran and Russ’s mother, Alisse Lyons. “It’s just something you have to do.”

  “Right. I guess I’ll see you then.” He paused a beat. “And thanks for the help with the Shermies, Cynthia. And for telling me about how I treated you. It helps a lot.”

  “Sure.” She was a regular Good Samaritan, all right. Making him pay for lunch at Shermann’s most expensive restaurant while listening to her run him down had to be a high point in any man’s life.

  “See you then,” she repeated as she fled to her car.

  * * *

  The Shermann Junior League was the kind of story her publisher, Andrew Sexton, loved. Unlike Junior Leagues of an earlier generation, most of the members of the Shermann chapter were businesswomen rather than homemakers, although a few, like Millicent Wanks, trembled on the outside like overanxious puppies afraid they were going to be beaten. The women of the Junior League ran the stores, sold real estate, provided accounting services, and bought advertising. League meetings were a chance for networking, for business decisions, and also a chance for gossip to be transformed into news.

  Cynthia hated the Junior League as much as Andrew loved it. But she was going to produce ten column inches about the meeting or Andrew would demand to know why not. She was also going to have to find a way to work the names of all the members and their businesses into the story. It was just one of the small ways that small-town newspapers blurred the line between advertising and editorial, one of the ways that the newspaper managed to stay i
n business in an increasingly post-literate society.

  She arrived early—she could have given Russ another half hour without any problem and she’d known that—and started up a pot of coffee in the small kitchen.

  By the time coffee was ready, members had begun to wander in.

  Naturally, the meeting wouldn’t start until Heather arrived. Not only was she the President, she was also the woman who validated all of the decisions. Without her okay, nothing happened.

  The tight-knit core of Heather’s fan club surrounded her as they came in giggling from a few Margaritas over lunch.

  Heather surprised Cynthia by walking over to her and shaking her hand. “I am so grateful for all you’ve done to help Russell. I called him a few minutes ago and he said you’d given him whole new insights into the person he used to be. ‘Course we all know that he’s the same person he always was, right?”

  She got the expected giggles and nods of confirmation from the fan club. She got nothing from Cynthia, though. Because Cynthia wasn’t sure Heather was right. Was Russ really the same person that Russell had been? Isn’t it the memories that make the person? Wasn’t that why Russ was working so hard to recover them, so he could become that person once again?

  “But that reminds me,” Heather went on, apparently not noticing that Cynthia hadn’t been among the crowd agreeing with her. “I’ve been thinking about what we should do with the money we raise this year.”

  “I thought we were going to sponsor the 4th of July Pig-Outing again,” Jane Lintz protested. “We’ve done that every year for the past decade.”

  “And promoting town-farm togetherness is a good thing,” Heather said, “even if it does mean fattening up a bunch of already overweight Midwesterners. But Russell’s injuries have made me think that maybe we should do something for the hospitals that treat our servicemen and servicewomen. I’ve been doing a bit of research and, from what I’ve discovered, the hospitals and especially the rehabilitation centers are getting overwhelmed by all the wounded from the war. I think we should raise funds to help with the rehabilitation. Maybe we could even invite some of the recovering soldiers to move here to Shermann.”