Found: One Marriage

by Laura Parker

  Halle admired the simplicity of his explanation. He was married. Enough said. She wondered how many other men viewed their marital commitment just that way. “But your marriage was in trouble. Perhaps Maria thought she might get you if it failed.”

  He shook his head, not denying but not quite understanding that logic.

  “Did you ever try to see your wife, afterward?”

  “What afterward? I had no job, a sullied reputation, no friends who would admit to the relationship in public. What could I say to her? ‘Hi doll. I know I’m a bastard and near-felon but you’ve got to believe that I still love you.”’

  His bleak gaze rejected any pity his words might have unconsciously engendered. “I had nothing to offer her. Even New York is small-town when it comes to certain things. I was known. Rogue ex-cops aren’t popular with any segment of the law-abiding population. Work wasn’t steady. After a while I knew I was going to have to leave. About the time I was packing up for good some thoughtful person taped a wedding announcement to my apartment door. My wife—ex—cuse me—ex-wife, was now somebody else’s bride.”

  Halle looked away from the mask of fury and betrayal on his face. “And you never forgave her.”

  “No, you’ve got it wrong. She never forgave me. That’s what hurts the most, still does.”

  His gaze found and mated with hers. “She never gave me a chance to explain and be forgiven.”

  “That’s a pretty impressive story,” she said after a moment. “It has the sweep and depth of tragedy. Is that how you see your life, as a tragedy?”

  Joe raised his hands in a futile gesture. “No. I’m not that important. I’ve just come to accept that for some people there are no second chances.”

  Halle looked up into his face, seeing in his expression for the first time the ravages of a man battered and bruised by his experiences with a failed marriage and lost honor. It was-awful, the most awful thing she had seen in her sheltered life. She understood now why he had taken her in, in spite of everything. Even with his memory intact, he was more alone than she.

  She didn’t mean to disturb him, to try to get past the Keep Out sign he had again posted in his eyes. She didn’t know if she had the nerve to challenge the bunching resistance in his jaw, or to weather the fury of eyes that dared her to enter at her own risk. She just scooted up the bed on her hips and hands until she was close enough to touch him.

  She lay a hand first on his cheek, hot with emotion as if he had a fever. Beneath her fingers the muscles of his face were hard, a man turned to stone by feelings he could not escape. She traced his mouth with her fingertips, waiting and wanting a return of the man who had held her and lulled her and incandesced her with his touch.

  He fought her. She could see the effort he made. His lower lip disappeared behind the barrier gate of his teeth. His chin rounded in stubbornness. A muscle twitched in his cheek where the dimple of joy should be. When she leaned closer to add the persuasion of her mouth, he stiffened. But he could not escape. His head was backed against the wall. She rose up on her knees, bracing her hands on the wall on either side of his head, and leaned in to him.

  The kiss was so soft Joe thought he must be dreaming. He had not expected this, not to have his confession of sins of commission and omission forgiven in a chaste, perfect kiss.

  “I don’t expect you—”

  She cut him off by deepening the kiss. Deep inside he shuddered not just from desire and relief but from the sure certain knowledge that this was how his life was supposed to be lived, with Halle and for Halle, forever.

  He still held one secret from her.

  He put a hand on her shoulder to hold her a little away and turned his face to one side. “There’s something you should know, Halle. Something every important.”

  “No!” She grabbed his jaw and wrenched his chin around so that she could kiss him hard. “Later,” she murmured against his mouth. “Much later.”

  “Damn!” Joe dropped the receiver back in its cradle.

  Halle paused in smoothing her hair. “What’s wrong?”

  “Everything.” He pointed at the phone. “That was my answering service. Bill McCrea called last night. Seems their missing baby boy has turned up.”

  “Lacey came home?”

  “Not home, yet. But he’s on his way. Called his mother last night. Said he’d be home sometime today.” He tossed his empty coffee cup into the waste basket. “I had a bad feeling about this. The money looked too good.”

  “Money again?” she asked lightly.

  His eyes cut to her face. “Yeah. Money. Again. Same song, different verse. You got a problem with that?” His expression did not encourage further comments.

  Halle raised her hands in a gesture of surrender. As he turned away she stuck her tongue out at him.

  Lousy was too nice a term for his mood, she decided. He had awakened looking like a prize fighter the day after a bout and proceeded to act as if everything that had happened between sunset and sunrise was an adult fairy tale: lovely, erotic, but not real.

  Halle told herself it was his face. His eye was a little less swollen this morning but it looked painful nonetheless. She could occasionally glimpse a brown eyeball surrounded by angry red inside the puffy folds of skin. There was a four-inch long scrape along his right lower ribs. And there was the pouty fullness of his lips, testimony to their heavy-duty lovemaking sessions. He hadn’t gotten much sleep but it seemed that his libido’s satiation had made no inroads in his temperament. It was as if he were mad that he’d had so good a time. Knowing Joe, she believed that might be the answer. He was feeling guilty.

  She looked down at her breasts which felt heavy and slightly swollen after all his eager attention. She felt guilty, too. But not enough to confess why just yet.

  “So, what now?”

  He glanced at her. “I go home.”

  “We go home.”

  He scowled. “How’s that memory coming along?”

  Halle bent over to fish a sandal from the floor. “It’s coming in little flashes. Kind of like trying to remember someone’s name you haven’t seen in a long time. You know you know it but you can’t quite grab it by the tail as it whips around at the edge of your consciousness.”

  “You will let me know when you’ve nabbed the culprit?”

  “Will do,” she murmured, knowing it was a lie.

  Her memory was back, in spades. How to tell him? What to tell him? What to do next? Until she could answer that last question she wasn’t about to tip her hand.

  “There will be other cases,” she offered as she quickly gathered up her things.

  “It doesn’t matter.” He went to stand in the doorway holding the door open with the tip of his boot. “There’s always fishing.” He glanced back over his shoulder. “Ready?”

  “You can’t fish your life away,” she said a little later as they were heading out toward the highway.

  He shot her a smirking glance. “Watch me.”

  She folded her arms and canted her head to one side, sizing him up as if she were looking at him for the first time. “You must have some ambition.”

  “Nope.”

  “Oh, come on. You could work in Dallas as a policeman, for instance.”

  He shook his head, his gaze steady on the traffic. “Not on the last day I live. I’ve been a cop. I’ve seen all the ugliness of life I can stand.”

  “You have a B.A. in psychology. You could become a counselor.”

  “Why would I want to do that?”

  “You’re a natural with people. Look how you took me on.”

  He spared her a quick glance. “I knew you.”

  “You were always good with people.”

  “Your gimpy memory tells you that?”

  “Brother! What side of the bed did you get out of this morning?”

  He offered her the first smile of the day. “Yours.”

  She laughed in spite of herself. “Try to remember that when you’re speaking to me in future.”


  “What do you expect? I’m a low-down dirty dude. Weren’t you paying attention last night?”

  “Yes. I heard every word, Joe.”

  “Then you know that since I haven’t been fishing for two days it’s the only unfulfilled wish I have at the moment.”

  “What about graduate school?”

  “I’m too old.”

  “Try again.”

  “Drop it, Halle. This is my life. It’s all I’ve got. It’s all I want.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  He turned slowly, his gaze as steady and as cool as the mirrored surfaces of his sunglasses. “Believe it.”

  Chapter 11

  Halle lay in Joe’s bed under the colorful quilt his great-grandmother Mary Maud Guinn had brought to America from County Donegal and thought about her future. To be specific, she thought about her future with Joe or if they might even have one together.

  It had come back to her in hard jolts of insight on the drive back to Gap what her life had been like two short weeks ago. Two weeks ago she had been the ex-Mrs. Daniel Shipmann and the recently resigned employee of Manhattan’s top auction house. At thirty years of age she had one career and two broken marriages behind her. It seemed she’d begun to accumulate a legacy that would soon match that of her many times divorced parents. It was that horrible thought that she had been running from, her past and her possible future.

  Failure.

  She had blamed Joe for the first breakup. He had been the one who’d changed after their marriage. He was the one who had become remote, moody, difficult, worried about money, standoffish with her friends, secretive, jealous. It had not occurred to her until Daniel asked her out a few weeks after her divorce became final that she had spent more social time in his company than in her own husband’s the last few months of her marriage.

  She had chalked that situation up to the fact that Daniel was an old friend, that he worked in the same business, at the same house as she. They had accounts together, mutual quasi-social engagements in common. Naturally it seemed better to go out with a friend to after-hours business events when Joe couldn’t join her—which became more and more frequent during the three years they were wed. Daniel was reliable, funny, conversant on many subjects, an impeccable escort just like all the men she had dated before she looked up into the English toffee eyes of Joseph Aloysius Guinn and lost her heart and head.

  Joe moved beside her, turned toward her, his arm finding and spanning her waist.

  Halle held her breath, hoping this once he would not awaken. Not yet, not until she had decided what to do. She couldn’t think rationally when he was looking at her. When he touched her she forgot to draw breath.

  It had been that way for her from the first moment. He had not lied or even embellished his remembrances as he had related his side of their story to her in Dallas the night before. He had stated things exactly as she remembered them. He had even remembered that it was she who called him.

  What he couldn’t know was that she had dialed the precinct three times before she got up the nerve to ask for him. She could not believe she was calling a man so casually met not even in a social setting. A policeman, no less. But he had looked at her, really looked at her, not her setting, her clothes, her body, her name, reputation or any other trappings that gave context to most peoples’ lives. He had simply seen her and it had been enough to light up his eyes with the mutual recognition she had felt that here—at last—was the one!

  From first glance to wedding vows she had never doubted for one moment that this union was meant to be. Cosmically intersected and soul-mated, they were one.

  She turned and watched the pale wraith of lace curtain dance as glib as a shadow in the breeze spawned by the open window. Perhaps if they had been left perfectly alone to work things out they would have found a way to keep the magic going.

  Or perhaps, if she had looked realistically at the prospects for failure then she would have spared him the heartbreak of ever-after. What else could she have expected? She was the child of a union so brief neither parent had bonded firmly with her. She was the error neither repeated. For all the stepparents she collected in her diary, she had never been given a stepsibling.

  Halle bit her knuckle as a soft-as-a-sigh sob escaped. When she had divorced Joe, so full of the anger and hurt and misery, she was certain it was his fault and his fault alone. But that misery and pain and hurt had followed her into marriage with Daniel. The only difference was that she knew, knew with that frightful clarity that comes in the middle of a sleepless night, that it wouldn’t work. She didn’t love Daniel. Worse, she still loved Joe. But she had tried to tough it out. She had wanted it to work because the alternative seemed unthinkable; she was replacing the right man with the wrong one.

  Daniel said it aloud first. A week after the wedding they were walking on the beach of Half Moon Bay in Antigua and he turned to her, brushed the hair from her face and said, “I’m willing to wait, Halle, until you’ve gotten over Joe.” But they both knew by then that he wouldn’t wait forever and that she would never get over Joe.

  “Stupid, stupid!” she whispered into the silence modulated by the occasional chirp of a cricket.

  She had ruined not one, not two, but three lives. That’s why she had come here to Gap, Texas, to Joe, to apologize.

  The fear she had had of something or someone being after her was no more than her past, or perhaps she was trying to escape the future. She hadn’t counted on Joe drawing her back into his life, of breathing fresh life into old feelings, of resurrecting the possibility of a future in which they both had a stake. Was that possible?

  She turned on her side into him, bringing her knee up to rest on top of his thighs as she laced her arms about one of his.

  “Love me again, Joe,” she whispered in his sleepplugged ear. “Please, love me again.”

  “Joe! Thank God you’re there!”

  Joe came fully awake, half sitting up in bed as he palmed the phone more firmly. “Mrs. McCrea?”

  “Yes, that’s right. I hope I didn’t wake you. My husband asked me to call. I know it’s early and all but I do hope you were already awake.”

  “I’m up, Mrs. McCrea.” Joe heard something besides polite inquiry in her tone but decided to follow her lead. “What can I do for you?”

  “It’s Lacey. He came home last night. He wouldn’t speak to either of us. Then, this morning, my husband tried to talk to him but things got all twisted ’round and now, well—” She took a sharp nervous breath. “We have a situation.”

  “What kind of situation?” Joe kept his voice polite but he glanced at his bedside clock. It was a little past 8:00 a.m. He’d overslept and missed the best time for fishing.

  “I’d rather not say over the phone. But you must come. Come quickly!” Joe’s attention zeroed in on the woman’s voice as she added, “I don’t know—I just don’t know what to do.”

  “All right, Mrs. McCrea.” Things began to clink into place. This was a plea for help and Ella McCrea hadn’t struck him as an easily flustered woman. “I’ll be right there. But tell me this. Is there any immediate problem for Lacey or your husband?”

  “Ye-es.” She drew the word out distractedly. “Bill’s in there trying to talk to him but I think he’s only making things worse. Lacey’s so angry, Joe. So angry!”

  The numbers tumbled into place. He’d received similar calls a hundred times as a policeman. “I’ll be right there. In the meantime, you call the police.”

  “No! No police!”

  “But, Mrs. —”

  “No authorities. My husband was emphatic. He wants only you.”

  “But I’m not—”

  “Come, oh please, come quick!”

  “On my way!” Joe hung up the phone and rolled out of bed in one motion.

  “Who was that?” Halle strolled in the bedroom fresh from her shower. She was wrapped in one towel and fluffing her wet hair with another. “Joe?” she said sharply as she watched
him yank his jeans on over his bare hips.

  “Got to go out,” he called over his shoulder as he reached for the T-shirt he’d dropped by the bed the night before. “Don’t know when I’ll be back. Have some coffee. I’ll call you when I can.” His dark head popped through the neck of his shirt then he wrestled both arms through the sleeves at the same time.

  “Something’s wrong,” Halle said as she reached for her underwear laid out on the back of the rocker.

  “Lacey McCrea’s back,” Joe said as he perched on the edge of the bed to pull on his socks. “He and his dad are mixing things up a bit. Mrs. McCrea wants me to play referee.” He tossed her a brief smile as he stood to stomp his foot into a boot. “No biggie.”

  But Halle had seen that tense look in his eyes too often to believe his facile lie. “I’m going with you.”

  “You can’t.” He straightened after wedging his heel into the second boot. “No time.” He gave her a short hot glance that scorched her skin as he surveyed her standing there in only her panties. “Sorry.”

  Muttering a depredation, Halle hurried after him, holding her towel to her bosom with one hand while she trailed bra and his sweat shorts in the other. “Wait! I can dress in the truck!”

  Joe half turned at the front door to spare her an exasperated glance. “How am I going to explain it if we get stopped before you’re decent?”

  “You can tell the patrolman I’m a hitchhiker who overpowered and took sexual advantage of you.”

  He turned a little more fully toward her as she approached, his arm swinging out to embrace her. “You sure as hell did that, sweetheart.” He pulled her tight against him for a quick hard kiss as his free hand found and squeezed a terry cloth covered breast. “Come on. But get in your things quick. I can’t afford any distractions at the moment.”