by D. Brown
Locked Hearts
Locked Hearts
D.P. Brown
Copyright 2013 D.P. Brown
All Rights reserved
ISBN-13:978-1482740707
ISBN-10:1482740702
For my kids, Brian Brown and Sarah Gilstrap,
And their mother, Barbara Clark,
It took me long enough, but here it is . . .
Locked Hearts
D.P. Brown
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book would not be possible without some extraordinary people in my life.
First my family, you have endured the past 35 years of me promising to write a novel and actually get it published.
To my kids, Brian Brown and Sarah Gilstrap, you make me proud every day.
To their spouses Lauren, who always has my back and keeps me from saying things I shouldn't, and Tommy who I can sit and talk football and Star Trek with and we both get it, you are my children as well and I am delighted you both are part of my family.
To my kids' mother, Barbara, I live on your last nerve I know, but see? I finally finished one.
To my parents, who often don’t understand all the wild things I write and aren't sure what to do with my wild imagination.
To everyone who has ever read anything I’ve ever written, especially the ladies of the Thr3e A.M. Diaries secret reading group who have read my stuff two and three times over, I thank you for accommodating my rampant ADD and taking the time to read what I write. To you I say, see? I finally finished one as well.
To Karen Cox, who cracked the whip and made sure I finished this and made sure it got published, you are a taskmaster but I wouldn’t be here without you. I am forever in your debt.
A big thank you goes to April Klontz, the cover model for Locked Hearts and the soon to be released The Lunch Box. She's got The Look.
To Margo Machnik who pushed me to finish the second solid revision and who has taken on the Herculian task of marketing me and my books, thank you. I hope I can keep up the pace.
To Martha, you have inspired a lot in me and I thank you for believing in me.
To those of you who believe in me and believe in this story, this is just the first. Lots more are coming. I thank you for reading my stuff.
And, lastly . . . eternally . . . to Her.
Wherever She is . . . And whomever She may be . . .
Ordinary people, living ordinary lives, finding extraordinary love...
Prologue
The young man came here to find the man who loved his mother.
The man named Sam.
He came to find him and ask a question.
He wanted to know.
Do you?
Do you love my mother?
Sam recognized him right away.
The young man had his mother’s eyes.
Sam’s smile creased the weathered lines on his face, and a curious squint squeezed the crinkles in the corners of his eyes. A ripple of anxiousness skittered over his heart.
My life has come down to this moment right here.
To right now, and what the boy had to say.
Sam wanted to ask him, “What brings you here?”
He didn’t.
Let the boy talk first.
The young man who last walked this beach as a 7-year old boy, curled around the slope of the dunes, stopping to give a long look at the beach house where they stayed. It looked as he remembered it, right down to the Adirondack chairs arranged around the picnic tables and fire ring.
He never realized how much he missed this place, a place where he remembered his father saying as they drove off into the night, “If we never set foot on this piss-ant island ever again it won’t be too soon.”
And here he was, 11 years later, back on this same piss-ant island.
The young man’s name was David, and to David, Sam looked like a picture postcard.
Immune to time’s passage, he never changed.
Sam still wore the same denim shirts and Dockers shorts, Sperry Topsiders and no socks.
His hair had gone completely white and was now cut short. His complexion glowed with the seasoned tan of one who spends his life on the beach. White whisker stubble shadowed his jaw.
Time treated Sam well, the young man thought.
He may have aged, but hadn’t grown old.
David remembered the five days his family spent here as if they happened last week and how Sam took the time to be with him then.
He took him fishing.
He taught him how to play baseball.
They even formed a club, the He-Man Woman Hater’s Club, and Sam looked as if the enjoyment he took from being with him back then was indeed genuine and not an act.
As if Sam had as much fun as the 7-year old did.
The young man couldn’t say the same about his own father.
David stopped at the base of the porch steps, stomped his feet free of loose sand on the flagstone walkway, and looked up at Sam, a curious smile of his own pulling at the corners of his mouth, hands stuffed in pockets, feeling suddenly like a kid again.
“Remember me?”
“You never forget a fellow He-Man Woman Hater,” Sam said.
He stood, a little more slowly than he used to and crossed the porch to take David’s hand. They shook, and then Sam pulled him close to give a fatherly hug to a young man who was the little boy Sam would have liked to treat as a son once upon a time, and whose mother he once loved, and still loved very much.
“We’re in the South, son. We hug down here.”
And he pulled David closer, gave him an extra squeeze and patted him on the back.
“It’s good to see you.”
“I wasn’t sure I’d find you.”
“I’m glad you did.”
Sam stepped away, hands still clasping the boy’s shoulders to get a good look at what kind of man the little boy he remembered had grown into.
“It’s been a long time.”
“Too long.”
“Look at you, all grown up.”
David smiled, “I do okay. I start college this fall, Ohio State.”
So proud of his standing on the threshold of adulthood, Sam thought.
Sam offered the second rocking chair and asked David if he wanted anything to eat or drink.
“Not right now,” the young man said and thanked him for asking.
They sat down and Sam resumed his steady rocking.
David watched the way he eased into the chair, as if reclining into the caress of weather worn pine slats was where Sam received all his comfort, and where he always belonged.
“Well, just so you understand. You are staying for lunch, and that’s not open for discussion, understood? I made some ham salad this morning out of the leftover pork shoulder. I‘ve got macaroni salad and some good sourdough bread.”
“Still cooking for everyone on the island?”
“Not as often,” Sam said. “Most of the old regulars are gone now.”
“You have any plans for the Fourth this year?” David asked.
“Same thing I do every year,” he said, “No plans really.”
“I saw your name on the mailbox out front. You live here all the time now?”
“Spent so much time here, I started receiving my mail here. I can’t imagine being anywhere else honestly.”
Sam rocked easily, pushing with his left foot. Hands rested on the armrests. A writer’s hands, David thought.
“I read your books,” David said changing the subject. “Locked Hearts was awesome.”
“I didn’t think guys your age were into romance. McGee would call you a sissy, you know.”
David laughed.
“Hey, it was good,” he said, “Didn’t know quite what to think about you writing
about my mom though.”
His mom, the woman he loved, the woman he wrote about because he had no other ‘Happily Ever After’ that included her, so he made one up.
“Besides, Locked Hearts isn’t why I came back here.”
“I wondered when you’d finally get around to telling me why you’re here.”
“And I’m wondering when you’re going to ask me how my mom’s doing.” David replied.
“I was angry with you for a long time, you know. You made my mom cry.”
David looked into his lap, the little boy in him coming out again. Suddenly they were sitting out in the Adirondack chairs, David with one leg slung over the armrest, his lower lip stuck out in an angry pout. When it comes to talking about your mother, it doesn’t matter how old you are, you’ll always be her little boy, and David proved no different.
“I don’t know what to say, David. I really don’t.”
“There’s nothing to say. It happened, and Mom took it really hard.”
“I can’t change what happened,” Sam said. “And I don’t think I want to. I‘m sorry this hurt you.”
“You could have fought for her.”
Sam sighed yielding in deference to the folly of Destiny and Fate.
“It wasn’t meant to be son,” he said. “I wish I could say otherwise, I really do.”
The young man paused to regard the spot in the yard where he sat as a boy, and he remembered what was.
“So, are you going to ask about my mom or not?”
“Okay, okay, I’m asking, how is your mom?
Sam was not prepared for what the young man said next, “Not good. Not good at all Sam. She’s dying. My mom is dying.”
Five Days
1
The First Day – Thursday, July 2
11 years ago
When Maggie first met Sam, he had a gun in his mouth.
She saw him through an open screen door, the summer-at-the-beach sounds playing in her ears, a gritty film of sand coating her feet, and the sting of the Fourth of July sun on her shoulders.
The man has a gun in his mouth, Maggie and here you stand on the man’s front porch.
Is he going to shoot himself, or shoot you?
Of all things to see at the beach, the man had a gun and it’s in his mouth.
The thought flashing across her mind: Sunscreen, I need to remind the kids to put on sunscreen.
These are called defining moments.
Do you let the moment define you, or do you define the moment?
She had come here to this stranger’s house along the beach on Tybee Island, Georgia, because she was out of sugar and she needed a cup to make what her husband called “Maggie’s special freshly-squeezed lemonade.”
She picked this house because it was closest to hers, and if pressed, Maggie couldn’t say why.
If pressed further she knew nobody borrowed cups of sugar anymore. That pastime went out with rotary dial telephones and Happy Days.
This is why nobody borrows cups of sugar anymore; strange men sticking guns in their mouths.
I should have gone to the store.
But there was just one tiny grocery store on the island and Wal-Mart was an hour trip there and back.
Maggie wanted to blame her husband and wished she were invisible.
Please let him not see me.
Please.
The caress of the salt sea breeze raised the hairs on her arms. The hint of a sneeze tickled her nose, but she dared not move.
Fear cemented her feet to the ground.
She saw him through the screen’s faint gray haze, his finger on the trigger, the hammer cocked and the most forlorn and hopelessly lost look in his eyes.
Shock and horror stole the breath from her and she gasped, an open-mouthed ‘No!’
The gasp died on her lips as an empty sigh.
And she dropped the coffee cup.
When it shattered at her feet his eyes jerked up at her in start.
And he pulled the trigger.
Click!
Sam looked into the deepest brown eyes he’d ever seen. There was something about her face that snagged his heart in mid-beat and told him his life would never again be the same.
And here she sees me like this.
Damned gun . . . what a stupid thing to do.
I’d give anything to undo this moment.
Maggie thought she was about to faint.
As Sam slowly pulled the gun from his mouth, a half-pleading expression wanted to tell her this wasn’t what it seemed, but he knew, it was exactly what it seemed.
He had a gun in his mouth.
He pulled the trigger.
The woman saw it all.
He wanted to stand.
He wanted to reassure her everything was all right.
Her eyes remained frozen on him, wide in horror as shame and self-revulsion washed over him.
Sam stood and let the gun dangle by the trigger guard.
“Please don’t,” Maggie said as she finally found her missing voice.
“Don’t what?”
“Kill yourself.”
Sam looked at her with the last shred of sadness in his eyes.
“Wasn’t planning on it,” he said, then added after gaining a modicum of composure, “but for the sake of argument, give me one good reason why I shouldn’t.”
“Me,” Maggie said.
“Okay, I’ll bite, why you?”
“It would ruin my vacation for one,” she said. “And I don’t want to watch you die.”
“Well, we can’t ruin your vacation.”
Sometimes Sam and his sense of humor was poorly timed.
“Please don’t.”
Like now, “Don’t worry, it’s not loaded.”
And here too, “I’d probably miss anyway. I’m a lousy shot.
She didn’t laugh.
He let the gun fall to the sofa.
“Sorry I scared you.”
He took a step forward.
Maggie took a step back.
And felt a stab of pain in the bottom of her foot.
“Don’t move,” Sam said.
Maggie looked down and saw blood.
“I stepped on a piece of glass,” and winced.
She was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.
“Let me take a look at that,” he said and moved toward the door. “Are you okay?”
Sam stepped outside with her.
“Careful,” he said. “There’s glass everywhere.”
“I’m so sorry, I’ll clean it up.”
“That’s nonsense,” Sam said, “You’re bleeding.”
“I’ll be all right really.”
She studied the intense glint in his eyes, an intensity many found intimidating. Deep, gouged out creases, smile lines wrinkled in a constant bemused smirk.
He wore a cream cotton shirt with the sleeves cuffed once over, a pair of khaki green shorts and Topsiders with no socks. The sun and middle age had bled almost all the color from his hand-combed hair that allowed a few stray locks to fall over his forehead.
Sam was tall, more than a full head taller than she and was stockier across the chest than her husband. His complexion was rugged and shadowed with a two-day stubble of beard, like chiseled stone – craggy was the word that came to mind. It glowed with the golden brown tone of a summer spent on the beach.
He was handsome, Maggie thought, in his own way, comfortable, like a favorite old sweater.
Sam slipped her arm over his shoulder and she was aware of his presence pressing against her side. The scent of wood smoke coming off his shirt, mingling with the morning’s coffee on his breath, and something else, hickory-smoked bacon, and him, the whole mix was nearly intoxicating. It was as if he could read every thought flashing through her head.
Yet his smile was a secret, and he wasn’t sharing.
“Come inside,” he said.
A spark flashed with the firmness of his touch and Maggie’s knees weakened.<
br />
A hot surge of embarrassment flushed her cheeks as she obediently followed, stepping gingerly, but suddenly angry with herself.
The porch suddenly pitched like a storm-tossed ship at sea.
Star bursts flashed before her eyes.
He’s not that good looking.
Come on, Maggie.
This is ridiculous.
You’re swooning?
There was something different about Sam and it nagged at her, leaving her wanting to find out more.
But her thoughts, like her next breath would not come.
“You’re old,” Maggie said in a far-away voice. “And you’re not that handsome.”
Still, Maggie took one look at Sam’s sun-weathered neck and promptly fainted.
Like a china doll, Sam thought as the woman collapsed in his arms.
So fragile.
So tiny.
Pale as a ghost.
Like fine porcelain.
And damn, she’s bleeding.
Sam scooped her up in his arms and carried her to the sofa. He grabbed a wet washcloth and a tray of ice from the kitchen.
Truth be known, he never handled situations like these well.
He didn’t mean any emergency requiring the rendering of First Aid, but the occasional instance requiring intimate contact with women.
Take having one faint in your goddamned arms, for instance.
I come apart at the seams, and God help me if they start crying.
I turn to putty and get out my checkbook.
Sam washed her face with the cold washcloth, cracked the ice tray, and rubbed a pair of ice cubes about the base of her neck.
She groaned, a low moan emanating from the back of her throat. Color returned to her cheeks and her eyes fluttered open.
She blinked away the dregs of unconsciousness and blew a deep sigh through pursed lips Sam imagined tasting like cherries.
I want to kiss you.
“Easy now, take it slow,” he said instead as she tried to sit up, “There’s no need to rush.”
Sam also said this as much for own benefit as hers.