Rebel in a Small Town

by Kristina Knight

  “Of course she is, and of course she was. You think it’s a coincidence that a destructive girl like her befriends the sheriff’s son?”

  “Technically, I was Collin’s friend. She just tagged along with us.”

  “And led you all astray.”

  “We weren’t sheep. We knew exactly what we were doing, just like all the other teenagers in this town have known what they were doing. I love this place, but it isn’t the most interesting way to grow up. Sometimes we needed a little excitement.”

  “She painted another girl’s phone number on the water tower.”

  “Because that girl dumped Aiden in a very cruel way. That, incidentally, was Adam’s idea. Mara just figured out how to do it without getting caught. Well, until your cruiser made an unexpected patrol through the park.”

  “And I suppose the computer tricks were part of her planning for her future career as a security tech?”

  “Actually, yeah. We boys saw something similar on an old movie and couldn’t figure out how to do it. She figured it out.”

  “And now she needs a father for her child, and you’re just going to step right into that role?”

  “He’s my son, Dad. Your grandson.” Now, he was getting annoyed. James wadded the napkin in his hand. He wouldn’t raise his voice. He wouldn’t slam his hand against the table. He would be calm. Rational.

  He would win this debate with his father.

  “Says who?”

  “Says his mother. The timing fits. His baby picture is almost a replica of mine—”

  “You haven’t even met this kid yet?”

  “She’s been in town less than a week.”

  “But she’s had plenty of time to plan a grocery store heist and get you right back in her web.”

  James shook his head and stood. He put his hands on the table and leaned forward. “It’s my child, Dad, and you can be a grandfather or not, but you won’t talk about Mara like this. She made a few mistakes as a kid. We all did—”

  “She’s the only one who ran out of town ahead of the law.”

  That stopped James short. He knew from the start that the rumor mill almost immediately attached Mara’s name to the school bus incident—it was part of the reason she left so early for college—but he hadn’t known his father planned to arrest her.

  “She wasn’t responsible for that.”

  “Of course she was. Letting the air out of those bus tires was exactly a Mara Tyler thing to do, and she used you to do it.” Jonathan folded his arms across his chest as if that statement was the end of it.

  That stopped James for a moment. How much did his father know about that night? Although Jonathan was a straight-arrowed officer, to James’s knowledge, his father had also been a fair officer. If Jonathan knew he was in the bus garage that night, though... Could he have been part of the reason so much of the talk about that prank turned to Mara? Was that why, when she left town, the case went cold? So that, in accusing Mara Tyler, Jonathan could protect his own son?

  “Dad—” he began, but Jonathan cut him off.

  “That’s it, son. We’re going in circles. It’s time to end this.”

  They were nowhere near the end, and it was time for his father to stop treating James as if he had no idea how to make a decision. He’d done everything his parents wanted as a kid. Played football, got the grades, won a scholarship, went into law enforcement. “You know?”

  Jonathan turned his attention to the tablecloth, picking at something James couldn’t see on the fabric.

  “I did it voluntarily.”

  Jonathan shook his head. “You were a kid—”

  “I was eighteen, a year older than her. If I was a kid, what was she?” James paced to the end of the table and back.

  “Trouble.”

  “She had nothing to do with the tires, Dad. That was all me.”

  Jonathan slammed his fist against the table. “She had everything to do with it. Without her there would have been no water tower, no misconnected computers—”

  “All she wanted to do was leave the lights on to run down the batteries so the buses wouldn’t start. No buses, no bus routes, no school. Instead of the underclass students finishing their last week of classes after graduation, they’d be out early, along with the actual graduating.” James still couldn’t put into words exactly why he’d taken things further.

  Why it had seemed, standing in the dark parking lot with Mara, that if at that moment he didn’t do one thing that was absolutely against the rules, he would lose himself. He’d needed a single moment when he wasn’t the heir apparent to the Slippery Rock Sheriff’s Department, when he wasn’t on his way to college as the only one in their group who didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and didn’t skip school. He’d gone along with the other pranks without truly taking part, and when Levi, Collin, Adam and Aiden skipped their graduation night plans, he’d felt as if he was losing something. He’d wanted, once before he turned himself into the law-abiding citizen who would become sheriff, to be like every other teenager in the world.

  And so when Mara turned on the bus lights, he started letting the air out of the tires, not realizing the bus weight would ruin the tire rims. He’d deflated only three of those big tires when Mara stopped him and dragged him out of the parking lot. If she hadn’t, the school would have lost all fifteen of the buses instead of only two.

  “Well, that isn’t what she did, is it?”

  “Actually, the lights are exactly what she did. The tires were all on me.”

  Jonathan clenched his jaw. “No.”

  “Yes. I did it. I’m not proud of it, but I’m also not going to let you blame Mara for something she didn’t do. We both made mistakes when we were younger, but we’re adults now, and we have a baby, and we’re going to do whatever we have to do to make sure that child has a good life with two parents. If you’re on board with that, welcome to the party. If you aren’t, it’s really a shame.”

  James walked out of the house feeling as if a weight had been lifted from his shoulders. He loved his family, but what was going on between him and Mara was only between them.

  * * *

  A BELL TINKLED over the entrance of The Good Cuppa as Mara pushed open the door and stepped inside. At just after noon on Saturday morning, the coffee shop clientele was more a trickle than a bustle, but then, most people were playing on the lake by now or running whatever errands brought them into town. She’d been after good coffee. After searching Gran’s pantry shelves, she’d found a handful of items that she would like to have on hand. A bag of coffee beans and a grinder were two of those items because, after only a day at the orchard, she knew ground and canned coffee from the grocery store was not going to be enough. With the meat loaf and veggies prepped for dinner, she’d taken the quick trip into town.

  She surveyed the old bookshelf filled with whole bags of different roasts, finally deciding on a Brazilian blend. For all of Collin’s interest in farm-to-table foods, he hadn’t yet caught on that coffee in a can on a grocery store shelf was mildly flavored hot water rather than real coffee.

  At the counter, a petite teenager operated the cash register. She had dark hair and eyes, and her name tag read Copper.

  “I’ll have an iced caramel coffee, extra ice. And this, too,” she said, putting the bag of coffee on the counter.

  “Watch her,” said a man with a gravelly voice from behind her. “I hear she’s already been in trouble with the law.”

  Mara whirled, ready to take on whoever was there, but stopped short. The man sitting at the little table near the fireplace had filled out from high school. His shoulders seemed broader and the voice was definitely deeper, but those hazel eyes could only belong to a Buchanan. And there was only one Buchanan man under the age of thirty in town.

  “Adam,” she said, smiling. “I
thought you were still in the hospital.”

  “Yeah, well, I tortured the doctors and nurses enough that they kicked me out early.” He tapped his hands against the arms of the wheelchair. “I just didn’t get far before they threw me in one of these.”

  The barista passed Mara her cup. She took it and the bag of coffee, and went to Adam’s table in the corner. She put her arms around his shoulders and hugged him tightly.

  “It’s so good to see you.”

  He didn’t hug her back, and that was unlike Adam. He’d always been the touchy-feely type. It threw her off, and Mara stepped back.

  “Do you want to sit?” Mara shook her head. “I mean, you’re sitting, but do you want me to sit with you?”

  Adam smiled, but the grin didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Sure, I can spare a few minutes.”

  “I don’t want to keep you—”

  “It was a joke,” he said and shrugged. “A bad one. I don’t have anywhere to be, and a little company would be better than sitting here and staring at the walls while I wait for Jenny to finish up at Shanna’s Dress Shop. She’s helping her mom pick out a dress for the second marriage of one of the bridge ladies.”

  “Margery is still playing with the Tuesday night bridge ladies?”

  “And they’ve expanded to Sunday afternoons, Saturday mornings and Thursday afternoons.” Adam rolled his eyes, and for the first time seemed like the man she remembered. “How long are you in town?”

  “A few weeks, maybe. I’m working on the new security system at Mallard’s, and after that...” She shrugged. “We’ll see.”

  They fell silent. Mara watched as the clock on the wall counted off the slowest minute of her life. What could she say to Adam? She hadn’t seen him since high school. She knew he was injured but didn’t realize he was in a wheelchair. Did that mean he was paralyzed? Sheriff Calhoun used a wheelchair because of broken bones, but Adam didn’t appear to have a cast on either leg. Should she ask him about the chair? Talk as if it was normal? She settled for taking another drink of the iced coffee.

  “You can ask,” he said, and she thought she caught a bit of defiance in his voice.

  “I wasn’t sure you’d want to talk about it.”

  “It’s kind of the elephant in the room at this point—or it will be until I get out of the chair.”

  “How long are you in the chair? I mean, is it permanent?”

  “Depends on how long it takes to get the dog.”

  Mara felt as if she were missing something. “What does a dog have to do with paralysis?”

  “I’m not paralyzed. I have the chair because my hip and knee need surgery, but until they get my head figured out, I’m not a candidate.”

  “What’s wrong with your head?”

  “Traumatic brain injury. Bricks from the old Methodist church bell tower hit me during the tornado. I had three seizures in the hospital, so they tell me I’m now epileptic.” Adam circled his index fingers on the vinyl of his chair. “I’m on the wait list for a service dog. They supposedly detect abnormal brain activity like seizures so I can get to a safe place before I collapse. Once the dog gets here, and once the docs are confident in the medication regimen to control the seizures, I’ll have the surgeries on my leg and be out of the chair.”

  “I didn’t know,” Mara said, and the words felt woefully inadequate.

  “Could be worse. The bricks could have severed my spine instead of just putting me on the seizures list.”

  She reached across the table, taking his hand in hers. “I’m so sorry.”

  Adam nodded, and she thought it might have been the saddest nod she had ever seen. “Me, too.”

  The bell over the door tinkled again, and Mara saw James enter. He wore cargo shorts, a T-shirt and old Nikes. The uniform she’d seen him in earlier in the week made his shoulders appear wider and his hips leaner, but the casual clothes brought out the country boy in him. She’d always found that country boy to be irresistible.

  James pushed his aviator sunglasses on top of his head and looked around. He spotted her with Adam and frowned. Then he took a closer look, and Mara thought his face paled a bit. With his attention on their table, he crossed to the counter and placed his order—black coffee—and waited for the teen to pour it into a travel cup.

  “Still you and James, huh?” Adam asked, dragging her attention off the cop at the counter and back to the man at her table.

  “Still?” she asked, and hated the squeak in her voice.

  “We might have been idiot teenage boys, but we weren’t blind idiot teenage boys. Other than Collin, I think we all knew you and James were hung up on each other.”

  Mara blinked. “I wasn’t.” He’d been her friend back then. The attraction started later.

  “You turned down every guy in school.”

  “That doesn’t make me hung up on him,” she said, motioning toward James with her thumb.

  “It does when you spent all those date nights with James watching old movies or swimming at the lake.”

  Mara started to protest but then stopped. From the time the school accelerated her ahead a grade when she was fourteen, she had spent a lot of time with James and without the other guys. Collin hadn’t dated, but he’d spent most of his time working the orchard with Granddad. Adam and his brother, Aiden, had both had a string of girlfriends, as had Levi. It had seemed normal to spend time with James. But looking back on it now, after they’d spent three years having a long-distance, fling-style relationship, maybe that hadn’t been so normal.

  “We were just friends.” Then. And now they weren’t friends, but they were parents. Parents who didn’t have a future together, and one of whom couldn’t stop thinking about the other’s hot mouth. Probably just residual attraction from not sleeping together for two years; they’d always done the sleeping-together thing well. She had no doubt James had been practicing his skills on someone since Nashville, but she hadn’t. Two years was a long time to go with no sex. She sat a bit straighter in her chair when James turned toward them.

  Adam shrugged and, when James approached, made room for him at the small table.

  “When did they release you?” James asked.

  “Yesterday evening,” Adam said.

  James sat between them, and the hair on her arms prickled. He smelled good, like soap and sunshine, and although he sat a few inches from her, she swore she could feel his heat. He sipped his coffee and looked out the window. Adam fiddled with his empty mug. Mara watched the two of them, who always had so much to say to one another when they’d all been kids. Strain etched a line between James’s eyebrows. Adam bit his lower lip.

  “The Cardinals are playing like crap,” James said after a long moment.

  “Royals, too,” Adam replied.

  Neither mentioned the chair in which Adam sat. Mara knew she hadn’t handled the wheelchair thing well, but at least she had addressed it. Considering his father’s injuries, James should have been used to wheelchairs, albeit not seeing one of his best friends in one. It wasn’t as if mentioning the chair could cause James to need one, too.

  “At least the weather is hot and miserable,” Mara said sarcastically, hoping to pull them into more normal conversation.

  “Hottest summer on record, at least so far,” James agreed, still keeping his attention focused outside the coffee shop rather than at their table.

  “Need rain or the farmers won’t have a good harvest,” Adam added. Then he turned his attention to Mara. “How are the new trees at the orchard holding up under the heat?”

  Mara blinked. “Are you kidding me?”

  “What?” they said in unison.

  She focused her attention on Adam. “Not five minutes ago you told me it was the elephant in the room.”

  “What’s the elephant in the room?” James asked, as
if he had no idea what she was talking about. Mara didn’t buy that for a second, not when he was looking everywhere except at Adam.

  Before she could answer, a woman Mara didn’t recognize walked into the coffee shop. She had long, curly brown hair pulled back into a ponytail and wore lime-green capris and a white-and-green polka-dot tank top. She spotted their table and made a beeline in their direction.

  “Hey, James,” she said when she reached them. “Or is it Sheriff Calhoun already?”

  “Acting, only. Until the election,” he said, “Hey, Jenny.”

  She grasped the handles of Adam’s wheelchair. So this was Jenny. She was the perfect match for Adam, Mara thought, or at least the Adam she remembered. The boy she’d known was happy-go-lucky, and this woman’s open expression, her bouncy walk, and the way she spoke to James, was bubbly.

  “I’m Mara,” she said, reaching across the table to shake Jenny’s hand. “Mara Tyler.”

  “Oh, I know who you are,” she said with a smile that lit up her face. “I was a year behind you in school. Well, until you accelerated, and then it was two. We didn’t have any classes together, though.”

  Mara tried to place Jenny in the halls of Slippery Rock High but couldn’t. “I don’t remember.”

  “Why would you? You were busy with the Sailor Five,” she said, mentioning the nickname the local media used for James, Adam, Aiden, Collin and Levi. “The rest of us were just background noise.” But she didn’t sound angry or annoyed at that.

  “It was hard to keep them in line,” Mara joked.

  “I can imagine. This one,” she said, tapping Adam’s shoulder, “keeps me running 24/7. Even now.” She shot a look at the wheelchair, and a flicker of sadness showed on her face for a moment. “Speaking of, we’re supposed to be at your mother’s for lunch and still have to pick up the boys from swim practice. See you all later?” she asked, but she was already pulling the wheelchair away from the table.

  “I can manage,” Adam said, and his voice wasn’t bubbly or even moderately friendly. It was straight-up annoyed.