“Da … da … damn that Millie and her st … stu … stupid letter,” Lace stuttered, for about the thousandth time since her letter had ended up in the school paper.
“That’s why we’re here,” Natalie had said cheerfully as they entered the Cupid cave.
Natalie shone her flashlight over the stalagmite and they’d stood there in awe. Whether she wanted to admit it or not, it was an impressive sight.
The stalagmite was over seven feet tall and almost touched the ceiling of the cave. Cupid appeared to be running, one leg on the ground, the other bent at the knee, a quiver on his back. He held what looked enough like a half-cocked bow with an arrow strung in it that you didn’t even have to squint to see the resemblance. The top of Cupid’s head was graced by what looked like a three-pointed crown, three thin knobs of stone standing up less than an inch tall. Cupid’s face was just a green-orange blob of stone formed from years of steady dripping, but it was easy enough to see why the stalagmite had captured everyone’s imagination.
“Here.” Natalie held out a closed fist to Lace. “Open your hand.”
Lace put out a palm.
Natalie dumped a handful of black-eyed peas into it. “Stick those in your pocket.”
She did that too.
Natalie took their flashlights and propped them up so they would illuminate the stalagmite, passed a slingshot to Lace, and kept one for herself. “Load up.”
“You mean sh … sha … shoot Cupid.”
“I do.” Natalie put a pea in the leather pocket of the slingshot, pulled back on the stretch rubber, and let a pea fly. “Take that, Mary Alice for publishing Lace’s letter in the school paper!”
Lace had been a bit shocked. Cupid was such a town icon and Natalie was generally such a goody-goody, her actions seemed like sacrilege.
“Your turn,” Natalie said cheerfully.
She cast a glance over her shoulder. It wasn’t that she was afraid to let Cupid have it, but rather she feared that once she got started, she wouldn’t be able to stop.
Natalie nudged her in the ribs with her elbow. “Go on. You’ll feel better.”
“Here goes nothing,” she muttered, nestled the pea in the pocket, raised the slingshot to her face, closed one eye, Cupid in her sight, pulled back, and let go, and the pea did fly with a zing that rocketed around the cave and shook through Lace’s arms.
Cupid didn’t flinch.
“Mary Alice, you’re a bitch.” She loaded up another pea and sent it sailing. It hit Cupid’s bow, bounced up and hit him where an eye would be if he had one.
She shot another pea and another and another, calling out the names of the students who’d laughed and ridiculed her, faster and faster. She rummaged through her pocket, through the knots of humiliation and lint balls and loose change, searching for one last pea to fling. When she found it, hidden underneath a dime, she pinched it between her fingers, last shot, make it count.
“Take that, Millie Greenwood!” she hollered. The last syllable echoing throughout the cave—wood, wood, wood.
Then aiming right at Cupid’s head, she pulled back the leather strap and released the pea.
It catapulted, whizzed gracefully through the air, and slammed into the middle tine of Cupid’s crown, breaking it off with a brittle clink.
“Oh shit,” Natalie said.
Lace had never heard her curse.
Her cousin grabbed up the flashlights, tossed one to her. “Let’s get the hell out of here.”
Holding hands, they ran giggling for the entrance.
It was only when they were outside again that she realized, not once during the roll call of the black-eyed pea shootout, had she uttered a single stutter.
“Yo, daydreamer!” Zoey’s voice snapped her back to the present. She was dangling a letter in Lace’s face. “You want this or not?”
“Yes, sure, I’ll take it.” She snatched the letter away from Zoey, crumpled it in her fist.
“Lace?” Sandra asked. “Are you sure?”
Uh-oh. Damn, she should have been listening. Lace shrugged. “Sure, why wouldn’t I be?”
“It’s a letter about …” Junie Mae trailed off.
Without even looking, Lace knew from the expression on everyone’s faces what the letter was about. “Go ahead, Junie Mae, you can say it.”
Junie Mae shook her head.
“Unrequited love,” Lace finished for her.
Junie Mae poked at her potato salad with a plastic fork.
“It was twelve years ago! You people can stop treating me with kid gloves. I got over the stutter and I got over Pierce Hollister. I was a dumb kid with a dumb crush. You guys are the ones who made a bigger deal of it than it was.” Blatant lie, but that was her story and she was sticking to it. Although she had eventually worked through her feelings and gotten them properly sorted out.
“We just don’t want to see you hurt.” Natalie’s eyes were gentle.
“So I got humiliated in front of the entire high school. I survived. Can anyone here say they’ve never been humiliated?”
“Got it,” Carol Ann said brusquely, and typed into her iPad. “I’ll mark you down to answer Hero Worshipper.”
They went on like that, divvying up the letters to be answered, until they got through the entire pile. Sandra got up to clear away the food. Natalie slipped the letters Delia said she would answer into her own purse. Zoey snatched up the last piece of chicken and headed for the door with a jaunty wave of her hand.
Carol Ann was zipping up her iPad in her briefcase when her phone dinged, signaling she had a text message. She glanced down at her cell. “Oh my goodness, what a surprise.”
“What is it?” Junie Mae asked, putting the lid back on the potato salad bowl.
“Melody is coming home for a visit.”
Melody was Carol Ann’s oldest child and only daughter. At twenty-eight, just eighteen months older than Lace, she was a big-wheel ad executive on Madison Avenue. Although Lace and Melody were the closest in age of Grandmother Rose’s four granddaughters, they were polar opposites in both looks and personality.
While Natalie and Zoey had tried to cheer Lace up following “the incident,” Melody had told her to suck it up and stop being a crybaby. She’d resented her cousin for years because of that blunt opinion. But now? She conceded that Melody’s advice had been spot-on.
“We should throw a party for her at the vineyard,” Mignon said.
Lace tuned out. Parties were not her thing. She shouldered her purse, murmured her good-bye, which no one paid much attention to, and slipped out the door. She’d just stepped out the front entrance again when she realized she’d left the letters she’d agreed to answer back in Aunt Delia’s room.
Venus frigging flytrap.
Sighing, she went into the hospital for the third time that day.
“Pierce Hollister fever.” The annoying candy striper grinned. “It’s going around and it looks like you’ve got it bad.”
Chapter 3
Corolla: the part of a flower that constitutes the inner whorl.
ABE Hollister’s appearance was shocking. His skin was pasty, his normally sharp eyes glassy. He’d always been a lanky man, but now he was so skinny that the gold band on his bony fourth finger looked like it would fly across the room if he suddenly waved his left hand. But lethargy had a strong hold on him. No sudden hand waving going on here. His frail body sank deep into the hard mattress.
Pierce stood in the doorway of his father’s hospital room, the hyper-edginess of intense sexual attraction that had overcome him in the elevator draining away.
His father wore a paper-thin hospital gown the color of misery. House shoes with worn-down heels were tucked underneath the foot of the bed. A metal walker parked beside the bed with the maroon robe Pierce had sent him for Father’s Day thrown over it. Dad lifted a weak hand to his stomach, pressed his lips together into a grimace.
Pierce’s throat constricted and his gut twisted. Ah damn, ah damn. This was not go
od. No easy solutions. No quick get things straightened out and get back to the gridiron. No magic wand.
The last time he’d seen his father had been five months earlier when Abe had come to visit him in the hospital in Dallas. In February, he had been the one in trouble. Now it was Dad. How could his father’s health have deteriorated so rapidly?
His brother, Malcolm, was seated in a chair beside their father’s bed, keyboarding on a laptop computer. He was small-boned and blond like their mother. He wore what every rancher’s son in Jeff Davis County wore, the same thing Pierce had on—Wranglers, Western-style shirt, cowboy boots. Except Malcolm’s boots were dusty and scraped, whereas Pierce’s were shiny, new, and cost ten times more.
Abe hacked a raspy harsh cough that shook his spine.
A dark word carved into Pierce’s brain, in a big, red neon glow of ugly.
CANCER.
Air hung in Pierce’s lung. He curled his hands into fists. Ah man, no, no. Not again. Cut and run! His father hadn’t seen him yet. The impulse to flee was mutinous. He just might have done it too, if Abe’s gaze hadn’t flicked toward the door.
Instantly, his father’s face brightened. “There he is! My number one son! C’mon in here, boy. Let me see you.”
“The big shot he remembers,” Malcolm muttered. “But the son who works side by side with him every day? Not so much.”
Alarmed, Pierce flung a glare at his brother. What did he mean by that crack? Was Dad’s memory going too?
Malcolm lifted one pale eyebrow, gave a tight, one-shouldered shrug.
His father opened his arms slowly, like a leggy sandhill crane unfurling his wings for flight.
To keep from limping, Pierce took his time crossing the room and then allowed his father to envelop him in a weak-muscled hug. “S’up, Dad?”
“Not a damn thing. I sure am glad to see you.” He sank back against the pillow, his arms drifting down to his sides. “But why aren’t you at practice getting ready for preseason? You boys are gonna win the Super Bowl this year, I just know it.”
“Broke my leg, Dad. Remember?” Pierce touched his left leg.
His father’s face clouded. “I don’t remember that.”
“Sure you remember Pierce’s Joe Theismann moment. They showed it on TV over and over and over.” Malcolm sounded damn cheerful about it.
“Joe Theismann. Yeah, yeah. Lawrence Taylor got him on the blitz.” Abe grimaced.
“When it comes to football, memory as big as an elephant’s balls.” Malcolm closed his laptop, stood up, and settled the computer in the seat he’d just vacated.
“Do you have to do that in front of Dad?” Pierce kept his voice low and his tone even.
“What? Speak the truth?”
“Be disrespectful.”
Malcolm’s mouth dipped in a sulk. “Don’t worry. He never listens to me anyway.”
“Theismann was never the same.” Abe shook his head woefully. “Taylor’s sack ruined his career.”
Pierce’s leg twinged.
“I rest my case.” Malcolm folded his arms over his chest.
“Do you need to take a walk?” Pierce asked.
“Matter of fact, I do. I’m going for a sandwich.” Malcolm headed for the door. Paused. “You want anything?”
Pierce raised a palm. “I’m good.”
“I want for Pierce to bring home that Super Bowl ring,” Abe sang out.
Pierce sucked in his breath. That’s all his father had ever wanted from him. It had started with the football Abe had given him for Christmas when he was five. Pierce never knew if he really did have an exceptional passing arm as the sportscasters claimed, or just an exaggerated need to please his old man.
Malcolm looked put out, grunted, and left the room.
Abe’s eyelids lowered and he was breathing shallow. Asleep already? Pierce took the seat Malcolm had been sitting in, settling the laptop on the window ledge.
His father’s eyes popped open. “How’s that throwin’ arm?”
“Good.”
“Good?” Abe glowered, grabbed the bedrail, and pulled himself upright. “Boy, good ain’t near good enough.”
“I know, Dad.”
“To have a prayer of making the junior varsity your arm has to be great.”
“Uh-huh.” Better than great.
“Better than great. You have to be excellent. Never forget, this is football in West Texas! Now, get back out there and practice your throwin’. Make me proud.”
“Yes, Dad.”
What was going on here? Now his father thought he was still in high school?
Pierce felt the same pang in his stomach that he’d felt when he’d heard the lecture the first five million times. Usually when it was well after dusk and his throwing arm was aching so hard that all the ibuprofen and mentholatum rub in the world couldn’t soothe it.
Abe’s eyes were bright, his breathing too quick and raspy. “You’re gonna be the next gawddamn Roger Staubach one day. Just as long as you don’t cloud your mind with girls.”
“You’re right.”
He shook a finger at Pierce. “No girls. You got that?”
“Dad, I already made it, remember,” he murmured wearily. “I played in the Super Bowl for the Dallas Cowboys.”
His father looked startled and for a moment, clarity flashed in his eyes, but then his expression turned wily. “Then lemme see that Super Bowl ring.”
“I don’t have a ring. We lost the game.”
His father dropped back against the mattress, waved a dismissive hand. “You’re no Roger Staubach.”
“Don’t I know it,” Pierce mumbled.
He sat there feeling like he was fourteen again and had seriously upset the old man when he didn’t make first-string quarterback his freshman year. Always a disappointment, no matter how hard he tried.
It was an old wound he tried not to pick. Abe was proud of him when he won, not simply because he’d done his best. Pierce gulped. He couldn’t be resentful. Abe’s constant pushing was what had gotten him to the top of the heap. In a way, he was glad his father thought he was still in high school, had forgotten he’d lost the Super Bowl, busted up his leg, and now his entire career hung in the balance.
Abe drifted off to sleep.
Malcolm returned sometime later with a brown paper bag smelling of garlic and marinara sauce. “Picked you up a meatball sub from Franny’s. I know it’s your favorite.”
“Thanks.”
“Think quick.” Malcolm threw the sack.
He stood up and with an easy one-armed catch, snagged the sandwich in midair, but his left knee crumpled and he stumbled against the bed.
“Huh?” His father jerked awake. “What is it?”
“Sorry, Dad,” he apologized.
“Is that a meatball sub from Franny’s?” Abe eyed the sack and perked up.
“Sure is.” Pierce reached for the controls and raised the head of the bed. He unwrapped the sandwich for his father.
“He won’t eat it,” Malcolm muttered, moving to the other side of the bed.
Sure enough, Abe took one bite and shook his head. “My stomach hurts.”
A lead anchor pressed against Pierce’s chest. He couldn’t believe the shape his father was in. He met his brother’s eyes. “Can I talk to you out in the hall?”
Pulse thumping hard, he turned and stalked out into the hall. Malcolm took his sweet time following him. While he waited, Pierce drummed his fingers against the wall.
A nurse was in the hallway pushing a medication cart from room to room. She did a double take and her eyes widened. She smiled briefly, glanced away, and then peeked back at him again. If he had a dime for every time a woman had glanced at him like that, he’d double his net worth.
Malcolm strolled into the corridor, his eyes unreadable.
Pierce swallowed, reached out, and clapped his brother on the back in a quick, stiff hug.
It took a good three seconds for Malcolm to lift his arms to touch him briefly
, and then step back.
“How long has he been like this?” Pierce lifted his cowboy hat, ran a hand through his hair.
“Been going on two months, but he’s steadily been getting worse. The memory lapses are fairly new. I’m scared it’s Alzheimer’s.”
“Christ, he’s only fifty-eight.”
“It’s been tough.”
“Why didn’t you call me before now?” He struggled to temper his tone. His brother bristled easily.
“You know how stubborn the old man is.” Malcolm jammed his hands into his front pocket, hunched his shoulders. “Besides, you had a lot on your plate.”
He stuck his cowboy hat back down on his head. “He’s my dad too. I had a right to know how bad his condition was.”
Malcolm’s jaw tightened and he ran a hand over his mouth. “If you called once in a while—”
Pierce took a step forward. “I’ve been recovering myself.”
Malcolm raised his chin, held his ground. Pierce was three inches taller and fifty pounds heavier. They stared at each other like two gunslingers on the streets of Dodge City.
“How’s your leg?” Malcolm asked through gritted teeth.
“Healing. I should be off the disabled list by October.” Okay, that was a best-case scenario, but he wasn’t going to tell his brother that.
“Good for you.” Malcolm’s upper lip curled in a sneer.
He sank his hands on his hips. “What do the doctors say about Dad?”
“Nothing yet. They’re still running tests.”
“We need to get him out of here. Send him to a specialist in El Paso or San Antonio.” Pierce tugged his cell phone from his pocket. “I’ll call and make the arrangements.”
Malcolm clamped a hand on his wrist.
Nostrils flaring, he narrowed his eyes, put flint in his voice. “What is it?”
“You can’t just waltz in here and start ordering people around.” This time, his brother was the one to take a step forward until their chests were almost touching.
Lori Wilde - [Cupid, Texas 02] Page 4