“I only meant you might be pushing yourself a little hard. You don’t strike me as a couch potato.”
“Yeah, actually, you’re right. And I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to snap.”
“Forget it.” She downed the rest of her drink. “It’s late, and it’s been a long day. I think I’ll call it a night.”
He nodded, disappointment hanging on him like a weight. He called for the tab and signed for it when the server came over, waving off Asia’s offer to pay for her half. Then he followed Asia out of the booth.
“I’ll walk you back.”
She looked up at him and smiled, her own apology in her eyes. “You don’t have to do that.”
“Waal, little missy,” he drawled in a bad approximation of John Wayne. “That there’s a mighty dark parking lot, and it’s a long way home by yourself.”
Asia laughed. “Never let it be said that a man can’t be a Yankee and a gentleman at the same time. Lead on, sir.”
Ethan gave her a little bow and held open the door. “My pleasure, ma’am. After you.”
The air still held the last of summer’s warmth and only an occasional breath of wind hinted at the chill of fall still to come. Ethan watched Asia as they walked the short distance to their rooms, watched the smooth glide of her hips and the stretch of her legs as she walked, the play of her shoulders under the sweater she wore. She walked like she owned the world, like she feared nothing. After all she’d been through, that simple demonstration of her courage made his heart swell with tenderness.
He shook his head. What the hell was wrong with him? Just because he’d formally ended their therapeutic relationship didn’t mean he could allow himself any other kind. Beyond a strictly platonic, friendly kind of thing. Right, his id answered slyly, and gave his cock a twitch, just to make the point.
They arrived at her room, and it was all he could do to keep from touching her. He couldn’t read her expression; the light was too uncertain. But it seemed as if her smile was tentative. Or sad.
He found himself without anything to say. He wanted only to kiss her.
She looked up at him. “Thanks for the drink.”
“Thanks for the massage.” His voice was a dry, breathless rasp.
Her breath caught; he heard it. “What time tomorrow?”
“We should probably get an early start. Say, breakfast at eight?” Not what he wanted to say.
“That works.” A pause. “See you then. Good night.”
“Good night.”
She turned and let herself into her room. He waited until the door was closed and locked before he walked away, so hard he hurt, and so lonely his beating heart echoed in his empty chest.
CHAPTER TEN
We were on the road by nine the next morning, Ethan’s battered BMW climbing gamely into the mountains, following the mist rising from the valleys. The hillsides were splashed with color—red and yellow and lingering green leaping to life as the sun rose higher to hit the trees on the slopes. It was beautiful. It was home.
We didn’t say much on the two-hour ride up to the little town where Ida Mickens lived. Ethan put some bluegrass on and we let Lester and Earl, Doc and the Carters do the talking. What they had to say seemed more profound anyway.
The mountains always made me feel this way—quiet, introspective, settled. Any apprehension I’d been feeling about my meeting with Ida melted into that sense of calm, and I just went with it for a while.
Ethan seemed to have his own preoccupations this morning. Whatever they were, he wasn’t inclined to share with me. At least he wasn’t favoring his leg. When I asked him about it, he said it felt fine. After the way he’d bristled last night, I wasn’t going to push him on it.
Around 11 o’clock we pulled into the tiny town of Clay Fork, a mountain metropolis boasting a post office, a Piggly Wiggly, a Dollar Store and a few houses. At the single intersection in town we took a left, crossed a shallow creek on a new concrete bridge and followed the narrowing road up the mountainside toward the Mickens home place.
“You sure we don’t need four-wheel drive up here?” Baby was struggling around the hairpin curves leading up the mountain.
Ethan grinned. “Welcome to West Virginia. How much further?”
I glanced down at the sheet he’d handed me at the start of the day’s outing. “Another half-mile? Past the Seventh-Day Adventist Church there’s a private road.”
Around the next bend we saw the church, and the road appeared through a gap in a barbed-wire fence enclosing pastures on either side. The car bounced and slid along the dirt road, Ethan wrestling the steering wheel to avoid potholes that would have swallowed the Beemer without a trace. The track rose through the open pastures to a little knoll, where a sturdy farmhouse sat surveying the folded mountains for miles around.
On the porch in a rocker sat Ida Mickens, waiting with a big smile on her face for us to rattle to a stop in her yard. Once we had, she got up and came down off the porch to greet us.
Ethan opened the window and hollered, “Hey, Ida,” before the car even stopped moving.
She was already teasing as Ethan opened the driver’s side door and got out. “Lord have mercy, son, you still driving that old car? I even got me a new Jeep last year.” She laughed at his shrug and wrapped her arms around him. “You look good, honey. Almost grown, I declare.” She pulled back from admiring him and turned to me. “This must be the girl you were telling me about.”
I had come around the car by then and stepped up with a smile to say hello. “Yes, ma’am. I’m Asia Burdette.”
She reached out to hook my arm with one of hers and took Ethan’s with the other. “Well, Asia, hit’s a pleasure to meet you. Just call me Ida. Y’all come on in and make yourselves to home.”
The sun was well up in the sky by this time and had warmed the air to comfortable sweater temperature, so we sat on the porch with some hot coffee and admired the view. The mountains rolled as far as vision could carry you. Behind, the shoulder of the mountain rose up to deflect the worst of wind and weather.
I exhaled. “It’s gorgeous here.”
“Mmm,” Ida agreed. “This land has been in my family since the 1700s, they reckon. Got records in the church going back to 1806. Used to be an old log cabin back in the woods there. Reckon the termites ate it all up by now, though.”
“Guess there wasn’t any coal under it, huh?” Ethan said.
Ida laughed. “Lucky for us. I still own this old farmhouse and the two pastures down there. My nieces and nephews still farm around here, too. Lot of folks sold out and went in the mines in my granddaddy’s time. Too late to turn back now.”
I was curious. “So you grew up in this house, Ida?”
“Born in the back bedroom in the middle of a snowstorm.” She grinned. “Went to school down the road with five grades in a room until it came time to ride the bus to the high school across the mountain. Married Billy Mickens the spring we graduated, and he went off to join the Army a week later. That was 1942.”
I thought about all she had seen and done in this world, right from this front porch, and fell silent with awe. We hadn’t even begun to talk about the “visions” she lived with, and I already admired this woman.
Ida looked at me, an awareness in her gray-green eyes that saw right through me. “What part of Tennessee you from, Asia?”
“I grew up near Cookeville.” Wondering how much Ethan had told her, I glanced in his direction.
“Oh, don’t worry, honey, he didn’t tell me a thing about you,” she said. “I’m just guessing from the way you talk you don’t come from up north like he does.”
“Well, we know he’s a Yankee, but we don’t hold that against him.”
Ethan just smiled and rocked.
Ida brought an end to light-heartedness with her next question. “Are you married, Asia? Got kids?”
The band of steel that I had almost forgotten existed tightened at once around my chest. Ethan straightened in his chair but said nothin
g. I took a breath. If I expected to get anything out of today, I had to be brave enough to open up.
“I was married.” I was surprised at how even my voice was. “I’m divorced now. My three kids died in a fire three years ago.”
Ida’s eyes widened in horror, and her hand went to her mouth. “Oh, my Lord Jesus, child. I’m so sorry.” She threw a look in Ethan’s direction. “I had no idea.”
I shook my head. “Of course you didn’t. I don’t tell many people. Ethan knows that.”
She nodded. “That’s an awful heavy thing for a soul to carry, Lord knows it is. My boy Charlie’s been gone thirty-eight years this June, and I still miss him. He was in Vietnam.”
Tears welled in my eyes, threatening to spill over onto my cheeks. I struggled for control and just barely managed to find enough manners to say, “I’m sorry.”
Ida saw that I needed a minute and rose from her rocker. “Well, children, I suspect dinner’s close to being done. I’ll just go and put the biscuits in the oven. If you need to use the outhouse, it’s around back.”
Ethan tilted his head back to grin at her. “Now, Ida, even I know you’ve had indoor plumbing for fifty years.”
She laughed. “Can’t fool you, huh, city boy? All right, throne room’s just inside.”
From the way Ida had cooked that day, you’d have thought Ethan was a long-lost son returned home to kith and kin. The tiny table in her sunny kitchen was laden with fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans, pinto beans, tomatoes, corn, squash, biscuits, gravy and three different kinds of homemade jam. Plus the apple butter, which Ethan made an absolute pig of himself over. Really made me wonder about that comment he’d made in the car the day before.
We ate and talked about things that didn’t matter so much until I couldn’t hold one more mouthful of food. I could barely move to help clear the table.
“Ida, I haven’t eaten like that since my grandmama passed on. And it’s a good thing, too, or I’d weigh three hundred pounds.”
“Well, you could stand to gain a little weight, darlin’, if you don’t mind me sayin’.” She gave me a look. “A man likes something he can hold on to.”
I snorted. “I always thought there was plenty of me to go around.”
Ethan smiled and ducked his head, fleeing for the safety of the porch. I glanced after him, feeling a little warm inside.
“Um-hm, that’s what I thought.” Ida nodded, up to her elbows in dishwater at the sink.
I picked up a towel and started to dry the glasses she placed in the drainer. “What?”
“You and Dr. Ethan.”
“Oh, no. It’s not like that,” I said, maybe a little too quickly. “He wouldn’t. I mean, he was my psychiatrist until a couple of weeks ago.”
She looked at me like I’d just grown another head. “You don’t seem crazy to me.”
“Are you sure?”
She went back to washing dishes. “Reckon that’s what you’re here to find out, isn’t it?”
Ida, like Rita, didn’t miss much. “Guess you’re right about that.”
“Well, let me tell you something, little girl.” She stopped washing and pinned me with a hard stare. “Doctor or no doctor, that boy’s got it bad for you. He hadn’t hardly taken his eyes off you since y’all got here.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” But a shiver ran down my spine.
“You don’t, huh?” She smiled as she returned to her dishes. “Maybe you’re thinking he’s still carrying a torch for that dead wife of his.”
My jaw dropped. I scooped it up as fast as I could, but she caught me, all right, and grinned. “I started in with Ethan not long after the accident, and I can tell you that woman left him a mess. But it wasn’t because she was any good for him. She was one them kind of women that rhymes with witch. He didn’t want to tell me much about it, but I found out anyway. I don’t read them detective books for nothin’.”
My heart was slamming against my ribcage. Why the hell was she telling me all this? And, God, why did I find the information so welcome?
Ida was reading my mind. “I’m telling you this for one reason, Asia Burdette. If you break Ethan’s heart, I’m gonna drive down off this mountain and come looking for you. Because there ain’t no sweeter man in this world than him. You understand me?”
Shaking, I took the next glass from the drainer and dried it, afraid to meet her eyes lest she see the hope in mine. “Yes, ma’am.”
The shadows had already started to lengthen across the grass in front of the farmhouse when Ethan opened his eyes. He stretched and sat up in the porch swing, turning an embarrassed smile in Ida’s direction.
“I’m sorry. I guess I fell asleep. What time is it?”
“Oh, I reckon around three.” She glanced up at the sun from the book in her lap—Elmore Leonard’s last novel in hardcover. “Don’t fret. I had me a nap, too. Big meal like that usually needs one.”
“Where’s Asia?”
Ida smiled. “Inside in the guest room. Once she saw you were out like a light, she took my suggestion.”
Ethan ran a hand through his hair and settled back into the swing, letting his gaze roam over the russet hills. He sighed, suddenly in no hurry to go anywhere, do anything.
“She’s a good girl, Ethan. Got a good heart.”
“Yes, she does.” He looked at the old woman, wondering what was on her mind.
“And she likes you. More than you know.”
“What?” He had the idea he was going to lose control of this conversation very quickly.
“Why haven’t you told her how you feel?”
“Ida . . .”
“Now, son, don’t go gettin’ on your high horse.” She laid her hand on his arm to forestall the leap to his feet he was considering. “I’m old enough to be your granny so I can say what I want to. Y’all are both way yonder too old and too hurt to be a-wasting time. She wants you. You want her. What are you waiting for? You better be asking her to marry you before she slips away. Believe me, son, chances like this don’t come along too often of a lifetime.”
Ethan stared at her, speechless. What in God’s name had led her to conclude there could be that kind of relationship between him and Asia? Married? They barely knew each other—and what they did know had come from a professional, not a personal, relationship.
“Ida, you have this all wrong.” He hardly knew where to begin to explain.
“Hey, y’all,” Asia said from the doorway. “What did I miss?”
Ida turned to her with an innocent smile. “Not a thing, honey. Come on out here and set a spell. I’ll make us some coffee.”
She went inside and Asia sat down next to Ethan on the swing. She smiled up at him, kicking his already accelerated heartbeat into overdrive.
“Hey, sleepyhead. Did you have a nice nap?”
He smiled. “Yeah. You?”
“I did. Seemed like the thing to do.”
His arm was draped over the back of the swing. He wanted to drop his hand down onto her neck, curl his fingers in her hair. He resisted the impulse.
“You ladies talk about anything special while I was out?”
Asia seemed to lose her composure for a second, but recovered quickly. “Not really. I wasn’t sure how to ask her about the visions. Guess that’s next on the agenda, huh?”
He nodded, then jumped up to hold the screen door open for Ida. She put the coffeepot and cups on a table in the corner of the porch, went back to the kitchen and brought out sugar, cream and sliced applesauce cake.
Asia laughed. “Lord, Ida, you act like we’re going to starve once we leave here.”
“Well, you ain’t leaving here hungry, that’s for certain.” She served them each a huge piece of cake. “If I didn’t have a big day at church tomorrow, I’d ask you to stay over tonight and I could really fatten you up.”
Ethan shook his head. “You’ve already done enough for us, Ida. We’ve got a long trip back in the morning, too.”
“W
ell, then, I reckon you come here to hear this story, so I might as well tell it,” Ida said, settling into her seat with a cup of coffee. “Ethan says you have one a lot like it, Asia, so maybe you’ll understand me when I say this is the Lord’s honest truth. Ain’t nothing of a lie about any of it. I been beat often enough for telling it, so if it was a lie I would have given it up before now.
“The first time I remember telling the tale I was ten years old, and I woke the house up screaming in the night. Mama and Daddy said it was a dream, but it was so real, I just knew I’d been somewhere else. I got a beating for talking back that morning. And the next day. And the next. Until I stopped talking about it. But the visions didn’t stop. They kept up every night for a while. Then it was just ever once in a while. Then not so often, but often enough that I was sure to remember.
“It got bad after Charlie died and again after Bill died. That’s when I went to see Dr. Ethan. The machine just seemed to bring back all the details. And that’s when I knew for sure.”
Asia touched her hand. “Knew what, Ida?”
“That what I’d seen was real.”
Asia met Ethan’s eyes, sending a cold ripple of apprehension down his back, before she looked back at Ida. “What had you seen?”
Ida shook her head. “A place like nothing on this earth. The sky was as green as that grass yonder and the sun was never yellow like ours is. It was white, like a neon light, so white it was nearly blue, and it burned like a diamond in that green sky.
“It was hot all the time there, like I reckon it must be in Africa, and the plants grew tall and thick, like some kind of jungle. But they wasn’t no plants like you’d ever seen before. I could swear they looked like giant ferns. Yes, ma’am, ferns as big as that oak tree there, and the colors—well, I can’t even describe the colors. Seems like we don’t even have colors like that in this world.”
Ida stopped talking and looked at Asia, waiting for her reaction. Ethan waited, too, wondering what Asia would say. Asia looked at him, and her feelings were there in her face for anyone to read—astonishment, relief, kinship.
Unchained Memory (The Interstellar Rescue Series Book 1) Page 13