A Man Without a Wife

by Beverly Bird

  Thank the Holy Ones that the Navajo didn’t hold with that old doctrine of servitude to the people who had saved you, she thought dismally.

  “I’m sorry,” she managed.

  “For what?” Cat came cautiously closer.

  “For snapping at you.”

  “You do that all the time. Why apologize now?”

  Because it’s over and I’m so alone.

  Sometime during the past three days it had occurred to her that her Toyota was still in Flagstaff, but Eddie Begay would have to go get that. Barbara Bingham would probably still insist upon that final conference with Dallas and Ricky, self-righteous saint that she was. But Dallas wouldn’t insist that she be there this time. All the loose ends could be tied up by someone else.

  It really was over. He had left her at the clinic just as she had told him to, and now there was nothing left. And it was easiest this way, it was best....

  “Ellen?” Cat said, watching her closely. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “God, I hate when you say that!” she snapped. She had one leg in her jeans and one leg out, and that really infuriated her. She kicked the one leg off as Catherine sat warily on the bed beside her.

  Before she knew she was going to do it, Ellen put her head on Cat’s shoulder and cried.

  * * *

  “Dad, this is foul. This is really foul.”

  Ricky was as angry as Dallas had ever seen him. He was sitting on the sofa, one of the pillows balled in his lap, and he punched one small fist into it ferociously. His black eyes sparked, like Ellen’s. His chin jutted mutinously. Like Ellen’s. Then he crossed his arms over his chest almost militantly. Like Ellen.

  Why hadn’t he ever noticed before? But he had. And until he had known the truth he had thought it was cute, a charming coincidence.

  “Just get your jacket,” he answered shortly. “We’re going to the Wythes’ house. They invited us for dinner.”

  “You go,” Ricky muttered. “I want to go to Albuquerque.”

  “Ricky, for God’s sake. I called, all right? I called the hospital. She’s not there. They were letting her out today.”

  “You’re yelling at me, Dad, and I didn’t do anything. I just want to go to Albuquerque.”

  “She’s not in Albuquerque!”

  “Well, then, wherever she is. Don’t you know where she lives?”

  “No.” Dallas went to the coat closet and grabbed his own jacket. It was overcast outside, and Flagstaff was only truly warm one day each year in July.

  The Res was almost always hot and steamy.

  “You were consolimating with her and you don’t even know where she lives?” Ricky demanded.

  “I wasn’t consolimating with her—consummating—and whatever the hell I was doing, it’s none of your business!”

  “Dad, you never talk to me like that. You’re blue.”

  Dallas knew beyond a doubt that he was going to lose it. He dug his fists into the fabric of his jacket, clenching them. “Ricky, go down to the car and wait for me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I said so. I’ll be there in a minute.”

  “You’re really mad, aren’t you?” He finally got off the sofa and skittered around him toward the coat closet, giving him a wide berth. That hurt. He’d never struck him in his life.

  Ricky grabbed his jacket and slid out through the door, then it opened again a heartbeat later and he stuck his head back in. “Are you going to call her? Is that why you want me to leave?”

  Dallas looked up very slowly from the bar where he was pouring himself a scotch. “I honest to God don’t know how to, Ricky. She doesn’t have a phone, and she wouldn’t be working. She’s just getting out of the hospital.”

  “She saved my life, Dad.”

  Dallas felt himself flinch, a reflex that tightened everything down to the very core of him. “I know,” he answered quietly.

  “She didn’t have to do that, Dad.”

  Yes, she did. She’s your mother. She couldn’t have done anything else.

  “She could have been seriously killed,” Ricky went on.

  “I know that, too.”

  “So it’s not right that we don’t take her flowers or something. You know, to say thank you. Even if you are mad at her.”

  “I’m not mad at her.”

  “Yes, you are. Cause if you weren’t mad, we’d go see her.”

  I don’t want to see her any more. If I don’t see her I’m going to go crazy. “Go downstairs.”

  “Well, I just thought maybe you should think about it.”

  “I am thinking about it. Now go.”

  Ricky left, and this time the door didn’t crack open again. Dallas drained his scotch in one long swallow.

  The only thing that made sense, his only responsible alternative, was to stay in Flagstaff. To keep their backsides firmly planted right here. It was the only thing that would work, he thought again. Because she was who she was, and even if she hadn’t deceived him, even if he felt he could ever trust her again, who she was made the situation too tangled, too damned strange.

  She was Ricky’s birth mother, for God’s sake. He couldn’t get involved with her.

  He was already involved with her. And it hurt like a physical ache.

  Slowly, scowling, he put down his glass and picked up Mary’s picture. “I’m sorry,” he muttered aloud. “Mary, I swear I don’t know how this happened. But I’m not going to let it get any worse.”

  She didn’t smile back at him this time. He thought he heard her sigh the way she used to do when she felt he was being especially dense. And stubborn.

  He remembered vaguely that she had always accused him of being stubborn. Just the way he had always accused Ellen of the same thing.

  Dallas swore quietly and put the picture down again. He placed it facedown on the bar.

  * * *

  A line of headlights came up the road to her trailer. Ellen felt overwhelmed and too tired to cope.

  She’d only been home for a few hours. It had taken half that long for word to spread that she had returned. There were more covered casseroles in the kitchen than she could eat in a lifetime. People were packed into her living room. Ryan—Cat and Jericho’s son—crawled busily between their ankles. The triplets were in her bedroom, trapped on her bed in the center of a protective bolstering of pillows.

  Her own son was gone.

  She hugged herself, staring out at the crowd. The ache was as bad as it had been the first time, she thought dully. No, it was worse. The first time it had been a hole in her heart, a vast, gnawing hole. This time something alive filled the emptiness, like an animal that was clawing and vicious and nasty.

  This time she had lost too much. This time she had lost both of them. She hadn’t loved Ricky’s father, not like this, but she loved Dallas and that made it better and worse, intolerable and worth it all, worth everything that had happened.

  She squeezed her eyes shut before she could cry again and felt someone approach her. She looked and saw Shadow.

  “Are you okay?”

  “Sure. Right as rain.”

  “Well, don’t let Cat see you looking like that. She’ll come running with another needle.”

  “And I’d clobber her.”

  “No, you wouldn’t. You’re definitely starting to warm up to her.”

  Ellen managed a thin smile. “Can you make them all go home?” she asked, waving a hand.

  Shadow looked helplessly around the living room. “I can try, but I don’t think it’ll work. You know how people around here get when something exciting is going on. And this...” She trailed off, shaking her head. “Ozzie is something that would have affected all of us. I mean, a wolfman for tribal-council president, for God’s sake! They’ve got to talk about it, Ellen, and they want to do it right at the heart of the action.”

  “The action is down at the ballot places.”

  Shadow shook her head. “Not really. The last I heard on the Res radio, it was
a landslide. I don’t think Ozzie’s gotten more than his mother’s vote.”

  Ellen tried hard to smile again. “Good.”

  Shadow started to leave, then she hesitated. “Are you sure you can’t go to him?”

  Ellen sighed raggedly. “I’m sure.”

  “But you love him.”

  She lifted one shoulder in a shrug, but Shadow saw a tremor go through her. “I have no business loving him. You had every right and reason to go after Mac. You never lied to him. But I did something...pretty wild, pretty rotten to Dallas.”

  Shadow sighed. There was that.

  Ellen gave a breathy, quiet laugh that hurt. “Who knows? Maybe someday he’ll forgive me. Maybe someday he’ll look me up again. All I can do is hope.”

  And she would, she thought. She would until the stars burned clear of the sky.

  * * *

  The first thing Dallas noticed when he turned onto the Wythes’ street was that her Toyota was gone. He wondered if he remembered exactly where they’d left it—his attention had been understandably diverted at the time. But he was sure it had been on this street, and it was nowhere to be seen now.

  Ricky was sullenly quiet. He hadn’t said a single word on the drive.

  They parked and went up the walk to the door and he noticed that the boy was still keeping a careful distance between them. Dallas was frustrated and appalled. He was getting the wild feeling that after everything they had been through together, he was going to lose his trust and respect over this...over a woman, over something Ricky was simply too young to comprehend. And there was no way in hell he could try to explain it to him.

  Nelson pulled open the door almost as soon as he knocked, then he scowled. “How’s the other guy look?”

  “Huh?” Dallas asked, confused.

  “He’s blue,” Ricky muttered, pushing past both of them into the front room. “And he won’t do anything about it.”

  The Wythe kids were playing with their own Nintendo games. Dallas’s heart spasmed when Ricky showed absolutely no interest. He planted himself on the sofa rather than on the floor among them and crossed his arms over his narrow chest again.

  What the hell was he supposed to do about this?

  He looked back to see Nelson staring past his shoulder, outside. “This invitation was to the three of you,” Nelson said.

  “There is no three of us,” Dallas snapped. “Are you going to offer me a drink or are you going to stand there sticking your nose into places where it can get bitten off?”

  Nelson closed the door slowly. “I think I’m going to offer you a drink, then give you a good, swift kick.”

  “None of this is any of your business.” Dallas followed him into the kitchen, accepting a scotch.

  “The hell it’s not. I guess I’ve been involved from the beginning.”

  Dallas went still. He felt his heart give a strange kick. “What do you mean?”

  “I did the legal work on the adoption.”

  His jaw dropped. “You know? You know who she is?”

  “It wouldn’t take Einstein to figure it out, friend.”

  “So why the hell didn’t I?”

  Nelson took a good swallow of his own drink and motioned him outside into the backyard where no one could hear them. He finally shrugged. “Maybe you were too close to it. Or maybe you just didn’t want to see. But Ricky looks like her, for one thing. He’s got her eyes.”

  “They’re Navajo. They’ve all got black eyes.”

  “They’re not all so passionate, so expressive, not that I’ve noticed.”

  Dallas felt sick.

  “And he’s got her mannerisms,” Nelson went on. “You know how he kind of slides a look at you out of the corner of his eye, especially when he’s done something wrong? I noticed her do that, too. And God knows he has that tendency to jump in before he thinks.”

  Yes, he supposed Ricky did, Dallas thought grimly. Between the two of them jumping, they had brought the whole Ozzie mess right down on everybody’s heads. Dallas figured he had pretty much been just an innocent bystander who’d ended up needing a new car.

  “Then there was the fact that there was no way the orphanage would have known that Mary died,” Nelson continued. “They just don’t keep running tabs on the kids they place, not once the adoptions are finalized. The manpower that would require is staggering. So after I thought about it a while, I realized that something didn’t smell right. Ricky shouldn’t have been part of that study unless someone wanted him to be for personal reasons. When I did the agreement on the visitations, I asked for a copy of the letter they sent you. I saw who signed it, then Ellen showed up here with you the day we were looking for Ricky and there wasn’t a doubt left in my mind.”

  Dallas grunted. “So I guess I’m not Einstein.”

  “And that,” Nelson said dryly, “is really the whole problem here, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Your male ego is so bruised right now you can’t see past it.”

  Dallas slammed his glass down on top of the barbecue. “She lied to me, Nelson.”

  “What was she supposed to do? Write to you and ask, ‘How is he? I just wanted to know?’”

  “That would have been preferable.”

  “It would have been illegal as hell for her to contact you that way.”

  “She did it anyway! She just did it covertly.”

  “So what?”

  “So what?” Dallas echoed incredulously. “How the hell can I trust her, knowing what she’s capable of? You should have heard her when we found the film! You should have heard her explaining to the forensics guy how she lost it. The story rolled right off her tongue, glib as you please.”

  “Thank God,” Nelson said dryly.

  “She could look God in the eye and tell a whopper,” he muttered. “Damn it, Nelson, what she did was wrong.”

  “Breaking the law because she loves her kid? Get off it, Dallas. Stealing a car isn’t going to get you past the pearly gates, either. You can just thank God that Dodge belonged to Nancy’s best friend.”

  “That was different and you know it.”

  Nelson shook his head. “What I know is that you’re blowing this all out of proportion. You’re getting all sanctimonious on me, throwing out a lot of excuses about why you can’t see her again. Okay, Dallas, she lied. She broke a few minor laws so she could find out how her kid was doing after all these years—and she did it in such a way that you probably would never have known the difference and couldn’t have been hurt by it. Then you two got something going and she was afraid to tell you the truth. But she did it when she had to, and then she saved his life. And what I see here is that if you didn’t love her, if you weren’t so scared out of your pants about loving her, then you’d maintain some sort of contact with her because of that. Under any other circumstances, you two would remain friends. You’d invite her to his birthday parties. You’d probably let her watch him grow up, albeit by a distance, with Ricky never really knowing who she was. Because you’d feel you owed her something.”

  Dallas opened his mouth to argue.

  “I know you, friend. I’ve known you for eighteen long years, and I know how you are. You’re so damned honorable sometimes it gags me.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You’re not pushing her away because of who she is or what she did. You’re pushing her away because it means saying, ‘Adios, Mary, old girl. I’m willing to live again.’ And you can’t stand the guilt. Not to mention the fact that there’s some small part of you that’s terrified that if you fall in love, God or the fates or somebody or other is going to come and snatch it all away from you again. So sure, if you want to play it safe, then by all means get rid of Ellen now before it goes much further.”

  Dallas’s fist tightened.

  “Go on,” Nelson said. “Punch me. It’d be worth it if it would wake you up. Of course, going after her would mean swallowing all that righteous male pride.”

  “Nelson, yo
u’re crossing a line here,” Dallas warned quietly, but his heart was moving fast and hard. The scotch he’d had was burning somewhere midway between his throat and his gut.

  Nelson only shrugged. “So are you. At least I hope you are, because celibate, self-righteous friends are damned hard to live with.”

  Dallas swung. Nelson ducked and went back toward the house, shaking his head.

  Dallas looked down at his still-clenched fist for a long time before he trusted himself to follow him.

  Chapter 19

  Dallas told himself he was going to see her to get everybody off his back. It didn’t have anything to do with long nights that ached with silence after Ricky went to bed because suddenly alone was lonely and solitude was a void.

  He told himself he was doing it because in at least one respect, Nelson was right. If he had never touched her they would be friends now, somehow bound by everything that had happened. He would have allowed her into Ricky’s world as long as she kept a safe distance because it was the decent thing to do. He told himself he didn’t have to touch her again.

  He let Ricky help him pick out the flowers, but then he sent him to the Wythes’. Mrs. DiNardo would no longer babysit, not that he could blame her. That was why he sent him to Nelson and Nancy’s, not because if he was there, then Dallas didn’t necessarily have to go back to Flagstaff tonight.

  He told himself all this as he set out to find her, but he wasn’t sure he even believed it himself.

  This time he went straight to the Exxon. He closed his eyes and leaned back against the headrest of his new Explorer while he waited for Eddie Begay to make his way to the pump on Navajo time.

  This time Eddie recognized him immediately. “Hey, it’s you! The belagana hero.”

  Dallas opened one eye to look at him. “Will you trust me this time to go get cash?”

  Eddie eyed the vehicle and grinned. “No way. Nice wheels, man. I can’t guarantee they’ll be here when you get back. I’ve been wanting one of these for a long time.”

  “It’s okay. I brought cash. I’m through losing cars for awhile.”