Carry Me Home (Paradise, Idaho)

by Rosalind James

  “It’s that . . .” she began. “It’s that I don’t know where we are, and this isn’t what I planned, and you’re . . . not the kind of guy I’m used to. And now, bam, it happened, and then Jolie . . . I like you so much, though, even so, even knowing all that, and that’s making me stupid. I can feel it making me stupid right now, just looking at you. How I’m not making any sense, and you’re looking at me like I’m . . . nuts.”

  “No,” he said. “I’m not. Go on.”

  “If I go upstairs with you now, what am I doing?” she asked him, her face urgent, because she wasn’t casual. She was never casual. “What are we doing here? I don’t know, and it’s all so fast, and I didn’t even mean to do that, and I’m not sure you did, either. And everything that’s happened. I’m not sure I’m making good decisions right now.”

  He leaned back again, frowned down at his feet. “Wow. That was a whole lot.”

  “Yeah.” She laughed, although it didn’t sound too convincing to him. “Sorry.”

  “If I said it was more than that,” he said slowly, “if I said, yeah, I want it to be real. Would that be enough?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I hope so. But maybe not today. And I’m sorry.”

  He sighed. “In other words, no. It wouldn’t be enough.” He shoved off his stool. “Come on, then. I’ll give you a ride home. And,” he said, trying another smile on her, “I’ll ask you out again, too. You can bet on it. Even though you’ve messed me up bad already, every single time I’ve been with you. Even though I don’t have a clue what’s going on here, either.”

  She was smiling back. A little shaky, but a smile all the same. “I guess if I let you give me the orgasm of my life on your dining room table, I could go out with you. You think?”

  “I guess you could,” he said, the grin starting slow, then growing. “I won’t make you a bunch of promises we’re not ready for, and that you won’t believe anyway. But I’ll promise you this. If you think that was the orgasm of your life . . . I’m just getting warmed up here. You haven’t even seen my good stuff.”

  “Oh, yeah?” she asked, the teasing light back in her eyes. “You got good stuff?”

  “Darlin’,” he said, “I’ve got stuff that’ll rock your world. That’s a promise. And I can’t wait to show it to you.”

  “Thanks,” she said quietly when they’d gone back to his parents’ place, collected her things, and were in his truck again for the twenty-minute drive into town, Junior right there between them, hogging the middle. “For everything. I guess it hasn’t been an easy day for either of us.”

  “Nope,” he said. “I guess not. Although some parts were better than others.” He grinned at her. “Way better.”

  She smiled back, gave Junior’s head a rub. “Well, for me. Not so much for you.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I may have gotten a little charge out of it, too. But I’ll just put it out here—on the table, as it were—that you’ve got pretty much free rein to consider my body yours to use. Because it’s been a while, and tell you what, I’m ready to break that drought any old time.”

  “Really? You haven’t been . . .”

  “Not so much. Just like you haven’t been. I know that’s hard to believe, but divorce can be tough on a person. Found that one out the hard way.”

  “How long has it been since you split up?”

  “Since the divorce was final? Four big months. Since she left? A little over a year.” He laughed, although it didn’t come out quite right. “But who’s counting.”

  “Makes dating again tricky, huh? We’ve got a few strikes against us, seems to me.”

  “Or we’re two people who understand each other. You could think of it that way. And anyway, I’m past the rebound stage. Unfortunately.”

  She’d been looking out the window, but now she turned to look at him again. “Unfortunately?”

  “Well, yeah. Because when you’re on the rebound, you get to think you’re right and that she was wrong. Nice and simple. Of course, you’re also walking around like a great big gaping wound. That part wasn’t too good.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m sure it wasn’t.”

  “And unfortunately, like I said, I’m all the way to the point where I can see her side of the story now. Pretty damn uncomfortable. I’d sure rather go back to where I was right.”

  “What could her side of the story possibly be?” Zoe demanded. “I’m just fascinated.”

  “You really want to know?”

  “Hey. I shared all my naked truths with you. It’s the least you can do.”

  “Well not all your naked truths,” he reminded her. “Still got a few of those I’d like to see.”

  “Come on. Tell me. Please,” she added hastily. “If you want to. If it would help.”

  He slowed to twenty-five for the city limits, got stopped at a red light, but he didn’t mind this drive taking a while. She was so sweet, and she didn’t even know it.

  “I changed the rules,” he said. “She married one guy, and I turned into another guy.”

  “You mean, not a football player.”

  “I mean more than that. When I found out I couldn’t play anymore, when I finally faced the fact that I couldn’t rehab my way out of this one . . . Let’s say it was a dark time. I thought football was all I could do. Hell, I thought it was all I could be. It was who I was, and it always had been, at least that’s how it felt.”

  “But you must’ve known you could get injured. You must’ve gotten injured. Doesn’t that happen all the time?”

  “Sure. And you recover, and you come back. I didn’t prepare for that not working out. I thought of retirement as something that would happen later. You know, when I was thirty-three, thirty-four. Three or four big long years away. Nothing I had to plan for now. And then—” He hit the steering wheel with the flat of his palm. “Bam. It happened, just like that. My right shoulder, my throwing arm. Dislocated one too many times, and they couldn’t keep it from happening anymore. Couldn’t fix it enough. My career, who I was—it was all over. And I didn’t handle it well. But she stuck around anyway. Give her credit.”

  “What did you do? That wasn’t handling it well?”

  He was turning into her street now, pulling up outside her house. He shifted into neutral, but didn’t turn the car off. He let the motor and the heater run, sat there and thought a minute, and she waited.

  “Got mad,” he finally said. “Got quiet and angry and . . . sullen, I guess you’d call it. Or you could come right out and call it pouting. Drank too many beers. Stopped working out much. Stopped talking to Jolie. I sure wasn’t thinking about what she might be feeling, how it was for her.”

  “But that changed? Or did it?”

  “Yeah, it changed, but not in the way she wanted. That went on for a couple months, and then my dad came over for the weekend by himself for once, not with my mom. Told me flat-out that I needed to come on home and help him on the farm while I decided what to do. Quit sitting around on my butt feeling sorry for myself. I wasn’t too happy to hear that, I’ll tell you. He had a few words to say about that, too.”

  “Like what?”

  He turned and looked at her. “Well, as I recall, it was along the lines of, ‘Oh, you’ve got a football injury. You’ve hurt your passing arm, can’t keep making millions of dollars a year and being on TV. Well, suck it up, buttercup. I want you to sit here a second and think about some kid who joined up with the Marines because he didn’t see any other options. Who got blown up by an IED and came home, not with a bum shoulder. With no arm at all, or no legs. Those boys are out there learning to live again. They don’t have millions of dollars. They don’t have legs. And they’re out there learning to walk on those artificial limbs. They’re sucking it up and getting on with it. Go on the Internet sometime for something other than looking at what you don’t have. Go on there an
d think about what you’ve got. And then sit still for a minute and thank God. And then come home and get to work.’”

  “Wow,” she said blankly.

  “Yeah.” He laughed. “Did the trick, tell you that. My dad’s not one to dance around it. Tell you straight out. He sure told me. So I did what he said, came home, and Jolie came along for that, too.”

  “But it wasn’t just for a while,” she guessed. “Because you stayed.”

  “Yep. I stayed. My dad yanked my butt out of bed every morning at six no matter what I’d been doing the night before, or how late I’d been up doing it. Took me along to work like he always had, since I was about four. Spring work. Harvest,” he explained. “All those hours on the tractor, in the combine, you’ve got nothing to do but think. And I remembered that this was who I was before I was anything else. That I was the son of a farmer, and the grandson of one, and for all I know, the great-great-great-grandson of one, too. That this was in my blood before football ever got there.” He shook his head. “That’s the only reason anybody would farm in the first place. Hell of a way to make a living. You could always do something easier, because just about anything is easier.”

  “You could have been a mechanical engineer, seems to me,” she said.

  “Well, and in a way,” he said, “I am. I’m that, and a businessman, and a laborer, and a mechanic, and a whole lot of other things, too. I remembered all that. And all that anger, all that bitterness . . .” He spread out a palm, pushed it sideways. “I guess I drove it away, somewhere around the thousandth time up and down a hillside in that combine. And then, you know, my dad told me he wanted to retire. I realized I had something that was mine, after all. Something to believe in again. Luke didn’t want to farm, so I did what every single generation before me has done. Started paying off my brother and sister out of the proceeds—which takes about twenty years, by the way—so it would belong to me someday. So it would be mine.”

  “And Jolie?”

  “Yeah.” He sighed. “Jolie. I kind of left her out of that equation, didn’t I? That’s where she had a point. That’s where she was right. That’s her side of the story.”

  “Because she didn’t want that.”

  “She sure didn’t. She wasn’t a country girl, and she’d never pretended to be. She stuck around at first, thinking I was getting back on track. My old track. Her track. Begging me to move to California and take the color commentator job the network had offered me. It was a good job, too. A whole lot easier. And as you’ve pointed out, I can talk.”

  “But you didn’t want it.”

  “Nope. Didn’t want the job, and sure didn’t want to move to California. I lived in California. Stuck on the freeway every time you wanted to go anyplace, living in some gated-community ghetto with a bunch of other rich people? No, thanks. I told her that, and for a while, she didn’t believe me. And then she started getting mad. Started heading off to Seattle to be with her friends, because it was too boring here.” He gave a sharp laugh at that, because the pain and anger were still there after all when he thought about it. “Yeah. Her friends.”

  “And she had an affair.”

  “Yeah. That’s the part I could never get past, that I had such a hard time forgiving. I mean, if she’d had the guts just to say it. Just to leave me. It would still have been tough, but this was . . .”

  “Betrayal.”

  “Betrayal,” he agreed. “But after a long time and a whole lot of denial, I realized that she thought I’d betrayed her, too. I hadn’t kept up my end of the deal.”

  “That was the deal?” she said, sounding outraged for him. “I didn’t think that was the way the deal worked. I thought that was what the whole ‘for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse’ thing meant. And you weren’t even poorer, right? You weren’t even worse.”

  “Call it not richer. Not that I have anything to complain about. I invested, and anyway, I’ve got the farm. I could live just fine on the proceeds of that. It doesn’t do bad at all. That ground rent I told you about, that I pay Luke and Theresa? That’s a hundred grand apiece. Just the rent on a thousand acres.”

  “A hundred . . . thousand . . . dollars? You mean . . . extra? A year? Apiece?”

  “Yep,” he said. “It’s hard work, but it’s a good farm. A good living. But not private-jet money. Not vacation-house money.”

  “Not a house in Puerto Vallarta.”

  “Pretty good memory you’ve got there, Professor. Of course, she could buy it herself. She got half of everything I’d made since we got married, and we were married for three very good-earning years. But she doesn’t tend to look at it that way.”

  “I think you’re being way too charitable,” she said. “Way too understanding. I think you should be mad.”

  “Well,” he pointed out, “I tried that. It’s been more than a year now, remember? I tried the mad thing. I tried it hard. It didn’t exactly make me feel better. So after a while, I decided to try something else. Been doing all right with it, up until today. And I’ll do all right again. Just might take me a little while to remember that.”

  They’d been sitting in front of her house for more than fifteen minutes, and she seemed to realize it at last.

  “All right,” she said, sounding a little shaken. “All right. You’re not on the rebound.”

  “Nope. But ready to start up with somebody new, maybe? Yep. I’m that.”

  “Even if she’s got demons of her own?”

  “Hell, darlin’,” he said with a sigh, “we’ve all got demons. You’ve got demons. I’ve got demons. All God’s children got demons. I guess the only difference is, who’s running the show. You, or the demons.”

  FOOTPRINTS

  “Well,” she said, because she was too rattled by everything he’d shared to say much else. This wasn’t who she’d thought Cal was. For somebody who was supposed to be so smart, she wasn’t feeling very smart at all. There was so much more to him than she’d ever guessed, and it made her want him more than ever. “I guess I’d . . . better go in. Since Rochelle won’t be home until later on this afternoon, and I can’t go over there now.”

  She was babbling, because he already knew that. She’d already told him that she’d called Rochelle and made the plan.

  “I’ll come in with you,” he said. “Check it out.”

  He got out of the truck with her, and she was glad of it, and they walked around the side of the house together.

  “Nobody’s shoveled yet,” he said, his boots sinking into the drifted snow of the walk.

  “I think my landlords are out of town.”

  The significance of that hit her at the same time it did Cal. “So who,” she asked slowly, “made these?”

  Tracks through the snow. Barely indentations, because they were partially filled in. Because it had snowed through most of the night.

  “Junior!” Cal called sharply. “Come back.” The dog circled around, sat in the snow beside them, and Cal crouched to examine the faint marks. “Somebody walked this last night,” he said. “Come on. Let’s take a look.”

  They walked the rest of the way to her door, and the faint tracks continued on and around the walkway to the . . . Her heart gave a sickening thud. To the sliding-glass door at the back.

  “He thought it would be shoveled,” Cal said. “Or he didn’t think it mattered.”

  “Because even if I saw it, even if I figured it out,” Zoe said, “nobody would believe me.” She was shivering from more than the cold. He’d been here. He’d looked into her windows, checked for . . . checked for access. He’d been planning. She could swear she felt his presence, and the hair on the back of her neck was rising.

  It wasn’t just fear, though. It was anger. That he could wipe out all the closeness of the day, all the good things, just like that. Just by leaving his tracks in the snow.

  “I’m not going to let him
do this,” she said, her voice low. “I’m not going to let him take away my life like this, or anybody else’s life. It’s not fair. It’s not right.”

  “No,” Cal said, and there was nothing easygoing about his face now. “You’re cold. Let’s go in. He’s not inside,” he added, seeing the moment when the thought struck her. “Those tracks are from last night, and they go both ways. He came, he looked around, and he left.”

  She tried to laugh. “Sorry. I’m not much of an outdoorsman.”

  “Luckily,” he said, “I am.”

  Inside, he prowled around, Junior at his heels, testing locks, rattling windows. “We’ll go to the hardware store,” he told her. “Get a dowel to put in the runner of that sliding door, get some alarms for that and the front door. And I’ve got a couple other ideas, too. But I don’t think you should be here alone today.”

  “No.” She didn’t even want to sit down. “I’ll go work at my office,” she decided. “Can you give me a minute to change?”

  “I can do better than that. I’ll wait for you, and we’ll go out to lunch. Then the hardware store, get this place fixed up so at least you can come back and forth. Then Junior and I will take you on up to the university, walk you up to your office. As long as you get Rochelle to pick you up from there tonight, get a ride with her on Monday if your car’s not done, you’ll be all set. Well, mostly set,” he amended, “because I’m going to be giving you girls some self-defense instructions, too. And some home protection. I don’t really like the two of you being alone at her place. That’s not very secure, either. I’ll come by tomorrow and get you started with that.”

  “Whoa,” she said. “I mean, sounds good, but . . .”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bossy. Can’t help it. My mom says I came out like that. All right, let’s try this a new way. That’s my idea. How does it sound to you?”

  “Good,” she decided. “Great. How do you know what Rochelle’s place is like?” she asked distractedly. She could stay with Rochelle for a week or so max, because her friend’s apartment was just too small. What about after that? Maybe Rochelle wanted a roommate, a bigger place? Zoe would feel so much better if she weren’t alone. If there were a bigger place to rent, which wasn’t likely, not in the middle of the semester, and anyway, she had a lease, and she couldn’t afford double rent, that was for sure. So she was going to be coming back here alone. No choice. She hoped that Cal did have some ideas. She was going to need some ideas.