by JoAnn Ross
That accusation was tinged with enough acid to peel paint off the walls. “Bull’s-eye,” he said.
She glanced out the window again. As a car rolled up to the curb, she picked up her bag. “As I said, she’s next door. The house with the rocker and mums on the porch. The neighbor’s name is Jami Young. She’s expecting you. I also boxed up your things when I left our California apartment. They’re in the garage.”
With that she left the room. And the house.
Pushing himself to his feet, Mac followed, standing in the doorway, watching as the driver climbed out of the car, took the bag from her, and put it in the trunk.
Once, after he’d joined the Air Force, because she’d kept pouring wine during an hours-long argument, Kayla had taken a cab to a local hotel, where she’d spent the night cooling down.
But the black BMW parked in front of the house was no yellow cab.
And the guy wearing the gray sweater, black slacks, and what were probably Italian tasseled loafers sure as hell didn’t look like any taxi driver Mac had ever seen.
She climbed into the passenger seat without looking back.
Mac watched the car until it turned the corner and disappeared from sight.
Leaving him all alone. And wondering what the hell he was supposed to do next.
4
It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.
Radio had always been one of the few things he and Kayla had in common. She had, as she’d told him many times, fallen in love with the guy on the radio. The guy he’d wanted to be, ever since his days as a kid growing up in Portland, Oregon, when he would lie in bed in the dark, listening through the static and fades of all those far-flung radio stations riding the nighttime airways.
It didn’t matter whether the station was rock, country, disco, or R&B. Even, on occasion, pop, which he’d mostly thought of as “girlie music.” It was the personalities of the guys spinning the records that fascinated him. They were as much a part of the show as the music they played, and they seemed to be having fun. What was most amazing was that they all seemed to be talking directly to him as if they knew him personally.
All of the men Mac knew as a child had real grown-up jobs. His father had been a fighter pilot. His adoptive father, Boyd Buchanan (whose own father had been a fisherman), was a doctor. The guy across the street went to work every day in a fire-engine-red pickup to build houses, one next-door neighbor sold insurance, and the guy who lived on the other side, the father of Mac’s best friend, taught history at the University of Portland.
All of them were so damn serious about their work. Which was a huge contrast to the excitement he heard from the radio guys. Whether they were talking about the record they’d just played, reading a commercial touting a local bank or car dealership, or just talking about cars, or sports, or what they’d done that weekend, you could tell they were having a high old time.
By the time he was fourteen, the hook had been set. Mac had decided that he wanted to be one of those guys on the radio, to reach thousands of listeners who would hang on his every word, who’d laugh at his jokes, all while probably being paid, like, a million dollars a year.
And they weren’t just on the air. They made personal appearances, too, where they were treated like rock stars. Whenever he showed up at these occasions, it did not escape Mac’s notice that deejays were really, really popular with girls.
When he was fifteen, he built a ham radio and spent hours listening to all the conversations between people in distant places. Growing even more convinced that radio could form bonds between people only cemented his determination to have a career on the air.
After two years at Oregon State University’s KBVR station, impatient to get started with his life, he dropped out of college and landed his first professional job, at a country station in Alturas, a town with a population of less than three thousand near the California-Oregon border. He didn’t make enough to live on, but it didn’t take him long to figure out how to game the system.
When the volunteer firefighters wanted him to mention their Friday fish fry fund-raiser on the air, he suggested they bring some by the station, so he could tell everyone in broadcast range how hot-damn delicious the fish was. And sure enough, the firemen showed up with a platter of beer-batter-dipped fillets, which were as good as advertised.
After glowing mentions for three days, people arrived in droves at the firehouse. Not only was it a good deal for him, since he didn’t have to buy dinner; it was beneficial to the community and only drew in more listeners.
Which made advertisers happy.
Which, in turn, made management happy.
And got him a raise.
Not a huge one. But, hey, every bit helped.
Having a pancake breakfast to raise money for new bleachers for the school’s gym? Bring some pancakes and fried eggs by and he’d fill that gym with pancake-buying fans.
Win/win.
Unlike most deejays, Mac was never fired from a job, but he did swiftly jump from station to station in bigger and bigger markets, until that memorable day while he was in Fresno, when the clouds parted, angels sang hosannas, and damned if he wasn’t offered a gig that landed him in sun-drenched, California-beach-bunny clover at San Diego’s KSUN.
He’d achieved a career beyond his wildest boyhood dreams, and been given more freedom than he probably should’ve been allowed—playing music, making jokes, staging stupid contests, talking about pretty much whatever he wanted to. The days of begging for food on the air were in his rearview mirror.
Like the billboard with his grinning face on it towering over the freeway near Balboa Park, Mac was living larger than large: bantering with listeners on the radio during morning commutes, making public appearances in the afternoon, partying at beach bars late into the night, living on too little sleep and too many of the Advils he ate like jelly beans for the inevitable morning-after hangovers.
Fortunately, once that red control light went on and he was on the air, despite the pounding head and roiling stomach that were the result of living too large, Mac easily slid into his Radio Guy persona, and there was never a hint of complaint from the management guys.
By the time Kayla had arrived on the scene, he was growing tired of burning the candle at both ends. A former Miss San Diego whose title had won her a job as entertainment reporter for San Diego News in the Morning, she’d appeared at a fund-raising gig he was doing for Wounded Warriors at the Naval Medical Center.
She’d let him know from the moment they were introduced that she was attracted. Which wasn’t that unusual. In his early days on the radio, he’d viewed his groupie fans as a perk of the job. Like a tasty buffet—and he’d certainly sampled his share of delights.
It had never made sense to get into a relationship when he knew he’d be moving on to the next station. The next town.
But in San Diego his career was finally exactly where he wanted it to be. So when the stunning beauty queen, who’d warned him up front that she wasn’t into one-night stands, invited him back to her apartment at the end of the fund-raiser, Mac couldn’t think of a single reason why he shouldn’t move on to the next stage of his life.
And now, it seemed, he was moving on again.
He also realized that he was clueless about how to be a single father to a five-year-old girl.
Who was waiting next door for him.
Reminding himself that having survived a suicide bombing, he could certainly handle this situation, Mac took a deep breath, left the house, and walked across the front lawn to retrieve his daughter.
5
Jami Young was a pretty woman in her late twenties with brunette hair pulled into a side ponytail. She was wearing jeans and a University of Colorado sweatshirt, and holding a toddler on one hip. Both her smile and her eyes, as she invited him into the house, held hints of the sadness and pity she felt toward him, whi
ch did nothing to boost Mac’s mood.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “About what happened to you. And . . .”
She shook her head. “Well, you know.”
“I think that’s going to take some time to sink in,” he admitted. “But right now, I’m here for Emma.”
“Of course. She’s in the backyard playing with Riley. He’s our beagle. She loves dogs, by the way.”
“Thanks. That’s good to know.”
She paused, as if trying to decide how much of what Kayla had shared to tell him. When she put a hand on his arm, Mac braced for yet more bad news.
“She doesn’t know her mother’s leaving.”
“What?”
The woman sighed, and shifted the now wiggling toddler to her other hip. “Kayla said she wanted to avoid the drama of a good-bye. But she plans to call Emma from the road to tell her good night.”
“That’s big of her.” An icy anger flowed over the initial flare of heat.
His daughter was standing with her back to him, throwing a blue ball to the brown and white beagle, who would race to it, baying with joy, then return to drop it at her pink-sneaker-clad feet.
“Good boy, Riley!”
As she picked up the ball and was about to throw it again, Mac said, “You’ve got a great arm! Are you, by any chance, a famous baseball player?”
She spun around, dropping the ball. “Daddy!” Lights on her shoes flashed as she raced toward him across the leaf-scattered lawn, propelling herself through the air and into his outstretched arms.
She flung her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist, and held on tight. “You’re home!”
“I’m home,” he said, not wanting to get into the fact that he had no idea where home might turn out to be. He smoothed his hand down her flyaway blond hair. “For good.”
“Really?” She leaned her head back to look up into his face. Her blue eyes, as bright as sunlight on an alpine lake, searched his face. “Truly?”
“Really, truly.”
“Cross your heart and hope to die?”
“Cross my heart.” Holding her with one arm, he managed to make a cross on his chest between them with the other.
“Yay!” She wiggled free and began running toward the house. “Let’s go tell Mommy!”
“Good luck,” Jami said as the toddler, who she’d put down on the grass, headed toward the beagle, who was ripping the ball apart with enthusiasm. “If you need backup, or anything, just give me a call.”
She pulled a sticky note with her phone number on it out of her jeans pocket.
“Thanks. We’ll be fine.”
Mac hoped. But he took the paper anyway, because if there was one thing years in war zones had taught him, it was that it was always good to have backup.
He caught up with Emma just as she reached the front porch. “There’s something I need to tell you,” he said, scooping her off her feet again. “About Mommy . . . She just had to go away. On a trip.”
“But she didn’t tell me.” Tears welled up in those lake blue eyes and her rosebud lips began to tremble.
Terrific.
“She needed to leave right away, but she figured it would be okay, because then we’d have time to ourselves after me being away for so long.”
“It was a long time,” she agreed as he carried her into the house. “What happened to your head?”
“I got dinged up a bit.”
“When you got blowed up?”
Although he’d received a handmade get-well card from Emma, Mac realized he had no idea what Kayla had told her about the attack. Which made this conversational minefield even more dangerous.
“It wasn’t that bad. And I’m fine now.”
“I heard Mommy telling Mrs. Young that you could’ve died.”
“Nah,” he lied. “That wasn’t going to happen. Because I had you to come home to. And your special card made me get better a lot faster.”
“I’m glad. . . . When is Mommy coming back?”
“I don’t exactly know.”
It wasn’t the whole truth, nothing but the truth, but given their past, there was an outside chance that Kayla might change her mind. Maybe not for him, but for their daughter. Surely he could hope for at least that much from her?
“Meanwhile, what would you say about the two of us going out for dinner?”
Mac had no idea what Kayla had left in the refrigerator and pantry, and since if it wasn’t an MRE, bacon, burgers, or hot dogs, he was pretty much clueless, going out seemed like the answer to his most immediate problem: feeding his daughter. “Anywhere you want.”
Her mood turned on a dime.
“Yay! I want pizza!”
Thirty minutes later, surrounded by ringing, flashing arcade games, animatronic singing figures led by a guitar-playing mouse, amusement rides, climbing equipment, tubes and slides, and hordes of kids who appeared to have morphed into perpetual-motion machines with high-pitched voices that the military would probably love to be able to duplicate in order to puncture enemies’ eardrums, Mac realized that this parenting gig could make his tour in Afghanistan seem like a cakewalk.
But he couldn’t deny, as he wiped a bit of tomato sauce off his daughter’s face, that her dazzling smile was worth it. He also suspected that the frantic activity helped keep her mind off her mother’s “trip.”
He’d worried about more questions about Kayla’s departure, but fortunately Emma was wiped out by the time they returned home with the booty he’d helped her win from the arcade games. Whatever other lack of maternal behavior he might be putting on his wife, he couldn’t deny that their daughter was well behaved.
She didn’t argue about going to bed in a pink room that looked as if a bottle of Pepto-Bismol had exploded all over the walls, other than letting him know that “Mommy and I always read a story together.”
After dutifully brushing her teeth with a Disney Cinderella toothbrush, she changed into a nightgown featuring a red-haired archer who was, Emma informed him, Scottish, and the “bravest princess of all!”
Apparently Jami Young hadn’t been kidding when she’d told him that his daughter loved dogs. Emma’s white spindle bed was covered with plush toy dogs of every size and color.
After making space, he lay down beside her and listened as she read aloud the story of Ferdinand, a fierce-looking but gentle bull that would rather just sit in the meadow and smell the flowers than fight. Which had Mac wondering what would happen if some government declared a war and no one showed up.
“And he is very happy,” Emma recited the last line. Having proven a failure in the bull ring, Ferdinand had been sent back to sit beneath his cork tree and smell his flowers.
“So is Daddy.” Mac dropped a kiss on her head.
“Me, too.” She sighed, then wiggled beneath the Disney Princess coverlet, settling into a comfortable position as he put the book back on the shelf. “I’m sooo happy you’re home. Will you be here when I wake up in the morning?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good.” Her eyes were already at half-mast. She was asleep before he’d turned off the light.
6
Two hours later, having given up on the idea of his wife calling, as she’d assured her neighbor she would, Mac was sitting in the dark with the radio tuned to a country station, working his way through a pricey bottle of single malt Scotch he’d found in a cupboard. Since Kayla had never liked the taste of hard liquor, he had to deduce the bottle belonged to BMW guy.
As Dustin Lynch sang plaintively about cowboys and angels, Mac wished he still smoked, as he had when he’d first started in the business, partly because all the other deejays did, so it seemed cool. If there was ever a night for whisky and cigarettes, this was it.
“And wouldn’t that be a friggin’ lame cliché,” he muttered. He took another hit of the
Scotch, enjoying the burn of it sliding down his throat like a velvet flame, and thinking back to that seemingly perfect first morning together.
Over a fluffy asparagus omelet, he and Kayla had shared family stories. He told her about his birth father, an Air Force pilot whose fighter jet had crashed into the Arizona desert when Mac was eleven. And how the doctor who’d later married his mother and adopted him had encouraged him to keep his hero father’s name.
Her father was career Navy, which meant she’d lived a gypsy existence growing up. Despite living in a city where you couldn’t throw a stick on the beach without hitting a sailor, she was firm about the fact that she would never, ever marry a military man.
Mac assured her he had no plans to run off to sea.
Having been an only child who’d always wished for a brother or sister, Mac wanted two kids. Maybe three.
An only child herself, Kayla had cheerfully agreed that three was a perfect number. Later, he would realize that she’d never disagreed with a single thing he’d ever said. At least before the marriage.
Their brief courtship led smoothly to the altar, and since they were both young and enjoying life, Mac had gone along with Kayla’s desire to spend a few years just playing before they got down to the serious business of parenting.
Then, two days before their second anniversary, he’d been working a remote radio gig at the San Diego County Fair when an Air Force recruiter had dropped by his broadcast booth, professed to be a fan, and invited him out for a beer after the show. Two beers later, persuaded by the argument that he’d be serving his country by bringing a sense of home to lonely troops stationed overseas, Mac had decided to join the flyboys.
When he’d gone home and announced his decision to Kayla, she’d hit the roof.
“I grew up in the damn Navy,” she’d shouted at him. “You knew I didn’t want to be a military wife!”