Almost A Family

by Marilyn Tracy

  “They wrote me letters—”

  “I know, but—”

  “And in them they described working off community service at the Almost Antiques and More.”

  Taylor frowned. “And...?”

  Steve’s face was devoid of expression. “You didn’t hear from Doris. Are they there now? I’ve already been to your place and couldn’t raise anyone.”

  Taylor pictured him walking up her front walk, turning the doorknob of a house that was never locked and calling for them. As he’d called her every night in her dreams.

  “Taylor...this is serious. Are they there now?”

  “Why?”

  “I’ll tell you later.”

  I’ll call you. I’m not leaving. And now, I’ll tell you later.

  “No, sir,” she said, and pushed away from the counter, no longer needing that support. “This time, we play this game by my rules. Full disclosure. Clearly defined terms. No vague hints that you’ll call me or bedtime promises about not leaving. If you have something to tell me, you tell me now.”

  Steve blinked at her words and Taylor realized how much she’d revealed in her angry outpouring. But she didn’t care. She was tired of feeling abandoned, sick at heart she’d allowed herself to believe so thoroughly in this man that she hadn’t listened to the barest modicum of reason. Not even when he’d tried warning her away.

  “I think Caldrerros is the name DuFraunt was trying to say when he was...when the boys found him. They misspelled his name so many times in their letters that I finally realized that to someone who didn’t speak any Spanish, the man’s name could sound like Cold Dray Horse.”

  Taylor’s breath hitched in her chest and her fingers felt curiously numb and slow as she raised them to her temple. It made a sick kind of sense. Jose Caldrerros had never asked them for community service before, not even to paint his storefront, though everyone else on the singleblock downtown district had availed themselves of the boys’ sporadic beautification projects.

  And she remembered someone at that impromptu party commenting on Jose’s absence. And she remembered the boys’ excitement at discovering a gun “just like the one Kurt Thompson found” at Jose’s store. And recalled how many questions he’d seemed to ask the boys about the incident behind Charlie Hampton’s barn.

  But for all this, and for the terror that welled up in her, Taylor couldn’t help one final question for Steve Kessler alone. “And that’s why you came back?”

  “Of course it is,” he said.

  Taylor didn’t wait for anything more. “I see.”

  “No—”

  “Yes, I do,” she said, rounding the customer counter and reaching for the wall phone. “I’ll call them and tell them to come right over.”

  “Taylor—”

  She held up a hand for his silence, already punching in the numbers.

  “Taylor—”

  Jose himself picked up the phone on the other end. She craned forward to peer at his building through Sammie Jo’s dusty window.

  “Jose? This is Taylor Smithton.” For a split second, she had visions of his having gagged and bound her three sons. She swallowed heavily. “I forgot I was supposed to take the boys to the doctor’s this afternoon. Would you mind sending them over to Sammie Jo’s?”

  Jose said something about them sorting out items in the back but that he would send them right over. “There’s nothing wrong with them, is there?” he asked.

  Taylor remembered how white their faces had been the afternoon they found the nearly dead guy, and how agonized Jason’s screams had been during his nightmare. And the questions he’d asked later about his father.

  “Oh, no,” she lied, hating the man who had brought murder back into her sons’ lives. “Just a regular checkup. Before school starts.” It nearly choked her to be pleasant to the man. But she didn’t dare raise any suspicions.

  She hung up the phone, her entire body trembling.

  Steve’s hands dropped to her shoulders. She shook herself free of his touch, though she felt it long after she put at least three feet and the customer counter between them.

  “No,” she said firmly.

  “Taylor...you have this wrong. I didn’t mean—”

  “Oh, Steve, don’t tell me what I have wrong,” she said tiredly. “I was just stupid, okay? I can live with that. I’ve lived with tougher things than falling for a man who doesn’t want me. Trust me on that one. I’ll survive.” She whirled to leave before he could see the tears leaping to her eyes. “Thanks for coming to tell me about the kids.”

  “Taylor, damn it...!”

  The tinkling bells on Aunt Sammie Jo’s front door drowned out the rest of his reply, but she wasn’t an inch through the door before his hand encircled her upper arm and yanked her back inside.

  “You don’t know a damned thing about anything,” he snapped, pulling her to him.

  “No?”

  He looked as if he literally might explode. His face was mere inches from hers and she thought, irrelevantly, that he hadn’t had much sleep since she saw him last. And she wanted to lift her hand to his brow and readjust that lock of soft brown hair that seemed to fall there just for her fingers to touch.

  He’d apparently abandoned his hat on Sammie Jo’s counter, for his other hand rose to take her other arm. “Don’t you get it, Taylor? Nothing about this was your fault. I tried telling you that after we kissed that first time. I’m a two-time loser. I’ve failed at marriage twice. I’m exactly the kind of sap that does fall in love after one kiss. Why do you think I practically came unglued when the kids said that? Why do you think I argued so vehemently against the idea? I mean, I picture the whole shooting match, kids, picket fences, dogs.... You think I was going to trust my instincts this time around? What instincts? I told myself I would rather lose you than go through that hell again!”

  It seemed as if everything cold inside her, everything that had been frozen for an entire week, softened then melted all at once. And yet, he hadn’t really given her anything with his impassioned outburst. He’d only half explained.

  Tears welled in her eyes, as if proof of her thawing.

  “Taylor, honey,” he said, “don’t cry...don’t you understand? I don’t want to lose you.”

  “You can’t lose what you threw away,” she murmured, knowing this was true, hating the part of herself that needed to say it.

  “Oh God, Taylor—”

  The front door burst open again, sending the cowbells flying up to meet the wall and jangle back down again.

  “Steve!”

  “Cool!”

  “Hey, Mom, Steve’s back!”

  “Is this why you called us?”

  “Why are you crying, Mom?”

  “Those are happy tears, doofus. Remember? In that movie?”

  “Oh, yeah.”

  “Jose asked us a whole bunch of questions about you, Steve.”

  “Yeah, just a few minutes ago even. We didn’t know you were back in town. We could of told him.”

  Taylor swiped at her eyes, having broken from Steve’s grip at the first jangle of Sammie Jo’s bells. She was struck by the expression on Steve’s face. Acceptance, annoyance, relief and a rather exasperated well of love for her sons.

  The back door opened and closed. Aunt Sammie Jo said from behind the customer counter, “I tried to head them off at the pass, but they weren’t having any of it.”

  “We don’t really have to go to the doctor’s, do we?”

  “Heck no, doofus. She was just tricking us about Steve.”

  “So, what are we going to do now, Steve?”

  Steve dropped hands on two of the towheaded boys grinning up at him and brought his knee up to jostle the third. “Well, I think we’re going to get the bad guy.”

  The three boys whooped and swamped him with a hug.

  And over the cacophony, Jonah told the group at large, “I told you. It is just like that movie. First he gets the bad guy, then he gets the mom.”

  W
hile Steve waited for Tom to show up, frustrated that he couldn’t continue his discussion with Taylor—only the single most important discussion of his entire life—he filled the boys in on Jose Caldrerros’s possible role in “their” case, and all three were inclined to believe it had been their perspicacity in misspelling that had given Steve the final clue to the possible identity of the killer.

  To his delight, they were much less concerned about the potential danger to themselves than the fact that Jose had been both friendly to them and generous in the tasks he assigned them—and paid them for their work, unlike everyone else in town. To their payment they assigned perfidious motives.

  “He was just trying to buy us off.”

  “Yeah, like a bribe or something.”

  “Or trying to make us feel debted to him, so he could ask us favors in the future.”

  “He’s a bad guy, doofus, not like a mafioso.”

  “Steve, a guy can be a bad guy and a mafioso, can’t he?”

  Taylor’s face was pale, Steve thought. She looked as if she hadn’t slept well in days. It wasn’t fear of confronting Jose Caldrerros that had robbed the color from her cheeks or added the faint shadows beneath her eyes. He knew that reason lay at his door.

  He’d done this to her. Her statement, You can’t lose what you threw away, haunted his every movement now, colored his vision.

  He’d been so busy running from his own instincts that he’d caused pain to the one woman he would have moved heaven and earth to have spared. And her sons? They, thankfully, were too young to understand that hearts could be permanently bruised, that walls could be erected that had no doors. So they had simply written him, asking him to come back.

  And yet, he realized, watching them, watching their mother nervously drumming her fingers on the customer counter, wasn’t he being far too simplistic, discounting what he already knew about them? They had been too young to suffer the loss of a parent and had survived that particular hell. They hadn’t been too young to understand what had happened, they’d been young enough to wish otherwise.

  And were willing to go ahead and work toward making their dreams come true.

  Steve heard a car door and straightened. But what held him perfectly rigid wasn’t the sound of Tom Adams’s rolling gait across the boardwalk leading to Sammie Jo’s store, it was the realization that he, Steve Kessler, Texas Ranger, was the boys’ dream.

  And that they—and their loving, beautiful mother—were his.

  Chapter 16

  Steve thought it was the hardest thing he’d ever done; to walk away from Taylor and out into the oppressively hot Almost afternoon. She’d called his name just before he closed the door, but when he turned back, she’d only looked lost, a cross between hopeful and abandoned.

  But she wasn’t abandoned, he thought. And if he had his way, she never would feel that way again. Maybe they hadn’t said all they needed to say. Maybe a lifetime wouldn’t take care of everything he wanted to say to her. But she’d let him know in her anger, in her hurt, that he’d been wrong to distrust his instincts.

  Everything about her was what he wanted in a woman. Everything.

  You can’t lose what you threw away.

  He’d only lifted a finger to tell her to hold that thought, that he’d be right back to finish their discussion. To tell her that he’d never thrown anything away in his life and wasn’t about to start with her.

  And he was smiling as he crossed the street to confront Jose Caldrerros, the connection they’d been looking for.

  Tom cleared his throat before they hit the far sidewalk.

  “Nervous?” Steve asked.

  Tom chuckled. “Nope. But someday you gotta tell me how you put this one together. We only stumbled on the Caldrerros angle after your Doris called to order me to be here.”

  “What angle?” Steve said, reaching into his jacket to release the holster strap on his gun.

  “That there’s a South American drug family with the same last name. We never put it together before.”

  Steve shot him a look. “Only just found this out, did you?”

  “Yeah, well, you know how it is, right hand doesn’t know what the left hand is doing. You didn’t know it then? So how did you stumble across it?”

  Steve grinned down at his old college roommate. “I didn’t. I just knew he was involved in the fancy dudes’ death. And I only found that out because Doug’s kids spell as badly as you do.”

  “Whose kids? They looked like yours back there.”

  Steve resisted an urge to glance back and wave, knowing they would all be looking out the window of Sammie Jo’s minimart. “Could be,” he said, and had the oddest feeling he was jinxing everything by this simple, if heartfelt, admission.

  Tom, who had spent some fifteen years chiding him for bad calls and worse choices, nodded and cuffed him on the arm. “About time, Ace. You’ve been in love with her since the first time you saw her. And I mean back in college.”

  “Are you going to knock on the door or do I have to?”

  “You’re taller. You be the target this time.”

  Taylor held her breath as she and her aunt and the three children pressed faces to the store’s dirt-encrusted front windows and peered through the tall, slanted reversed lettering.

  She watched as Steve accompanied Tom Adams across the street to Jose Caldrerros’s Almost Antiques and More. While the sight of the two men, as dissimilar in height and shape as day was from night, should have struck her as humorous, the only thought she had was that she and Steve hadn’t finished talking.

  And on the heels of that realization came the awareness that she never wanted to be finished talking with Steve. His biggest crime with her had been in leaving things unsaid, unresolved. How much better that than saying things that might have ended them once and for all?

  The boys had broken in before he’d been able to complete his sentence, a statement that began with Oh God, Taylor... What had he been about to say? What might that have resolved for her?

  She wanted to wrench Sammie Jo’s jangling door open to call after him that before the boys had burst in, she hadn’t meant her last words to him to sound so final, so conclusive.

  She’d even called his name out before he and Tom exited the store, and he’d turned. But she hadn’t recanted the words, she’d only looked at his expressive eyes, the face she’d once thought capable of masking every emotion. A myriad of longings had waved across his features at that moment, robbing her of speech, stealing any and all thoughts from her mind.

  “I’ll be right back,” he said, and then lifted a single finger in a gesture that was both a farewell and a promise.

  Steve and Tom, a law enforcement equivalent of Mutt and Jeff, strolled across the road cutting through Almost and ducked—at least Steve did—beneath the sagging portal over Almost Antiques and More. They nearly disappeared into the deep shadows of the doorway there.

  “Do you think Jose will put up a fight?” Jonah asked.

  “Doofus, what’s he gonna do against—”

  “How come they don’t call in a SWAT team or something?” Josh asked.

  Not taking her eyes from the shadowed porch, Taylor said, “We don’t know for certain that Jose really had anything to do with our mystery. This will be routine questioning only.”

  In dramatic contradiction to her words, a gunshot shattered the silence of the Almost heat-baked street. Two more shots followed in quick succession. The highpitched ringing sound lingered after the percussion faded.

  All five of the watchers, the boys, Sammie Jo and Taylor, jumped and shrank back from the window as if injured themselves.

  “Jeezly crow—”

  “Mo-om?”

  “Oh, merciful heavens,” Sammie Jo said, her hands finding Taylor’s shoulders and gripping painfully.

  “He’s all right,” Taylor murmured, gathering her sons to her, enfolding them in her arms as Steve had done with her on the night of Jason’s nightmare. She rocked them back and
forth, never once taking her eyes from the antique store. “Sh. He’s all right.”

  Martha Thompson stepped out onto her front porch and looked from the Antiques and More to Sammie Jo’s minimart and back. Cactus Jack came around from the back of the store and leaned against one of his gas pumps, shading his eyes against the glare of the western sun.

  It seemed hours before Tom Adams burst out through the store’s doorway and into the street. He held a portable cell phone to his ear and his previously immaculate white shirt was now blotched with blood.

  Taylor’s heart seemed to freeze in her chest.

  Tom looked at the minimart for a moment with obvious disquiet, drew a deep breath and seemed to force himself to cross the street. He held up a hand at Cactus Jack but continued on toward the store.

  “Wh-where’s Steve?”

  “He’s with Jose, right, Mom?”

  “Why does Agent Adams have blood on his shirt?”

  The cowbells pealed an inappropriately merry announcement when Tom Adams entered the store.

  Taylor looked up at him from her crouched position in front of the window. She couldn’t ask, couldn’t speak. She’d held her sons to comfort them only seconds before. Now they seemed to be holding her the same way.

  Tom said hurriedly, “He must have known something was up. Caldrerros, I mean. Probably my car. I dunno. He opened fire before we could get out five words. The ambulance is on the way. I already called them.”

  “Steve’s dead?” Jason squeaked, his fingers digging into Taylor’s arm.

  “No! No, he’s not dead. I felt a heartbeat. He was wearing his Kevlar vest. Thank God.” Tom felt his own, obviously vulnerable chest. “But he took it point blank. Minimum range. No range. Hell, the blast knocked him back five feet—”

  “I don’t think these boys need to hear every detail, young man,” Sammie Jo interjected tersely. “Just cut to the chase.”

  “Oh, right. Well. Anyway, he was...knocked cold.”

  “Mo-om?”

  “What about Jose?” Sammie Jo asked.

  “He’s down. I gotta get back over there,” Tom said urgently, and left the store to run back across the highway. They all heard him tell Cactus Jack that he’d rather no one came over to the Antiques and More.