by Cara Colter
“What my nephew needs most in his life is stability,” she warned him. When J.D. looked unimpressed with her pronouncement, she added, “I read it in a book.”
“Look, I can see you are one of those people who goes through life with an instruction manual, a complete set of world maps, a first aid kit, and a parachute, but sometimes it’s okay just to create a plan as you go along. Be spontaneous.”
Spontaneity didn’t sound safe at all. If he’d lived his whole life with Elana he wouldn’t be saying that.
“You need to know I am actively seeking a father for Jed,” she said. Then she closed her eyes, commanded her courage and plunged. “I am committed to creating a normal, happy, healthy family for him.” In case she hadn’t been plain enough, she added. “That means a mother. And a father. Together.”
The very thought of this particular mother and this particular father together in that particular way made the rest of her body catch up with her ears and nose and throat. Heat burned through her, from her toes to the very top of her head.
Not that he appeared to notice.
“Jed,” he repeated, savoring the name. And then the rest of her statement caught up with him. His mouth dropped and snapped shut. He looked longingly at the door, but then he just took a deep breath, and met her gaze steadily. “And you need to know, I’m his father, but that doesn’t change my position about getting married. Ever.”
“Being a father is more than a function of biology and I wasn’t proposing to you! Ugh! As it happens, I have a man picked out.”
The “ugh” made him narrow his eyes and move even closer into her space. Their chests were nearly touching. She could feel heat rising from his body. Or maybe from her own.
“Is that who gave you the ring?”
He’d noticed the ring. What did that mean, exactly? “Yes,” she said. “Herbert gave me the ring.”
“Herbert,” he repeated slowly, as if a name could tell him something. “So what are your criteria for a father for my son?” he asked.
“I want a man who is infinitely stable. Who is kind and considerate. Neat and tidy would help.”
J.D.’s lip curled in derision.
“Well,” she continued, “he won’t run around in a towel for one thing. Or kiss complete strangers. He certainly won’t have an engine dismantled in my kitchen!”
He leaned even closer. He planted one arm on either side of her head. His eyes were snapping with anger, but when his lips touched hers she did not feel anger. Or “ugh,” which was probably the point of this exercise.
His lips were warm and sensuous. They tasted sweet and clean, like cold creek water. He nuzzled her mouth, until her lips parted ever so slightly and a strange, soft sigh came from her.
J. D. Turner was just much too sure of his charms. And not without reason. Her heart was pounding so hard inside her chest she thought she might collapse, slide her back right down the wall and sit herself down on the floor.
With great effort she stiffened her spine as he took his lips away.
“There,” he said. “I’ve disqualified myself from your family plan, which by the way, I think is idiotic. That poor kid. He’ll probably be raised in a home about as cozy as a military school based on your criteria for neat and tidy. A life of relentless nonadventure.” It was his turn to say “ugh.”
“I am giving Jed a wonderful life!” she said.
“You and Herbert, I assume. Do you polish his sneakers, too?”
“Herbert’s or Jed’s?”
“Boy, are you missing the point.”
“I don’t think the fact that I have clean sneakers should be seen as a mark against my character!”
“But the fact that I have an engine on my kitchen counter should be a mark against mine?” He looked at her lips again. Just his eyes on them was enough to make her shiver. “The right man could make you forget all about the condition of your kitchen counters.”
“And that would not be you! You are the most aggravating person I have ever met!”
“Better get used to me, because it seems our lives are going to be tangled for a good long time to come.”
It occurred to her that was true. J.D. was part of her life now. He would be, from the look of determination on his face, a part of her life for as long as Jed was a part of her life.
And that was going to be forever.
She hadn’t even made a conscious decision to include this horrible man in her life. It had just happened. Or had a conscious decision been made, way back in the safety of Dogwood Hollow, when she had looked at that photo of a laughing man leaning on a car?
“Let’s go,” he said, glancing at his watch, dismissing that kiss as easily as he would wave away a fly.
It truly made her want to throw herself at him, recapture his lips, and chase away any image he had of her polishing sneakers. As if! She threw them in the laundry with her whites.
But throwing herself at him would truly complicate a relationship she had just realized was going to last a long, long time.
Numbly, she dragged her suitcase into the bathroom and changed from her pajamas. She thought it was just a little pathetic how hard she tried to look nice. She packed all her things and he took her suitcase as if it weighed nothing and tossed it in the back of his truck.
“You paid up here?” he asked.
She nodded.
“You might as well leave your car out at my place,” he said. “It’ll keep poor old Rufus from wondering why it’s still here and you’re gone.”
“But I’ll need my car. Once I’m home.”
“I thought maybe we’d just pick Jed up, and head on back here. I could get to know him on my own turf.”
“What makes you think I can just put my life on hold like that?”
“Kind of got you figured for a schoolmarm,” he said, sending her a sidelong look. “I bet you have the whole summer off.”
“I am not a schoolmarm. What a ridiculous term.” She could not believe he had pegged her so easily.
“But you do teach school, don’t you?”
How she would love to tell him she was a belly dancer at the Fruit-of-the-Loin Club in downtown Regina! How she would love to tell him her work for the government was top secret, and she couldn’t discuss it with him.
But of course, lies did not come easily to her. “I teach grade five,” she admitted coolly. “At a private school.”
He nodded an annoying just-as-I-thought nod.
He opened her car door, on the driver’s side and she slid in behind the wheel. He looked down at her. “Don’t try anything,” he said. “Just straight out to my place. I’ll be right behind you.”
How she would have loved to try something! A high-speed chase through the streets of Dancer, a swift right-hand turn onto the prairie, just like in the movies. That would erase that smug certainty from him that she was somehow boring and predictable and that those were bad things.
Had she actually agreed to bring Jed back here?
She started her car and drove carefully out to J.D.’s place. She waited while he got out of the truck and then started asking all the questions she had been thinking of as she drove.
“How long are you thinking Jed should come visit? And where are we going to stay? And what are we going to tell him?”
He held up a hand. “Lady, one thing at a time. First I need a pair of socks. Then I can start mapping out a careful course for the rest of my life.”
A half hour later she was sitting beside him in his truck, that horrible smelly dog right on top of her feet.
She had protested the dog, but J.D. had just reminded her, with infuriating calm, that he was in control now, and the dog was nonnegotiable.
He was driving silently through the darkness, his face a mask that told her nothing about what he was thinking. He certainly did not seem to be mapping out the rest of his life.
The dog tried to get up on the seat beside her. She pushed him down, and he looked at her sadly.
She me
ant to stay wide-awake. She ordered herself to be alert, to maintain some modicum of control over this bizarre situation.
But the highway unfolding endlessly into darkness made her eyes heavy. She awoke once to find the dog had climbed onto the seat after all, and had stretched out, his big smelly head on her lap. When he noticed she was awake, he nudged her hand, hoping to be petted.
“Ugh,” she told him.
“For a schoolmarm,” J.D. said, “you have a very limited vocabulary.”
She gave him her best look of schoolmarmish displeasure, which seemed to faze him not one little bit. The dog nudged her again, and she gave him a tiny, reluctant pat on the head before she went back to sleep.
It occurred to her, just before she slept, that her life was now well and truly out of her control.
And that she had survived. She was alive. Her world had not disintegrated into a billion pieces that she would never be able to put back together.
“Yet,” she mumbled.
J.D. glanced at the woman sleeping on the seat of the truck beside him. Had she muttered something in her sleep, anxious about the order of her world?
“Anything would be an improvement,” J.D. said, glaring at her. She’d put her hair back up in the bun, and her sneakers were practically glowing in the dark.
Beauford had his head on her lap, oblivious to her dislike for him, or maybe forgiving of it. It was said a dog could see right through a facade, right to the heart. Beauford seemed to have decided Miss High-and-Mighty had a good heart.
Her head had fallen sideways against the window, and her mouth was slightly open. A sputtering little snore, that would have embarrassed the hell out of her, came out of her.
Even in her sleep, he could not help but notice she looked worried, her forehead all puckered up, her hands in fists on her lap.
Well, he was just a little worried himself, not that he intended for her to see it. His life had just been totally upended. Totally.
Outside the truck a splendid dawn—pink and fiery orange and red and yellow—painted the prairie landscape in magnificence.
Up until the very moment she had confirmed it, there had been the slimmest chance J.D. had been wrong about the kid. Up until that moment it had remained a possibility that he was caught in some middle-of-the-night dementia, taking wild stabs in the dark. Though his heart had reached for the truth, and found it, he was unprepared for it. He had a child. The knowledge staggered him, a blow from a heavyweight.
A boy. He had a son, who had been named after him. A child who had walked his first steps without him, and spoken his first words without him, who had been without the protection and care of his father.
Despite believing Tally that her sister had been ill, he could not quell his sense of betrayal. Every missed birthday was a betrayal. Every missed milestone—first tooth, first steps, first words, first snowflakes—a betrayal. Every missed visit with Santa Claus, every missed Easter egg hunt, a betrayal.
For a man who had made a vow of being a bachelor for the rest of his life, it occurred to him he was not unhappy about the boy. Not at all.
Maybe because he could have the best of both worlds—a son, without the complication of the kind of family Tally was so hell-bent on finding. He made a mental note to call a lawyer to find out what his rights and responsibilities concerning his son were, though he was pretty sure if he listened to his heart, he’d get the less complicated version.
He glanced again at the sleeping woman. You’d think she’d have the good sense to be as disillusioned about families as he was. He suspected that hair, tortured into the neat bun, and that pucker in her brow had a lot to do with growing up in the shadow of her sister.
His own truth was that he had been disillusioned about the fairer sex long before Elana’s first betrayal, never mind this more recent one.
His own life held shadows. His mother had never been happy in Dancer. She had always conveniently blamed her unhappiness on J.D. and his father. He’d grown up listening to her litany of might-have-beens, should-have-beens. If not for them, she claimed, she would be sun-bathing in Saint-Tropez and skiing at Steamboat, surfing the wild North shore of Oahu. If not for the family that had tied her down she might have had a life of excitement and accomplishment and adventure, not a life of cooking and cleaning and driving to peewee hockey games.
She had, mercifully, left when J.D. was thirteen. He remembered his father and enjoying contentment in their simple house, finally. For awhile, she’d kept in touch, but she had seemed as unhappy as ever even with no one to blame it on.
Looking back as an adult, he could see the instability of his mother’s nature, but at the time all that unhappiness had seemed like it was his fault.
Was it that, at some unconscious level, that had attracted him to Elana? Had he been trying to win the love of a woman, who just like his mother, was incapable of giving it? Had he been trying to fix a wound from his childhood?
He hated psychobabble. It was part of the membership agreement for the A.G.M.N.W.N. Club to boycott both Dr. Phil and Oprah. J. D. Turner was not given to introspection, nor the uncomfortable probing of his own mind. He put this unusual drifting now down to the fact he hadn’t been up all night for a long, long time. It was making his mind go places he generally did not allow it to go. Snorting at himself in derision, he put on a tape. Country music. Some guy sang a great story song about going to prison, over a woman who done him wrong, and the tracking dog getting him out.
Beauford sighed happily, whined at all the right places.
Tally stretched and woke up, slowly. It was things like that—watching a woman come awake—that could make a man regret the road not taken.
There was a softness about her in those waking moments that could make a man look at the hardness of his life with faint regret.
“Where are we?” she asked. She tried to dislodge Beauford’s head from her lap, but he sank deeper, rolling his eyes pleadingly upward at her. She scowled at the dog but gave up without a decent fight. J.D. wondered if that was her modus operandi—appear uptight and cool—to hide that scorching warmth he had tasted in her kisses, to hide the delicate softness he had sensed in her waking moments.
J.D. told her where they were. “I’ll stop for breakfast and a coffee at the next town.”
Tally sighed and looked at the window. She took a deep breath, as if gathering courage and then said, “I’m sorry you didn’t know about him sooner.”
He glanced at her. Had his thoughts, his sense of loss and betrayal, somehow etched themselves in his face, for her to see?
“Elana always said she didn’t know who the father was,” Tally continued. “I had no reason to believe that wasn’t true. She did really wild things, when she was up. She couldn’t help herself.”
He tried not to flinch. He had been one of the “wild things” Elana did. He had been sucked into the whirlwind of a baffling illness, and he had never suspected.
“I started to sort through Elana’s things a couple of months ago. I found the picture. When I read the back of it, I knew you were my nephew’s father. Biological father. I’ve been debating what to do ever since then.
“I thought you had a right to know. It seemed so unfair to me that you didn’t know. It wasn’t your fault Elana was sick. But I also thought I should find out what kind of person you were before I even considered introducing you to Jed’s life.”
“A lot of women would have put that picture right back in the box.” He gave her that, grudgingly.
“A lot of men wouldn’t care if they’d left a kid somewhere along the way. Wouldn’t want to know. So, that seemed like step one to me. To find that out about you first.”
“Tell me about him,” he said. “Tell me about my son. Everything. From the day he was born.”
“I have a picture.”
He nearly threw Beauford onto the floor he pulled over to the shoulder so fast. “Let’s see.”
She rummaged around in that big purse she had hit him with
and finally came out with a picture.
J.D. took it. It was a professional shot. A little boy sat on a stool, his hands folded neatly in his lap, his legs crossed. He was wearing a plaid shirt, suspenders, a goofy-looking bow tie. His dark hair had been slicked back, and his expression was very solemn as he gazed at the camera. He was pudgy-cheeked, and dark-eyed. His eyelashes were thick and black and tangled as a chimney brush.
J.D. traced the lines of his son’s face. “I looked like this at this age,” he murmured. “I have almost this identical picture somewhere. Only of me. No bow tie, thank God.”
“There’s nothing wrong with bow ties!” she said, way too defensively, and then seemed to realize she had over-reacted. “When I saw your picture in Elana’s things, I really didn’t have any doubt. Those beautiful brown eyes.”
She caught herself and blushed.
So, Tally Smith thought he had beautiful eyes. For some reason he liked that nearly as much as he liked looking at this picture of his boy.
How complicated his life had become in the past twenty-four hours.
He handed her back the picture and pulled back onto the highway. “How old is he in that picture?”
“It was taken a few months ago. At a Sears portrait day. You know. Six ninety-nine for all the pictures you want.”
He didn’t know. Because he had missed all those things that parents knew. Because of Elana.
He suspected that all her life, Tally Smith had been trying to fix her sister’s mistakes.
But this one was too big for her.
“So now tell me everything,” he ordered gruffly, “from the second he was born.”
She gathered her thoughts, and then began. “He was born at 6:02 in the morning on April 10. You know how you picture babies coming out yelling and screaming? Not him. A little Buddha, right from the start.”
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw some finely held tension in her let go as she talked about the boy. Despite the polished running shoes, and her dreams of a neat and tidy house, J.D. heard in her voice the love for that child, and knew, for all the stupid mistakes she was making, she was good for his son.