This Heart of Mine

by Brenda Novak

  She laughed again, hoping to finally lighten this up. “Not many people could offer you less than I could.”

  He shook his head as he gazed back at her.

  She used her fingers to comb the tangles out of her hair. She had to look a sight covered in the blood from her cut and the dirt from her fall. “There’s no need to feel conflicted, Riley. You’ve got it all. Just enjoy life and carry on the way you always have,” she told him, and shut the door.

  7

  On the drive home, Riley cursed softly to himself as everything Phoenix had said ran through his mind. Her words wouldn’t have affected him so deeply if she’d been accusing or resentful. Then maybe he would’ve felt defensive. But she’d assumed responsibility for everything, going all the way back to when they’d been together—even though he had told her he loved her and taken her virginity. Of course she would assume she could count on what he said, because she’d been sincere with him.

  It was easy to see why she’d felt sucker punched when he broke up with her. But he honestly hadn’t intended to put her in that position. She had no idea how much pressure he’d been under—from his parents, from everyone, including his teachers—to distance himself from her. No one wanted him to get mixed up with “Lizzie’s girl.” It was his mother who’d wanted him to date Lori, her best friend’s daughter. Riley had never been that interested in Lori. Phoenix had been every bit as special to him as he’d told her at the time.

  Maybe that was why it had stung to hear her discount what he’d said and done—categorize his part in their relationship as throwaway, the difference between boys and girls, sex versus love. Although it was logical that she would. He’d let her down, hadn’t been old enough or mature enough to know how to stand up against his parents. He hadn’t even been convinced that he should! In his eyes, at that time, his parents were always right, the guiding beacon he relied on. He hadn’t wanted to lose their love and approval. And he certainly hadn’t wanted to “ruin his future” as they’d insisted he was doing.

  So he’d unwittingly ruined Phoenix’s future. If he hadn’t set that chain of events in motion, Lori would still be alive.

  He thought about that occasionally, late at night when he tried to work out how he should treat Jacob’s mother. But with his parents’ support—with everyone’s support—he’d always been able to justify his behavior, to believe she had indeed reacted out of jealousy and done something unforgivable.

  The more he dealt with Phoenix as an adult, however, the easier it was to believe her explanation of that tragic event.

  Parking his truck in the driveway instead of the garage, since he was planning to leave again, Riley hurried inside the two-story house he’d built four years earlier to put on a clean T-shirt and check on Jacob.

  “Is Mom okay?” Jacob asked, coming out of his room the minute he heard the front door.

  “She’s going to be fine.” Riley hoped. The doctor had indicated she should be. But it seemed crazy to leave her over there all by herself, drugged up and with a possible concussion. That trailer had no air-conditioning, and she didn’t have a phone. How would she call for help if she needed it? What if she couldn’t get over to her mother’s? And who would she call even if she did reach Lizzie’s?

  There was a chance she might not be able to get out of her bed, so Riley planned to go back and check on her. No way could he count on Lizzie to take care of anything or anyone. She was the most dysfunctional person he’d ever known. If he didn’t return, he wasn’t sure Phoenix would even get dinner, and that worried him. For one thing, she was supposed to have something in her stomach when she took more of the pain meds the doctor had sent home with her.

  Jacob stepped out of the way so Riley could get past him on the stairs, then followed him to his room. “Did you take her to the doctor?”

  “I did.” Riley pulled a T-shirt from one of his drawers and yanked it over his head. “He cleaned her wounds and stitched her up.”

  “She needed stitches? How many?”

  “Six. It was quite a gash but not as bad as it looked. Head wounds bleed a lot, like she said.”

  Jacob dropped onto the bed while Riley went into the master bath to wash his hands and face. “That whole thing scared the crap out of me,” he said, speaking loudly enough that Riley could hear him over the running water. “When I saw Buddy racing up on me in that Excursion of his, I thought he was playing with me at first. But then I saw the look on his face and knew we were in trouble.”

  The fear his son must’ve felt in that moment made Riley angry all over again. Jacob had only been driving for six months.

  “Can you believe Buddy would do something like that?” Jacob asked.

  Riley couldn’t. He’d known Buddy wasn’t pleased to have Phoenix back in town, but this was ridiculous. “I’m going over to the police station to talk to Chief Bennett right now. Why don’t you come with me, so you can explain exactly what happened?”

  “You’re going to report him?”

  “You’re damn right I am. He had no business doing what he did.”

  Jacob seemed hesitant. “But you don’t even like Mom.”

  “I’ve never said that.”

  “You weren’t very happy about her coming home. And you didn’t want to meet her for breakfast.”

  “I wasn’t sure what kind of person she turned out to be. That’s all.”

  “And now she’s okay?”

  “Let’s just say I’m giving her the benefit of the doubt. As long as she doesn’t break my trust, I don’t have a problem with her being here.”

  “But if you stick up for her, it’ll get us in a fight with Buddy, and that won’t be good. Grandma really likes the Mansfields. She hangs out with them all the time, and that means we have to see Buddy once in a while.”

  “Sometimes you have to do what you think is right regardless of the fallout.”

  He didn’t comment, so Riley thought maybe he’d left. “Jacob?”

  “I’m here.”

  “Don’t you think that’s true?”

  “Yeah, I do.”

  When Riley reentered the room, Jacob was still on the bed. “You’d better get your shoes. We need to leave right away.”

  His son got up, but didn’t head to the door. He walked over and gave Riley a hug. It was a man-hug—a brief clasp. But it was meaningful because it was so unexpected.

  “Thanks, Dad.”

  * * *

  When Riley returned to Phoenix’s trailer, all appeared to be quiet. He didn’t want to drag her out of bed and down the hall to answer if she was sleeping, so he knocked softly and, when no one came, tried the door. It was locked. He thought he’d have to rouse her, after all—until he realized that the door wasn’t quite latched. He was able to open it without a problem.

  The trailer was hot, but not so hot that he considered it dangerous. He was more concerned about the fact that it didn’t appear as if she’d been up since he left four hours earlier. Nothing in the trailer had changed.

  After setting the soup he’d bought at Just Like Mom’s on the counter, along with the backpack and purse she’d left in Jacob’s Jeep, he walked down the hall, knocking gently on the cheap paneling to alert her. He didn’t want to scare her.

  “Phoenix? It’s me, Riley.”

  There was still no response, but her bedroom door stood ajar, so he poked his head in. She’d showered, but that was about as far as she’d gotten. She’d fallen into bed with a towel wrapped around her head; she didn’t appear to be wearing anything under the sheet that covered her. Hot as it was, he couldn’t blame her, but the sight of her bare arms and shoulders, and the profile of her face, made him pause. She was pretty, all right—even when she was beat up.

  “Phoenix?”

  Nothing.

  He moved to her side and took her hand. “Hey, Phoenix. Are you okay?”

  She mumbled something about being fine and rolled over, jerking her hand away. The sheet dropped in the process, baring her shoulder bla
de, which bore a tattoo of Jacob’s name and the date of his birth written in cursive. A bit lower he found an oddly shaped scar, as well as the fresh scrapes from having dived into that ditch.

  Averting his gaze before he could see anything more revealing, he muttered a curse. She looked so small and fragile lying there. Damn Buddy for making a difficult situation even worse.

  “Phoenix,” he said, shaking her. “It’s time to wake up. I brought you some dinner.”

  “Later,” she grumbled.

  Figuring he’d fulfilled the doctor’s orders by getting her to talk, Riley decided to give her another hour. She’d been through a lot. Maybe, right now, rest was more important than food.

  “Okay. I’ll wake you again in a bit,” he told her.

  As he closed her bedroom door, his phone vibrated in his pocket. He had an incoming text. It was Jacob, wanting to know about his mother.

  She’s fine. Just sleeping, he wrote back while walking to the living room. Jacob had wanted to come with him, but he’d had a group homework project. Riley had said he could stop by after.

  So what to do until then? Phoenix didn’t have a television. She didn’t have much of anything, he saw as he wandered around the place. There was a bedroom on the far side of the living room, which she’d furnished with the same type of broken-down furniture that filled the rest of the trailer. He found a warped chest of drawers, a bed that was set up on cinder blocks and some homemade bookshelves. It all looked as if it had been retrieved from a junkyard, but it was clean. The whole trailer was clean. He could smell the ammonia from whatever she’d used to scrub the place.

  In the kitchen he came across a small, cheap microwave, but he wasn’t sure what she used it for. Other than the food he and Kyle had delivered, her cupboards were bare. When he opened the fridge to put away the soup, he discovered that it was almost as empty as the cupboards. A half-eaten bowl of oatmeal, an apple and some hummus sat on one shelf, which made it easy to see what she’d been surviving on. But that hardly constituted a balanced diet. How she’d had the strength to do the cleaning she’d done, and in such a short time, was a mystery. There was evidence of her work all over. For instance, she was in the process of removing some old wallpaper in the living room, but she didn’t even have a scraper. From what he could tell, she’d been using a butter knife and a razor blade, both of which were sitting on the corner of a wobbly side table.

  He shook his head at how tedious and painstaking a process that would be, and yet she’d made significant progress—through sheer determination. She was used to making do with whatever she had, he thought, which reminded him of her bike. So he called Noah.

  Noah answered with “What’s up?”

  Caller ID had identified him. “Not much. What’s going on with you?”

  “I’m closing the shop for the day so I can go home and have dinner with my wife. I think she’s cooking her famous meat loaf. Want to join us?”

  “No, I’m tied up. I was just calling because I have an old bike I’m hoping you can fix.”

  “What kind of old bike?”

  Noah sold mostly high-end mountain bikes, so he was assuming Riley would be able to name the make and model. “It’s a twenty-year-old ten-speed, if it’s that new. And it needs tires, maybe a lot of other work.”

  “Dude, what are you doing with a piece of shit like that when I own a bike shop? Come on in. I’ll set you up with the perfect ride at my cost.”

  “Actually, it’s not mine.”

  “Whose is it?”

  He stood at the window of that extra bedroom and gazed out at the depressing sight of Lizzie’s yard. “It belongs to Phoenix.”

  There was a slight pause. “I can help her out, too, if you want.”

  “She doesn’t have any money. But she doesn’t have a car, either, and needs a way to get around.”

  “I see.” There was another brief silence. “How’s that going, by the way? When we were at the coffee shop on Friday, you weren’t too excited about her being back in town.”

  “I don’t mind,” he insisted, feeling guilty for having bitched about her impending return.

  “Really?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Does that mean she doesn’t have horns on her head and carry a pitchfork?”

  “She’s not so different from everyone else.” He considered telling Noah what Buddy had done, and how apathetic Chief Bennett had been when he and Jacob had gone to complain. Of course there was going to be some resentment, he’d said. Buddy would get past it. The Mansfields were good people. Buddy was just having a hard time since his wife walked out on him. Yada, yada. Although Bennett had said he’d look into it, Riley had gotten the distinct impression that he didn’t plan to do much more than issue Buddy a cursory warning.

  As much as that irritated him, Riley didn’t want to get into a long discussion right now. Despite how disoriented Phoenix had seemed when he tried to wake her, there was always the possibility that she might overhear him.

  “I’m glad,” Noah said. “That should make things easier for Jacob.”

  “I agree.”

  “So when do you plan to bring in the bike?”

  “Tomorrow okay?”

  “Tomorrow’s fine with me. We open at ten, but if you have to be at work earlier than that, leave it on my front porch. I can take it around to the shop when I walk over.”

  Riley turned his back on the piles of rubble he could see from the window. What a place to grow up... “I’ll do that. Any idea when you might be able to get to it?”

  “Biking season’s started, so we’re swamped. But you don’t need to worry, since you know the owner.”

  Riley smiled at his jocular tone. “It’s nice having friends in high places. Thanks.”

  “No problem. If I ever need my roof repaired, I’ll expect the same treatment,” he joked. “See you tomorrow.”

  Riley sighed as he hung up. Then he realized he didn’t have to stand around being bored. He had his tools in the truck; he could finish removing that old wallpaper.

  The wallpaper was gone within the hour, but Phoenix still hadn’t stirred, so he began to look for other odd jobs. He fixed the hinges on some of her cupboards so they’d close properly, replaced a broken screen so the mosquitos couldn’t get in and repaired a leak under her sink. He was in search of more small repairs he could make when he opened a door off the hallway and discovered her workroom.

  “What the hell is this?” he muttered, but it was quite obvious. That bracelet she’d given Jacob? She’d made it. Apparently, she made a lot of them. Several different types—some braided, some with carved pieces of wood or silver beads, some personalized—hung on a coat hanger dangling from a nail above her desk, and a pile of packages, all addressed and ready to be mailed, were stacked along the far wall. A shelf consisting of a length of board supported by two cinder blocks held an array of stampers, hole-punchers and heavy-duty scissors. On another shelf he saw several bowls of beads, metal pieces, fasteners, even feathers. And the whole room smelled like the leather strips that filled an old suitcase lying open on the far side. There was also a chalkboard leaning against the wall with names and checkmarks and what he decided must be a style number.

  Phoenix hadn’t mentioned that she ran a business. Why had she kept that to herself?

  He had no idea, but the sight of her little bracelet factory made him smile. What she’d accomplished was impressive, considering everything she’d been up against.

  He wondered where she sold them...

  Suddenly her door banged against the wall, hard enough to rattle the whole place. She was up.

  Assuming she was ready to eat, he ducked out of her workroom.

  Then he stopped dead in his tracks.

  8

  Phoenix was so disoriented. She was fairly certain the doctor had given her too much pain medication. It should’ve worn off by now, she told herself. She couldn’t even walk straight. She had to use the walls to steady herself and feel her way alon
g, since her eyelids were so heavy.

  Or maybe some of it was the aftereffects of her tumble. She’d landed really hard...

  She was staggering in her attempt to reach the bathroom in the hall, since the one in her bedroom didn’t work—until she heard a choked sound. Then she froze, shoved her hair out of her face and looked up to see Riley standing, big as life, in the doorway of her office less than three feet away, his jaw practically on the floor.

  She screamed before she could stop herself, and the grogginess evaporated. She didn’t have a stitch of clothing on! Even the towel she’d wrapped around her head was in the bed somewhere.

  Whipping around, she tried to dart back into the bedroom, but when the door hit the inside wall, it had bounced back so hard it’d slammed shut—and that must’ve jarred the lock because she couldn’t open it. All she could do was cover as much of her breasts as possible while trying to break through the door using her shoulder.

  “Wait! Stop!” Riley cried. “You’re going to hurt yourself even more. Will you calm down? You’re freaking me out!”

  He took off his T-shirt and, for the second time that day, offered it to her. But she was shaking too badly to put it on, so he stepped up to help. After righting the sleeves so she could poke her arms through, he yanked it over her head and pulled it down, and she felt the warmth of the cotton cover her body.

  Then they both stood there gaping at each other and breathing as hard as if they’d just run a mile.

  “What are you doing here?” she asked when she could find her voice.

  Thankfully, he was so much bigger than she was, his shirt came to midthigh. She no longer felt exposed. She was, however, writhing with embarrassment. He was the only man she’d ever slept with, which suddenly seemed far too significant.

  Looking a bit rattled himself, he wiped his face with one hand. No doubt her bloodcurdling scream had shaken him up. “I’m sorry. I thought you knew. I came in a couple of hours ago to check on you. I spoke to you, and you answered me. I’ve been going in and out and hammering and stuff...”

  She had no recollection of any of that. She only remembered falling into bed. “Hammering?” That caught her attention because it was the last thing she’d expected him to say. Why would he be hammering at her house?