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Cowboy Undone

Page 18

by Mary Leo


  It took her a moment before she realized the distraught woman in the picture was her mother. Her breath immediately caught in her throat and confused emotion clouded her eyes. Why was there a picture of her mom in Chuck’s office? Where did it come from? And why did her mom look so miserable?

  She looked as though she’d been crying, and her normally neat hair hung in fuzzy tufts about her head and down the sides of her face, as if she’d been pulling at the ponytail that fell lopsided on the top of her head. Dark makeup smudged her eyes, making it appear as though she’d been punched, and she wore no lipstick . . . which was very unusual. Avery couldn’t remember a time when her mom went without lipstick. It was the first thing she’d put on in the morning and the last thing she removed at night.

  What was most disturbing about the picture was the vapid look on her mom’s face, as if a light had gone out inside of her. If there hadn’t been a window behind her, Avery would have thought it was a picture of her mom’s corpse.

  Avery kept the picture along with the new agreement and walked out of the office, turning out the light before she left.

  She headed straight for the kitchen, hoping that Kaya hadn’t left for the day, which she hadn’t. Maybe Kaya could shed some light on how the picture got under the rug in Chuck’s office. Avery’s mind spun with scenarios . . . none of them good.

  “Miss Avery, can I make you a tray?” Kaya asked as soon as she spotted Avery from across the room.

  “Yes, please, maybe a cup of herbal tea and something light. Nothing fancy.”

  “I’ve got some cold fried chicken and I made a pasta salad. I’ll fix you a plate before I go.”

  “That would be perfect,” Avery said as she walked over to show Kaya the picture.

  At first, Kaya told her she didn’t recall ever seeing the woman.

  “She was my mom,” Avery had told her.

  “She looks very sad,” Kaya said. “As if she lost something of great value. This is not a picture you should dwell on. You should only dwell on the happy pictures of your mother. This picture should be kept hidden or better still, thrown away. It is not a picture for a daughter.”

  Avery wanted to tell her where she’d found it, but she didn’t want to put Kaya in an awkward situation.

  “Aside from one other picture of my mom and dad, this is all that I have of her. I couldn’t possibly toss it. My father never liked to talk about my mom. He got rid of all her things, along with all of her pictures. I haven’t seen them since soon after she died. If he kept any pictures, I’ve never been able to find them. Not that I’ve looked very much. But now that I’m back on this ranch, all I seem to think about are those missing pictures.”

  Not only had her dad removed all the pictures of her mom, but he’d removed all the memories from their house, including any and all of her things. Even some of her mom’s favorite belongings had slowly disappeared, like her favorite dishes, mugs, figurines, and of course, every stitch of her clothing. Avery had managed to hide her mom’s favorite figurine, a small pink cat with black polka-dots playing with a pink ball of yarn, and a picture of all three of them standing in front of Chuck’s ranch house when he’d first moved in. But up until this moment, that was all she’d managed to save.

  Avery cherished those two things and had kept them hidden under her bed in a box of old toys until she’d finally gotten a place of her own. Once there, she’d bought a pretty frame and kept the picture on her nightstand with the cat right next to it.

  “Not a problem. There’s a box of pictures up in the attic. And if I’m not mistaken, they’re of your mother. I always wondered about the lady in the pictures. If I had known she was your mom, I would have mentioned them sooner. Why didn’t you ask Mr. Starr about them? I’m sure he would have given them to you.”

  Avery’s heart raced. “There are pictures of my mom in the attic? But that can’t be. You must be mistaken.”

  Kaya glanced at the picture in Avery’s hand once again. Really staring at it this time. “That’s her. And look here. There’s a date on this picture, but I can’t make it out without my glasses. Maybe you can see it.”

  The date, if it was a date, was on the side of the picture, but it looked more like a smudge than numbers. “I don’t think that’s a date,” Avery said, dismissing the notion.

  “May I?” Kaya said, reaching for the photo. Avery gave it to her. “They used to print the date on pictures like these all the time.” Kaya turned on the overhead lights above the stove, slipped on her glasses that she kept in a case on the counter and studied the picture for a moment. “It looks like it says nineteen ninety-eight or nineteen ninety-nine. I can’t be sure. It’s so tiny.”

  “That can’t be,” Avery said. “My mom died in nineteen ninety-seven.”

  Kaya looked at the picture again. “Well, if this is your mom, that can’t be right. You must have the wrong date. You were young.”

  Kaya handed Avery the picture and Avery studied it under the light. And sure enough, the date read nineteen ninety-nine. Two full years after her mom died.

  “Believe me, I know when my mom died. There must be some mistake. This date can’t be right. It just can’t be.”

  Nausea suddenly overtook Avery and she felt as if she might pass out.

  “You should sit down, sweetie. You don’t look so good.”

  Avery agreed and sat down hard on one of the bar stools as she stared down at a picture of her mom taken two full years after her dad had said she’d died . . . after that first summer on Chuck’s ranch. Two full years after her mom had abandoned her inside the Olympic Theater.

  “What the hell?”

  Avery gazed down at the picture one more time, trying to make sense of all of this.

  Kaya busied herself putting together the tray for Avery. When it was ready, and the hot water was poured into the white ceramic teapot, and the light supper had been assembled on the tray, she said, “Do you want the box of pictures now? I know right where they are in the attic. Maybe they’ll help you to sort this out.”

  “Yes, thank you,” Avery managed to tell her.

  “Not a problem. The elders in my tribe told me this would happen, that I would help you to understand your childhood. I didn’t understand what they meant. Now I understand and I am glad this is our path,” Kaya told her, then she disappeared into the next room leaving Avery alone with her thoughts.

  Avery didn’t move off the stool for a long time, her thoughts spinning with wild assumptions. She needed something stronger than tea, and went looking for that bottle of brandy Chuck kept in his office. When she found it, she poured a couple shots into a glass, drank down what she could, and then added the bottle and glass to her dinner tray.

  She picked up the tray and headed to her room, wanting to bury the thoughts swirling in her mind, maybe drink some more brandy and then sleep it off . . . and really feeling like she wanted to call her dad or Chuck, or Reese.

  There had to be a logical explanation, because if there wasn’t, then that would mean her mom didn’t die that summer.

  But why would her dad have lied to her? And if her mom hadn’t died then, did she die two years later?

  “What the hell is going on?” Avery said out loud.

  As she approached her bedroom, she noticed a medium-sized cardboard banker’s box right outside her door with a note attached that read: Had to leave, but here’s the box from the attic . . . Kaya

  The box looked as if it had been around for a while, a very long while, and had gotten beat up over the years.

  Avery couldn’t move for a moment, as she stared at the ominous box, wondering who had stored it in Chuck’s attic. Her dad? Chuck? Why?

  She couldn’t explain it, but at once apprehension tightened her throat, and her resolve had turned to complete mush. Her eyes welled with tears. She’d wanted pictures of her mom her entire life, but her dad had kept them from her. And now there they were . . . in a battered banker’s box . . . sitting in front of her, provided by Chuc
k’s house manager.

  She hesitated, staring at the ominous box, thinking she’d seen it before . . . at her old house . . . in her dad’s arms. She recognized the logo on the side. It was from his old law firm: Taylor, Brook, and Watkins.

  A shiver ran through her so intense she thought she would drop the tray she was still holding. She immediately stepped into her room, and slid the tray onto the bed, then went back out to retrieve the box.

  She pulled the cover off and gazed inside. She took a deep breath as tears filled her eyes. The box was filled with pictures of her mom. At once Avery wanted to tell Kaya to take it back. She didn’t know if her heart could take seeing all the memories. Maybe her dad had been right in hiding all of this. Looking at them now would only cause Avery to grieve for all the lost moments, all the unmade memories, all those years of missing her mom’s embrace.

  She forced herself to pick up the box and carry it inside her room, closing the door behind her. Outside the storm pelted the windows with hard rain as lightning and thunder tore open the skies and as the memories tore open her heart.

  Once safely tucked inside her room, she placed the box on her bed, slipped out of her robe, added some mood music from her phone to try to drown out the storm, hit the switch for the gas fireplace, took another sip of brandy, and proceeded to carefully dump the contents of the box onto her bed.

  At once vivid memories of her mom flooded her senses, causing her skin to prickle, and her stomach to ache. There was so much she’d forgotten, so many glances and nuances that had vanished from her memory that hot tears stung her eyes and blurred her vision. She threw back another swallow of the brandy, but it didn’t help ease the hurt. All those years her dad had kept her mom from her, had allowed her memory to fade, her light to go out, were years that Avery wished she could get back.

  “How could you do that?” she said aloud, as if her dad could hear her, as if he was in the room with her.

  She felt cheated out of getting to know her mom, what her mom had liked and didn’t like. Her hobbies or her lack of them. Her best times. Her worst times. But most of all, what she had been like when Avery was an infant, a toddler, a young child going off to school. She couldn’t imagine why her dad had kept all this from her. Why he’d cheated her out of knowing the one woman in the entire world who had given Avery unconditional love and whom Avery had loved in return with more affection than she’d thought possible. A love she’d never felt or given since.

  On the very bottom of the box were two things that stopped Avery cold: the small beaded evening bag that she’d given her mom for her last Mother’s Day, and a pink baby book: “Pamela’s Precious Baby: Avery Miller Templeton.”

  The storm outside raged, accentuating Avery’s dark mood, the rain cascading off the roof and sounding like water pouring into a bucket when it hit the ground.

  Picking up the beaded bag brought back the memory of buying it with her dad at a shop that her mom loved in Tempe, an enclave on the outskirts of Phoenix. It had been hot and sunny that day, and the air conditioner in her dad’s car wouldn’t work. He’d been aggravated about it, but Avery remembered how the hot breeze felt on her face as they drove over to the shop. And how she wished the air-conditioner would stay broken because she loved the hot wind coming in through the open window much better than the cold air from the dashboard.

  She had picked out the purse as soon as she’d seen it, blush pink made out of tiny beads, and a pink floral hankie to go inside . . . she had remembered how much her mom loved pretty hankies. Now, when she opened the beaded purse to check for the hankie, her mother’s perfume instantly swaddled her. The purse contained a lipstick tube, a small change purse with some cash, a comb, a compact and, of all things, her mom’s engagement ring, a round-cut, deep blue sapphire surrounded by tiny diamonds. A ring her mom never took off. Ever. How and why it was loose inside the purse puzzled Avery, but then this box of pictures stored up in Chuck’s attic puzzled her even more.

  The floral hankie sat neatly folded at the very bottom of the small handbag where her mom had left it, and it still held her mom’s distinctive scent from the perfume she loved: Yves Saint Laurent’s Opium. Her mom never went anywhere without a splash on her wrists and behind her ears. When Avery plucked out the hankie, a ticket stub fell into her lap. A stub for a movie they’d seen together on June 15 at the Olympic Theater in town.

  For a brief instant, Avery felt as though her mom had cradled her in her arms, and when she closed her eyes, she envisioned her mom’s beautiful face, smiling as she pulled Avery in closer.

  “Oh, Mama, I miss you so much.”

  Lightning lit up the windows that surrounded her room on two sides, and thunder rolled across the sky, pulsating through her bed. She knew her mom had answered with the same amount of longing.

  Avery’s chest tightened as tears poured freely from her eyes. She reached for the brandy on her nightstand, emptied the glass and poured another shot while she steadied her raw emotions.

  She wiped her tears away with her hands, put everything back in the small purse, including her mom’s engagement ring, and snapped it shut. Then she carefully opened the baby book. A plethora of photos she’d never seen before shocked her back into the present. Each picture told a story of a young mother and her sweet baby girl. As Avery studied the photos, along with her mother’s handwritten descriptions on the side of the page, another wave of emotion overtook her and soon she couldn’t help but weep for her mom and for the little girl who still resided inside of Avery, a girl who never had the opportunity to really mourn the loss of her mother.

  It was as if her mom had only recently passed instead of almost two decades before. She suddenly felt vulnerable, as vulnerable as the ten-year-old child who had never been allowed to talk about her own mother.

  And what of that picture with the misleading date? Was that true? What did it mean?

  For the first time since she’d met Reese, she could truly identify with what he’d been going through with the loss of his beloved dad. She could finally appreciate genuine grief.

  REESE HAD READ over the partnership agreement that Avery had dropped off with his mom so many times that he had parts of it memorized. His only real drawback to signing the damn thing was the inclusion of the Cooper Ranch. That stuck in his craw, and gave him a chronic bellyache. He just couldn’t do it, and had to tell Chuck in person.

  He knew it was getting late, going on ten at night, and the storm that filled the skies wasn’t going to make his trek easy, but he couldn’t wait any longer. Plus, Avery had told him that Chuck usually stayed up well past midnight and got up at the crack of dawn, so ten o’clock was relatively early in Chuck’s night. Reese’s dad had been the same way, only getting about five to six hours of sleep per night. It seemed that most older men Reese knew only needed a few hours . . . probably due to the naps they took during the day, but that was beside the point.

  Plus, he’d had a few bad dreams about Avery last night. In them, she couldn’t stop crying over something that tore her apart, and she refused to tell him what was making her so upset. He’d awoken that morning with a strong desire to see her, but he’d forced himself to stay home and read the partnership agreement instead. Now, all he wanted to do was talk to Chuck. That had to take top priority.

  Problem was, as soon as he drove over to the Circle Starr ranch and saw the light on in Avery’s bedroom, all his willpower slipped away like a dry creek in this rainstorm.

  He knew he should ignore the strong urge to see her and instead head straight for the front door of the ranch house, but as soon as he killed the engine, secured his hat on his head and stepped out of his truck, his feet headed straight for Avery’s private entrance.

  He ran over the stone driveway, up the three steps to the covered porch and hesitated. He hadn’t spoken to or seen Avery in days. He hadn’t tried to contact her, nor had she contacted him. It seemed that neither of them had been prepared for what happened in her bedroom. And when she had stopped
by his ranch, she never looked for him after she’d spoken to his mom, nor was he able to get her attention when he called out to her when he’d spotted her on the front porch.

  They’d both been avoiding each other, or so he thought, and he could only speculate on her reasons. Hell, he barely knew his own reasons.

  He tentatively knocked on her door, but the more he thought about it, the more he felt certain she never wanted to see him again, and especially at this time of night, during what had to be one of the worst storms in a long time.

  The rain came down in sheets, pushing against him even though he stood under the roof, soaking his clothes and his face even though he bent his head down to shield himself with his hat. When she didn’t answer, he turned to head around the porch to call on Chuck, like he’d originally planned. With a great gust of wind, Avery’s bedroom door swung wide open, hitting the wall in its wake.

  She stood there staring at him for a moment while the rain pelted her through the open doorway. Neither of them spoke, and he didn’t know if she was going to tell him to leave or pull him inside. When she looked at him straight on, he realized it wasn’t the rain he saw on her face, but tears.

  “Can I come in?” he asked in a whisper.

  “Where have you been?” she replied, her voice shaky and fragile as the hard rain beat down on them both now, the wind pushing at his back, and causing her beautiful hair to billow around her face. The rain had already soaked through her white pajamas to reveal all the round curves of her body. She may as well have been naked standing in that doorway, now completely drenched by rainwater.

  “Home. Reading. Thinking of you. Of us. I came here tonight to talk to Chuck, but I ended up on your doorstep.”

  Lightning cracked through the sky, and soon after it a clap of thunder that caused Reese to flinch.

  “Oh, Reese, I’m so sorry.”

  He stepped inside, pulled her into his arms, and covered her mouth with his, parting her lips and pressing his tongue against hers. Realizing then how much he’d missed her, how much he wanted her.

 

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