My Name is Nell

by Laura Abbot

  The mileposts blurred as he continued east on I-70. His thoughts turned to the two-story early twentieth-century house he’d called home. His small bedroom had overlooked the barn and the mountains beyond and shared a common wall with his parents’ room. He remembered balling his fists over his ears in the futile attempt to block out the squeak of the mattress as she pushed herself higher on the pillows, followed by her relentless cough. In vain he would wait for his father to help her. On the infrequent occasions when he did, he could hear his mother say, “That’s all right, Dale. There’s nothing to be done.” Like an echo that single word had resounded in his head. Nothing.

  Through the years he’d kept tabs on his family through data collected via the impersonal vehicle of the internet. Both his father and Velda were still alive. Still living on the ranch. His brother Danny taught and coached at the local high school.

  Brady adjusted the car heater. Danny. There was a source of shame. When Danny was born, Brady had been eleven, far more interested in sports and horses than in a demanding baby brother. Then for a time when his mother’s condition deteriorated, Danny had been farmed out to his grandmother. Brady had never been close to his brother. For years after he left home, he had felt guilty. On two occasions he’d tried to contact Danny, but by then it was too late. Danny wouldn’t even talk to him. Perhaps Velda and his father had successfully turned his brother against him—or he’d built up his own case of resentment. After Nicole’s birth, he had made one last attempt to contact his brother. When he’d received no answer, he’d said the hell with it.

  He’d been angry for a long time. Then anger had turned to apathy. But beneath the surface, boiling like hot lava, lay the resentment. And, damn it, the guilt Nell had recognized. He’d been a teenager in turmoil—cocksure, defiant, hurt. He’d bargained with the gods, then raged at them. How could they have done this to his mother? To him?

  Then had come his father’s unthinkable betrayal, moving Velda in mere weeks after they’d laid his mother in her grave.

  Even now, as he slowed for the Grand Junction traffic, his stomach churned with the injustice of it all.

  He gnashed his teeth. So what was he doing anyway? What could he possibly accomplish?

  Yet deep inside he knew he had to go through these next few hours if he was ever to move on with his life.

  It was noon when he pulled into Glenwood Springs. The town had grown some and new motels and franchise restaurants bordered the highway, but once he reached the center of town, he noticed familiar landmarks. He pulled into a service station and filled his gas tank. As he was paying his bill, a wizened little man with a Denver Broncos ball cap punched him on the arm. “Say, aren’t you Brady Logan?”

  Brady flushed. “Yes. I’m sorry, but—”

  “Oh, I wouldn’t expect you to recognize me. I’m Buster Fowler’s dad. I only recognized you because you were such a jock in high school. Buster always wanted to be just like you.”

  Brady covered his confusion with a laugh. “Well, I hope he turned out better than that.” Then he changed the subject to Buster, whom he barely remembered. “What’s Buster up to these days?”

  The man visibly swelled. “He has a great job with the Denver Post. Selling advertising.”

  Brady signed the credit card receipt, hoping to put an end to the conversation. “Good to see you.”

  He had made it halfway to the door when the man called out, “Say, we’re sure proud of that brother of yours.”

  Brady wheeled around. “Oh?”

  “Yeah, helluva basketball coach. Took us to state last year, you know.”

  No, he hadn’t known. It had been a while since Brady had checked out Danny on the internet. “I hope he’s as lucky this year.”

  Only after hearing about the four returning starters and a six-foot-six sophomore did Brady manage to extricate himself from the conversation.

  On a whim, he detoured past the high school before heading for the ranch. He didn’t know what he expected to see. Yet Mr. Fowler’s words had brought to the surface memories of his own high school days. Memories that had lain buried for years. He was tempted to go inside. Find Danny. Get that part of his visit behind him.

  But it wasn’t the time. Or the place.

  Or was he simply procrastinating? Avoiding the worst? The ranch. Velda. His father.

  Near Carbondale he turned off the highway and traveled a few miles to the familiar dirt road. The mailbox, battered by time, looked as it always had, the “Logan” painted in crooked white letters.

  As a matter of course, Brady didn’t consider himself a praying man, but he was conscious of forming a word in his mind—over and over again. Help.

  He pulled around to the side of the house and parked. On the back of the house was an addition. Maybe a family room. On the sidewalk, a golden retriever lifted its head, then ambled to its feet and approached his vehicle. Brady climbed out of the SUV and leaned down to pet the dog. “Easy, pal. I’m a friend.”

  Straightening, he took a deep breath and walked to the kitchen door. Help. He knocked.

  He could hear a radio playing soft music, then the sound of someone moving to the door. He hadn’t known what to expect, but not what he saw when the door opened.

  Before him stood a roly-poly woman with soft reddish-gray curls and beautiful brown eyes partially concealed by a pair of granny glasses. The welcoming smile on her face faded and she raised trembling fingers to her lips. When she spoke, her voice cracked. “Brady?”

  Only then did he recognize faint traces of the woman he had known years before, with her well-endowed body, long auburn hair and the flirtatious dark eyes that ate his father in one gulp. The woman who had called his mother friend. Nursed her. Then betrayed her by marrying his father in record time. “Velda?”

  She stared straight at him, sadness and shock in her gaze. “It’s been a while,” she said.

  “Eighteen years.”

  “I suppose I should be killing a fatted calf or something,” she murmured dryly. “Instead, I’ll just ask a simple question. What do you want?”

  Damn good question. What did he want? Then the answer came. “It’s time to make peace. If that’s possible.”

  Cocking her head, she studied him for a few seconds before standing aside. “Come in.”

  When he stepped over the threshold, smells and sights inundated him, carrying him back to days when he couldn’t wait to get off the school bus, run up the lane to the house—and into his mother’s arms. “Thank you.”

  Velda gestured to the kitchen table. “Have a seat. Coffee?”

  “Sounds good.” Neither of them said a word until she’d poured the coffee and sat down across from him. He needed to pose the question burning in his gut. To stall, he took a swallow of the coffee, thinking about what he had to ask. “Where’s Dad?” he finally said.

  She nodded toward the pasture. “Over there. Mending fence.”

  “Do you think he’ll talk to me?”

  She shrugged. “That’s entirely between you and him.”

  “You’re not going to give me any help here, are you?”

  “Seems to me you never wanted any, if I recollect right.”

  “You’ve got me there.”

  Velda lifted the lid of the sugar bowl, then dipped out a teaspoonful. Stirring it into her coffee, she went on. “You never cared much for me, either.”

  “There were reasons.”

  She nodded. “Yes. There were. But there was a lot you didn’t know. Didn’t want to know, I imagine.”

  Was she trying to prepare him for something? Her tone was neither hostile nor welcoming, but she was hardly the home-wrecking siren he’d imagined her to be. “We all made some mistakes back then.”

  For the first time she allowed the wisp of a smile to cross her face. “Is this a new Brady Logan? One actually willing to listen?”

  He had to give her credit. She wasn’t backing away from painting an accurate picture of him as a teen, no matter how unflatte
ring.

  “I don’t know if there’s any way to deal with what happened.”

  “Listening’s a step. The main thing is—you’re here. Dale needs to know.” She took hold of his hand. “Why don’t you wander out to the pasture. Find your father.”

  Fear, oily and hot, sat in his stomach. “That’s what I came to do.” He stood, then paused, looking down at the small woman. Harmless. Honest. “I’ll listen, Velda.”

  “Good,” she said behind him as he walked out the kitchen door.

  A cold wind blew down the valley as he made his way through the gate and across the pasture. In the distance he could see a figure in a sheepskin rancher’s coat bent over a fence post. It required an effort of will to take each step that closed the distance between them. Finally, when Brady was about twenty feet from his father, the man looked up.

  His body stilled and his gnarled hands closed around the fence stretcher he held. His weathered skin bore deep wrinkles and his chapped lips formed a thin line. His eyes, still steely blue, narrowed.

  The man was…old. How had that happened? Somehow Brady had always pictured the father he’d known as a teenager—ageless, rock-hard, unyielding. He braced himself, awaiting his father’s judgment.

  But Dale Logan surprised him. He dropped the implement in his hand, then approached Brady. As if no time at all had elapsed since they’d seen each other, he simply said, “Let’s go to the house, son.”

  The vise constricting Brady’s chest loosened and he could breathe again. He’d called him son. That didn’t erase the pain of the past, but it was a start.

  Maybe that’s all they needed. A start.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  NEITHER MAN SPOKE as they walked toward the house, its white frame silhouetted against the distant mountain range now shadowed by dark clouds. Expecting to feel detachment, Brady was ill-prepared for the memories, long submerged, which rose to his consciousness or for his sense of connection to this place.

  And certainly not for the impulse of something akin to affection he felt for his father.

  He plunged his hands into his pockets, fighting his weakness. Or would Nell call it forgiveness? He’d been wronged, damn it. He couldn’t afford that luxury.

  He would think of Nell at a time like this, her gaze tender even as she accused him of addiction. Resentment and anger had fueled many of his actions, but, by now, they were familiar companions. Could he give them up? Was she asking too much?

  Inside the house, his father took off his coat and slung it across the back of a kitchen chair, then hung his Stetson on a peg near the door. Brady, likewise, draped his coat over a chair while Velda filled his coffee cup and another for his father. Then she looked inquiringly at Dale, sending one of those messages that pass between a man and a woman that requires no words.

  His father sat down in the place across the table from Brady. “Stay, Velda. You’re part of this, too.” Without a word, Velda slipped into the chair beside her husband.

  Dale lifted his cup and blew on the steaming liquid. Finally he fixed his eyes on Brady. “Why now?” was all he said.

  Brady considered his answer. “Because someone I care about accused me of being addicted to the anger and pain of my past. She suggested it would be therapeutic for me to face my demons.”

  His father’s eyes were cold. “Is that how you think of us?”

  Brady felt defensiveness kick in. “I never understood. I still don’t.”

  “What? Spill it, son.”

  Brady fingered the distressed wood of the kitchen table, remembering the long-ago times he’d gripped the edge of this same table as an anchor in the sea of his rage. “Didn’t you care about Mom at all?” He was surprised to hear the crack in his voice.

  “Is that what you think? That I didn’t care?”

  “You tell me.” He nodded at his stepmother. “Sorry, Velda, but, Dad, you certainly didn’t waste any time moving on, did you? Did you ever stop for one minute to think how that made me feel? It was as if you didn’t care. You planted Mom in the ground and then, within two months, remarried. You expected me to just accept that. To forget all about my mother.” The coffee in his stomach soured.

  Velda’s eyes darkened with concern. “We didn’t let you grieve, did we, Brady?”

  “I’ve grieved for years.” He stared at his father. “You’re the one who never grieved.”

  His father slumped in his chair. “You couldn’t be more wrong.”

  “Well, excuse me, if I fail to see it.”

  “You’re still angry.” His father made the words a statement.

  “Damn right.”

  “I tried to talk to you back then. So did your mother. You wouldn’t listen.”

  “To what?”

  “The plans we made for what would happen when—” his father stumbled over the words “—when she died. You refused ever to hear us out. You’d stomp out of the room.”

  “What plans? What are you talking about?” It was all Brady could do to remain seated.

  Velda covered Brady’s hand with her own. “Your mother picked me.”

  “Picked you for what?”

  Dale raked a hand through his thinning hair. “Let me start at the beginning. Your mother knew about Velda.”

  Surely he wasn’t hearing correctly. “Knew what?”

  “That she was a godsend during the last weeks of her illness. That she was a kind woman and a good friend. Your mother had been sick for so long, but she was always loving. Always thinking of others. She didn’t want me to be alone. Didn’t want you boys to be motherless. She’d known Velda for years. Liked her. I was torn up with grief and, well—” he patted his wife’s arm “—Velda was there for me.”

  “But you married so quickly.”

  “I’d grieved for years before your mother died. I couldn’t do it any more. It was either lose myself or start a new life. I had your mother’s blessing. I didn’t see any reason to wait.”

  Brady leaped to his feet. “What about me? Wasn’t I reason enough to wait? Danny?”

  “Like I said, there was no talking to you. You were determined not to hear.”

  Brady paced the floor, finally bracing himself against the counter, his back to his father. “Hear what exactly?”

  From behind him came the explanation, told in a labored voice by the man he’d spent years hating. The shock of his mother’s diagnosis, her long illness, his parents’ agonizing over the future, over what would become of their sons. Even as her health declined, his mother’s insistence that her husband get his rest, her refusal to let him do for her what she could still do for herself.

  Brady closed his eyes. That explained those awful nights when his mother’s relentless coughing spells went unattended by his father.

  “I begged her to let me help,” his father continued, “but she knew I needed my strength for the ranch.” There was a long silence broken only by the furnace blower and icy raindrops flicking at the kitchen window. “Toward the end, she began talking about what would happen to us—you, me, Danny. She understood how heavily I had come to depend on Velda, the one friend I knew I could count on day or night.”

  Stirring in Brady was a vague recollection of coming home from school to find Velda reading to his mother.

  “It was your mother who first suggested that I take another wife. Quickly.” He cleared his throat. “She wanted it to be Velda.”

  Brady turned to face them. “Still, you didn’t waste any time.”

  “I had loved your father and mother for a long time,” Velda murmured. “We would never have proceeded without your mother’s blessing.”

  “I hated you,” Brady said, addressing his father.

  “I know. And in a way I hated you. You wouldn’t listen to us when we tried to explain, not to me and not to your mother. It was as if you didn’t want to hear the truth—that your mother was terminal. Then, afterward, you took all your grief and anger out on me.”

  “If you understood that, why did you treat m
e so badly?”

  He raised his eyes and expelled a deep sigh. “I was wild with the pain of losing your mother. Worried sick about the future. Anger was my outlet, I guess, and you gave me plenty of cause to unleash it.”

  “You were like two wounded bears,” Velda said.

  “You’d grown physically big and strong, Brady. I thought you could take it. You were my whipping post. I forgot you were still just a kid.”

  “You made some pretty unreasonable demands.”

  “I did some things I’m not proud of. I couldn’t deal with my emotions where you were concerned. Maybe I was afraid of letting you get too close. Afraid what it would do to me if something happened to you or Danny.” He snorted at the irony. “Pretty screwed-up thinking when you consider what I did was drive you away.”

  Brady saw himself at eighteen, standing in the doorway, his backpack slung over his shoulder, facing his father. I hate you for forgetting about Mom. For marrying that slut. If I never see you again, it’ll be too soon. And his father’s cutting reply. Get out!

  “Why didn’t you ever look for me?”

  “I could ask you the same thing.”

  Brady sat back down, studying his coffee cup.

  Velda smiled sadly. “You’re two of the stubbornest men I know.”

  Brady quirked his lips. “Must run in the family.” His father seemed lost in thought. Brady took a swallow of the tepid coffee, then set the cup down before continuing. “What now?”

  “Are you still so angry?” his father asked.

  Brady looked up, aware of an inner calmness he hadn’t felt…maybe ever. “No,” he said with wonderment.

  “Could you…would you tell us about these missing eighteen years?” The hardness in his father’s eyes had disappeared.

  Brady sat back in his chair. “Yeah,” he said, “I think I can. But first, Velda, I owe you an apology.”

  She smiled. “Accepted.”

  He nodded, breathed deeply and then began speaking. Neither his father nor Velda said a word during his recitation—the odd jobs that had led to a junior college computer course, losing himself in the world of cyber-technology, meeting Carl, moving to California, setting up the company.