After You Were Gone

by Alexis Harrington

  Grinning, he replied, “Okay. I have to go.” He leaned down and gave her a swift peck on the mouth.

  When she heard the back door close behind him, she exhaled. Theirs was not a relaxed relationship any longer. At least she didn’t think so.

  She put the packing list into the scanner, then once the file appeared on her screen, put the paper document into the shredder. Keeping clutter and records organized and minimized was one of her goals. Eventually, she’d have to go through The Tomb and see whether anything in there was worth saving. With Cade gone, maybe she could begin to tackle it, a bit at a time.

  So far, business had been pretty good. Not blow-the-doors-off busy, but not bad for just the first few days. A lot of people came out of curiosity, just to see what she’d done with the place, then stayed to buy something. She’d taken “before” and “after” pictures, and when she compared them, the store did look totally different.

  Julianne knew that she couldn’t have accomplished it without Mitchell’s help. If only that incident with the hen in her mailbox hadn’t happened . . . She didn’t quite believe that he was responsible, but as a group, the Tuckers were still a trouble-making lot with no respect for others and a sense of self-righteousness that baffled her. They had no love for her, either, and even if Mitchell knew nothing about the latest episode, his brothers did.

  It hadn’t taken much insistence from Cade to make her call 911, and early on she’d promised Mitchell she’d do just that if something happened that made her uncomfortable. Still, in a corner of her heart she’d felt guilty and a little ashamed when she saw him manhandled into the backseat of the patrol car. She hadn’t expected that to happen.

  With her thoughts elsewhere, her computer had taken advantage of the peace and turned on its screen saver. When she bothered to look at it again, she found herself looking at crisp, professional photos of the Grand Canyon and decided to quit for the evening. She glanced at the wall clock—it was 8:00 already.

  “Jack?” she called, and heard his thunderous footfalls on the stairs to the apartment. He appeared at the bottom and came to sit at her knee. “What do you say to dinner and a movie?” He jumped up again—she guessed it sounded fine to him. “Maybe a glass of wine for me and some cooked hamburger chopped up on your crunchies?” Chicken feed, dog food, cat food—to her, all dry kibble was crunchies. That sounded good to him, too. “Okay, let’s go.”

  Suddenly, he pointed his nose toward the back door and started barking. She froze. Then there was a knock, and Jack’s barking increased. Just as she closed her hand around the barrel of the shotgun, she heard, “Julianne?” The sound was muffled by the walls. But the dog’s frenzied barking turned to happy whining and tail-wagging, and he looked up at her.

  She heaved a big sigh. “Mitchell, what do you want?”

  “I brought another bag of food for Knuck—um, Jack.”

  Mitchell’s fault . . . her fault . . . Mitchell’s fault . . . her fault . . .

  She released the shotgun, gripped the knob, and opened the door about four inches. His eyes reflected his weariness, and he seemed to have aged five years in the last three days. He carried a big bag of dog food in his arms. “I don’t expect you to keep feeding him,” she said.

  Jack pushed his muzzle through the opening, and Mitchell stroked his nose. “I can’t do much for you. At least let me do this for him.”

  That struck a deep nerve in her. She tumbled from her lofty tower of injured party to the uncomfortable position of doubt. That picture of him in the back of the patrol car flashed past her mind’s eye again, and guilt nudged her again. She opened the door wide. “Come in. I was about to fix dinner for me and Jack. Would—do you want to stay?”

  “What, no Lindgren to cook for? Thanks, but I already ate.”

  She flinched. “A beer, then?”

  Mitchell gave her an even stare. “What’s going on? I’ve gone from accused villain to invited guest in such a short time? No offense, but this is a one-eighty after the other day.”

  She ducked her head. “Yes, I know. I-I’m sorry about that. I didn’t think Gunter would take you in.”

  A short laugh escaped him. “What did you think would happen? I’m Mitchell Tucker, one of the Tucker clan, ex-con, washed-out baseball player. You have nine-one-one on speed dial. Nine-one-one has us on the usual suspect list.” He shrugged and added quietly, “Not without reason, I admit.” He put down the bag of dog food.

  The warm night air floated in behind him. “Since I didn’t pay you for your help, I wanted to thank you.”

  “Like I told you, Juli, community service.” Her brows hitched up her forehead. He hadn’t called her Juli since the old days, before either of them had even heard of Wesley Emerson. He shifted his weight from one hip to the other. “There’s still one thing to settle between us, but it can wait for a while.”

  Her head came up and so did her chin. “If you’ve got something to say, you might as well speak up. I hate having that sword hanging over my head.”

  “Not tonight.” He looked around the office area and toward the store, where a couple of dim lights burned. “Where’s the other guard dog, the two-legged one?”

  She hesitated. How much should she tell him? “Cade is away on business. Anyway, he doesn’t live here, you know.”

  “Did you get everything finished in the store?”

  “Almost. There are still a couple of painting jobs and some shelving to finish.”

  “I can do it, that is, if you want me around and promise not to call the law on me again.”

  She knew she should decline, but those words didn’t come out. “Okay, yes, that would be great.”

  “Then I’ll see you tomorrow.” He went out the door and down the back stairs. She heard his boots pounding across the path to the curb, then the sound of his engine. And he disappeared into the hot, still night.

  “I haven’t had anything this good for a long time,” Mitchell said as they sat at a card table in the back, drinking soda and eating roast beef sandwiches Julianne had made upstairs. He’d spent the morning doing those painting jobs she’d needed finished. She listened for the brass bell on the front door—business picked up every day—but she might make it through the whole sandwich first.

  “The food around town isn’t that bad.”

  He shrugged. “Eating in diners and grabbing takeout gets old after a while. I can’t remember the last time I ate a home-cooked meal.”

  “This isn’t cooking. I just sliced up a loaf of sourdough bread and put some lettuce and tomatoes on roast beef. I bought everything at the Shoppeteria. It’s not fancy cuisine.”

  “But it’s great, Juli, thanks. I never got to taste your cooking.” Mitchell downed half the soda in one gulp. “You know, I thought you would have remarried by now.”

  She paused, sandwich halfway to her mouth, surprised by the comment. It wasn’t like him to pry. That was more Cade’s speed. “The first time I lost so much. I just didn’t . . . haven’t . . .” She shook her head. “I’m not really comfortable talking about this.”

  Julianne couldn’t bear to think of everything that was lost because of Mitchell’s thoughtless act so many years ago. Even so, sometimes when he was around, she felt the hard, cold shell around her heart loosen a bit. There was still an air about him—a sizzle, a familiar vitality that could pull her in too easily if she let it.

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to drag up bad memories.” The expression in his eyes was sincere. He let a couple of moments pass before he spoke again. “Have you ever wondered what started the feud between our families?”

  She nodded. “Yes, but I never could find anyone willing to tell me.” She replaced a piece of fallen lettuce in her sandwich. “I’ve thought that the true reason was forgotten along the way and the thing developed a life of its own. Like a monster in a horror movie.”

  He chuckled. “It’s a monster, all right. Years of time and energy have been wasted on it. It caused a lot of trouble and made some of us do t
hings we wouldn’t have otherwise.”

  Julianne waited. Where was he going with this?

  “I want you to know that I never meant to hurt you, Julianne. Not ever,” he continued. “When you married Wes Emerson, I sort of lost my head for a while. Nothing mattered anymore. But I never meant to hurt him, either. I was just so jealous.”

  She’d put down her sandwich. Her throat began to feel tight, and she didn’t think she could swallow any more of it. “Mitchell—”

  He pushed on, as if trying to get the words out before she could stop him. “I went to prison and served my time. People have asked me why I didn’t get out sooner on parole. The truth is, I didn’t think I deserved a break, so I didn’t try for parole when it came up. But even that sentence didn’t wipe out the guilt I’ve carried around in me all this time.”

  She stared at him, barely able to speak. Her throat was as dry as the caliche. “Why are you bringing this up? To make me relive it? To make me feel worse than I already do?”

  “God, no, girl!” He leaned forward and reached for her hand, but she snatched it away. “I just want to—I mean I hope that someday you can forgive me.”

  He’d come far too close to a raw nerve for Julianne. “This is the unfinished business you’ve been talking about?”

  He looked down at his plate, now empty except for bread crumbs. “Yeah, I guess it is.”

  “No apology is going to bring Wes back to life or put Erin in my arms! I lost my baby, my sweet little girl, right after that trial.”

  “I-I heard a little about it. I didn’t know until I got back to town.”

  She hadn’t wanted to analyze this memory again, but Mitchell had pulled the top off its hiding place in her heart. “She was stillborn at twenty-four weeks. The doctor was in tears when he put her in my arms because he couldn’t find anything wrong with her! She was perfect and she was innocent of her parents’ blunders, and she died.” She grabbed her napkin and swiped at her eyes. Loss, loss, and more loss.

  “God,” he muttered, the color drained from his face, “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  “I don’t talk about it. Ever. But I think about it every day.”

  He slid from his chair and dropped to his knees in front of her. “Juli, you might not believe me, but I never wanted anything bad to happen to you. I was angry when you married Emerson because I just couldn’t believe you’d throw us away.”

  “I didn’t ‘throw us away.’ Why did you string me along all those years ago? You knew I wanted to marry you.”

  “I was ready to grab you and get us out of here. I was only waiting to hear back from those baseball scouts. When I got turned down, I didn’t have a backup plan. All I could see in my future was slaving away at a place like Benavente’s. I didn’t know how to do anything except play ball and be a grunt worker. When you married Wes, well, after that I didn’t much care what happened to me. I ran around with Cherry and let myself get carried away by Earl’s hate and my brothers’ knack for making trouble.”

  “Don’t you try to blame me for any of that. You strung me along with a lot of stardust and pie-in-the-sky. With my father dying and—and other problems, I had to do something.”

  He bowed his head for a moment, then looked into her eyes. “I’m not blaming you, Juli. I just couldn’t bear the idea of you married to someone else. A couple of months later, I saw you in town, pregnant, and something in my screwed-up brain flipped a switch. When I left here for prison, I swore I’d never come back.”

  She wadded up the napkin. If he hadn’t come back, her heart wouldn’t feel as empty as it did now—and she’d already thought it couldn’t feel any more barren. The longing that had slept uneasily in the hollow of her loneliness would have remained undisturbed. His return had dredged up all that.

  She glared at him. “Why did you, then?”

  He put his hands on her knees. “I came back to Gila Rock only to see you. To ask for your forgiveness.”

  “Really?” she demanded, furious now. “So you can sleep at night? Why do you deserve that luxury when there is no one I can ask forgiveness of for my own guilt? I’ll forgive you the day that Wes and Erin do!”

  She pushed out her chair and escaped up the stairs to her apartment and slammed the door. Then she pounded back downstairs, swept past him, and went into the store to lock the front door and flip her OPEN sign to CLOSED. She raced upstairs and slammed the door again.

  Mitchell swallowed hard and let her go.

  The rest of the day and that night were rough for Julianne. Tortured by jumbled pictures of the past, she spent the afternoon alternatively swearing at fate, Mitchell, and events in her past, and crying for all of them. She kept trying to move forward, but something—or someone—always seemed determined to pull her back. She was tired of having no one with whom to share her burdens, but when Cade’s face rose in her mind, she found no comfort in the image or the idea of him. Wesley’s memory left her feeling just as empty. Only one man came to mind, and she viciously steered her brain away from him.

  When evening came, she ate the other half of her dried-out sandwich and finished a bottle of wine she’d opened two nights earlier.

  Jack watched her, puzzled but somehow comforting, and never left her. When she sobbed against his big, furry side, he didn’t move an inch but let her cry on him. “You’re the only friend I have,” she wailed, fueled by old grief and stale wine.

  At last she wore herself out and fell asleep. Jack took his usual place beside her on the bed and stayed close.

  Mitchell went “home” to the Satellite Motel, but restlessness put him back in the Skylark. He drove aimlessly, passing a patrol car once. The officer gave him a piercing look, and he waited to be pulled over, but it didn’t happen. After a while he found himself looking at the old high school baseball diamond again, reliving the brief, heady days when he’d believed he’d escape Gila Rock, take Julianne with him, and head for the bright lights of the stadiums. Instead, he sat in the parking lot, using the dashboard lights to see the crummy burger and cold fries on his lap, wondering if his real life would ever start—or if this was it. Julianne’s earlier words kept replaying themselves in his mind.

  . . . there is no one I can ask forgiveness of for my own guilt . . .

  What had she meant by that? He crumpled the white burger sack and drove by a garbage can to toss it in. She wasn’t the guilty party of anything. He was.

  Toward sunup, he made his way to the edge of town, chugging along in a fire-bright dawn through the gates of Desert Rest Cemetery. He parked along one of the paths and got out of the car, surrounded by headstones and modest statuary, searching the names carved upon them. If he couldn’t get a pardon from Julianne, maybe he could explain himself to a dead man. After walking between graves decorated with silk flowers, Texan and Mexican flags, and the occasional unopened beer or melted candy bar, he found the headstone for WESLEY J. EMERSON, BELOVED SON AND HUSBAND. He sat down in the weedy dust beside it and looked at the dates. Wes had been twenty-two when he died, probably fifty or sixty years too soon. And he, Mitchell Tucker, convicted felon, was responsible for putting him here.

  “Wes,” he said aloud. “I’m sorry for this. I’ve been eaten up with guilt since the day this happened, something I never intended. I was crazy about Julianne.” He shrugged helplessly. “I still am. When her father convinced her to marry you, I just about lost my mind. It wasn’t your fault you got into the middle of this. I was young back then, kind of a screw-up, and I guess she felt that she had no options. I wanted to marry her, but I wasn’t ready—hell, I was barely nineteen, old enough to know better, but not smart enough. She’s doing pretty well, I think, but she’s not ready to forgive me.” He pulled a dandelion leaf from the weed next to him and began shredding it. “I was hoping you might, since you’ve moved on to something better.”

  But he knew that forgiveness was not the same as forgetting, and it did not absolve the wrongdoer. Most of all, he realized, it wasn’t always easy to give o
r to get.

  On the other side of Wes’s grave, Mitchell noticed a very small headstone with a lamb etched into it. The morning sun sparkled on the flecks of mica in the stone. ERIN BRETT EMERSON . . . BELOVED DAUGHTER. Wait . . . Mitchell read the name three times. Oh God—could it—it was—

  He swallowed and took a deep breath. He got up and stumbled back to his car, hoping he could find a pen.

  Julianne didn’t sleep well, but when morning came, she dragged on her clothes and started again. She had a slight headache but nothing too horrible, certainly not as horrible as the day before had been. Trying to come to grips with yesterday had made the muscles tight in her neck and shoulders. She’d made several concessions she thought she never would when it came to Mitchell—after all, she’d never expected to even speak to him again. But forgiveness? No, that was too much. Let him go to a priest or ask God, or whatever. She didn’t have to forgive him.

  Her thoughts, though, carried her a bit further along, and suddenly she remembered something she’d read in high school English class years earlier.

  The quality of mercy is not strain’d,

  It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

  Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest:

  It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

  Yeah, blah-blah, easy for Shakespeare to say, she argued with herself. He’d probably never faced the sort of dilemma she was looking at.

  After getting her coffee and since it was still early, she decided to take a peek at The Tomb. Even though she’d been in and out of that corner many times over the past few weeks—sometimes with her own things that she’d moved from the house—she hadn’t stopped to really look at the stuff back here. Now she set her coffee cup on a nearby peach crate and plowed in.

  Some of what she found surprised her, although she knew it shouldn’t by now. She discovered rubber-banded stacks of old, yellow carbon copies of customer receipts going back to the 1960s, created with real carbon paper. Lifting another box lid, she discovered three dozen rolls of adding machine tape and the heavy, ancient dinosaur of a machine with a crank that had probably used them. The thing might even qualify as an antique to someone who liked collecting that sort of junk. She excavated more of the same as she poked around, then came to a box that she had put here herself. On it, she’d used a marker to write, MOM’S STUFF. She remembered vaguely that most of the contents had come from the back of her own closet, things that she’d never noticed and had probably been there for many years.