by Jillian Hart
Tidy driveways veered off the main road, about a quarter of a mile or more apart, where mailboxes stood bearing the family name, some in the shapes of barns or decorated to look like a duck. The graveled driveways wound through the green fields and the country homes seemed to smile, although it was only the reflection of the sunlight on the front windows.
He saw everything from trailer homes to lavish houses. It was all so neat and quaint, with horses grazing in white-fenced pastures and now and then a farmer riding a tractor along the fence line. Irrigation tossed water into the wind, and thousands of tiny rainbows glittered midair in the spray.
The beauty surrounding him made him feel keenly what he’d become inside—ugly and bitter.
Had he become so hard and callous that he could no longer recognize good when he saw it? He remembered the look on the waitress’s face. The stunned shock and the sudden hurt as if he’d reached out and slapped her—not that he would ever hit a woman.
But that’s how much harm his panicked words had done.
C’mon, lady, you can’t be real. Whatever it is you’re thinking you can get from me, forget it.
Yeah, he could hear how it would have sounded to her. He’d become so bitter, it felt as if it was all he was. Nothing but disillusionment and pain, and he was ashamed of himself. Ashamed. He wasn’t a bad man. He didn’t go around hurting people.
So why had he said that to her?
Because he’d stopped believing in good, in kindness, long ago. It was easier than the truth he could not bear to face. It was easier than trying to understand why God had taken so much from him. And why—
Black pain clamped so tight on his heart, he gasped. Air caught in his throat. He’d swear he was having a heart attack, but he knew better. It was a different kind of pain in his heart. A different kind of damage.
The road stretched ahead of him, rolling and rib-boning up the gentle rises and falling out of sight in the slow dips. Then it rose again in the distance, like a thin black thread lying along the endless green. The road could carry him far away, past those mountains rising up thousands of feet, the rugged, bare-faced granite and white glacier caps holding up the vivid blue bowl of the sky.
Yeah, he could keep going on this road, keeping on just the way he was. Adding this stain on his soul to go along with the emptiness in there. He could drive east and once he had those mountains behind him, he could forget this place ever existed and with it the wrong he’d done. He could go on.
But he didn’t want to be the kind of man who did. He might have lost everything on a rainy night over two years ago. That didn’t mean he had to grow into the kind of man who went around causing harm.
No, Lord knew there were enough of those kinds of people on this earth already.
Was he going to be one of them? Suddenly he saw how it worked: One mistake after another, one harm caused after another, until it was a way of life.
So he stopped in the middle of the road. With the windows down, sweet fragrant air breezed into the cab. As it bathed his face and tickled his hair, he debated. Then he checked for traffic—not that there was a vehicle in sight in either direction. And, with no one but God to witness it, he pulled a U-turn and headed back the way he came. Not so bitter a man, after all.
Not so lost.
The diner was jammed. Amy gave thanks for the warm sunny day because they could use the tables set out on the brick patio at the side of the building. Without them, they’d be turning business away. As it was, they were almost out of those tables, too.
As Jodi seated another soccer family, Amy filled orders as fast as the grill would cook them. She was glad the twins—young though they were—had shown up early to help with some of the prep work.
“Westin is like the coolest kid ever!” Brandilyn—or was it Brianna?—grabbed the order for table three and, instead of hurrying, stopped, cracked her gum and gave a high-wattage smile. “I can’t wait until I get to be a mom. Not that I’m in a hurry, ’cuz I hope I can get into college first.”
It was Brandilyn because Brianna sidled up to actually take the plates from the warming lights. Amy could clearly see the name badge on her collar.
Equally as blond and cute and full of teenage charm, Brianna cracked her gum, too. “Like, college is a year away. We’re supposed to be waitresses, Brand. So, like, waitress, okay?”
“Oh, right!” With a swing of her head, which sent her ponytail flopping, Brandilyn grabbed the last plate and followed her twin down the aisle.
“We were never like that when we were their age,” Jodi commented as she brought in a bin of dirties and dumped them on the counter. “Right?”
“Right. We never giggled. Never used words like cool.” Amy laughed as she unloaded small glass plates of house salad from the refrigerator and uncovered them. “Is it me, or does it seem like a century since we were that young?”
“For me, two centuries at least.” Jodi hadn’t had the easiest life, either, but she managed to smile. “Those two are the cutest things. I adore ’em, except they make me feel about twelve hundred years old.”
“Oh, wait until they pull you aside for their senior life class assignment.” Amy trayed the plates and left Jodi to finish them as the fryer beeped. She had fries to rescue.
“I’m afraid to ask,” Jodi said as she spooned out the creamy salad dressings.
“They wanted to know what school was like in the ‘olden days.’”
“What?” A spoon clattered to the floor and rattled to a stop. “The olden days?”
“Sure. I’m practically thirty and, as they said, that’s ‘like ancient.’” Amy lovingly mimicked the twins’ intonation as she set the basket out of the grease and turned to add slices of cheese to half of the frying meat patties. “You gotta love those two.”
“Or something!” Jodi was laughing—or maybe crying. Several years older, Jodi was well into her midthirties and, Amy suspected, unappreciative of-being called ancient. “I’ve got a few crow’s feet, but goodness! The olden days. Did they really say that?”
“Honest and truly. I wish I could say they meant to be insulting, but they said it as cheerful as could be. Just wait.” Amy reached with the tongs to rescue the buns from the browning rack—but missed. Her fingers froze in midair, woefully short of the metal tongs.
The screen door behind her squeaked. Turning, she saw a tall, broad-shouldered man fill the doorway.
Her loner was back, and he didn’t look happy. “Can I come in?”
“We’re busy.”
“I need to talk to you.”
“I’m busy.”
Heath knew that look and what it meant when it was on a woman’s face. He was in the doghouse, no doubt about that. His hand was raised in a loose fist to knock on the metal door frame, but since he’d already been spotted, he lowered his hand. He tried to gather up his pride and his troubled conscience.
The other waitress took one look at him, grabbed her tray of salads and disappeared through the swinging doors, leaving him alone with Amy McKaslin, who turned her back on him to whisk two burgers from the grill with a neat jab of the big metal spatula. She deposited them on well-dressed bottom buns, added bacon to one and sauce and pineapple rings to the other and, finishing with the top bun, loaded them onto plates.
He knew the look of hard, honest work. His conscience smote him even harder as, with her back to him, she kept on working. Her golden-blond ponytail bounced in rhythm with her movements, the curling end brushing at the collar of her T-shirt. It was a vulnerable thing, seeing the soft creamy skin and the visible bumps of her vertebrae. She was small-boned and fragile, and yet she worked with a strong capability that said she was made of steel, too.
He’d hurt her more than he’d realized, and he felt sick about it. He could see that in the rigid way she kept her back to him as she worked. Flipping strips of bacon, stirring sautéing onions, changing gloves to drop fresh oversized buns onto the rack to warm.
“Maybe you could spare a minute?�
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She didn’t so much as flinch. “I don’t really have a minute to spare.”
“I can see you’re in the middle of a lunch crowd.”
She arched her brow, her face a set mask as she rushed by to lift a bin of sliced tomatoes from the industrial refrigerator. Okay, she wasn’t going to make this easy for him, he understood it. He respected her for it, too. She was a nice person, but she wasn’t a pushover. He liked women with a bit of grit to them.
So he tried again. “I just wanted to apologize. I’ll only take, say, thirty seconds of your time.”
“Believe me, if you want to apologize properly, it’s going to take a lot more than thirty seconds.” She kept her back to him, swapping gloves again, dressing toasted buns with relish and mayonnaise, adding lettuce and tomato.
She didn’t seem quite as angry. Maybe that was a good sign. He gave his cap’s bill a tug as he thought. He wasn’t sure what to say other than that he’d behaved like a donkey’s behind. Without reason. “Can I come in? Or are you going to make me stand here and grovel for forgiveness from ten feet away?”
“Are you going to grovel?”
He thought he heard a smiling sound in her voice, but he couldn’t be sure. “How would you like it? On my knees? Prostrate on the floor? Maybe wearing sack cloth and covered with boils?”
“Boils? I’d like to see you suffer, but there are health codes to uphold. I guess I’ll have to settle for prostrate on the floor. Would you like a towel? The tile’s clean but it’s the old-fashioned kind and it’s cold to lie on.”
“Well, if you want me to suffer…” He didn’t finish the sentence, and he liked that she turned from her work, a hint of a smile tugging at the curving corners of her soft mouth.
“I do want you to suffer,” she confessed, but the questioning tilt of her deep-blue eyes said differently.
She was studying him, as if measuring his intentions, not in a harsh way but in a way that made him feel as if he had a chance of measuring up. But why should he care about that? All he needed to do was ease his conscience, apologize and move on.
He had places to go. A job to find. A past to keep forever buried.
“Come in. It’s not locked.” She went back to work, flipping the burgers, dumping a huge pile of freshly cut potatoes into the French-fry basket, lifting another out of the golden oil full of crisp, hand-battered onion rings.
He turned the screen-door handle and the hinges rasped as he stepped inside. Could use some grease, he thought, looking around. The white tile floor was probably original, most likely put in sometime in the sixties. The kitchen was small and simple, but clean. Chrome shined. The countertops were a perfect white. The appliances up to date.
He didn’t know what made him open his mouth or where the words came from. He surprised himself when he heard his voice say, “Want some help?”
She dropped her spatula. Spun on her heel. Surveyed him up and down with her intelligent eyes. “Do you have a food handler’s card?”
“Got one a while back. It’s still current.”
“Okay, then. You can seat folks. Gather up the empties. Bus. Can you do that?” It wasn’t a question the way she said it; it was more of a challenge. As if she wanted to see if he could measure up to her standards.
He hadn’t had a challenge in a long while. Not that he was worried—he liked to work hard. She pointed at the sink and he washed up, letting the hot water scald his skin. He didn’t know what whim he was following, but whatever it was, it had to be a good one. His conscience wasn’t bugging him. His stomach was calm. He felt as if he was finally doing something right as he grabbed an empty dishpan and shouldered through the swinging doors.
Out of the corner of his peripheral vision, he saw Amy watching him in surprise before the doors swung closed, stealing her from his sight. He didn’t know why, but he felt a sense of rightness click into place like a key in a lock, and it was as if a door opened. In his old life, he would have chalked it up to Providence, but he’d long since stopped looking—or wanting—God’s hand in his life.
But now he just saw it as a fortunate occurrence. That’s all, not Providence. He spotted a family leaving one of the booths. The father took the wiggling toddler from his wife, who looked kind but a little harried, as she encouraged her older two sons—both wearing different colored soccer uniforms—to stop goofing around on their way down the aisle.
Heath looked away and froze his feelings so he felt nothing at all. He was just a man staring out the window, working in a diner, more interested in the few cars crawling by looking for parking. The family passed by on their way to the cash register up front.
Only then did he plop the bin on the seat and start clearing.
Chapter Five
Amy flipped the double patties on the garnished bottom bun, added hot sauce, jalapeños and hot peppers, and heaped fries on the last plate on the last order of the Saturday lunch rush. Through the hand-off window she could see the last of the families were waiting for Jodi to ring up their meals.
Amy turned to begin clean-up and then halted in midstep. What was she thinking? She wasn’t thinking, that was the problem. Her thoughts had been scattered like dust in the wind and she couldn’t seem to get them focused. Not since the loner had returned. He was a good worker—she had to give him that. Through the swinging doors she could just see the top of his head as he wiped down the outside tables.
She still didn’t know if she had completely forgiven him for being so rude to her, and that was wrong. It was her faith to forgive. He’d offered her a sincere apology and she had accepted it. But deep down his harsh demeanor grated. See, it was good never to trust men. Whether they meant to or not, they caused pain.
She’d had enough pain in her life and certainly wasn’t about to look for more. So, why did she keep wondering about him? Why had he come back? Why was he helping out? Where was he going, that he had time to spare instead of rushing off to wherever it was that he’d been heading?
The swinging doors burst open—it was one of the twins. Tall and willowy and coltlike in the way of teenagers, and radiating pure energy.
Brianna, a touch theatrical, gave a deep meaningful sigh. “I’m, like, totally starving. I’d give anything for, like, a totally loaded chiliburger. Oh, and can I have lots and lots of fries? I burned off, like, an awesome amount of calories.”
Maybe the twins were terrible behind the cash register, but they were fun. Amy bit her lip to keep from laughing and got to work. Knowing Brandilyn would be waltzing in any second with the exact same request, she set two buns on to toast while she dished out two scoops of the chili stocked in the fridge, put them in a bowl and placed it in the microwave to warm.
Brianna, in the middle of counting up tip money, stopped to add, “Ooh, and, like, cheese, too.” Then she looked down at the big stack of ones, rolled her eyes, huffed out another sigh and started counting all over again.
She loved the twins, but really, she was glad she’d never have to be a teenager again. She wouldn’t go back for anything. Sometimes it was painful to look at the girls and remember when she’d been that age—and far too rebellious. She’d been the top student in her class all through high school, but she’d never made it through her senior year.
And the years after that…no, she wasn’t interested in looking back at that time. It was better to act as if she’d been able to erase it from her memory, like words from a blackboard, so that it was as clean as if it had never been.
“Here’s your cut.” Brianna slapped a stack of ones on the counter. “Oh, and isn’t Heath totally awesome? Are you, like, gonna hire him for keeps?”
Heath? So that was his name. She resisted the urge to peer through the doors—she could hear the faint clink and clank of dishes as he bussed. She deliberately kept her voice low and even. “He offered to pitch in and help us out for this shift. I don’t know what his plans are.”
“You should make him take the cook job. Well, only if he can cook, you know? ’
Cause, like—”
Brandilyn burst through the doors, ready to finish her twin’s sentence. “He’d be cool to have around. He’s this awesome mysterious kind of guy. Like from movies and stuff. You know he’s a good guy, but he’s so totally distant and almost scary.”
“But nice,” Brianna added. “Definitely nice.”
“Yeah.” They nodded together, both blond heads and ponytails bouncing. “Don’t you think he’s nice?”
Amy flipped the meat patties, shaking her head. There they were again, trying to find her a husband. And, to use their words—as if!
She did her best to hide a smile, because she didn’t want to encourage them. “I’m just interested in hiring a cook. You girls go get your sodas. Your burgers are ready.”
“Cool!” they said, spun on their heels and blew through the kitchen, leaving her alone.
As she dressed the buns and built the sandwiches, she let her mind wander over the possibilities. Heath. The name suited him and she liked it.
“So, are you going to tell me about the job?”
Startled, her hand flew to her throat. Trembling, she tried to catch her breath. He stood there, legs apart and braced, dressed in black jeans and T-shirt, his dark gaze fixed on her. He reminded her of a lone wolf, lean and sizable and fierce looking. She didn’t feel in danger around him, but she didn’t feel exactly safe either.
“You scared me. I didn’t hear you there.”
“Sorry.”
He didn’t look sorry. And yet she thought she heard a sense of humor warming that one word.
He looked less imposing as the hint of a grin curved the far corner of his mouth. “Next time I’ll stomp my feet and bang hard on the door so you can hear me coming.”
“Great idea. Maybe you could rattle some pots.”
“I’ll try.”
The grin spread across his hard-shaped lips until it softened his chiseled features.