by Meg Maxwell
Ask her. Just bring it up and see how she reacts.
He cleared his throat. “Delia, a few months ago I received a letter from someone my mother used to know, and I was wondering if the name rings a bell with you. Clyde Parsons.”
He stared at her and she didn’t disappoint. Her expression changed so suddenly from warm and open to shocked and guarded.
She knew.
She glanced away at the display of cereal boxes, concern etched on her face.
He took a breath. “I don’t want to put you in an uncomfortable position of talking about something you were very likely asked never to breathe a word about. But the man wrote me a deathbed confession and I have some questions. Maybe you could answer some.”
Delia bit her lip, then glanced at her cart, which so far contained only a box of steel-cut oatmeal. “I’ll put this back. Looks like you haven’t started on your shopping either. Let’s take a walk so we have some privacy.”
Logan breathed a sigh of relief that she was willing to talk about it and nodded. He wasn’t up for talking about something so personal in the middle of the grocery store either. A couple of weeks ago, he’d stopped in for a few jars of peanut butter, the boys’ favorite food, and managed to learn that so-and-so was having an affair and that so-and-so’s kid was failing algebra and that so-and-so’s sister-in-law couldn’t cook to save her life. People sure did like to chat in grocery store aisles. And he didn’t want anyone listening in on his and Delia’s conversation.
Logan returned both their carts and he and Delia walked out of the store and around back to a large grassy area with a few picnic tables meant for an outside break area for employees. No one was around. Across the field, an elderly woman was walking what looked like a miniature poodle. The woman was far enough way not to be able to overhear them, so Logan felt comfortable staying put. He kept his eyes on the dog, suddenly anxious about facing Delia and whatever information she had.
Delia was watching the scampering dog too, worry in her brown eyes. She seemed uncomfortable.
“I really just have one question, Delia.”
She turned to face him. “Okay.”
“Did my father know?”
She nodded. “Yes.”
Logan almost sagged with relief. He’d had no idea how badly he needed that to be the answer, to know that his father had treated him the way he had, like a flesh-and-blood son, despite knowing. To Logan it meant that his father’s love for him had been based in truth, in reality, in love and commitment. Not in “ignorance is bliss.” If Delia’s answer had been no or I don’t know, Logan would have always wondered how his father would have felt had he known, if it would have changed things.
Not based on the Haywood Grainger he knew, though. But still, it would have poked at him, the not knowing, the wondering.
“He knew,” Logan repeated, relief flooding him.
“He knew,” Delia said. “Your parents grew up together in Blue Gulch, as you know, they’d been childhood friends, but never dated. Then one day, your father found your mother, just eighteen years old and newly graduated from high school, sitting and crying on a swing at the playground behind the town hall. She told him the truth, that she’d just found out she was pregnant, barely six weeks along, and that when she told the baby’s father he said he was sorry but a settled-down life wasn’t the life for him and he was gone in an hour, packed and completely gone. He was a twenty-year-old traveling ranch hand who’d been hired on at your grandparents’ place and she’d fallen for him fast.”
Logan took that in, trying not to imagine his scared mother going to see the father of her baby after the first rejection and finding him cleared out. Bastard.
“Two minutes after hearing she was pregnant, your father proposed to your mother. He told her he’d secretly loved her his whole life, ever since they were kids, and if she’d have him, he’d take care of her and raise the baby as if it were his own flesh and blood. No one had to know any different, he’d assured her.”
Oh, Dad, he thought, tears pricking his eyes at the thought of his gallant father, the best man he knew. He’d gotten the girl he always loved, but he’d taken on another man’s child and he had raised Logan as if he was his own son.
“Before you were even born, your father loved you, Logan. He and your mother got married and both sets of parents helped them buy the ranch you grew up on and they settled in to await your birth. By the time you were born, you were Haywood’s son. It just was. You were his son same as if you had his DNA. That was what they believed in their hearts and it was their truth.”
“But it wasn’t the truth,” Logan said.
“There was no good reason for you to know, Logan. No good reason then. I’m not sure there’s a good reason now.”
Phoebe Pike flashed in his mind. If Logan didn’t know, if Parsons hadn’t sent him that letter, if he hadn’t gone looking for information about him, he wouldn’t know about Phoebe, a girl who had his rodeo champ poster up above her desk, a girl with losses that made his heart ache when he thought about what she’d been through.
“Deathbed confession, you said?” Delia continued. “Selfish to the end. He wanted to go in peace, I suppose, apologizing for old wrongs. But what good does knowing do you? Why’d he have to put this all in your head and make you question your identity and your father?”
Ignorance was bliss, Logan knew. But the truth was the truth, no ways around it. Good or bad, pretty or ugly, the truth was about acceptance and facing facts. Logan had been unwilling to do that when he first got Parsons’s letter. He didn’t feel all that much closer to doing so, either.
But another truth was that his father, Haywood Grainger, had loved him before he was born and had decided that he was Logan’s father, no ifs, ands or buts. Haywood became Logan’s father that moment on the swings when he proposed marriage, proposed a future.
Logan liked that truth. It filled in a lot of raw cracks in his heart. And for that, he was grateful.
“Thank you for telling me about my parents,” he said. “It means a lot to know my dad knew and that it didn’t matter that I wasn’t biologically his. He never treated me any differently than my brother.”
“You are his son, Logan. He was your father. Nothing will change that. Not a letter from Clyde, not DNA, nothing.”
He nodded, liking her surety.
“If you have more questions, you can always ask,” she said. “I’m the only person besides both sets of your grandparents who ever knew the truth. Your mother insisted on sitting down her parents and Haywood’s and telling them. She didn’t like the idea of anyone thinking that Haywood had proposed because he’d gotten her pregnant. She wanted them to know he proposed because he was a good man and because he loved her.”
Sounded like his mother. He smiled at the thought of her doing what she thought was right. Both sets of grandparents were long gone, but the Graingers had always treated him the same as his young brother.
“Thank you, Delia,” he said. “You’ve helped me feel a lot better about the whole crazy thing.”
Delia hugged him, then headed back around the corner to finish her shopping, and Logan stayed put, watching two other dogs playing on the far side of the expanse of grass. He’d liked what he heard about his parents, about his father, about his grandparents. But the jury was still out on what kind of man Clyde Parsons was. Why had he bothered with the letter? Had it been just to appease his guilt? Maybe he thought Logan already knew, that his mother had told him long ago. He didn’t get that sense from the letter, though.
He wanted that question answered, but there was only one person on earth who knew anything about Clyde Parsons, and Logan wasn’t about to poke around in the memory of a foster kid to get those answers. Phoebe clearly didn’t know he was Parsons’s biological son. But she could help him fill in the gaps of what kind of person he’d been.<
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Thing was, Logan still wasn’t sure he wanted to know. Maybe Parsons had changed from the twenty-year-old ranch hand who’d walked out on his pregnant girlfriend. Wasn’t Phoebe proof of that? Problem was that acknowledging Parsons as his biological father meant accepting that the great Haywood Grainger wasn’t. And Logan just couldn’t do that. No way.
He sighed and watched the little dogs chase each other. Phoebe was coming over after school to “work” to earn some money and learn about running a ranch. Maybe he should just get it out in the open, explain his connection to her other than rodeo hero.
He looked up at the blue sky, following a giant fluffy cloud moving westward. No answers there either.
* * *
Clementine loaded up her tray with the McDowells’s lunches, the blackened chicken po’boy special, the fish and chips, and a big side of spicy sweet potato fries. She glanced at her watch. Almost two o’clock. The lunch rush at Hurley’s Homestyle Kitchen had slowed down; only two tables were filled. She was desperately in need of a long, hot shower before taking Phoebe over to Logan’s. This morning, after walking Phoebe to the elementary school as she did each morning, she’d come back and helped out in the kitchen since the bigwigs from Texas Trust had their annual holiday lunch at Hurley’s today. The luncheon featured po’boys of every kind and every imagined side dish, from fried green tomatoes to Gram’s famous loaded twice-baked potatoes. Then a waitress had called in sick and Clementine had worked double duty, which was usually no problem since she could practically do her job in her sleep and do it well. But today, she had a lot on her mind.
Just when she’d thought Phoebe was letting her in a little, the distance was back. This morning, Phoebe had been staring in the mirror on her closet door, and Clementine had told her she looked great, which apparently had been the wrong thing to say.
“I don’t look great,” Phoebe said. “Emily Catwaller said I look like a boy and that if I didn’t have long hair, she’d think I was one.”
Clementine knew the Catwallers. Every time the family, including Emily, a fellow fourth-grader, came into Hurley’s, they sent at least one dish back since it wasn’t “prepared to exact specifications” and Donald Catwaller, a lawyer, always had loud conversations on his cell phone. Once Essie had asked him to take his phone outside and he’d humphed at her. The family had thankfully stopped coming in for months, but Hurley’s food was irresistible and unfortunately, the Catwallers were back often.
“Do you like the way you dress?” Clementine had asked Phoebe.
“It’s how I dress,” Phoebe said, looking in the mirror at her blue T-shirt with another Stocktown Rodeo advertisement and her slim blue jeans and baseball cap. “It’s how I’ve always dressed. I don’t like skirts and pink and frilly stuff.”
“Then that’s all that matters,” Clementine said with a smile. “It’s your style.”
Phoebe shrugged. “But should I wear something pink and frilly so I’d fit in better? My stepfather once bought me a pink sweater with little unicorns on it as a joke.” She smiled. “We cracked up over it.” Her smile faltered. “Maybe I should wear that to school.”
“You wear what you like,” Clementine said. “You are who you are, right? And that is someone pretty great.”
Phoebe glanced at Clementine, then down at her feet, at her usual orange sneakers. She slid open the closet door and rummaged around, then pulled out a pink sweater. With little unicorns all over it. “Maybe next Halloween,” she said, holding it up and giggling. “If it still fits.”
Clementine laughed. “Yeah, that doesn’t look like you. It sure is cute, though.”
“Clyde loved it,” Phoebe said, the wistful expression back. “The day he told me he was really sick, I wore it to the dinner table that night and he started crying. At first I thought I made him upset, but he explained to me that I’d made him very happy because ‘even though it’s the dumbest sweater on earth,’ I wore it because he gave it to me, because I cared about him.”
“That’s a beautiful memory, Phoebe.” She stepped closer, wanting to give the girl a big hug, just hold her and let her cry if she wanted to, but Phoebe stepped back and then Clementine had frozen.
“I’d better get to school,” Phoebe had said, quickly putting the sweater back on the row of shelves above the rod. Then she’d given herself a harsh glance in the mirror and turned away, insecurity in her sweet hazel eyes.
Again, Clementine had stepped forward, determined to hug Phoebe and give the girl what she didn’t even know she wanted most of all—love, assurance, security. But Phoebe had walked around her and headed for her backpack near the door, a wall of distance erected between them as though it was made of brick.
Time, Clementine told herself for the thousandth time as she glanced around the almost empty dining room’s tables and refilled the Cantor sisters’ coffee mugs.
Then there was the matter of Logan on her mind. She’d gone to sleep thinking of him; she’d woken up thinking of him.
And in an hour she was due at his ranch, a piece of her heart staying behind with him every time she was near him.
* * *
“Thank for you letting her come here,” Clementine said to Logan as they watched Phoebe reach out toward Lulu with an apple slice in her a hand. The mare took it and Phoebe grinned. Then she gave Winnie and the other ponies their snacks and used the brush to groom them the way he’d showed her during her fifteen-minute tutorial.
They sat at the picnic table near the pony pasture, both on the same side so they could watch Phoebe and so Logan could rush over if anything went wrong. He was ostensibly buffing a saddle on the table, but he was really keeping a close eye on his young “ranch hand,” as was Clementine.
“She’s earning her ten dollars, that’s for sure,” Logan said, smiling at how carefully Phoebe ran the grooming brush down Winnie’s side, gently patting the pony’s nose and telling the little horse she was being a very good girl. “How are things going at home?”
Clementine shrugged. “Step forward and back, repeat, repeat. I know from my own experience that this is how it can go. But I just want to rush straight to love and hugs and hair-brushing and long walks.”
“You’ll get there,” he assured her.
She nodded, and he hoped she believed him. “You’re doing a great job with Winnie,” Clementine called out.
Phoebe turned and smiled. “I love grooming the ponies. I love everything about ranch life.”
“Me too,” Logan called out, “but I sure would love to live in a restaurant. Waking up to the smell of biscuits. Having a smothered po’boy anytime I want.”
He did mean that; he’d be very happy to have a Hurley’s biscuit slathered in apple butter just a staircase away every morning and coffee break, but he’d said it for Clementine’s sake. He felt her looking at him, and her expression made it clear he’d surprised her. Because he’d been kind? She had to know how much he cared about her. Didn’t she?
Maybe it was better if she didn’t.
“It’s awesome,” Phoebe said. “Georgia, that’s Clementine’s sister, taught me how to make biscuits yesterday. She even gave me enough to bring in for my class today. Now almost everyone likes me.”
Logan paused in buffing the saddle. “I’m sure everyone liked you before that too. I mean, you’re very likeable.” He smiled at her, but the expression on Phoebe’s face suddenly had his own faltering.
“Emily Catwaller called me ‘foster kid’ today,” Phoebe said, her eyes on her sneakers. “‘Don’t let the foster kid touch you or you’ll turn into one,’ she said at recess today. Some kids stuck up for me, but some backed away. Whatever. I totally get it. Who’d want to be a foster kid?” She was still staring at her feet and clearly trying not to cry.
Logan shook his head. Why were there always mean kids? Why the hell couldn’t everyone just be ki
nd to one another?
Clementine gave Logan an uneasy glance, then stood up and walked over to the fence. “There are all kinds of families in this world,” she said, her expression tight. “I dealt with those kinds of taunts too when I was in foster care. It hurts.”
“Did you kick someone?” Phoebe asked. “I wanted to kick Emily.”
“I wanted to also,” Clementine said. “I didn’t, though, ’cause I’d get in trouble for that. And because striking back that way isn’t the answer—it’ll never make you feel better, even if it seems like some kind of justice at the time.”
“So what is the answer?” Phoebe asked, staring at Clementine.
Logan wasn’t sure if he should go inside to give them some privacy, but heck, he too wanted to know the answer. He pretended to be working hard on buffing the saddle, but his ears were glued to the conversation at the fence.
Clementine glanced at the pony, then back at Phoebe. “Well, when some kids were taunting me about being a foster kid, I thought to myself, well, I am. I am a foster kid. That’s just the way it is. And I could either get all upset or I could just accept the truth and figure out a way to make myself happy. I used to make lists titled Clementine Is and then wrote down all the things I thought I was. Foster kid was on the list but so was smart and determined and a fast runner and a good listener and a big reader and a nice person. It might sound weird to make a list about yourself, but it helped me really think about who I actually was. Foster kid was pretty far down the list. It was just one thing about me. Not everything.”
Logan had long paused with the buffing cloth. He stared at Clementine, vaguely noting the way the sunshine lit her dark hair and the side of her face. All she said seemed to flow right inside him, in his veins, in his bones.
Foster kid was pretty far down the list. It was just one thing about me. Not everything.
If he could make this cruddy truth about Parsons just one thing instead of everything, he’d be a hell of lot happier. But he couldn’t seem to.