The Pursuit of Jesse

by Helen Brenna

  “I don’t know much about you,” she said. “And what I do know makes me wonder what kind of influence you’d have on Brian.”

  Silent, he walked toward the windows. Stood there, looking out.

  “Tell me,” she whispered, “why you went to prison.”

  JESSE’S THROAT WENT DRY and he couldn’t seem to push out a single word. He’d known this moment would eventually come. He’d known that at some point he was going to have to spill his guts to someone on this island. He just hadn’t wanted that first someone to be Sarah.

  “I need to know,” she whispered.

  “I’m no threat to Brian. Or you. Isn’t knowing that enough?”

  “Going to prison…had to have a big impact on you. I need to know what you did. I need to know who you are before I can let my son be alone with you.”

  “You said you know who I am. Remember?” He turned away, anger building inside him. What right did she have to intrude? What right—

  But the truth was that his shame wasn’t her problem. He’d been working for her for weeks now and, for the most part, she’d let it lie. She was Brian’s mother and she had a right to limit his involvement with a felon. She was being a good mother. She deserved to know the truth.

  “Jesse, tell m—”

  “I’ve always worked construction,” he said, not really sure how to begin. “Usually followed the weather. In the winters I went south. In the summers I came north. Late one summer, I was working outside of Milwaukee. A housing development. I was in charge of two of the projects. This was years back. During a peak in new building.”

  He started pacing in front of the windows and refused to look at her, knowing that the mere sight of Sarah’s eyes might cause him to freeze up.

  “We’d all been working God-awful hours,” he went on. “Trying to complete the houses before the snow started flying. Seventy-hour weeks for more than a month. Finally, we got to a point where we could relax. It was a Saturday night. The heat was off and all the crews were celebrating.”

  “You mean at a bar?” she asked.

  Jesse nodded. He could almost hear the music playing in the background, the voices in his head as if it was yesterday.

  Come on, Jesse. Bottoms up.

  Happy hour ain’t happy without the life of the party.

  You’re empty, man. That’s no good.

  One more. It’s just beer. It’s not like you’re doing shots, right?

  On and on and on, that night’s dialogue had been running through his mind for years. Though the lines might change from one time to the next, one thing remained constant. He was always left with the desperate longing to go back in time and do it all over again. Do it right this time.

  “The bottom line is that I drank one beer too many and then got behind the wheel of my truck.” He stopped and stared out into the bitterly cold night. There was no way he could look at Sarah. “I was on my way home when I fell asleep. Next thing I knew, my horn was blaring and the air bag had smacked me in the face. I don’t know how long it took to get that thing out of the way, but by the time I climbed out of the truck, sirens were wailing toward me. I’d run my truck right up onto the sidewalk and smashed into the corner of a drugstore.”

  “So you got a DWI. That doesn’t explain—”

  “I hit a man, Sarah.” His hands trembled and his heart raced. He turned then, knowing he had to face her. He had to face what he’d done.

  She stared at him, her eyes wide.

  “I ran into a human being with my truck,” he whispered, the truth spilling from him like bile. “One minute the man was at one of those video machines outside a drugstore picking out a movie. And the next minute he was pinned between the front of my truck and the brick building.”

  “Oh, my God,” she whispered. “Was he still alive?”

  “Unconscious, but alive.” Jesse nodded, forcing himself to hold her gaze. “I ran back to the truck, threw her in Reverse, but she wouldn’t budge.” He swallowed. “My truck had somehow gotten wedged between that building and a corner streetlight.”

  She put her hand to her mouth and her eyes watered, but she didn’t turn away from him as he’d expected. She didn’t look away as if she couldn’t stand the sight of him. The way he often couldn’t stand the sight of himself.

  “Seconds later, an ambulance arrived and the EMTs pushed me aside. Then the cops came.”

  “How did they get the man free?”

  “The cops drove gently into the side of my truck, dislodging it.”

  “Did the man die?”

  “No. And the man’s name is Hank Bowman.” A husband, son and brother. “He ended up with head injuries and internal bruising. He was in a coma for about a month. But the worst thing…” he said, pausing. “He’s now paralyzed from the waist down. Hank hadn’t even turned thirty years old yet when I ruined his life. He may never walk again.”

  For Jesse, one of the worst parts about it all was that he couldn’t remember a thing about hitting Hank with his truck. Jesse had been asleep at the time he’d gone off the road and that wasn’t right, that he had no memory of the moment of impact. By rights, he should be haunted by that instant every day, day in and day out for the rest of his life. The look of Hank’s face as the grille of Jesse’s truck hit the man’s body should cause restless nights and plague his nightmares. Nothing else seemed like justice.

  “And don’t go off saying things like at least he didn’t die. At least you didn’t kill him. At least he didn’t…” Jesse groaned and spun away from her. Jesse’s family, his mother and brothers and sister-in-law had tried to help him cope, tried to help him feel better. “There’s no way to make this okay. No way to diminish the wrong I did.”

  He’d had almost four years to think about this. Justify. Minimize. Rationalize. Hell, all he’d had were a couple of beers that night. His only problem had been drinking on an empty stomach. People drove drunk all the time and never got caught. Never caused an accident. Here he was, with his first DWI, and this is what happened. All he’d done was fall asleep. Such a simple thing. It wasn’t his fault the guy had been in the wrong place at the wrong time. But, in the end, he knew in his heart. There was no excuse for what he’d done. No excuse.

  “So you went to trial and were convicted—”

  “I waived my right to a trial and pled guilty. With my clean record, Garrett said that a good attorney could’ve gotten me off without any prison time, but that didn’t seem right. Hank lost his ability to walk as a direct result of me slamming my truck into him,” Jesse whispered. “I broke the law and deserved to go to jail.”

  Sarah looked back at him, but he couldn’t for the life of him venture a guess as to what she was thinking.

  “That’s the only time. The only time I’ve ever hurt anyone,” he offered. “There are no cars on Mirabelle, and I won’t ever touch a drop of alcohol so long as I live. So you go ahead and hate me all you want, Sarah. I won’t blame you. But don’t punish Zach, or Brian, because of what I did. I would never, ever hurt either one of those boys.”

  There. It was done.

  Jesse spun away from the look on Sarah’s face and stalked through the double door and out of Duffy’s dining room. Keeping his head down, he went directly toward the pub’s side exit, effectively evading anyone he might’ve met in the short time he’d been on the island. Then he ran down the alley, crossed Main and took off up the hill to Garrett’s house as fast as his legs would carry him.

  Now that it was out of him, now that Sarah knew, he should’ve felt relieved, free. Instead, shame overwhelmed him. The freezing air numbed his cheeks and stung his lungs, but still he couldn’t erase the look on Sarah’s face from his mind. Part anger, part sympathy, part pity, and all disgust. He couldn’t take it anymore.

  On reaching the house, he nodded at the boys and their babysitter watching a movie in the family room and headed directly back to the spare bedroom, grabbed his duffel bag from under the bed and started throwing things inside. The new clothin
g he’d bought. The books. A few new toiletries. If he had to cross Chequamegon Bay’s ice pack on foot, he was getting the hell off this island tonight.

  The front door opened and closed. A moment later footsteps pounded down the hall and a big shadow appeared in the doorway. Garrett. “What happened?”

  “Nothing,” Jesse said. “I’ve overstayed my welcome. That’s all.”

  “I saw you leaving Duffy’s. I saw the look on your face. And I saw Sarah coming out of the dining room a moment later.”

  Jesse continued throwing things in his pack.

  “You told her, didn’t you?”

  Jesse paused, but he kept his back to his brother and his mouth closed, not trusting himself to speak in that instant.

  “Jesse, listen to me,” Garrett said. “I know I played a bit of a hard-ass when you first got to Mirabelle, but I was worried you might slip back into some old bad patterns. You haven’t. You’ve changed. You’ve grown. You’ve done your time. You deserve to move on.”

  “Do I?”

  “You paid your debt to society.”

  “What about my debt to Hank? He’s in a wheelchair, for God’s sake. May never walk again. He had to sell his house and move because he couldn’t go up stairs. He can only enter buildings that are handicapped accessible. He lost his job because of me. His life. Even his marriage is on the rocks.”

  “You’ve kept in touch with him?”

  “He’s kept in touch with me. God only knows why, but he visited me a couple times in prison. Sent emails.” Jesse put his head down. “I took everything away from Hank. He won’t ever be able to move on, Garrett. Why should I have that luxury?”

  “So that’s it?” Garrett said. “One sign of trouble and it’s hit the road again.”

  Garrett paced behind him. “Dammit, Jesse! I thought things would be different this time. Maybe I was wrong. Maybe you haven’t changed.”

  Jesse spun around ready to defend himself. “You don’t understand—”

  “You can’t face what you did.”

  “That’s not entirely true,” he murmured. “I can’t face…Sarah.”

  Garrett held his gaze.

  “People I don’t know. I can stand their disapproval. Jonas. Sean. That couple at the pub tonight. They don’t know me. They don’t know what’s inside. They don’t know what I’ve been through. But there’s something about Sarah.” He threw a balled-up T-shirt into his pack. “I don’t know how to live with the way she looked at me.”

  “You live with it by staying and fighting it. You follow through on a job you committed to finishing. Sarah doesn’t need to like you for you to get the job done. And you don’t need to like her. She’s your boss.”

  Garrett didn’t understand.

  “Maybe…just maybe…if you show Sarah the man you’ve become, she’ll come around. With any luck, she’ll eventually accept and possibly even respect the brother I know regrets with his whole heart and soul what happened that night four years ago. Stay, Jesse. Face it.”

  Zach appeared in the doorway. He glanced down at the bag on the bed and pushed his way into the room. “You’re not leaving, are you, Uncle Jesse? You can’t leave. You just got to Mirabelle.”

  Everything in Jesse was ready to bolt and run. He wanted to be anyplace but here. Someplace he wouldn’t know anyone. Someplace no one knew him. Someplace—

  Then what? Some other town? Some other job? If not Sarah, it’d be someone else he was starting to care about who would look at him the way she had tonight. That was the real problem. He’d started to care for Sarah. Zach, Brian and Erica, too. Jesse glanced from the boy’s face to his brother’s. He’d missed Garrett much more than he’d realized all these years.

  “Uncle Jesse? Are you really leaving?”

  He’d planned on staying on the island only long enough to stash away some traveling cash, but is that really what he wanted? Was the man who’d walked out of prison really no different than the man they’d locked up four years ago?

  Maybe it was time this rolling stone settled for a while, at least until this frozen rock of an island thawed a bit. Maybe it was time to prove to himself he’d changed, regardless of Sarah. “No, Zach, I’m not going anywhere,” Jesse said, giving his nephew a half smile. “Had some dirty clothes to carry down to the washing machine.” He glanced at Garrett. “I’ll be staying on Mirabelle for a little while yet.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  “I HAVE IN MY NOTES that you wanted a buffet,” Sarah said, trying hard to keep the frustration from her voice as she paced up and down the living room of her house. It’d taken her less than fifteen minutes to confirm the menus for her other June weddings. In contrast, she’d already been on the phone with Megan for more than half an hour.

  “Absolutely not,” Megan said. “I ended up deciding on a sit-down dinner for the wedding reception, remember? I know I emailed you.”

  Megan had definitely not emailed that change to Sarah, and this was exactly why she made it a point to, without exception, reconfirm everything months ahead of time.

  Taking a deep breath and glancing up in an effort to clear her head, Sarah immediately noticed that Jesse had finished what he’d called knockdown texturing on all the ceilings. She studied several edges and corners and couldn’t pick out a single flaw. The man was nothing if not meticulous. And he was right, too. She’d been reluctant to spend the extra money renting a spraying machine, but the new ceilings gave the house an updated, contemporary look and feel. She loved it.

  “All right, Megan,” she said, feeling suddenly renewed. “A sit-down dinner it is. I’ve got you down for marinated chicken with olive tapenade and filet mignon with béarnaise.”

  Megan sighed. “What do you think about adding some Lake Superior flavor? Maybe whitefish with a white-wine cream sauce?”

  “I think you should stick with chicken and beef. If you want fish, we can add that to the groom’s dinner buffet.”

  “This is a destination wedding. I want more Mirabelle flavor—”

  “I get that, Megan,” Sarah interrupted, needing to shut this bride down. “But a lot of people don’t like fish. Remember that Mirabelle’s flavor comes into play the moment your guests step onto the ferry. The island charm is solidified when they’re whisked away on horse-drawn carriages to the Mirabelle Island Inn. Then there are the historic rooms. The rose gardens. The breezes coming in off the lake. The view. The gazebo. That’s what Mirabelle Island is all about.”

  Megan sighed. “You’re right. You’re right. Just like the gold calla lilies. Beef and chicken it is. But I want the vegetables steamed, not boiled. And I want pasta, not potatoes…”

  Sarah closed her eyes and kept her mouth shut, hoping Megan would soon run out of steam. Several minutes later, the bride took a breath and Sarah seized the opportunity. “Megan, I must run. I’ve got everything under control, okay?”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Positive. See you soon.”

  Sarah clicked off her cell phone and glanced around, taking in the status of her house. As picky as she could be, she couldn’t fault Jesse’s work. As for his admission at Duffy’s the other night as to why he’d gone to prison, she was at a loss. She hadn’t seen him since then and had no clue as to how to proceed in this strange relationship.

  Picking up a broom, she walked toward the back and started sweeping up the bathrooms. She and Jesse had an unwritten, unspoken agreement. He made messes. She cleaned them up.

  When the front door opened and closed, her stomach clenched.

  “Hello? Sarah?” Close but no cigar. It was Garrett.

  She stepped out into the hall. “Jesse’s not here.”

  “Actually, I was looking for you.” He came toward her, examining every angle and line of Sheetrock and trim with a critical eye. “My brother might not be able to design furniture to save his soul,” he murmured. “But he does damn good remodeling work.”

  “You were right.” Sarah finished sweeping the floor. “He was the best ma
n for this job.”

  “The only person likely to satisfy a perfectionist is another perfectionist.” Garrett smiled. “How are things going between you two?”

  Avoiding his gaze, she dumped the full dustpan into the garbage. “All right.” It’d been several days since Jesse had come to Duffy’s, and since then, she had to admit, she’d been avoiding him, coming to the house late in the day and hoping Jesse would already be gone. The time or two that lights had still been on inside she’d left to come back later.

  “You sure about that?”

  Silently, she glanced up at Garrett.

  “The other night at Duffy’s,” he said. “I know he told you about his DWI. Hitting a pedestrian.”

  She didn’t know what to say. Since then, Jesse’s admission had been all she’d thought about. What he had done was wrong. There was no way around that. But Sarah would’ve been lying to herself to not admit she’d made her share of mistakes.

  While she empathized with the man Jesse had hit and his family, people made mistakes every day, and sometimes those mistakes impacted other’s lives. Some times people even died. During her stint down in Miami, there were a number of times she could’ve been the one who’d ended up in prison for any number of infractions.

  “I think there might be a few other things about Jesse that might help you understand,” Garrett said softly.

  “I won’t say anything to any of the other islanders,” Sarah said, putting the broom and dustpan in the closet. “If that’s what you’re worried about.”

  “I hadn’t even considered that, to be honest.”

  “Then what?”

  “I’m worried about Jesse. Guess it’s the big-brother thing. What he’s been through has hit him pretty hard,” Garrett said. “Sometimes I’m surprised he still has a sense of humor.” He chuckled. “When we were kids he was always the comic relief. Bet that doesn’t come as a surprise, huh?”

  “No.”

  “Something that might surprise you is that for whatever reason—and I’m trying hard not to read anything into this—your opinion has become important to Jesse.”