Family Tree

by Carol Grace

  “Would you like some coffee?” he said at last.

  Startled, she turned abruptly. “Oh, no, we have to get going,” she said.

  “I’m going to make some,” he said, unfolding his long legs from the bench.

  “If you’ll show me where the fuse box is. I blew a fuse today with the electric saw.”

  “It’s in the pantry,” she said, accompanying him into the kitchen. It was dark in the kitchen, but she didn’t need any light. She’d know her way around if she was blindfolded. He followed her into the pantry. The small, dark room still smelled of pickles and relishes and preserves as it always had and always would, even though she’d cleaned everything out. Waves of nostalgia came washing over her. She should never have come back here. It was too painful.

  She was intensely aware of Brandon’s presence, only inches away from her. The outline of his body was all she could see, but she knew how broad his shoulders were, how his hair fell over his forehead and how his skin had tanned to a golden bronze from working outside. How he didn’t look so much like a city dweller anymore. She tried not to notice, but she couldn’t help herself. She was drawn to him as she’d never been drawn to any man. That didn’t mean she was helpless. She could fight it. She had to fight it. She had no choice.

  “Wait,” Brandon said, grabbing her arm as she reached for the fuse box.

  Her heart stalled, her pulse rate skyrocketed. She tried to pull her arm away, but he held on to her.

  “I have to tell you,” he said. “I was way out of line last night. I had no business going off like that about my troubles. You’re the one who deserves sympathy, not me. You’ve lost your house, everything. I want to make it up to you.”

  “There’s no need,” she said, fighting to stay calm, to breathe normally. “Everything that happened to me is my fault. I have no one to blame but myself. I just got what I deserved.”

  “I don’t believe that. I don’t believe anyone deserves to lose their house and their security. Especially not you. You’re too—” He traced the outline of her cheek with the pad of his thumb and she trembled all over. His touch was unbelievably tender for such a gruff man. “You’re too good and you’re too beautiful,” he said as his voice dropped to a whisper. His lips were only a breath away from hers. She felt the heat shimmy up her spine. His lips covered hers and a roaring filled her ears.

  It wasn’t lightning, it wasn’t thunder and it wasn’t an earthquake. They were in a desert valley where those things didn’t happen. But she could have sworn she’d been struck by lightning. No man’s kiss could do what his did. Could make the lights flash and the ground shake beneath her feet. Could cause her to kiss him back. To make her throw her arms around his neck and hang on for dear life.

  They came up for air after the longest, deepest kiss she’d ever known, and he nuzzled the sensitive spot behind her ear. In the back of her mind she knew she ought to leave. She feared another scene in which Brandon was overcome with guilt. A person didn’t get over those feelings in a hurry. Some people never did. He said he was one of them. She believed him. Then why would she allow herself to fall for a man who would never fall for her? She wouldn’t.

  “I have to go,” she murmured.

  Reluctantly he dropped his arms and let her go. She managed to pull herself together just enough to find the fuse box and flip the switch. The light blinded her. She blinked and avoided his gaze. Then she left the pantry, hurried through the kitchen and outside. She grabbed the picnic basket and called Dylan. While she was waiting for him, Brandon put Dylan’s bike in the back of her truck.

  “Dylan wants to come back tomorrow,” Brandon said. “to help finish the tree house. I didn’t know how you’d feel about it so I didn’t say yes or no.”

  “How I’d feel about it?” Had she heard right? Surely he wasn’t willing to have Dylan there another day. “You’re the one who has to put up with him. I don’t want him to be burden. After all, you have your own work to do.”

  “My work will keep. We’ve got to get this tree house fixed before somebody gets hurt.”

  A dozen questions popped into her head. Like, And then what? What will Dylan do? What will you do about the tree house once it’s fixed? She didn’t need to verbalize them. He answered without her speaking a word.

  “By then you’ll hopefully know where you want the house. I’ll have it moved wherever you say.”

  “That’s very kind of you,” she said. What else could she say? She could say that Dylan would be heartbroken if the tree house was moved because then this father couldn’t find him, but why start that again. Instead she managed a stiff smile and told Brandon to call her when his car was ready, otherwise she’d be by tomorrow evening after work to pick up Dylan.

  In a matter-of-fact tone he said he would, but his gaze was anything but matter-of-fact. He looked at her, and she saw something that disturbed her. She saw needs and wants and simmering seduction there. And that shocked her. This was a man who’d lost his one true love. But still a man. A man who was struggling to fight off an attraction to her. A man who’d just given in to that attraction in a moment of weakness.

  This was a man who’d never fall in love again. He’d made that clear. He had no more love to give because his love had been given away and had died with his wife and child. It was just as well. She was in no position to get attached to anyone right now. But was she attracted to him? She had to admit she was. Who wouldn’t be?

  He was rich, he was good-looking and he’d been incredibly kind to her son even though he didn’t want him around. And there was more. There was something else, something she couldn’t define—call it chemistry, call it electricity. She could call it anything she wanted, but she couldn’t deny it. Not anymore. That didn’t mean she had to fall into the man’s arms every time the lights went out. Because she had a son to raise, a job to get and a heart to protect to keep from getting hurt again.

  “HOW DID HE like the chicken?” her aunt asked, greeting her niece in the living room when she returned. “Very much,” Laura said.

  “Of course he asked you to stay and eat it with him,” her aunt said with a smug smile.

  “Yes, he did, how could he not?” Laura said. “And your chicken was delicious. I’ll have to get the recipe.”

  “Of course. Tell me, is there anything really wrong with this man?” her aunt asked, not put off a bit by Laura’s changing the subject to her cooking. “That the love of a good woman couldn’t cure?”

  “No, but—”

  “I know about the accident that killed his wife and child,” her aunt said. “Buzz told me.”

  “Good heavens, I hope the whole town doesn’t know. He doesn’t want pity.”

  “What does he want?” Emily asked, giving her niece a long look that made Laura feel as though Emily could see right through her. That she knew exactly what had happened tonight.

  “To be left alone,” Laura said flatly. It was time her aunt got rid of her romantic notions.

  “Then why have Dylan around?” Emily asked.

  “I don’t know, Aunt Emily,” Laura said, shaking her head. “I don’t really understand the man. I think sometimes he doesn’t understand himself. He’s a stranger here in a strange land. He doesn’t know our history or anything about us. And we know nothing about him. Except maybe a few things.” Like how he kisses. Like the way he looks at me, like I was a kind of forbidden fruit, and how he looks at Dylan with a kind of distant longing. How he makes me feel…. How he’s afraid to feel…. Oh, Lord, she was so tired, tired of making excuses for herself, for him….

  TWO DAYS WENT BY, days filled with thoughts of the stranger who lived in her house. Dylan rode his bike to the ranch in the morning and she picked him up at night. Laura didn’t bring another picnic hamper, although her aunt strongly suggested it, and Brandon didn’t invite her to stay for dinner. In fact, she barely saw him and hardly spoke to him. He seemed just as anxious as she to avoid any further contact that might lead to unwanted intimacy. Ju
st as sorry as she that he’d given in to temptation. What else was new? The man was full of contradictions and so, she had to admit, was she.

  Though Brandon kept their conversation to a minimum—no, his car wasn’t ready and no, he didn’t need anything—Dylan talked endlessly about what they were doing, how they’d replaced the rotten boards and how Brandon had let Dylan use the saw and taught him to use the Phillips-head screwdriver. Strangely enough Dylan never said a word about his father. Though that was obviously the reason he was there. To rebuild the tree house so he could safely wait there for him. He didn’t ask why his father hadn’t come yet or when he’d be there. Yet Laura was afraid that his faith in Jason’s return was not diminished one bit.

  She found out one evening after dinner that she was right.

  Chapter Seven

  “My dream didn’t come true,” Dylan said, shooting his mother an accusing look as he swung back and forth in the swing on her aunt’s front porch. “You said if I helped, it would. But my daddy still hasn’t come back.”

  “I know,” Laura said, leaning against a post on the wide veranda. “But some dreams just don’t come true. No matter how much we want them to. No matter how hard we try. When I was about your age I dreamed of being a rodeo star. I practiced riding my pony bareback, round and round the corral, roping tree stumps, but my dream still didn’t come true.”

  “Instead you got to be a post office lady.”

  She smiled wryly. It must sound pretty grim to an eight-year-old. At the moment it even sounded grim to her.

  “What do you dream of now?” he asked, stopping the swing with the toe of his sneaker and cocking his head at her.

  “Right now? I dream of being the postmistress and getting the apartment over the post office for us, with the fenced yard in back. And I’m doing everything I can to make that dream come true. I work hard at my job and…and…well, I’m just waiting to hear.” Okay, maybe it didn’t sound like much of a dream to an eight-year-old, but there were times when you realized that certain dreams weren’t going to come true, like happily-ever-after, and you’d better lower your expectations and substitute something more realistic.

  “But when my dream comes true, you won’t need your dream anymore, Mom. You won’t need to work at the post office and we can move back to the ranch,” he said.

  She swallowed hard. Was this the time to tell him once again that his daddy wasn’t coming back? No, it wasn’t. If only dreams like his came true. She held her breath, waiting for Dylan to tell her they were going back to the ranch when his dream came true, but he didn’t say that. If he had, she wouldn’t have been able to stand it.

  “Brandon said I got to be patient,” he said. “Do you know what that means?”

  “Yes, I think I do,” she said. “It means your dream may take a long time to come true. But mine won’t. It’s going to come true very soon. At least I think it will.”

  “Do you like him?” her son asked.

  “Who?” she asked, startled.

  “Brandon.”

  “Yes, of course,” she said quickly. What else could she say? How could she not like the man who, in spite of himself, was being good to her son?

  “He likes you.”

  She flushed, glad her son couldn’t see her face in the dusk. She wanted to ask how he knew, but she didn’t.

  “He hasn’t got a wife or a kid. We haven’t got a dad.” He paused and looked her in the eye.

  Oh, Lord. How long did it take him to put two and two together. How many other people, like her aunt, were thinking the same thing?

  “That’s right,” she said. “But we’ve got each other.”

  Dylan gave her a pitying look that said she had missed the point. So she had. But she’d missed it on purpose.

  “He likes our house, too,” Dylan continued. “And he’s got a cool computer,” Dylan said. “Can we get a computer?”

  “Yes, sure, someday.” She said, willing to promise him anything if he’d only change the subject. She’d almost added, when we move into our new place, but she’d said that so many times, it had lost its meaning.

  “I played a game on it,” Dylan continued.

  “Really?” She tried to picture it, Brandon taking the time to show her son how to use his computer. Where did he get the computer game? She tried to imagine why Brandon was going out of his way to be nice to her son. A son who must remind him of the son he’d lost. Building the tree house, she could understand. It was a way of eventually getting rid of the house and of Dylan.

  “I thought you were building the tree house,” she said.

  “Yeah, but sometimes it gets hot outside and he has to do some work inside. So I go in, too, and he talks on the phone and I play on his computer. He said it was okay, long as I don’t talk and bother him. That’s how I know he likes you. I heard him say so.”

  “Who was he talking to?” she asked, more puzzled than ever.

  “Somebody. I dunno. He said, ‘She’s nice.”’

  “But how do you know he was talking about me?”

  “I just know, that’s all.” With that he got up and went in to watch a rerun of a TV sitcom with her aunt. That was another good thing. Dylan had stopped complaining about her aunt. Maybe he was following Brandon’s advice and becoming more patient. Patient with her aunt and patient with her. She could only hope so.

  The next day she got the letter she’d been waiting for. The return address was the personnel department of the main post office. Taking advantage of the lull in business, she eagerly ripped the envelope open. And her heart fell. She had not gotten the job. She braced herself against the counter. Instead of the job of postmaster they were offering her the newly created job of rural delivery agent. A postmaster from a town fifty miles away with more experience was being transferred to Silverado to take the job she wanted. The job she deserved. The job she was supposed to get. And she was being given a vehicle and a route. She bit her lip to keep from crying out and reread the letter.

  It slowly sank into her brain—her job, the job she was counting on, the job that was meant for her, was being given to someone else. She read on. But but— they were pleased to offer her the new job at her current rank and salary, for which, they felt she was better suited than for the postmaster job. Due to the high demand from rural customers, the new delivery service was going to be inaugurated this summer.

  She read and reread the letter and each time reached the same conclusion. She would have gotten the job of postmistress if they hadn’t created the new job. They couldn’t let her go. They had to find her a job, but not the job she wanted. The reason they created the new job was because somebody complained about the lack of delivery service. That person was Brandon.

  Just as she was fuming about that, Willa Mae, the former postmistress, who was dressed in a black T-shirt proclaiming Reno The Biggest Little City In The World and stretch pants and mules, shuffled into the post office from the upstairs apartment Laura had counted on inheriting from her. Which would now, by custom, go to the new man.

  “Willa Mae, I haven’t seen you for days,” Laura said, resolutely planting a smile on her face.

  “Been over to Reno with my sister, finding a place to live, getting ready for the big move. I had to come back for the Fourth. They don’t know how to celebrate in Reno. Not like we do here. What’s new down here in the office?”

  Laura told her the news.

  “Oh, my,” Willa Mae said. “I was just sure you’d get the job. And move into my apartment. I was even going to leave my African violets for you. Now I think I’ll take them with me. Unless you have a place for them….”

  “I don’t. I don’t even have a place for myself and Dylan.” She choked back feelings of self-pity. She wouldn’t cry, not in front of Willa Mae, not in front of anybody.

  “Never thought I’d see the day when we’d have delivery service anywhere around Silverado,” Willa Mae said, shaking her head. “What’s wrong with folks? They can’t mosey into town to pick
up their mail? Not that it wouldn’t be a hoot, driving all over hell and gone delivering the mail.” She grinned toothily at Laura. “Pulling over for a cup of coffee from a thermos, eating lunch along the road somewhere. And keeping tabs on who’s doing what and where. Why, if I’d known that kind of thing was in the works, I might not have retired quite so soon. What kinda truck they gonna get you, four-wheel drive?”

  “I don’t know,” Laura said dolefully, rubbing her hand over her aching forehead, wishing she could have half the enthusiasm Willa Mae had. Wondering if some day she’d be living alone in a small apartment in town, just like Willa Mae, or seeking out the bright lights of a big town.

  She told herself she should be glad she had a job at all. That she might possibly enjoy being outside driving down country roads more than being inside the post office, staring out at the stores across the street. But she’d counted on the extra money, and more than that, she’d counted on the low-rent housing on the second floor. Where on earth was she going to live?

  “What’s this I hear about the man who bought your place?” Willa Mae asked, leaning against the counter.

  “What did you hear?” Laura asked.

  “That he’s rich as Rockefeller and twice as good-looking. True?”

  Laura smiled. She didn’t know what to say. If she agreed, it would be all over town and if she disagreed, well…

  “Just my luck,” Willa Mae said taking Laura’s silence for an affirmative. “An eligible man comes to town just as I’m about to leave. And I haven’t even met him yet.”

  “I’ll introduce you the next time he comes in,” Laura promised. “Then you can decide if he’s twice as good-looking as a Rockefeller.”

  “If he is, I might decide not to leave,” Willa Mae declared. “You know what they say about a good man being hard to find.” She tilted her head to one side and observed Laura critically. “You look a little peaked,” she pronounced. “I’ll run up and fetch you a glass of my apricot cordial.”