Kitabı oku: «The One Winter Collection», sayfa 28
CHAPTER EIGHT
TY felt her weight settle on the sofa beside him. He was surprised. He had used anger to keep people away from him for a long, long time.
Maybe he had used anger because it felt so much more powerful than what lurked right beneath the anger.
Sadness. A well of sadness so deep and so profound a man could drown in it, if he let himself.
But now Amy was beside him, and he felt that if he went down into that sadness, and it seemed like it would drown him, she would throw him the rope.
Crazy to think this little speck of a woman could save him.
Crazy to think he needed saving at all.
But he was suddenly so aware that he did. That he was alone and that he was lonely and that it was going to stay that way forever if he didn’t take the risk of telling someone.
The old cowhands had a favorite expression that they had used liberally on him when he was growing up and made mistakes.
If ya always do what ya always did, y’all always git what ya always got.
And suddenly, Ty was aware of wanting something different. A new chance at his old life.
He was aware he was giving in to the temptation of wishing. He took a deep breath and hoped he wasn’t going to be sorry.
“I told you already my mom left. I was a little older than Jamey, eighteen months or so. I don’t remember it. My dad wouldn’t say anything about it. Then or now. He didn’t talk about her. It was pictures of his first wife, Ruth-Anne, who had died, in his wallet and on the mantel. Until I was four or five I thought the woman in the pictures must have been my mom.
“Then one day she phoned. My mother phoned. She said she wanted to take me to Disneyland but my dad wouldn’t let me go.
“And then I never heard another word from her, ever. And my dad would just get this look on his face whenever I tried to bring it up. And believe me, I tried to bring it up. Because I had a mother! She was out there, somewhere. She wanted to take me to Disneyland.
“I was convinced she’d just show up one day. That I’d come home from school and come in the door and there she’d be. With a tray full of chocolate chip cookies. Or the Christmas tree up and decorated.” He smiled a touch at that.
“My dad and I lived in this world that was pure guy. Horses and cattle, hard work and cowhands.
“But we were invited for dinner lots. And I’d see this other world. Where people had curtains on the windows, and there wasn’t a tractor engine in pieces on the kitchen table, and a newborn calf on a blanket in front of the stove. They had nice dishes and their houses smelled like good things cooking, not motor oil and horses.
“And then I went to school. There’s a thing called Mother’s Day that I had been blissfully unaware of. Everybody makes a little plaster cast of their hand for Mom, or sticks macaroni on a plate with glue and paints it silver to make a wall hanging.
“Sometimes, if it was slow season on the ranch, I’d go home on the school bus with one of the other kids. Their handprints and macaroni art were hung on the wall. I stuck mine in a box I put it under my bed to give to my mom when she showed up.
“My friends’ moms would fuss over me. Cut my hair if it was too long, mend my jeans, send me home with cookies.
“Christmas was the worst time to be a kid with no mom. Every other house looked the way this house looks tonight and never has before.
“Everybody had trees up, and socks hanging by the fire and stacks of presents. Kids talked about Santa. Sheesh! Santa? My dad told me that was a bunch of baloney when I was two.
“My dad’s idea of a present? New leather work gloves. I got all the clothes I needed every year for Christmas—a pair of jeans, a couple of new shirts, and a new pair of boots.
“I don’t want it to sound like I didn’t appreciate it, but I wanted something else—a new book, or some music or a game. Something fun. Maybe even frivolous.
“In my mind, I was inventing a fantasy mother. She was a little bit of everybody’s mom. Pretty like Mrs. Campbell, could make lemon meringue pie from scratch like Jody Wentworth’s ma, she thought long and hard about just the right gifts, like Julia Farnstead. When I snitched my dad’s whiskey, she’d ground me, like Mrs. Holmes, not make me clean stalls. And then after a couple of days of being grounded, she’d forget all about it, not have me up to my ass in crap for the next hundred years.
“I guess I was building kind of a head of steam against my dad even before it happened. We were butting heads. I was drinking and smoking and carousing, and he was pretty damn unhappy about it.
“Then, when I was seventeen, I came in one day, and he was at the kitchen table with his head in his hands, and this pack of letters in front of him.
“And he looked at me and said word had just got to him that my mother had passed.
“And he handed me these letters, said he had been waiting on the right time to give them to me, and it had just never seemed like it was it.
“I’ve never been so mad in my whole life. Killing mad. But he got up and left, and I took those letters and read them, and the fury just built.
“My mom loved me. She’d written me letters. And he’d never given them to me. Not a single one. Not even when he saw me pining away on Mother’s Day, and on my birthday and at Christmas.”
Ty thought he should stop then. His fury felt fresh and dangerous.
“Then what happened?” Amy’s soft voice prodded him to go on.
“I packed my bags that night and left.”
“At seventeen?” She was aghast.
“Quit school. Slept under a bridge the first couple of nights. Got hungry. But never hungry enough to come back. Finally, I found work on a ranch. I ended up riding a bit on the rodeo circuit.
“Wild years,” he said with a shake of his head. “An angry young man taking out his anger on the world.
“And losing myself a little more every day. Taking stupid risks with broncs and bulls and life in general.
“Then I got a call my dad’s been hurt bad in an accident. And I came home. We didn’t really speak. He gave me the deed to the ranch, said it was mine now and he expected me to man up and look after it.
“And I did. End of story.”
He waited now. For her to do the wrong thing. To prove to him his trust had been totally misplaced, that it had been a mistake to tell her.
He waited for her to give him some Pollyanna advice. To make him hate her by giving him sympathy.
But she did nothing at all. She sat there, and after a while she leaned her head against his chest.
And she whispered, “Oh, Ty. Oh, Ty.”
Quite frankly, it made him feel as if he wanted to bawl his damned eyes out, which was what he’d been scared of all along.
But he put his hand to her hair and stroked it, and that sensation of fury disappeared, and so did the feeling he might lose control of his emotions.
Instead, a sweet sense of not being alone filled him.
She was absolutely silent, and yet he could sense her feeling for him. They stayed together like that in a wordless place of being utterly and beautifully joined, until his eyes felt heavy. He gave in to something. And he slept.
When he awoke, his heart felt tender. He carefully shifted out from under the weight of Amy’s resting head, let her down gently on the sofa. Then he went to the back door and put on his jacket and went outside into the cold night air. It had stopped snowing, finally. He could see the great expanse of stars over his head.
He went to the barn and into the tack room, and got down the little saddle he had used as a small child. It seemed impossibly tiny now.
He wanted to give something to Jamey. And something to her. He didn’t want them to wake up in the morning to no gifts from him, when clearly she’d been busy all day making sure everyone was getting something from her.
So in the cold of the tack room, under a bare light-bulb he worked long into the night cleaning and oiling the old, old saddle.
And when he was done, he went up to the house. Amy had got up off the sofa and gone to bed. It was past midnight—Christmas morning actually—and he was glad she had not waited up for him. He felt fragile. Some untouched part of him bruised.
He set the saddle aside and then took his most precious possession and wrapped it for her.
He put the saddle with a clumsy bow and the carefully wrapped copy of Lonesome Dove under the tree.
He realized he was giving away things that really mattered to him.
And that he didn’t feel sad. Still, fragile, almost raw, but not sad.
He felt lighter than he had in years.
In the morning, she cried when she saw the saddle for Jamey. And cried even harder when she unwrapped the book.
He felt a little lump in his throat, too, when he found his oven mitts had been repaired. He squinted at the repair job. If he was not mistaken, the repair had been executed at the expense of her little red toque. And she had surrendered the two books she had brought with her to him. He hadn’t read either of the authors before, but she promised him the books were not chick lit.
And then the real magic of Christmas happened. Jamey was put in front of a small pile of gifts, wrapped in butcher’s paper.
He was thrilled that he was allowed to rip and tear. The contents of the first package spilled out—she had wrapped up his little wooden puzzle for him.
“Regifting,” Ty said with a shake of his head.
“What would you know about regifting?” She laughed.
Jamey was way more interested in the paper anyway. He shredded it, and then moved on to his next package. A pair of Onesies fell out.
“Is that an elf suit?”
“I bought it before I came. Isn’t it cute? He can wear it over to your dad’s this afternoon.”
Something in him froze. He’d told her everything. Surely, she didn’t think he was going to go over there!
He’d trusted her. He’d thought she got it.
Now, looking at her, he wondered what he had expected. For her to choose a side? And for it to be his side?
To be understood, he realized. His expectation, his wish had been to be understood.
He had trusted her with his deepest hurt. He had told her about the man who had stolen Christmas mornings like this one from him. It was as if she hadn’t heard a word, lost in her Pollyanna world. If she had heard what he was saying, she would know he didn’t want to be around his father.
She was helping Jamey unwrap another parcel, taking a teddy bear from it, wagging it at him.
She didn’t even know she had hurt him. Which was good. She never had to. It had stopped snowing. If he worked at it, today could be her last day here.
For a hallelujah moment it felt very flat.
“I’m going to go feed the horses and cows,” he said. “Then I’m going to make a start on the driveway.”
“It’s Christmas!”
“I know.” He deliberately turned his back on the magic that had very nearly caught him with its spell.
“I’ve got to check the turkey,” Beth said.
It was a perfect Christmas moment: fire blazing in their hearth, Beth murmuring about the turkey, Hunter Halliday holding Jamey on the old wooden rocking horse he and Beth had given them.
It was the perfect Christmas, except for one thing: as soon as they had arrived, Ty had cast a glance toward the house, then headed for the machine shed. Moments later they had all heard a tractor start up.
“He’s not coming in,” Hunter said, casting her a glance. “You might as well relax.”
“He’ll come in for dinner, won’t he?”
“I don’t know. I doubt it.”
“It’s Christmas,” she whispered. “I had hoped something would happen.”
“Something did happen,” Hunter said.
She liked him so much. She didn’t know why he had kept those letters from Ty. But she also didn’t know why Ty didn’t just ask him. There had to be a reason. When she saw Hunter playing with Jamey she felt she could see who he really was.
And it was a man who loved deeply and completely, not someone intent on stealing his son’s happiness.
Why couldn’t Ty see that?
“You said something happened,” she said to Hunter. “What?”
“You said he gave your baby his saddle.”
“Yes, he did. I don’t know why. It’s not like I have a pony.”
“Don’t ever get a pony!” Hunter said. “Mean-spirited little rascals! Now, let me tell you about a gift like a saddle. It’s not a saddle. It’s a wish for your little boy. It’s a hope that his future holds a good horse. Long rides. Camping under starry skies. The companionship of hard men who have your back. Someone to teach you to be a man.”
Amy felt tears in her eyes. “You gave him that saddle once, didn’t you?”
“And my daddy gave it to me.”
“We can’t take it then! It’s a family heirloom.”
“It’s not about the saddle, Amy. It’s about the wish. Ty hasn’t made one of those for a very long time. So, maybe while you were waiting for one miracle, another came in the back door.”
“Ty told me you didn’t have any religion,” she said.
“Don’t need religion to see a miracle. Take me in this chair. I think I see some pity in your eyes.”
She was embarrassed. “I just see the man you once were and know it has to be hard for you.”
“Here’s the thing—when I got hurt, Beth was my nurse in the hospital. Wouldn’t have met her unless it happened.
“And here’s the other thing—that boy of mine was killing himself on anger and self-pity and I didn’t know how to bring him home.
“So, I could have my legs, but no Beth. And I could have my legs, but I would have put my son in the ground by now. So I can’t walk. Maybe I didn’t get the miracle I wanted, but I sure as hell got the one I needed. Lost my legs. Found my heart, got my boy back.”
The tears that clouded Amy’s eyes began to fall. She wiped at them.
“Don’t go crying, now. Beth’ll have my hide.”
“Dinner’s ready.” Beth called. “Amy, will you tell Ty?”
She pulled on her boots and coat and followed the freshly plowed drive. He was a long way down it, and she waved her hands at him.
He turned off the tractor.
“Come eat. Beth has put a lot of work into dinner.”
He looked as though he was going to refuse, but then didn’t. She wanted the man he had been last night. So open to her. But he wasn’t. He was remote and closed, and she wanted to weep at her loss. After a while, Amy wished he had stayed outside on the tractor.
He was ruining everything with his sour look and his terse way.
And right after dinner, he wanted to leave, even though Beth had the cards out and Amy thought it would make Christmas absolutely perfect to stay and play cards and laugh and get to know each other deep into the night.
The sleigh ride home didn’t even seem magical. Jamey was crabby until he finally went to sleep.
“Your dad really cares about you,” she finally said. “I think it’s time to bury your hatchets.”
“Yeah, in each other’s skulls,” he muttered.
“Stop it!”
He squinted ahead silently.
“Have you ever just asked him? Why would he do that? Why would he keep those letters from you?”
“Do you think any reason why would be good enough?” he asked quietly. “I’ve been watching you with your baby. I see what that relationship between a mother and a child is. If it was you and Jamey, could any reason someone kept him from you be enough?”
“You need to forgive him,” she said softly, imploringly.
“Don’t presume to know what I need. And you don’t seem like any kind of expert on forgiveness yourself.”
“That’s not true,” she said. “I have forgiven Edwin.”
“Edwin?” he snorted. “It’s not Edwin you haven’t forgiven. It’s yourself. You were so sold on your own fantasy world that you put the blinders on when it came to the man you picked. Because you wanted something so badly. That’s what you can’t forgive.”
She felt stunned by how clearly he had seen her.
And by the truth of it.
And by the fact that making a mistake on Edwin had not killed that fantasy at all. Here she was, in love again!
Still willing to overlook glaring faults—his stubbornness, his hard heart—to have her fantasy. Of home. And family. And love.
“You know I could overlook a lot of faults, Ty, but you being mean to a cripple? That speaks to your character!”
“Yeah, well, if my dad ever heard you call him a cripple, you’d be off his Christmas list, too.”
“You’re missing the point.”
“No. You’re missing the point. Why would I care if you overlooked my faults or not? That would imply some kind of vision for the future. And I don’t have one. Not with you.”
That hurt! And she saw that he had intended for it to hurt. But as mad as it made her, he was absolutely right.
She had no business thinking about a future that included him. She had a lot of work to do. All of it on herself.
As they pulled up to his barn he glanced over.
“Well, would you look at that?”
She looked and saw a long line of headlights moving slowly up the driveway.
“Neighbors,” he said. “Plowing me out.”
“Does that mean I can leave?”
Why did he hesitate before he answered? “Yeah, you can leave.”
“Good!”
She grabbed Jamey and, ignoring the pain in her hand, leaped off the sled. She could not bear Ty touching her, helping her. She was going to be off the Halliday Creek Ranch before he even unhitched the horses.
CHAPTER NINE
TY knew as soon as he walked in the house that she was gone. He could feel the emptiness even before he saw all the things had been taken.
He had tried to drive her off with those last cruel words.
He went to his front window, and could see her little red car going down his freshly plowed driveway. He could see she had it so packed full of stuff that she couldn’t even see out her back window.
Ty fought the desire to go after her, to follow her at a safe distance, to make sure she didn’t get lost again, to make sure she made it safely to her destination.
But wouldn’t it be better for all involved if she didn’t know how much he cared? He didn’t ever want her to come back here. Because how could you not pick up the gauntlet she had laid down? He would have to be a better man if he wanted a future with her.
And then he saw them.
He didn’t know where they had come from. He thought he had stuffed those letters in his riding jacket pocket.
But there they were on the kitchen counter, the envelopes yellow, that blue ribbon tied around them.
He went and touched them. He told himself just to throw them out. That nothing could be gained by reading them again.
Except, he had been seventeen when he’d read them last.
And full of emotion. Anger. Bewilderment. The loss of something he had held on to and wished for his whole childhood.
He took the letters, tossed them on his dresser and went to bed. The first thing he thought of in the morning was Amy. The second was Jamey.
The third, before he was even out of bed, was the letters.
Suddenly, he knew he needed to read these letters now, not as a kid, but as a man.
He took them, went and made coffee, sat in his house that was too quiet and too empty, and pulled out the first letter.
An hour later, he set the last one down, squeezed the bridge of his nose hard between his thumb and his index finger.
When he was seventeen, he had read these letters and he had been as blind as Amy had been when she married her husband, he had wanted something so badly.
All he had seen was his mother’s love for him and how his father had thwarted him. Now, older, wiser, he saw something completely different.
Every letter started with the same line.
Hi, Ty. Are you missing me?
And now he saw what he had not seen all those years ago. Not once did she say she was missing him. Not once. And that little blue ribbon held a dozen letters, which averaged out to less than one a year. The letters rambled on about things that would hold no interest to a child, her shopping trips, her travels, her concerns with weight, and hairdos and gym routines and boyfriends.
As an adult, Ty saw things he had overlooked when he’d first read them. He saw a certain sly undermining of his father: claims she wrote lots of letters and that his father probably withheld them. That she sent cards and gifts for his birthday or Christmas, but she was sure his father could not be trusted to pass them on.
How could he have missed this when he first read those letters?
And then he realized, he hadn’t. At some level he had recognized the truth staring straight at him.
He’d been abandoned. And she didn’t care about him. Not even a little bit.
And at seventeen, he hadn’t been able to handle what that had opened up inside of him. So much easier to be angry at his father. So much more powerful a feeling than to face the sadness of it all. To face the real ending of his wish. If he could convince himself that she was the one who had been wronged, then she could still be the good person he had imagined.
He remembered, as a kid, hearing the word amnesia for the first time. That such a condition existed had made him ecstatic. It would explain everything. And excuse everything.
Now, having reread the letters, Ty saw the truth. His mother had walked out. She hadn’t cared about the child she had had. She had not thought about him, or wondered about him, or dreamed of coming to tuck him in or make him cookies. She had not had amnesia. His father had played only the smallest role in her abandonment of her child.
At seventeen, he had not been able to face that reality.
Amy was right.
Kind, gentle, sweet Amy was right.
He needed to ask his dad the one simple question. Why? And he realized why it had been so hard to do that. Because part of him had known it had nothing to do with his dad. He was pretty sure he knew the answer, but he had to ask it anyway. It was time to man up.
He was glad his road was clear and he could drive to the old homestead place. It felt as if taking the sleigh there would pull what was left of his heart right out of his chest. All he would think of was her, and her awe of the experience, and that little baby with them.
When he arrived, he knocked on the door and his father told him to come in. He was obviously alone. Of course, it was the first day in several that the roads had been open. Beth was no doubt taking advantage of it to restock the household.
His father looked eagerly over his shoulder. “Where are Amy and Jamey?”
“Gone. The roads opened. And I doubt if she’ll be back. She was good and mad when she left.”
His father nodded. “Karma’s a bitch,” he said.
“Amy didn’t think I’d given you a fair shake. She said all I had to do was ask.”
“So you’re only here because Amy thinks you should be?”
“No. I’m here because I think I should be.”
His dad nodded, satisfied.
“Why?” Ty asked softly. “Why didn’t you give those letters to me? I read them again. I think I know the answer, but it’s time to hear your side of it. I should have asked a long time ago.”
Ty tossed the letters down in front of his father. He watched as his father picked them up with worn hands, turned them over, something resigned in his face, but strong, too, ready to weather the storm.
“Were there more of these?” Ty asked.
“No. I tied up everything that came with a ribbon to give to you. Someday.”
“Were there cards and gifts? For my birthday? For Christmas?”
“No, son. There weren’t. Not ever.”
It was as he had suspected when he’d read the letters; a lie contrived to cast a bad light on his father. Or maybe to convince a child—not that hard to do—that she was not the negligent one.
He dropped into the chair across from his father. “I need you to tell me.”
His dad glanced at him, and something flickered in his eyes. Ty was ashamed that he was able to recognize it as hope.
“Tell me about my mother,” he said softly.
And his father sighed and glanced at him again, then nodded. “All right. But maybe I need to tell you about me first. I’m just a simple man, Ty. Hardly been off this ranch, don’t have a whole lot in the tool kit to help me handle things that are complicated. I think you figured out I’m not really a man of letters. School was hard for me.”
“Yeah, I figured that out,” Ty said.
“I was married before your mama, you know that.”
“For the longest time I thought Ruth-Anne was my mother,” he said. “That’s whose picture you had on the mantel and in your wallet.”
He was taken now with the look on his father’s face, an almost dreamy look at the mention of Ruth-Anne.
“We were sweethearts from middle school. We got married right out of high school. I was only eighteen. You know that never should have worked, but damn, it did. We thought we were going to have us a pile of kids, but for whatever reason, she couldn’t. I suspect now it was a warning that something was wrong, but that warning took twenty-five years to play out.
“Aw, Ty, twenty-five of the best years. Working together. Playing together. Filling all those spaces where the kids would have been with each other.”
Ty was staring at his father, trying not to let his jaw drop.
“She died of cancer after we’d been married twenty-five years. I can’t even tell you about that kind of pain, so bad it was a mercy when she finally went. And then my world opened up to a whole new kind of pain. I didn’t know what to do with it. She’d been my earth. Everything.
“So I drank and lived hard and reckless and on the very edge, hoping the man upstairs would get the message and take me, too.
“But he dint. Nope. Those years are a blur of bad living, like attending a never-ending party in hell. I hooked up with your mama. Oh, boy. I’d met a woman who could match my hard living and raise me some. Her name was Millicent, though she never went by anything but Millie.
“And then, just like that, the party was over. She told me she was pregnant.”
He cast Ty a long sideways, measuring look.
“I want to know it all,” Ty said, reading reluctance in his father’s expression.
His father nodded, as if deciding something. “She said she’d decided to get an abortion. She said she’d had an abortion before. That it was no big deal.”
His father’s hands were clenching and unclenching unconsciously. “No big deal?” he whispered. “Me and Ruth-Anne would have done anything to have a baby. And now I was going to throw one away? It just went against my grain. Nothing in the way I was raised prepared me for a notion like that.
“I knew, that second, the party was over. The self-pity was over. I had a job to do, and I’d better step up to the plate and do it. I convinced Millie to marry me and have the baby.
“We moved back out here to the ranch. It had been neglected for quite some time. I nearly lost the place, and I was aware I could still lose it if I didn’t knuckle down. The work was unending. You know what it’s like now. It was ten times worse then. Trying to build a herd, every fence and building falling down. I wasn’t young anymore, I was in my mid-forties by then.”
His voice drifted away for a moment. “I’d been partying in hell before, now I was just in hell. No party. Your mama, she couldn’t stand this place. She was lonely and restless and bored. She wouldn’t come work with me, like Ruth-Anne had always done, so she’d sit in the house. She didn’t cook a meal or clean a floor. She just watched her soaps on TV and brooded on things to fight about.
“By the time I’d drag my sorry ass through the door after putting in a fourteen or fifteen-hour day, she’d be ready. That woman could fight about anything. If I said it looked like rain, she’d say snow, and the war was on.
“I thought it was my fault. Working too hard, not paying enough attention to her. I thought it might be because she was pregnant and hated everything about that state. She didn’t see herself as growing the most beautiful thing on earth. She saw herself as fat and ugly. And I’m ashamed to say I got tired of trying to convince her otherwise.
“She started accusing me of having a girlfriend on the side. I’d walk in, so tired and wet and dirty I could barely keep my feet, and she’d come and sniff my neck. Claim she could smell a woman on me. And I’m ashamed to say, I got tired of that pretty damn quick, too.
“And then you came along. God almighty, Ty, I ain’t saying this just because you were mine, but you were the most beautiful baby ever born. Golden hair, like a little lion, and bright eyes, and this lusty voice. Powerful for a baby. I just stood in amazement of you from the first second.”
Again, the hesitation, the sideways look. But Ty had read the letters. He had already guessed this part.
“Tell me,” he said.
“Aw, Ty, it’s what I never wanted to tell you. You’ve seen cows who reject their calves? Basically, she was indifferent to you. She was aghast at the idea of breastfeeding. That was for animals.
“I’d come in from a hard day, and it was more of the same. She thought I’d been seeing someone. And she’d start screaming it was my turn to look after the baby, my turn to change diapers and feed you.
“As if it was a burden,” his father said, soft, still shocked by it. “It was no burden. Hell, Ty, you were what I lived for. Those moments when I came in and picked you up and saw after what you needed. And then I’d take you and plant you right in the middle of my chest, and we’d both fall fast asleep on that sofa.
“After Ruth-Anne died, I’d pretty much given up on love. And Millie had soured me even more. But when you and I would fall asleep on that couch, I believed in love again.
“I came home one day early, and one of the ranch hands was coming out of the house. He wouldn’t look me in the face, muttered something about Millie calling him about the plumbing.
“I was so fed up, I was beyond caring what she did. I can see now that just added to the problems. The more I didn’t care, the more she tried to make me care. She thought she could make me jealous, but all it did was make me worry she might be neglecting you.
