Angel's Peak

Three

Sean promised himself he’d just drive around Eureka, but his car was like a heat-seeking missile and he soon found himself in Franci’s neighborhood and then on her street. He had no intention of bothering her, just a fierce need to see how she was living without him. What was the harm in driving by her house?

Franci’s house looked like something that should belong to her. It was cute, small, tidy, at least forty years old and very homey. It seemed the kind of comfy place a woman who wanted a family would choose—a safe, friendly neighborhood, large trees and spacious yards. She had a curving driveway lined with some kind of fluffy green ground cover, flower beds that were just going fallow in the fall weather, and right outside the front door was a scarecrow and some gourds in a horn of plenty. It was pampered. Loved. A family home.

This was nothing like a house Sean would live in—he tended more toward flashy, modern, low-maintenance homes; he had a lot of toys and liked to spend his time at play, not mowing lawns and shoveling snow.

His first panicked thought upon seeing the house was: Oh God! She has a man in her life! A man to settle down with! That’s why it looks so cozy and domesticated!

He didn’t slow down too much as he passed by; he didn’t want to raise any suspicions. Having satisfied his curiosity about where she lived, Sean decided to check out the local recreational facilities.

Finding a gym Franci might like was harder to peg. There were several in the general vicinity. One was the Y, which was small but inexpensive and functional. There was a relatively large fitness center on the edge of town near the freeway. There was a women’s gym, which would be obvious for any woman but Franci; she was ex air force and therefore used to working out with men. Fairly close to her house was a community center that appeared to contain a fitness facility, judging by the people wearing sweats and carrying gym bags who came out of the building.

As he drove past the various gyms, Sean noticed there were a few used bookstores and one big bookstore in the Eureka Mall. God, how he hated malls. But this might be the price of finding his girl, so he checked out the bookstore and the mall. While he was there he bought a couple of pairs of jeans, two shirts and a down vest as the fall weather was getting very brisk in the evening. And he bought a bunch of books he knew he’d never read.

Sean located the grocery stores nearby—there were plenty of those. He had a list of hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices and such to call. So he got himself a coffee and used his cell phone to call from his car while he sat in a grocery-store parking lot. But after countless calls there was no Francine Duncan to be found.

Over the next few days Sean developed a new routine. He’d leave Virgin River in the morning, drive to Eureka and make the rounds. He began to think of it as driving his circuit—hitting her neighborhood followed by a trip past the gyms, mall, bookstores and grocery stores. As he’d done on that first day, he’d park somewhere to make his phone calls to clinics and such, checking them off one by one. At least it was turning him into a slightly better houseguest as he would bring home groceries for a change, saving Shelby the trouble.

He was only on his fourth day of hanging out in Eureka when he started wondering if the whole thing was a waste of time. He was beginning to think that even if he did get a number for her she would probably hang up on him, leaving him no option but to go over to her house, anyway. Would she call the cops if he did pay her a call? Was it a crime to knock on her door and ask if they could just talk? He wasn’t going to beg or threaten—just ask! Avon ladies and Jehovah’s Witnesses did it all the time, and Sean was far less annoying!

But that fourth day turned out to be magic. Near the end of the day he hit the grocery store to pick up a few things. As he was choosing a head of romaine, he recognized the hand in the bin next to him. She was squeezing tomatoes. Now didn’t that say something? That he’d recognize her hand! He turned and looked at her. “Don’t make ’em go squirt,” he said.

Franci jumped a mile. She dropped her tomato and clutched her jacket tight at the throat. “God, you scared me! What are you doing here?”

He held up his produce bag. “I have a list of things to get for my sister-in-law. But I’m really glad I ran into you, Franci, because we—”

Before he’d even finished talking she turned away from him, quickly selecting three tomatoes, then she tossed them in a plastic bag and tried to escape. He noticed she was wearing a navy-blue jumpsuit and matching jacket with some kind of unit patches sewn on the arms.

“Hey, are you in the coast guard or something? Why couldn’t I find you after you left the air force?”

She stopped, looked over her shoulder and said, “I have absolutely no idea. I went to my mother’s, where I lived and worked for almost a year before moving here.”

“I left messages on your cell,” he said, tossing the lettuce in his small handheld basket, following her.

She turned toward him. “How many messages? Because I never got any.”

He was shaking his head. “I don’t understand that…”

“How many?” she demanded.

“I don’t know. A few. A couple. I don’t know—but I did,” he said. It was coming back to him now—the way she could poke him and get him all hot under the collar.

She could push him to be honest, and he hated it because he felt exposed. She smiled with mock patience. “Well, Sean, I guess we had a technological malfunction. If you had really wanted to talk to me, you’d have tried leaving more than a couple of messages a few years ago. Now, really, I have to get going. I’m running late.”

He grabbed her upper arm. “I’ve been trying to think of the best way to get in touch with you. I found your address, but no phone number, and I—”

“You know where I live?”

He looked around a little nervously; she made it sound as if he was some ax murderer or something. “Let’s not get loud here,” he suggested. “I needed to find you. I looked you up on the computer. You bought a house.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, rubbing her temples. She seemed to gather herself from within. “All right. What do you want?”

Now this was pissing him off all over again. “Gee, was I confusing you? I want us to have a conversation, maybe talk about what happened to us. I wanted to tell you that it didn’t take me long to wish I’d been more…more…cooperative when we had the argument that broke us up.”

“Well, Sean, it did actually take you too long,” she said. “So there—consider your mission accomplished. You told me. Now, can you please go away and leave me alone?”

“No, I can’t,” he said. “So I get it—you’re still mad. We can’t really deal with that without talking.”

“But I said I don’t want to!” she stated, raising her voice again.

“Franci,” he said quietly. “Could we try not to make a big scene here…”

“Look, I told you, I’m in a hurry. You still using the same cell number?” she asked. He nodded. “Great, I’ll call you sometime. Now, excuse me, if you’d please just leave me alone, I’d appreciate it very much.” Polite as that might’ve sounded, it was stated angrily, and people had stopped shopping and began watching them.

She turned away from him and he grabbed her arm again. “Franci, I am not going away. This is important.”

Suddenly there was a very large shadow over both of them, and Sean, who was a little over six feet tall and in excellent shape, was looking up at Paul Bunyan. And Paul was not happy. He was scowling.

“Everything all right, ma’am?” he asked, looking at Franci.

“Fine,” she said. “Old boyfriend. Nothing to worry about.” Then she focused on Sean. “Goodbye. Great seeing you again. Now scram.”

In a moment of temporary insanity, Sean went after her again. “No you don’t. We have to get together for that conversation,” he said. “Since I can’t call you, how about I go over to your house and wait for—”

He felt himself being plucked off his feet. His basket of produce went tumbling away as he was launched into a pile of melons. But Paul Bunyan didn’t let go of him. “She said it’s time for you to hit the road, bud.”

“Listen, pal, you got it all wrong,” Sean said. “I’d never do anything to—”

And suddenly Franci was there. Saving him. “Thank you, but it’s all right. He’s harmless.”

Sean was being held down with his back against the cantaloupe and honeydew melons and he was suddenly incensed. That statement about him being harmless made him growl and snarl dangerously.

“You gonna leave the nice lady alone, bud?” the big man asked.

“You’re gonna get your hands off me this second or you’ll be sorry,” Sean warned, his very masculinity threatened.

“I doubt that, my friend. So, when we understand each other, I’ll let you up.”

“Fine,” Sean angrily shot back. “Let go of me. Now.”

The lumberjack backed away slowly as Sean eased himself off the melons, many of them rolling around on the floor as he did so. A couple of them split open as they fell, spilling their slimy, seedy guts in the aisle. Sean brushed off his jacket where he’d been grabbed, trying to appear both fearless and dignified. And then he took off after Franci, his hand on her shoulder to stop her from walking away again. “Now look,” he said.

He felt the back collar of his shirt and jacket clutched in an iron grip and he whirled on the giant, hitting him square in the jaw with his fist. He suspected he’d broken his hand, but no way was he letting on. He did wince in pain, however, while the very large man merely turned his brick of a face to the side.

“You shouldn’t’a done that, little man,” the guy said. It took him roughly one second to draw back his fist and plaster Sean in the face hard enough to send him reeling into the melons. Then to the floor. Sean saw a lot of stars and was aware of the melons as they began to bounce around the produce section. And there was blood—he wasn’t sure where from since his entire face felt as if it had been through a meat grinder.

“Hey!” Franci shouted. “What’s the matter with you? I told you to leave it alone, he’s harmless!”

“No good deed goes unpunished, I guess,” the big man said. “It looked like you needed help. Maybe you like being grabbed like that in the grocery store, huh, babe?”

Sean muttered something about not being harmless and tried to get to his feet, without success. The big man said, “Just stay down where you are, buster.” But Sean was intent on getting up and he’d just about made it to his feet when the man took two giant steps in his direction. That was all it took for Franci to launch herself on the lumberjack with a cry of outrage. She had her arms around his neck, her legs around his waist and screamed bloody murder while pummeling him on the back.

“I. Told. You. To. Leave. Him. Alone!” she shrieked.

Paul Bunyan whirled around and around, trying to shake her loose, but she was on him like a tick on a hound.

Then the scene got a lot more interesting. “No! No! No! No! No!” screamed a store manager, running up to them, followed closely by another man and a couple of young bag boys. A crowd gathered and the grocery employees peeled Franci off the lumberjack, but she was kicking her heart out the whole time. “The police are coming!” the store manager yelled. “Stop this at once! Stop!”

And Sean absently thought, This really isn’t going how I planned.

Right about then, Sean attempted to stand and reclaim his manhood, only to slip on some slimy melon guts and crash into the floor again. He didn’t exactly pass out, but he was on the nether edges, half listening to the conversation going on above him.

“He threw the first punch,” a voice said.

“You threw him in the melons!” Franci yelled.

“He was grabbing your arm after you told him to go away and leave you alone! Shoot me for trying to lend a hand!”

“But then the little guy did hit the big guy,” someone said. And Sean thought, I am not a little guy. I’m definitely six-one. I bench two-fifty with no problem.

“But the big guy plastered the little guy, knocked him out.”

“I am not little,” Sean mumbled through a swollen jaw, though no one was listening to him.

“I didn’t ask you to protect me!” Franci shouted. “I told you to leave him alone!”

Yeah, Sean thought. Because I’m harmless. Just how I always wanted her to see me. Harmless. And that was Sean Riordan’s last coherent thought.

The next time he was conscious, a paramedic was waving some disgusting-smelling ammonia under his nose and holding an ice pack to his cheek. The ammonia made him gag and the ice pack hurt like hell. And what was worse, they were all in handcuffs. “Damn,” he groaned. “Damn, damn, damn.”

Three hours later, Sean was being held in a windowless room with a locked door down at the Eureka police station. The paramedics had recommended that he go to the hospital to have his head examined, to which Sean replied, “Well, no kidding.”

But while he was in the cell with his buddy the lumberjack, the big man apologized. Sean apologized right back. And what Sean learned was, Dennis Avery was not a lumberjack but a big rig driver who was on his way home, picking up some groceries for the little woman, when he got snared into that whole domestic between Franci and Sean.

So, as Sean was known to do, he told Dennis his life story. Or at least the part that had to do with breaking up with Franci.

“Man,” Dennis said, running a hand over his head. “Are you an idiot or what?”

“Watch it,” Sean warned, though what he was going to do about it remained a mystery.

“Buddy, I’m six-five in my sockies. I been loading crates into a semitrailer for almost twenty years. And you swing at me?” He laughed. “You got this little gal who throws herself on Goliath to defend you, because you pitched her out without thinking about it twice? No wonder she’s pissed.”

“I told you,” Sean said irritably. “She gave me an ultimatum. We get married or she’s gone.”

Dennis stood to his full height. “And you had to think about that?”

Then, mercifully, the police sergeant was at the door. “All righty, boys. You’re out of here. Somebody loves you and you got cited with misdemeanor public disturbance—a pure gift. Be smart and make sure I don’t see your faces again for a very long time. Like ever. In fact, a smart guy would get his groceries elsewhere, if you get my drift.”

Sean didn’t know why he should be so blessed, but he was taking the break without back talk. The last thing he wanted to do was call Luke and ask for bail money. After collecting his wallet, keys, cell phone, et cetera, he put on his jacket and made tracks, wondering how far it was back to the grocery-store parking lot to find his car. Meanwhile, Dennis Avery was calling his wife for a ride. Sean’s head was pounding and his left eye was almost closed as he left the small cop shop, disappearing into the early evening night.

And there, leaning against her car, was Francine. She had a very disgusted look on her face. “Come on, get in,” she said. “I’m taking you home. You can get Luke to bring you back for your car tomorrow, if you don’t die in your sleep.”

“You said that in a way that suggested you hoped I would die in my sleep,” he said.

“Don’t be silly. I’d like you to die much more violently than that. Now get in—I don’t have all night.”

“That’s right,” he said meanly. “You’re in a hurry. How could I forget that?”

Once they were both in the car, she said, “You’ll have to give me directions. I’m not sure where I’m going.”

“Just take me to my car,” he said. “It’s at the grocery store.”

“No, I’m taking you to Luke’s,” she said. “You can’t drive after a possible head injury. You’ve been enough trouble without weighing on my conscience anymore. Where am I going?”

Sean sighed audibly. He really didn’t feel up to fighting with her. “South till you get to Highway 36, then east on 36 for about twenty minutes. I’ll tell you where to turn off—Virgin River is about ten miles off 36, kind of hidden away in the mountains.”

“I’ve been out on 36. Cute, how they call it a highway—it’s only a two-lane,” she said. “It’s harrowing.”

“Yeah, all these mountain roads take some getting used to. This is very nice of you, Francine. Or is it revenge? You’re going to push me out on a sharp turn?”

She ignored him. “Here’s what I’m going to do for you, Sean. I’m going to give you my cell-phone number and you can call me. When I can spare some time—like a half hour—I will meet you for coffee. We can have this conversation you’re set on. Maybe we’ll straighten a couple of things out. After that, you are going to stop hounding me. Got that? Because I’m in no mood for this bullshit. You’ve had plenty of time to make up your mind about me and you were very clear. No commitment. No family. Now, I’ve gotten on with my life, and if you haven’t, it’s time to do so. Understand?”

What Sean understood was he now had thirty more minutes than he’d had before. He’d have to figure out a way to make good use of the time. “It wasn’t supposed to be like this, Franci,” he said softly. He hoped he said it tenderly.

“And yet it is,” she informed him.

After dropping Sean off at Luke’s house, Franci headed back down 36, the darkest highway she’d ever driven. She had plenty of time to think and admit that she had received his voice mails—all two of them. The first one came while she was in labor, six months after they’d parted ways, and he had said, “Hey, Fran! How you doing, babe? Give me a call. We should stay in touch, huh?” The second one came when she was at home at her mother’s with a ten-day-old baby, alternately nursing, walking the floor, sleeping and crying. That one was no better than the first. “So, Franci—you gonna call me back? Come on, babe—no reason we can’t talk, is there? I wanna tell you all about the U-2. Gimme a call.” That might explain her blind rage when the big guy in the grocery store casually referred to her as babe.

Back then Franci realized she was listening to those two calls over and over, alternately planning his death and praying he would come for her. She knew she was in trouble. After several weeks there hadn’t been any more contact from him so, to save herself, she had the cell shut off and got herself a new number. She changed her e-mail address. Then she started looking for a new job and a path out of Santa Rosa.

She had always known, from the time she’d said goodbye to Sean four years ago, that she would have to deal with him eventually. She wasn’t sure exactly when or how, but she’d thought she would have a little more time.

Her daughter, Rosie, three and a half and as precocious as an only child can be, had just recently asked, “Where is our daddy?” Funny she would say our daddy, but then the whole concept was new to her as she had just noticed that they didn’t have one. Preschool had its share of separated families, but almost all the other kids seemed to know where both their parents were. Most were being picked up alternately by their moms and their dads.

And Rosie hadn’t asked who is our daddy, but where.

“He’s flying a very fast, very high jet in the air force,” Franci answered. “It goes all over the world and he’s busy doing a very important job.”

Rosie had said, “Oh.” She probably didn’t understand much beyond the important fact that Franci knew where Rosie’s daddy was. But what Franci knew was that in a few months, maybe a year, maybe two, as her world became larger, Rosie would ask things like, “What’s his name?” “Why doesn’t he come to see us?” And eventually, “Why aren’t you married?” These would be increasingly difficult questions to answer. And those questions formed the primary reason Franci had not wanted to face this—she couldn’t imagine how she would tell Rosie that her daddy just didn’t want anything to do with her because he absolutely, positively did not want to be a father.

Franci didn’t tell her mom about Rosie’s question because her mother had asked her so many times how she intended to handle her situation. From the beginning Vivian had disapproved of this approach. “Fine, don’t marry him,” she had said. “Don’t have expectations of him. Don’t be disappointed in his behavior. But he deserves to know he has a child.”

Under any other circumstances, Franci would agree. “Mom, he was adamant! He did not want children. He didn’t want marriage, either.”

“All that has a way of changing when there’s a child actually on the way,” Vivian had said.

“Exactly,” Franci argued. “That’s why I want to handle this on my own, at least for now. Because I’m only interested in marrying and having a child with a man who loves me as much as I love him, who wants our child as much as I do. Don’t you get that?”

“Of course I get it. But, like it or not, when you accidentally get pregnant, you have a responsibility to tell the other parent and let the cards fall where they may. Deal with his response however you must, but you have to at least tell him.”

“I will. Eventually,” Franci had said. The problem wasn’t that she found the concept of informing him so unreasonable. It had just been that when she found out she was pregnant, and then when Rosie was a new baby, she wasn’t emotionally strong enough to have Sean in her life. She’d thought that, in time—time that so quickly stretched into four years—she would be ready to confront the reality without it completely disrupting her very existence. She knew what it could mean—Sean rejecting Rosie altogether, and that would hurt too much to contemplate. Or, best-case scenario, an arrangement of his visits and, too soon, of Rosie going to spend time with him. Ultimately it could be Rosie spending time with Sean’s new family, because eventually he would find the woman he could commit to. Being separated from Rosie was going to be so hard, and seeing Sean regularly? Seeing Sean happy with another woman would be sheer torture.