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Heather pasted a smile on her lips as she turned to Shayne. “I guess this means I’m not going to be late after all.” She glanced at her watch. “If I hurry to get the girls back home.”
“Need a ride?” Ben offered. He was aware of the sharp look that his brother gave him. But it was too late to gracefully rescind his offer.
Heather was already edging her way over toward the front door, drawing Hannah with her. Hayley was another story. “I have my car.”
“I’ll go with him,” Hayley volunteered eagerly, her eyes all but lighting up.
Shayne interceded. Without looking at Ben, he squatted down to Hayley’s level. “Sorry, honey, but I need him here. He’s a doctor,” Shayne told her.
Hayley’s perfectly shaped, tiny golden eyebrows knitted themselves over her nose as she pondered what Shayne had just told her. Looking up at her new hero, she asked, “You’re like him?”
Shayne placed his hand on his brother’s shoulder as if for the little girl’s benefit. “He’s working his way up,” he responded before Ben could say anything.
Ben flashed a grin at his brother. “And I’ve got a long way to go.”
“But you’re bigger,” Hayley pointed out in earnest, looking from one man to the other.
Amused, Ben assured her, “Size doesn’t matter in this case.” Glancing toward Heather, he noticed that Hannah was now burying her face in the fold of what there was of her mother’s skirt.
Heather had a great pair of legs. But then, she always did have. He remembered watching her practice cheerleading moves on the field while he and his friends were supposedly listening to the coach give orders. He allowed himself a moment to appreciate the view. For old-time’s sake.
“Is there anything else while you’re here?” Shayne asked her.
Heather shook her head, a little emphatically in Shayne’s estimation. “No. Thank you.” She felt behind her for the doorknob. Finding it, she held on as if it represented her ticket to freedom. “I can pay you around the middle—”
Shayne waved away her words. “Follow-up care. See you girls later.”
“Um, yes. Thank you,” Heather stammered. With a quick nod at Ben, she turned on her heel and left the premises. She had to almost drag Hayley in her wake. The latter, her gaze intent on Ben, waved madly as she disappeared down the front steps of the porch.
Shayne waved back even though he knew that the attention was centered exclusively on Ben. The door closed and he turned to face his brother.
“Looks like you’re a hit with the under-three-foot set,” he commented. Glancing at the day’s appointments, he saw that the next one wasn’t scheduled for another half hour—provided there were no emergency phone calls.
He knew better than to count on that. But he did need a caffeine hit.
Since Ben had neglected to take his blatant hint about making coffee, Shayne made his way to the back room and the barren coffeepot. Of late, at a very minimum, he found himself averaging a cup an hour. It was an unabashed intent on his part to stave off exhaustion. The feeling seemed to haunt him more and more these days, though he kept that to himself. Given Sydney’s penchant for reading him like a book, he knew it was only a matter of time before his “secret” was out. Hopefully, by then his energy would make a reappearance of its own volition.
“Not entirely,” Ben replied, following him into the back. He leaned against the doorjamb, watching Shayne move about the cramped area. With a discarded dinette table in the middle, surrounded with four chairs, the room wasn’t big enough for both of them to move around, and he didn’t want to crowd Shayne. “Her older girl looks as if she’s afraid of me.”
“Hannah,” Shayne said. “Hannah’s shy. She’s always been the quiet one in her family. She was born without making a sound.” He smiled. “Heather used to bring her in, concerned because Hannah didn’t cry. I told her to be grateful. Once Hayley was born, she realized she’d had a good thing with her firstborn.”
Ben nodded, only half listening. Another question had occurred to him. Try as he might, he couldn’t see the petite, delicate Heather married to Kendall, a big, burly man who looked far more at home handling steel beams than holding something as fragile as Heather in his arms. “How’s Joe Kendall doing? Is he still a miner?”
“Not these days,” Shayne told him dryly. Putting the filter in its proper place, he measured out several heaping tablespoons of coffee and then added very little water. The pot began making noises as it heated the water. “He’s dead.”
“What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
“The usual definition,” Shayne responded mildly. He replaced the plastic lid on the can of coffee and put it back into the tiny refrigerator Sydney had given him. “Not breathing. Body decomposing, or in Joe’s case, already decomposed.” He turned from the coffeemaker and glanced at his brother. “Did you sleep through the basic course in medical school?”
“I mean dead how?” Ben pressed. “How did her husband die?”
“Cave-in at the mines.”
The words were recited without feeling, but Ben knew better. No one cared more than Shayne about these people. Whenever there was a cave-in, Shayne was the first there to help with the wounded. To go into the bowels of the earth if need be. Shayne coped by keeping a tight rein on his feelings. Just the way he had when their parents were killed.
Ben thought back to the special he’d watched last month. The one that had triggered his decision to return home. Maybe the footage he’d seen on the Alaskan cave-in had even been of the one that had claimed Heather’s husband.
Small world.
He realized that Shayne was holding a cup out to him. Taking it, he looked down at the pitch-black, almost-solid contents. “You know, you should offer to coat the walls at the mines with this stuff, Shay. They’d never cave in again.”
“Starbucks is approximately a hundred miles due east,” Shayne told him, pointing in that general direction. Just as he took a sip of the dark brew, they heard a bell ring in the front. It was swiftly followed by a low, resonant greeting.
“’Morning!”
“That would be Jimmy.” Rather than leave the cup behind, Shayne topped it off then headed out of the small room. “C’mon. Time to make introductions.”
The coffee jolted through Ben’s system. He’d forgotten just how strong Shayne’s coffee could really be. He smiled to himself as he followed behind his brother. It felt good to be home.
Heather had no recollection of the short drive home from the clinic. She didn’t remember getting into the car, didn’t remember strapping the girls in, didn’t remember starting the car or turning on the radio. As she paused to glance into the back, she was surprised to see the girls were each in their car seats where they were supposed to be. She vaguely became aware the radio was on only when she heard the deejay, Preston Foster, launch into his stale routine. It hadn’t changed very much since he’d cut his teeth on the radio station in high school.
Staring ahead again, she gripped the steering wheel so tightly that had it been frozen, she would have succeeded in snapping it in two. Not to mention she was moving slightly faster than a snail suffering from a bout of the flu.
It was a preventative action because she didn’t want to hit anything. The fact that Hades had no traffic seemed to have escaped her. At given times of the day, there would be only one, possibly two vehicles on any of the three streets that led in and out of the town. A traffic jam was declared whenever three vehicles all headed in the same direction.
“Faster, Mama, faster,” Hayley urged. The girl waved her feet back and forth quickly, as if that would help propel the vehicle a little faster. “I’m gonna miss Celia Seal.”
Trying not to think about the man in the clinic, Heather pressed down on the accelerator. The speedometer on the dash rose to a racing twenty-five miles an hour.
“We’ll get there,” Heather assured her younger daughter.
Hayley was unconvinced. “Shoulda let the doctor drive,” she said, pouting.
Should have never come in today, Heather thought. “Maybe next time.”
Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw that Hayley’s face had lit up as she strained against her restraints. Lack of enthusiasm had never been Hayley’s problem. “Really?” she asked eagerly.
“No, not really,” Heather told her quietly, struggling to tuck away the frayed ends of her nerves. “He has other things to do.”
For now, Hayley dropped the subject and bounced on to another. “Do you like him, Mama?” she asked. “I like him. He’s cute.” She punctuated her declaration with a giggle, then tried to muffle the sound with both hands across her mouth.
Heather sighed, shaking her head. Like mother, like daughter. Except that she’d learned the hard way just what a fool she was. She fervently prayed that Hayley would never meet someone who would shake her world up so completely.
Looking again in the rearview mirror, she said to her older daughter. “How about you, Hannah?” Hannah had lapsed into her customary silence while they were still at the clinic. Heather had tried to gauge the little girl’s reaction to Ben, but she couldn’t detect anything one way or the other. “Do you like him?”
Hannah turned her small face toward the window at her side. Small shoulders rose and fell, as if she hadn’t thought about it and now found the topic not crucial enough to consider.
Hayley’s legs waved even faster. “Hannah doesn’t like anybody,” she declared.
“Do, too,” Hannah protested.
And they were off, Heather thought. But at least they were home, she comforted herself. Turning the wheel, she pulled up right in front of the small two-story house that Joe had built for her with his own hands. It was a labor of love. Every time she looked at it, she could feel a smattering of guilt assail her. Joe had loved her a great deal. And she had rewarded that love with deception.
Not going to do you any good, dwelling on that. You did the best you could. For everyone.
Knowing that didn’t make it right.
“Don’t fight, girls,” she said, turning off the engine. “You know how it bothers Gran.”
“Everything bothers Gran,” Hayley responded with a wisdom that was far beyond her four years.
She had that right, Heather thought. As far back as she could remember, her mother had something disparaging to say about almost everyone and everything. She tried to remember the last time she’d seen her mother smile, and couldn’t. The woman’s face had all but frozen in a permanently sour expression. It made her appear years older than the date on her birth certificate.
Heather stifled a sigh as she got out of the car and opened the rear door directly behind the driver’s seat. She undid first one child seat, then the other, her fingers moving mechanically; she’d done this a thousand times.
Life was funny. At eighteen, when she’d imagined herself at thirty, she would have thought that she would be at least half a continent away from both her mother and from Hades. She’d wanted to do something different, something important with her life.
Instead, hers had turned out to be a very old story, almost as old as time itself. Nursing a crush from the time she was ten, she had fallen under the spell of a handsome local one fateful night. Leading with her heart instead of the brains that God had given her, she had one wonderful experience and then very quickly found herself pregnant. With no one to turn to, she was trying to work up her nerve to tell the man who had captured her heart that he was about to be a father when she discovered that he’d abruptly left town. Leaving her emotionally stranded.
Not that he had done any of this on purpose. He had no more clue that she was pregnant than her mother did. It wasn’t as if they’d been going together before that night. They had run into each other, she walking off the effects of another awful argument with her mother and he coming back from a trip to Anchorage. She was walking along the road by the lake, and he’d slowed down his car to ask her if she wanted a drive home.
Home was the last place she’d wanted to go and said so. But he hadn’t wanted to leave her alone out there, so he offered to keep her company. They’d sat in his car and talked. About his plans. About hers. And then, somehow, magic had happened. Magic that had nothing to do with her mother or the woman he was supposedly engaged to, or the woman he’d been writing to who he’d invited to come out here to live. It was the first time she’d ever seen him looking anything but decisive. But he was having doubts about the future.
They both took shelter in the present. In the moment. In each other.
And soon after that, he left Hades. Left because Lila Montgomery had changed her mind. Lila Montgomery who’d once bragged that she could have any man. And she had wanted Ben.
Opening her front door, Heather realized that Ben had never answered the question she’d asked him at the clinic. He never said what he was doing back. Or how long he intended on staying. Was this just a visit or the beginning of something permanent?
She had no idea which she was rooting for.
Shepherding the girls in front of her, Heather entered the house. “Mother, we’re back.”
She heard the floorboards creak as the wheelchair slid over them.
“Did you remember to pick up my medication?” Martha demanded sharply as she propelled her wheelchair into the room.
Heather felt her stomach drop another notch.
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