First Time, Forever, page 13
She could hear the barely leashed fury in his words, and then he removed his hands from around her waist, and headed for the door.
“Evan, don’t deal with it in anger.”
“I don’t think it will hurt him to know I’m angry!”
“Please?”
“Don’t you trust me at all? What the hell do you think I’m going to do? Beat him with a two-by-four? Is that what you think of me, Kathleen? That I’m just a rough cowboy who can’t be trusted to deal with a twelve-year-old?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“It’s right there in your eyes that you want to protect him. From me. Have I done something to deserve that?”
“He just seems so mixed up right now, so fragile.”
“That looks fragile to you? You know what it looks like to me? Like out-and-out belligerence. He’s asking for some guidelines, and I intend to give them to him.”
He turned on his heel and went out the door.
She fought back the urge to go with him, to supervise, and instead watched from the window as he talked to Mac. And he was right. He had never, right from the very start, given her any reason to believe that he wouldn’t handle it just fine.
As far as she could tell he didn’t even raise his voice.
What was happening to her? She felt so torn, as if by choosing happiness for herself with Evan, she had let down her sister in her promise to look after Mac. She had really and truly believed that this union would be the right thing for Mac, too.
Or had she? Had she been pulled by a force within her so strong it would have told her any lie to get her into the heaven of Evan’s arms?
And what if the two of them couldn’t resolve it? Exactly what had those vows meant to her? At what price to Mac was she prepared to go to keep her promises to Evan?
Both her men came back in the house a few seconds later.
“Mac,” she said, “Why? I just don’t—”
“Kathleen, leave it,” Evan snapped. “I have tons of manure. Probably enough to see him through until his eighteenth birthday.”
Mac said nothing, and in fact when he glanced at her she saw the oddest expression on his face. It was as if he wanted to hate this man, and could not. Had specifically thought of the worst thing he could do, had tried to infuriate Evan, like a test. Will you hate me back?
And Evan had just answered him.
No.
The answer Mac most needed to hear.
“I guess I’m going to be moving so much manure,” Mac said, “you’ll probably have to buy more cows.”
“That’s right, son.” Kathleen detected just the slightest smile in Evan’s eyes.
Mac didn’t even protest being called son.
Trust him, she told herself. Trust your husband. And then she realized it had been a long, long time since she had to trust anyone but herself. And that when she had stood in front of this whole town and said “I do” she had really vowed to learn all kinds of lessons about loving.
Some of them seemed easier than others.
Chapter Nine
It was Evan’s favorite time of day. It hadn’t always been, but it was now.
The boys were in bed. Mac had actually sought him out tonight, and they had looked at some maps of the area together. Then, when it was time for Jesse’s bedtime story, they had all piled on his bed, including Mac, and laughed at the stories of Robert Munsch. Evan had looked at Kathleen and seen so clearly how happy she was, that this was what she dreamed of, and hoped for. A family not at war.
Which is, of course, what he had dreamed of his entire life, too.
Mac just didn’t share the dream. Evan had known it was a momentary truce only when he’d gone into the bathroom after the boys. Mac had written his name on the mirror in toothpaste. Evan wiped it off before Kathleen saw it, knowing how quickly it would erase the storytime serenity from her face.
Now, he and Kathleen had put away the last of the dishes, and the star-studded night beckoned.
He held open the back porch door for her, and watched how she walked with her head tilted back, looking at those stars as if she hadn’t seen them last night or the night before that.
When they reached their favorite little knoll, he reached inside his shirt and pulled out a long-stemmed rose.
“Evan! What’s this for?”
“Two weeks today.”
“Did you have to go all the way to town for it?” She held it to her nose and breathed in.
“Yeah.”
“And didn’t it scratch you, inside your shirt?”
“Yes, it did.”
“Was it worth it?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am. It made you smile. That little knot is all but gone.”
She looked swiftly away from him, then. “How can I not worry? Evan, he is being so bad. He’s never behaved like this. As if scratching that new word on the truck wasn’t bad enough! Then the ‘accidents’ started happening. Letting the calves out, driving your four-wheeler through the new garden, throwing that baseball through the bathroom window—”
“What?”
“This afternoon.”
“Let me guess, an accident?”
“Didn’t you notice?”
“I thought the bathroom window was open.” Actually, he’d been completely distracted by the toothpaste, which he decided not to tell her about.
“I just feel so sick, Evan, torn between loyalty and love.”
He knew that. Had known it from the first time they’d had words over Mac. He was scared to ask her which of them she felt loyal to and which she loved. They didn’t say those words to each other.
It surprised him how much he wanted to hear them from her.
How he woke up every morning and hoped today would be the day Kathleen told him she loved him.
Instead they woke up to some new horror of Mac’s and she got that worried look on her face, and the pain in her eyes ripped Evan apart.
He loved her.
He could not believe how it had come to him. How simply this gift had been given to him by the universe.
He watched her with his son, and he could feel the love grow inside his chest.
He came into his house to the smell of cleanliness and fresh cookies and it grew some more.
He watched her plant those flowers, so full of hope, so unrealistic about the challenges of the weather and wind here in Saskatchewan, and the love in him grew.
He went to their bed at night, and she was so full of wonder, so eager, so sexy without having any idea that she was, and his love grew more.
He saw her, after all these years of being on her own, giving her trust to him, slowly, and he took it as a gift he was not always sure he was worthy of.
They walked out here, under these huge mystical skies, and talked, and he came to love the sound of her voice and her quiet insights, her gentleness, her thoughtfulness and his love just kept growing inside him.
As hopeful as those flowers she’d planted.
And maybe, he thought darkly, just as doomed.
How could he love her and keep her when she was feeling ripped up, torn between him and Mac, suffering every single day? This being a decent guy—her knight—was really harder than he had ever believed it could be.
“There’s something else,” she said.
“Do you have to tell me?” he groaned.
“The Mortimers called this afternoon. They were very nasty. They said they were going to expose our marriage as a sham in court, and that then they would get Jesse for sure.”
Forgetting momentarily that he had turned over a new leaf, that he was a gentleman now, he said a word she probably hadn’t heard much. She would have seen it though, right there on the side of his truck.
“Evan, would you tell me about Dee? I feel if I understood some things about her I could understand Jesse better. And maybe her parents, too.”
He’d never wanted to talk about Dee before, and certainly not to his new wife, but suddenly he realized what Kathleen was offering—not just to understand Jesse better, but to help him heal, too. It reminded him that it was not just Kathleen who had come into this relationship with issues that needed to be dealt with. It was not just Kathleen who needed to learn to trust, to lean on other people. It was him, too.
“I met her at a rodeo. She was a barrel racing queen. Beautiful. Wild. I liked that—that she was as wild as me. She liked life fast. Lots of speed, lots of action. She was unpredictable and unreliable, and at the time, that just added to the whole sense of excitement I felt around her.
“She told me she was protected, so you could have knocked me over with a feather when she announced she was pregnant.” He tried to erase the bitterness from his voice, but knew he had not succeeded. “It didn’t even bother her to think about getting an abortion.
“I talked her out of it. I thought she’d be as ready and willing to change as I was when that baby came. But I learned a hard lesson about human nature. People tell you right off who they are. And you don’t have the chance of a snowball in hell of changing that into what you want it to be.
“She wasn’t interested in being nobody’s mama. She hated the farm, hated the hard work, and in pretty short order she seemed to hate me.
“Too late, I saw that in the wild no-holds-barred way that she went around a barrel on a horse she simply didn’t care if she lived or died. She wanted excitement and lots of it, and there’s not too much exciting about farm life in Saskatchewan.”
Or at least, he’d believed that until he met Kathleen. Suddenly with Kathleen, who seemed so calm and so quiet, his farm in Saskatchewan had become a pretty exciting place after all. And that didn’t even include the hijinks Mac got up to every day!
“It was like there was something wrong with Dee,” he continued thoughtfully, giving it words for the first time. “Hidden behind that reckless grin was the fact she didn’t care much about anything but Dee. Everything about her got worse after the baby was born. She was more restless and more angry and more resentful.
“I’d come in off the farm, and sometimes she’s just start throwing things at me and screaming. She claimed I loved the baby and not her, and that I wanted her to die of boredom and that I was killing her on purpose.
“One day she took the baby and she left. Took the baby, not because she wanted him, but to hurt me. To punish me for all her shattered expectations, I guess, for me not being able to fill that hole inside her, that I don’t think anything could have filled. Really, the more I tried to understand her convoluted thinking, the more I failed.
“I tracked her down, caught up to them once or twice, just long enough to see the satisfaction in her eyes that she was causing me such misery. And then she’d be gone again.
“I thank God every day that Jesse wasn’t with her the night she died in the car wreck, one party too many, one trip too fast. I suspect she told Jesse all kinds of rotten things about me, because when he first came he seemed terrified of me, suspicious and silent. He’s really coming out of it now.”
“That poor baby,” Kathleen said. “Both of them, poor babies.”
“Dee?” he said incredulously.
“Evan, she never grew up. That’s why Jesse is so taken with Mac. That’s just what Mac acts like. Affectionate to Jess, but not if it’s going to interfere with his plans.”
“I’m not sorry she died,” he said. “Is that awful?”
“It’s human. Evan? I think we need to invite her parents here.”
“Get real.” He thought dealing with Mac every day was quite enough to ask of a man.
“No, I mean it.” Her voice was firm, and he was beginning to recognize when she planned to be mulish. “They lost their daughter, and they’re full of anger and rage and want to blame someone, but if you let them come here, they’ll see it’s not you.”
“Yeah, right.”
“And they’ll see, maybe, that they still have a grandson, and that everything that was best about their daughter goes on in him.”
“What if they’re the ones who made her like that?”
“I’m not asking you to let them raise Jesse, but to allow them to be a small part of his life. His connection to his mother, and theirs to her.”
“I don’t want to,” he said.
“Just think about it.”
“Do I have to?” A true knight would.
“Yes.”
And it seemed to him that what he had just said about Dee—that a person let you know right off who they were—applied also to Kathleen.
Right off he had known that she was soft and gentle, but with a core of strength and stubbornness running through her.
Right off he had known in some part of himself that he would be required to be a bigger man than he was if he wanted to keep her—more open, more loving. Yes, even more forgiving. He was going to have to leave that renegade in him behind, the tough guy who could hold a grudge for a long, long time, if he wanted to ever be the man Kathleen thought he was.
“All right,” he said gruffly. “I’ll call them.”
She leaned over and kissed his cheek, and he felt his heart soar as high as those stars up there. Until he remembered one more thing that she had let him know, right off, and that was that her nephew meant the world to her, and that she would always do what she thought was best for him.
And so he wondered, looking at those stars, if being a bigger man than he was, would involve letting her go, rather than watching her be ripped up like this.
He hoped not. God, he hoped not.
He would give it more time.
Sometimes time solved things that all a man’s pushing and shoving and working and fretting could not solve.
She leaned over and kissed him again, on the mouth this time. And before he knew it they were clothed only in darkness, beneath a gorgeous summer sky, and she wasn’t even worried about snakes.
In the pleasant afterglow, when he felt ten feet high and bullet proof, he thought about what he could do to repair his relationship with Mac, to get by the boy’s anger. He had a brilliant insight. Brilliant. The kid wanted to find his dad. Why not help him? It was something they could work on together, unite them, make it so Mac didn’t see him as the enemy who’d stolen his auntie Kathy’s love.
Mac gave him an opportunity first thing in the morning. They were working together, feeding the mix to the calves, when Mac started.
“I’m going to find my dad. If we had the Internet I could find him really fast. Of course, out here in the boonies, we don’t have the Internet. How come we don’t have a computer? How come—”
“Do you know his name?” Evan interrupted.
“Of course I know my dad’s name!” Mac said so furiously that Evan suspected he didn’t.
“I’ll help you find him,” Evan said.
Mac froze, and Evan suddenly wished that he had discussed this with Kathleen, because the look on Mac’s face was not one of undying gratitude.
He looked very young and very vulnerable.
And he looked terrified.
He turned swiftly away from Evan’s probing gaze. “That would be great,” he said. “We’ll find my dad and I’ll go live with him.”
“Whoa, buddy. Nobody said anything about that. I’ll help you find him and then we’ll talk to your auntie Kathleen about what to do next. Maybe you could write him some letters or something, arrange to meet him later.”
Mac didn’t say anything.
“Next week, okay? After Jesse’s grandparents come on Sunday.”
“I can’t wait,” Mac said, but Evan heard something else, and wished he wouldn’t have opened his mouth.
Kathleen looked at the flowers in the vase. Scraggly, her bedding plants were not holding out very well against the ravages of the wind. Still, there had been a few blossoms to pick, and with the long-lasting rose Evan had given her, it looked quite nice.
She glanced at the clock. The Mortimers should be here within the hour.
Evan came in and smiled at her flowers.
“Are they pathetic?” she asked.
“They’re pretty.”
“Could you go get the boys? Mac took Jesse out to the barn to play with the new kittens. I haven’t seen them for a while. Jesse will need a bath.”
“The Mortimers sounded so excited to be coming, Kathleen. I think you were right.”
“I’ll try not to rub it in.”
“Very gracious of you.”
She wanted to tell him right now. That she loved him. When she got up in the morning the words went through her head, and they went though it all day long. In light of the rather intimate things they were doing, why did the words seem so scary to say?
Maybe it was because Mac was behaving so badly. How long could Evan stand it? How long before he suggested maybe this wasn’t working? And what did that say about her? That she was attaching a condition to her love? That he had to keep her in order for her to love him?
Keep her, she thought, as if he could return her to the store and get a new one or something. He would never break those vows he had said. Never. Was it going to be up to her to let him out of this?
“Now what are you worried about?” he said, pressing the line on her forehead.
“I think I’m wrecking your life,” she whispered.
“Wrecking my life?”
“If you’ve had enough of Mac destroying your property, I’ll understand.”
“Maybe what you’re trying to say is that you’ve had enough of the tension between us,” he said softly.
Was he giving her a way out? But the thought of leaving him filled her with such an ache she thought she would cry. She was not even sure she could do that for Mac. What kind of person had she become? Only able to think about herself? Was what she felt for Evan really love if it made her self-centered instead of a better person?
“We’ll talk later,” she said. “Please, go get the boys.”
With one more shrewd look at her, he went out the back door. But when he returned, nearly half an hour later, he looked pale and distraught. “I’ve looked everywhere, Kathleen. I can’t find them.”
She stared at him. “You can’t find them? But that’s impossible. Where would they go?”
