LITMIR.BIZ

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treat me when we get there.”

      Twisting around, she glared back at him. “He’ll chew you up and spit out the pieces, Marine! For heaven’s sake, Jackson, what can he do to you? He’s practically chained to his bed.” She softened a tad. “He’ll be glad to see you. Don’t worry.”

      Easy for her to say. He and Pop had almost come to blows the morning he’d left, the day after the senior prom. He tried not to think about the cruel, callow things he’d said to Pop. Tried not to remember Pop’s reasoned, soft-spoken advice and the way he hadn’t lost his temper at all until Jackson had yelled at him. Jackson tried not to think about anything as he followed Cass inside his boyhood home.

      The rooms were cool and shadowed, a welcome change from the heat outside. Through the doorway into the kitchen, he saw an older woman, her back to him. Bertha Jean Gillis stood stiff and straight in a blue housedress and a large white apron, her Swedish blond hair plaited and wrapped in a coronet. She turned at their approach. An unusual sight to see the woman the whole town had nicknamed “Crabby” smiling at him, even if it was a brief wintry token of a smile not intended as a personal welcome.

      “I’m glad to see you, young man, and not one second too soon, either.” Her faded gray eyes snapped with concern.

      Before he could reply, she spoke again. “Will woke up a few minutes ago. Go on in and say hello.”

      For a single moment, time stood still. The faded kitchen linoleum butted against the worn cranberry carpet he stood on. The hardwood floor in the hall needed waxing. Then, time restarted. Two doors down the short hallway, the stern, older man waited.

      Jackson strode toward Pop’s room, trying to walk like a Marine, proud and confident, but feeling more like a little boy about to get his hiney tanned. He tapped on the open door. Tentatively, he spoke. “Hi, Pop.”

      “Is that you, boy?” the reply came back. “You’ve grown a foot, seems like. Cass said you’d come, but I guess I didn’t believe it.”

      Jackson’s heart jerked to his mouth. The worn-out old man lying in the bed his mother had died in looked as if he, too, were ready to cross over. Jackson tried to say something, but no words came out.

      The old man spoke again, his voice stronger. “I’m not dead yet, so quit looking at me that way. That damn black bull Bertie sold me just beat up on me some, out of pure hell, I guess.”

      “I’ve missed you, Pop,” Jackson said, and wondered why it had taken so long to get over his anger.

      The appallingly weak voice pleaded, “Son, I’ve waited a long time. Are you going to come over here and hug your old man or not?”

      Jackson stumbled toward the bed on weak legs, his heart beating so loud it sounded like the bass drum in a parade.

      CHAPTER THREE

      THAT NIGHT, Jackson donned a pair of pajama shorts and stretched out on the same bed he’d slept in as a boy. It must have shrunk, because his feet touched the tailboard. He turned off the bedside lamp and lay still for a few minutes, then restlessly sprang from the bed. At the window, he pushed aside the blue linen curtains. A few miles away, he could see the distant glow of lights from Catherine Darnell’s home.

      In the wintertime, those lights cast a yellow cone against rolling drifts of snow. Now the night swallowed them, so they were just small reminders that this wasn’t the only farm in Traill County, that he wasn’t really alone, that if he climbed out the window and started walking toward the lights, at the end of his journey he’d see a well-remembered face.

      He wouldn’t do that, of course. He couldn’t. Stopping by to see Cat, as he’d told her he would, simply wasn’t in the cards. Logic dictated that he stay away from her.

      Cat Darnell hadn’t been very friendly, anyway. She must be married, though he’d noticed she didn’t wear a ring. Not to Roy Thoreson, or she would have said so when they talked about him. He’d have to find a way to ask Pop. Casually, of course.

      He turned away from the window. No, hell, he couldn’t do that. He didn’t need the complications she would bring and as he remembered the pink fullness of her lower lip, he knew there’d be complications. He’d do what he came to do and then get the hell out of Engerville. Christmas and maybe a week in the summer, he could come back and see Pop. Jackson thought he wouldn’t mind coming back on visits that much, now that he and Pop had come to terms.

      He lay on the bed again, thinking. Inevitably, his mind returned to that long-ago prom night. The memory came back to him as if it had happened yesterday. Cat in his arms, her face lit by a bright spring moon, the rose corsage she wore crushed beneath the lapels of his formal sport coat.

      He groaned, his body stiff and hurting, not from the protracted bus trip, but because, on that long-ago night, Cat’s shy smile had soothed the hurt Rebeka caused. And Cat was the first girl he’d ever made love to.

      CAT LOOKED IN ON Joey. Her daughter had fallen asleep almost immediately. She lay on her side, knees tucked up against her tummy like a small baby. Her hair all tangled and curled, swirled over the pillow and half covered her face. Cat wanted to go in and touch her, tuck the covers more securely around her, but Joey slept light. Cat blew a kiss toward her and pulled the door shut, taking care that its closing made no sound.

      She turned on the TV, but tonight Jackson filled her mind. She ignored the flickering light and thought about prom night and Jackson leaving town the next day, how her father reacted when she told him she was pregnant, and being in the hospital all alone. Her father had refused to come with her. Shame, she knew, though an unmarried mother was no great novelty, even in Engerville.

      She remembered her first drug-hazy look at the infant she’d brought into the world, her relief that the baby’s hair was as black as her own and her disappointment that it wasn’t the same beautiful red as Jackson’s. She remembered wondering if he would know, by some kind of mental empathy, that he had a child.

      Restless, she went to the door, looked back at Joey’s room for a second, then stepped outside. A clear moon shone down. Aunt Johanna’s lilacs scented the night. Cat missed her aunt. She missed her father, too, but he’d been a strict parent, often reminding her that her wild mother had run away from husband and child. Only Aunt Johanna had bothered to show Cat that love motivated her discipline.

      From the barn, a questioning whicker came from one of the horses. Probably Ruggie, she thought. The troublesome colt was always alert.

      The bank wasn’t happy about waiting until September for their money. They might even foreclose, though Greg Lundstrom had said he’d see what he could do. Where would she go then? Maybe if the yearling colt her father bought a year ago hadn’t had the bad luck to step in a gopher hole and break his leg, they’d have a horse ready to sell now. One whose price would make the mortgage payment for a year and take this load of worry off her shoulders.

      Dad’s funeral expenses ate up most of the remaining emergency money in his account. There hadn’t been much to begin with, since her father seldom planned ahead. After Aunt Johanna died, she’d taken on the job of balancing the farm’s books and worked out a budget, which her father followed only sporadically.

      Jackson. He was home again, a bare couple of miles away, and how was she supposed to handle that? If she’d thought she was over her infatuation with him, one glimpse of the Marine had knocked that thought “hind end over tea kettle” as her father used to say. How come she’d never wanted anybody else, anyway? Why had her attention settled so securely on one skinny redheaded boy that nearly fifteen years after meeting him she still ached with unrequited love? Unrequited? That was like saying the sky was blue. Jackson didn’t care about anybody but himself.

      He’d grown up spoiled by being the eldest child, the handsome boy, the star athlete. Only his kindness kept him from being labeled a royal jerk, instead of Engerville’s crown prince. A prince who ran away from the throne, not because he didn’t care for the soft seat, but just to see other kingdoms.

      Cat crossed her arms

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