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His heart boxed his ribs. His palms began to sweat. He took a step forward, her name in his throat.
A blond boy sauntered to her side. “Mama, can we make hamburgers in the backyard tonight?”
Adrenaline scooted across Luke’s skin as she tousled the kid’s hair. “We’re having spaghetti with meatballs, remember?”
“Oh, yeah, right. Hey, Miss Jo.” The kid pulled a miniature thumb from the mouth of the baby sitting in the cart’s basket. “You want rabbit teeth?” Before Miss Jo could whimper, the boy screwed up his face and started gnawing on her neck. “Rawrrr-rawrrr-rawrrr.”
The little girl giggled, a sound light as a musical scale. “Ep-say, no.” She grabbed his hair and pulled.
“Ow.”
“Don’t get her started,” Ginny warned the boy as she set the bananas in the cart and moved to the oranges.
Luke backed away. He was an outsider, looking in on her family—on a life he’d shunned. Bumping into another shopper, he muttered, “Excuse me,” and hurried from the produce section. Near the electronic doors, he dropped his basket on a rack.
She had a family. A husband.
What was she doing in Misty River?
They had to be on vacation. It was almost May, after all. Some families took their vacations early, before school finished. They were simply stopping for a few groceries. Probably had a big Winnebago parked around the corner. Husband was likely reading the paper while she shopped with the kids.
Why that bothered Luke, he couldn’t determine. Virginia Ellen Keegan hadn’t been his wife in damn near a dozen years.
But she could’ve been.
The thought zapped in. Quick, sharp, leaving a ragged tear.
He strode to his silver Mustang convertible parked on a side street. He couldn’t get inside the vehicle fast enough—and when he did, he simply sat staring through the windshield.
Ginny.
Shutting his eyes, he saw her again, heard her voice. A stranger, yet…completely familiar.
He’d never forgotten her.
And if he looked closely, he’d recognize the hole in his heart, where once she had lived and laughed and loved.
At 8:20 Friday morning Ginny pulled in front of Chinook Elementary and turned off the station wagon’s ignition.
“What are you gonna talk to Mrs. Chollas about?” Alexei asked, worry between his eyes.
“I want to make sure she understands about dysgraphia, honey. That’s all.”
“Okay.” He stared at three boys chasing a soccer ball. “I don’t want her to think I’m special.”
“You are special, Alexei. The most special boy in the whole world.” She leaned over and kissed his hair.
“Mo-om! Don’t! People might see.”
“Oops.” She smiled away the tiny prick of hurt; her boy was growing up too fast. “I forgot.”
“Okay.” He opened the door and hopped down. “Bye.”
“Have a good day, ba—” The door slammed. “Baby,” she whispered.
“Ep-say.” Joselyn squirmed in her car seat behind Ginny. “Ep-say, go.”
“That’s right, angel. Alexei’s going to school.” She climbed from the car as her son ran toward the boys chasing the ball. “And we’re having a chat with his teacher.”
She found Mrs. Chollas waiting for her in the fifth-grade classroom. Immediately Ginny liked the woman’s kind eyes and gentle smile.
When they were seated at the teacher’s desk—Joselyn on Ginny’s lap with a notepad and a crayon supplied by the teacher—Mrs. Chollas said, “Alexei is doing quite well in this first week. He’s already made some friends, which really helps ease the transition. He loves math, and is very adept at oral communication in class. But as we discussed on the phone, his writing skills need a great deal of encouragement.”
Ginny understood too well. Offering a smile she didn’t feel, she said, “Have you ever dealt with dysgraphia, Mrs. Chollas?” Few teachers heard of the word, never mind grasped the tangled process that went on in a child’s brain. In Ginny’s experience, they recognized the problem, but many passed it on to a colleague specializing in learning disabilities.
The teacher nodded. “In my twenty years of teaching, I’ve seen almost everything, Mrs. Franklin. Alexei’s case isn’t entirely unusual. We have a laptop he might want to use—”
“He doesn’t want to be labeled,” Ginny interrupted. His past teachers had done exactly that by sending him to resource rooms or modifying his workload. Ginny had tried to boost his confidence by saying that holding a pencil differently, writing in short backward strokes, was okay. “He prefers to handwrite whenever possible.” She looked straight at the teacher. “If you don’t mind deciphering what he’s written.”
Mrs. Chollas smiled. “I’ll have Alexei read his material to me if it’s too illegible. And I’ll work with him after school for a few minutes each day showing him tricks that will make his letters more readable. Would he be willing to do that?”
“Oh,” Ginny said. “He will.” She hoped. Joselyn on her hip, Ginny stood. “Thank you. For putting both Alexei and me at ease. His other teachers… Well. He hated being singled out.”
Mrs. Chollas rose as well. “I understand. Unless it’s a dire situation, my students stay with me in my classroom. Why don’t we start next Monday, say for fifteen minutes or so after school? Does he catch the bus?”
“I drive him.”
“Good. Pick him up at three.” She shook Ginny’s hand. “I promise you my best, Mrs. Franklin.”
Relief washed through Ginny. “Thank you.” She offered a small smile. “By the way, would you know of a trustworthy babysitter?”
“Sure. Hallie Tucker. She’s wonderful with little ones. Loves babies.” The teacher tickled Joselyn under her chin.
“Hallie Tucker?” Ginny watched her baby smile at the older woman.
“She’s the police chief’s niece. Goes to Misty River High. Want me to write down her number?”
Calling the home of her former brother-in-law and speaking to the child who’d once been her niece had Ginny’s belly tailspinning. But she needed a reliable babysitter and Hallie had come with a lofty recommendation.
The delight in the girl’s voice at hearing who was calling chased off Ginny’s apprehension. Most of all, Hallie met her explanation about Boone’s death and the children’s needs with adult grace and understanding. Most importantly, Ginny couldn’t ignore the love-at-first-sight gazes from her children when the young woman stood on their doorstep a half hour after school.
“Be good,” Ginny told Alexei, then kissed Joselyn. Rushing to her green boat of a car—the only vehicle she could find that had cost less than eight hundred dollars—she added, “I should be home by four-thirty, five at the absolute latest.”
Her main stop was the grocery store. Everything else could wait until the weekend. Alexei, her all-day grazer, could not.
Forty-five minutes later, the groceries stored in back of her car, she drove down Main Street checking stores she might want to visit in the near future. A small, old-fashioned facade with Waltzin’ Paper in quaint, lopsided lettering over the little display window caught her eye.
Why not? she thought, pulling to the curb. Her kitchen cried for wallpaper; she’d give the shop a five-minute boo, then head home.
Boone’s chuckle followed her into the store. He’d never been a fan of papering walls. For him nothing compared to the ease and immediacy of paint.
Boone. Today was his birthday. He would have been sixty-three. The more than two decades between them had never been an issue. She’d fallen in love with his kindness. A big gentle man—jogger, kayaker, skier, daddy—who loved children and whose eyes misted when her eleven-day-old baby lost the battle against his tiny underdeveloped lungs.
The baby she’d conceived with her first husband, Luke Tucker.
The baby he’d never known existed.
The night Robby had been conceived, she and Luke were in the throes of divorce proceedings. He’d come to the apartment to plead with her, and she’d cried for all their lost hopes. Because Luke had been afraid of failing. In work, in life and, irony of ironies, in his marriage.
And that night, as icing to an already imploding cake, he’d become a father.
Ginny hadn’t known of her pregnancy until she’d moved across the country to West Virginia—as far as possible from Luke and the memories they’d made together. For seven months she’d debated telling him about their baby. In the end, eight years of marriage hadn’t tempered his ambitions or his fears, and while she understood and absolved all his regrets and excuses, Ginny could not bear hearing them again. Nor could she imagine the guilt her child would shoulder, hearing the reasons for absenteeism or requirement for perfection from a career-driven father.
So she kept her secret—and birthed her son alone.
For almost two agonizing, worrisome weeks, Robby’s doctor had been Boone Franklin, the hospital’s head pediatrician.
Her solace. Her saving grace.
Today, on Boone’s birthday, she would’ve woken him with a kiss and maybe, if the hour was early enough, unhurried lovemaking. She inhaled long and slow. Sex hadn’t happened in a long, long while. Not that she was looking, but someday…when the kids were older, when she had an established income, when there was money in the bank, perhaps then intimacy would be a part of her life again.
The store owner approached. “Anything of interest?”
“These I like.” She pointed out bold, yellow sunflowers.
“I have more catalogs in back,” the woman offered. “The patterns are last year’s, but they include classic sunflower designs that never go out of style.”
“Thank you, maybe I’ll have a peek.” She followed the clerk into a back room which held shelving, a couch and a coffee table.
Fifteen minutes later, she made her purchase. An archetypal country-kitchen border of sunflowers, which she’d hang below the crown molding above her refrigerator, stove and eating area. The walls beneath she’d paint in spring-green.
She wanted her kitchen welcoming and wholesome. The way it had been in West Virginia with Boone. He had loved green. A healing color, he’d said. Although it hadn’t healed him.
Outside on the sidewalk, she blinked against the late-afternoon sun and hefted the roll of wallpaper under her arm.
At the big, sprawling homestead house, a mile and a half from where Ginny stood, Hallie would be tossing a garden salad for her and smearing grape jelly over bread for Alexei and Joselyn. Time to get in her clunker station wagon across the street, go home where her children waited—and where her loneliness for Boone wafted from the corners.
From between two pickups, she dashed across the street.
A sound like raptors escaping Jurassic Park screeched in her ears. She glimpsed a sleek silver nose.
Not raptors. A car!
The wallpaper roll lurched from her arms as if alive. Her body flung of its own volition through the air, banging onto the pavement. Pain clawed up her spine, shot through her skull.
The last thing she saw was the snarling tread of a tire.
Ginny! Oh, God, Ginny!
Luke leaped from his Mustang and rushed to kneel beside the woman lying on the street inches from his front tire. He hadn’t realized he’d shouted until two men materialized at his side.
“Call 911! Oh, jeez. Ginny! I didn’t see you. I didn’t see you!”
Her right leg angled crookedly from her thigh. Her eyes were open, sightless. Crouching down, he pressed a finger to her neck, seeking a pulse. Please.
There. Faint, rapid under the softness of her skin.
Luke curled her hair behind the delicate shell of her ear, ran a shaky finger down her smooth cheek. Please be okay. Let her be okay. Words tumbling into prayer. Oh, God. Hurry!
If he hadn’t been cruising town looking for her car, she wouldn’t be on the pavement. If he hadn’t been so anxious to see her again after those moments in Safeway five days ago, she would be okay. If he’d gone home after work, let bygones be bygones… If, if, if.
A small crowd gathered.
“Is she okay?” someone asked.
“What happened?”
“Did she jaywalk?”
“Who is she?”
My wife, Luke wanted to shout. Get help! She needs a doctor!
A woman spoke. “That’s Ginny Franklin. She was just in my store, buying wallpaper.”
“Franklin?” a man said. “Any relation to Deke?”
“Don’t know. But she’s been living in the old house at Franklin’s mill site for the past week or so.”
“She’d better watch out then,” a gruff-voiced man said. “Place is spooked.”
Another woman piped up. “My Allan redid the roof when they were doing all those renovations this spring. Said two guys wouldn’t hire on because of what’s happened on that land. Likely why the place’s been abandoned forty years.”
“Wouldn’t catch me out there,” a third woman squeaked.
“Me, either,” Gruff Guy said.
“Is she dead?” asked Squeaky Voice.
“No,” Luke snapped. “Did someone call an ambulance?”
“It’s coming, Luke.” This from Kat, owner of Kat’s Kitchen across the street. The granny-aged woman bent on one knee, opposite him. “I called soon as I saw it happen through the window.” Her eyes were kind. “You weren’t at fault, honey. She just stepped out from between those two trucks. Poor dear. Must have had something powerful on her mind to not pay attention.”
Sirens wailed. The crowd shifted as the ambulance arrived. Three paramedics sprang from the vehicle.
Within minutes, Ginny lay on a gurney. The medics hoisted her inside the van, closed the doors.
A hand clapped Luke’s shoulder. It was Jon, his brother and police chief of Misty River.
