A Match Made in Texas

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She leaned forward, her hands clasped behind her back, to ask, “And you?”

“Twenty-eight.” Felt more like eighty-two of late. He put on a smile and said, “I take it you’re not married. I mean, since you live with your father.”

“Uh, no, not married.”

“Engaged?”

“No.”

“Dating?”

She blinked at him, tilting her head. “Forgive me, but I don’t see how that is relevant.”

Feeling thwarted and a tad irritated, he waved a hand. “Sorry. Just making conversation. I can’t help being a little curious, though, since you live with your father still.”

“Not still,” she said pointedly. “Again.” He waited for her to go on, and after a slight pause, she did. “My father is seventy-six years old and suffered a heart attack a few months ago. I moved in to take care of him.”

“What about your mother?” Stephen asked.

“Deceased.” The way she said it told him that the death had been fairly recent.

“Sorry to hear that.”

Lifting her head, she beamed a soft smile and said, “Thank you.”

That smile took his breath away, rocked him right down to the marrow of his bones. The sincerity, not to mention the beauty, of it was downright shocking. No one in his world was that open and genuine.

After a moment of awkward silence, she glanced around the room, before blurting, “My brothers expected it of me.”

Knocked back into the conversation, Stephen cleared his throat and marshaled his mental processes. “They, ah, expected you to take care of your father, you mean?”

She nodded. “They’re all older, and I’m the only girl, and a nurse, too.”

“I see. What if you hadn’t wanted to take care of him, though?”

“I did!” she exclaimed quickly.

“Did?”

“Do!” she corrected. “I do want to take care of him.”

“But?” he pressed, certain that some caveat existed.

She bit her lip then fluttered her hands. “You have to understand that he’s been widowed twice over the years, and since he left the church, he’s been at loose ends.”

“Left the church?”

“Retired, I should have said. Retired from the church.”

Carefully, to prevent any misunderstanding, Stephen asked, “He worked for the church?”

“He’s a minister,” she said, confirming Stephen’s worst fears. “Or was a minister. Is a minister,” she finally decided with a sigh. “He just isn’t active in ministry right now.”

Stephen’s mind reeled. So she was not just a Christian, she was the daughter of a Christian minister! “With three brothers, no less.” He hadn’t realized that he’d muttered that last aloud until she addressed the comment.

“Yes, well, two are half brothers, to be precise, and a good deal older. Bayard’s fifty-five, and Morgan’s forty-two.”

“Fifty-five!” Stephen echoed, shocked. “My mother’s only fifty-three.”

“My mom would be fifty-eight. She died two years ago.”

“So your dad was nearly twenty years older than her.”

“Yes. It just didn’t seem that way until she got sick. He aged a dozen years during the weeks of her illness, and he hasn’t been the same since.”

“My father hasn’t been the same since my parents’ divorce,” Stephen said, to his own surprise. Realizing how personal the conversation had become, he quickly changed directions. “What was it you sent Aaron after?”

She ticked off a list of items. “Hand sanitizer, antibacterial soap, lip balm, sterile gloves, syringes…The doctor called in a new prescription, by the way, injections that should help you control your pain better.”

Stephen let that go without comment, but he was desperately tired of all these drugs. He felt as if he was sleeping—

and dreaming—his life away. The dreams, unfortunately, were not pleasant ones. Kaylie, he noticed, tapped her chin, staring at him as if trying to read his mind.

“I wonder if I should have asked for leverage straps?”

“Leverage straps?” Stephen parroted. “Whatever for?”

“To get you up and down more easily,” she explained. “I’m not very big, you know, and you’re—”

“Six foot four,” he supplied, “and over two hundred pounds.”

“Exactly.”

“Still,” Stephen pointed out, “we’ve managed pretty well so far, and I’m only going to get better, you know.”

“Hmm, I suppose.” She continued tapping her chin, the tip of her finger fitting nicely into the tiny cleft there. More a dimple, really, Stephen had begun to think it a charming feature. “Maybe I should’ve asked for a lap tray, too,” she murmured, staring down at the remnants of his breakfast.

“Now that I’ll go with,” Stephen said. “Why don’t I call Aaron and add that to the list? No, wait. I don’t have a cell phone any longer.” His had been destroyed in the accident, along with his car and half his house.

“You can use mine,” she said, producing a small flip phone from those seemingly bottomless pockets.

“Better yet,” Stephen said, “let’s text him. Then he has it in writing.”

“Oh,” she replied casually, “my phone doesn’t text.”

Stephen’s jaw dropped. “You’re kidding.” Stunned, he stared up at her. “You’re not kidding!” Who, in this day and age, didn’t have text?

Kaylie, of the dark, bottomless eyes and heavy, light red hair, tilted her head. “Is that a problem?”

“Yeah, it could be. Like, what if I need you in the middle of the night or something?” He ignored for now the fact that he didn’t have a cell phone himself. “Do you want me waking up the entire the household by shouting or even by ringing you? Or would you rather I sent you a nice quiet text message?”

“Oh, I won’t be staying the night here,” Kaylie told him calmly.

“Won’t be staying—” Stephen broke off, momentarily dumbstruck. “But I thought you were taking the job!”

“I am. I just won’t be here at night—or whenever you’re sleeping.”

“B-but what if something happens?”

“Such as?”

Such as nightmares, he thought, dreams that tormented him until he woke writhing and screaming, memories about which he could not bring himself to speak. He hated the weakness and guilt that allowed the horrific dreams to flourish, and the second accident seemed to have brought back the memories of the first one in all its horrific detail, details he’d give almost anything to forget.

“I don’t know!” he snapped in answer to her question. “You tell me. You’re the nurse.”

She patted his shoulder consolingly. “Now don’t worry. The aunts will look in on you, and there’s always the staff. Hilda, Chester and Carol have been taking care of Chatam House and its occupants for over twenty years, you know. They do, however, have Sundays and Wednesdays off.”

“You mean the cook, and that old bald guy I met when I first got here?” Stephen protested.

“Chester’s not old,” Kaylie argued with a smile. “Why, he’s just barely sixty!”

“But what if I fall out of bed or trip on my way to the bathroom?”

Kaylie Chatam folded her arms, looking down at him with the patience and authority that a particularly wise adult might reserve for an unreasonable child. “You’ll be fine as long as you don’t try to get up and about on your own too soon. I’ll make sure you’re properly settled in before I leave, and I will, after all, be just a phone call away.”

A phone call and three miles, he wanted to snarl. Well, if that’s the way she wanted to play it, he would make doubly sure of her availability. He held out his hand, instructing, “Give me the cell phone.”

Frowning, she produced the phone and dropped it into his palm. Stephen flipped it open and punched in the numbers with his thumb before hitting the send button and lifting the tiny phone to his ear. After several rings, Aaron answered. Stephen interrupted his effusive greeting and got right down to business.

“You’re going to have to make another stop or two. Seems Kaylie would like to add a lap tray to her shopping list, so I don’t have to eat off the bed pillows. Then I need you to do something for me. I want two cell phones with texting, Internet access, global positioning and anything else you can think of. One for me, one for our Nurse Chatam, who will not, as it turns out, be working full-time.”

“Even full-time is not around-the-clock,” she pointed out, parking her hands at her slender waist.

“For the money we’re paying you, it ought to be!” Stephen snapped. Then he barked into the phone, “Just do it, Aaron,” and hung up.

He passed the phone back to her, glowering. He didn’t know why he was so upset, really. Just last night, he’d argued that Aaron didn’t have to stay, and truth be told, the fewer people who knew about his nightmares, the better. Yet, he found that he’d been looking forward to having Kaylie Chatam around. She seemed to bring a certain serenity with her, an assurance that, temporarily at least, banished his worries and made him believe that he could put yet another stupid, ugly episode behind him.

But who was he kidding? Some things could never be gotten over. Some decisions, some disasters, could not be left in the past. They could only be lived with, one torturous day at a time.

So be it, he decided angrily.

His past had left him with enough pain to go around, and he was suddenly in the mood to share.

Chapter Four

Stephen Gallow, Kaylie decided, was as much child as adult. Honestly, the way he pouted! Then again, she should be used to it by now, for his behavior really was not much different from her father’s. Men! What was it that made them such impossible patients? Either they were too macho to give in to disease or, once overwhelmed by it, they wallowed in black despair and petulant behavior.

She thought of her mother and how patiently and cheerfully that dear woman had endured her own swift decline: dizziness so acute that she couldn’t stand without retching, vision so blurry that she could neither read nor watch television, pain so intense that there were whole days she could not lift her head from her pillow. At the end, she could not swallow even her own saliva, but she had smiled with gratitude every time someone had wiped her mouth for her. When relief had finally come, she had passed into the next life with the most peaceful expression imaginable. And Hubner Chatam had been angry ever since.

Why, Kaylie wondered, was Stephen Gallow angry? For angry he definitely was, so much so that she probably ought to tell him to keep his job or find someone else more to his liking. But she didn’t. Instead, she remained mute, for what if she offered him her resignation and he took her up on it? After all, if taking the job was God’s will for her, then she had no business resigning it.