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“Dear God, Max,” she said in a broken whisper. “What have you done to us?”
He was silent.
“Did you know before you got the letter you had a child?”
“Yes. Although until yesterday I didn’t know he was a boy.”
“And that made the difference. That’s why you’re telling me now,” she said, struggling to understand.
“No. It’s the letter.”
Her stomach heaved; she gripped herself tighter. “All these years you knew you had a child and you never told me.”
“I wanted to put it all behind me.”
Suddenly she was furious. She sprang to her feet on the rock. “What gives you the right to put a child behind you? To walk away and forget it ever existed?”
“Do you think that was easy for me?” he cried. “Do you think I haven’t wondered and worried all these years whether or not he or she was growing up happy and healthy?”
“How would I know?” she shouted. “You didn’t tell me!”
Her voice echoed off the cliff face, startling her into awareness of their surroundings. She took a deep breath, then another. “Okay, let’s calm down.” She sat again, forcing herself to ignore the pain that was eating away at her like acid. “You’d better start at the beginning and explain.”
Max told her the whole story. The dude ranch, Lanni pursuing him, the pregnancy, the subsequent meetings between both sets of parents. Kelly noticed he glossed over the part where he’d capitulated to Lanni’s advances. Fine, she sure didn’t want to hear about that, although it had always been her experience that it took two to tango.
“Lanni’s family were strong Catholics. They wouldn’t hear of abortion,” Max went on. “My parents gave her money to pay for medical expenses and kept in touch with her parents throughout the pregnancy. The baby was put up for adoption and…” He gazed at his hands, twisted together. “That was the last I’d heard of the child. Like I said, until yesterday I didn’t even know if it was a boy or a girl.”
At the ache in his voice part of her, amazingly, wanted to comfort him for the years of loss. He was a loving and responsible father and she knew he must feel guilt and regret.
An instant later, her heart hardened. Had he considered her feelings when he’d slipped away from the bunkhouse at midnight for a rendezvous with Lanni?
A chilly raindrop hit her cheek and she glanced up to see the sun had completely disappeared behind the gray clouds massing around the mountain peaks. “It’s starting to rain. We’d better head back.”
The rain came on with sudden violence, in driving sheets that turned the dirt trail to mud and the bushes and trees to dripping greenery that slid from their grasp as they pulled themselves up the slippery track. By the time they’d arrived back at the lodge, they were soaked through and cloaked in mud from the knees down.
In their room Kelly began to haphazardly pile sweaters and underwear into her suitcase, not even bothering to change out of her wet clothes.
“What are you doing?” Max demanded, toweling his head. His pale hair had turned dark with rain and now stuck out in spikes. “We’re booked for another night.”
“I can’t sleep in this bed with you.” She tossed in her cosmetics case with an angry jerk of her wrist. “Not with your affair making a mockery of last night and of every night of our marriage. I want to be with my children.”
“Kelly, for God’s sake.” He threw down the towel and tried to take her in his arms. “Don’t do this.”
Shrugging him off, she snapped the locks shut on her suitcase and faced him, chin in the air. “I want to go home.”
On the drive back to Hainesville, Kelly couldn’t look at Max. In her mind, she replayed endlessly that summer they were apart. How could she not have known he was up to no good? How could she not have gleaned from his infrequent phone calls and hesitant assurances of affection that he had someone else on a string? At the time she’d put his awkwardness down to the difficulty of communicating on the public telephone in the lodge. God, but she’d been naive.
Max slid his hand onto her knee and squeezed tentatively. “Talk to me, Kelly.”
“I have nothing to say.” Her voice was as dead as love gone wrong.
“Come on, you must. What are you feeling?”
“What am I feeling?” She twisted in her seat to face him. “Now you want to talk. Suddenly you’re interested in feelings. Well, listen up. I’m hurting, Max. I never imagined I could hurt this badly. And I’m angry. I’m so furious I could kill you. While I was sewing my wedding dress, you were sleeping with another woman. While I was counting the days until we could start a family, you were making a baby without me. While I poured out my heart in long loving letters, you were already lying to me. Our whole marriage is a lie.”
“Kelly, you know that’s not true.”
Scalding tears heated her already flushed cheeks. “You led me to believe I was your first, just as you were my first. And only. How many other women have you had that you haven’t told me about?”
“None.”
“How can I believe you?”
He didn’t answer. Finally, in a low voice, he said, “I guess you can’t. You have to trust me.”
With a snort, she threw up her hands. “Trust? What’s that?”
“Except for that one time, I’ve never lied to you or cheated on you.”
Kelly rubbed her hands over her face, suddenly exhausted, as though her anger had drained all the energy out of her. “I know. Or do I? That’s the problem. I’ll never know for sure.”
Silenced, Max drove on through the rain and the dark. Once or twice she glanced sideways, to see his hands gripping the wheel and his jaw set. He was thinking about Randall. She couldn’t stop thinking about the boy, either.
She didn’t want to talk, but she had to.
Her fury had dissipated, leaving behind an icy calmness that frightened her almost as much. “I can’t believe you fathered a baby and didn’t tell me.”
He took his gaze off the road. “I was eighteen. I was stupid. And too much in love with you to risk losing you by confessing the truth.”
“And now you’re not.”
The blaring horn of a passing semitrailer snapped his attention back to the wet highway. “Not what?”
“In love with me,” she said, exasperated by his inability to grasp the logic. “Now you can tell the truth because you don’t love me anymore and don’t care if you lose me.”
“For God’s sake, Kelly. That’s not true. It’s only come up because the boy contacted me.”
He had a son, not by her. Calmness deserted her as hysteria clawed at her throat. “The boy, the boy. He’s the boy you always wanted.”
“You know I love the girls more than anything. Randall isn’t going to change that.”
“You’re already saying his name as if you know him. What does he want, anyway?”
Max shrugged. “Just to see me. He’s curious about his biological parents. And no, I don’t know if he’s contacted Lanni.”
“Do…do you want to meet him?”
“Yes. Would that bother you?”
She stared at him. “Are you crazy? It would tear me apart. It would tear us apart.”
Max shook his head. “You’re overreacting.”
“Don’t tell me I’m overreacting,” she warned. “You don’t know how I feel. What are the girls going to think?”
“They might be pleased to have a big brother.”
Kelly refused to even contemplate that scenario. “You went straight from me to her.”
“No, not right away. It was—”
“Please, I don’t want details.” She stared out the window, watching the dark sodden shapes of trees flicker past. “How long?”
“Three weeks.” She winced, and he reminded her, “You called off our engagement.”
“You could at least say you’re sorry.”
“I never meant to hurt you, Kelly. What is the real issue? Is it that I slept with another woman, or the fact that I had a child you didn’t know about?”
In the reflection from the window, Kelly watched raindrops stream down her face. Lanni, the lies by omission, the secret he’d kept from her all these years. Hurt didn’t begin to describe how she felt, and forgiveness wasn’t even on the horizon.
“I can’t separate the two.”
What she couldn’t say, even to Max, was how inadequate she felt at never having given him a son. Max didn’t value her work outside the home; he only valued her as the mother of his children. She hadn’t even gotten that right. Supposedly the man’s sperm determined whether a child was a boy or a girl, but he’d had a boy with another woman. Maybe it was Kelly’s own body chemistry that had favored the survival of a sperm with an X chromosome and caused her to produce nothing but girls.
She had a bad feeling in her gut about Randall, and she didn’t think it was just because she was jealous of Lanni. Her and Max’s marriage had been on shaky ground for more than a year. If Max let this boy into their lives, he would turn them all upside down. He might somehow take Max away from her and the girls.
They got home late; the kids were in bed and Nancy was watching TV in the family room. Hiding her tear-stained face from the surprised teenager, Kelly went straight to the bedroom while Max made up some excuse for their early return. She heard the front door shut, and a few minutes later Max came into the room. He had a piece of folded foolscap in his hand. The letter.
“Would you like to read it?” he asked.
“No.”
He held out a photograph and tried to show her. “He looks like a nice kid.”
“I don’t want to see.” She pushed him away, then grabbed his arm. “Oh, give it here.”
Thoughts of DNA testing to prove paternity dissolved as she gazed at a younger version of Max. Randall’s eyes, the angle of his jaw, the slight tilt of his head were all pure Max, even if the boy’s coloring was not. Kelly’s head began to throb. She hadn’t wanted the kid to be real to her and now he was. “Let me see the letter.”
Reading Randall’s words compounded her mistake. She felt a physical ache in her heart from empathizing with the boy. No, she thought, deliberately shutting down her feelings. She could never feel anything warmer than dislike for Max’s son by another woman.
“He’s got a good home, with loving adoptive parents,” she said callously, thrusting the letter aside. “He doesn’t need you.”
“Maybe not,” Max agreed tightly. “Maybe I need him.”
Kelly closed her eyes on a sharp stab of pain, unable to speak.
“He wants to meet me,” Max went on. “I’d like to meet him, too.”
Opening her eyes, she reached for his arm. “Don’t go, Max,” she pleaded. “For the girls’ sake if not for mine. You can’t undo the past, but to some extent you can choose your future.”
“I want to meet him,” he repeated. “Kelly, he’s my son.”
“I…I’m not sure I can go on living with you if you contact that boy.” She knew she sounded melodramatic, but she was desperate.
“I can’t live with my conscience if I don’t contact him.” Max slipped the photo back into the envelope and spoke with a new determination. “Randall’s part of me, Kel. You can’t just ignore him, and I won’t. I’m going to Wyoming. I’m going to see my son.”
CHAPTER THREE
MAX’S LAST THOUGHT before his finger touched the doorbell of Randall’s house in Jackson two weeks later was, Am I doing the right thing? Then the chimes sounded, and whether or not coming here against Kelly’s wishes was right, the point became moot. He could hardly run away, or pretend to be a door-to-door salesman. Besides, now that he knew of Randall’s existence, nothing would stop him from meeting his son.
Yet he wondered at the wheelchair ramp that paralleled the steps to the front door. The photo of Randall had been head and shoulders only. Could he be handicapped?
Max heard footsteps inside the house and wiped his palms against his slacks; he hadn’t expected to feel so nervous. Would the boy like him? Would he blame him for the past? Could Max bear to find a son and not keep him? Would Kelly forgive him if he did?
The door opened. The boy in the photograph, standing firmly on two feet, stared back at him through clunky glasses. His pressed cotton shirt was buttoned up to the collar and his gabardine pants held a perfect crease. Randall turned a fiery red that clashed with his carroty hair and stammered a greeting. “H-hello. Are you…?”
“I’m Max. Hi, Randall.” Max reached for his son’s hand. The contact almost undid him; suddenly his throat was thick and his eyes moist. He coughed, Randall shuffled his feet, and their hands fell apart.
“Come in and meet my parents,” Randall said. “They’re in the living room.”
Randall’s parents had insisted on meeting him, and Max couldn’t blame them—for all they knew, he could be an ax murderer or a pedophile. But he hoped he and Randall would have some time alone; they’d need it if they were going to get past this awkward phase. Patience. He’d waited thirteen years for a son; he could wait a little longer.
He followed Randall into a room furnished with spare Scandinavian designs and a wall of books. A telescope on a tripod stood before a picture window looking across the broad valley known as Jackson Hole to the Grand Teton mountains. A baby grand piano dominated one corner, while precisely executed oil paintings of mountains and lakes lined the walls. The atmosphere was one of intellect and good taste, but to Max, used to the controlled chaos of life with four young children, the room seemed strangely sterile.
Mr. Tipton, dressed in a maroon cardigan and tie, rose as they entered and ran a hand sideways over his thinning pate, smoothing the sparse gray hairs into place. “Hello. I’m Marcus Tipton. This is my wife, Audrey.”
“Nice to meet you both,” Max said, extending his hand. “Are you the artist?” he asked Audrey, gesturing to the paintings.
“Clever of you to guess.” Audrey smiled warmly up at Max from her wheelchair. She had on black slacks and an ivory twin set, and wore her smooth gray hair in a chin-length bob. “I’ll get coffee. How do you take it, Mr. Walker?”
“Please, call me Max. Cream, no sugar. Thanks.”
Max settled onto the couch catercorner to the chair in which Randall sat, hands folded on his knees, and let his mind run over his first impressions. Audrey was in a wheelchair, and Marcus Tipton had to be well over fifty; how did they keep up with an active teenage boy? Although judging from Randall’s quiet demeanor that might not be a problem. No unrestrained bursts of youthful energy here.
Obviously, they’d managed perfectly well. Max was surprised and not very happy with his critical assumptions, and his protectiveness of a boy he hadn’t raised. He had no rights here, he reminded himself, only privileges.
“Did you have a good flight?” Randall inquired politely. The question had the air of being rehearsed.
“Fine, thank you. I had a window seat and got a good view of Jackson as we landed. I’d forgotten how beautiful the country is around here.”
Silence followed, awkward and begging to be filled. “Do you play any sports, Randall?”
“I played soccer when I was nine, but it was pretty wet and muddy and…” He glanced at his father, then at his hands. “I just didn’t care for it.”
“I see.” Meaning he didn’t see at all.
“Randall is more interested in intellectual pursuits,” Marcus interjected. “Piano, the chess club, debating society, art…”
