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“Would you?” Psyche asked. “Where would that leave Lucas?”
Molly couldn’t speak.
“You slept with my husband. You bore his child. And while convention would dictate that I ought to hate you for that, I can’t. You brought Lucas into the world, Molly. Try as I might, I can’t feel anything but gratitude.”
Tears burned in Molly’s eyes. “You are the most amazing person, Psyche Ryan,” she managed, fairly strangling on the words. “Worth ten of me, and a hundred of Thayer. He didn’t deserve you.”
Psyche gave a hoarse chuckle. “Well, I agree with you about Thayer. The man wasn’t fit to lick my shoes. But you, Molly Shields, are an entirely different matter. You are a far finer person than you think.”
Molly shook her head. “I was such a blind fool—”
“Stop,” Psyche said abruptly.
Molly blinked, surprised.
“Yes, you made a mistake,” Psyche allowed. “But something very, very good came of it. And now I’m dying.” She stopped, regrouping. Perhaps absorbing, yet again, the fate she couldn’t escape. “I have no time for hand-wringing or for regrets, yours or mine, so buck up and get over it. The first moment I held Lucas in my arms I forgave you for everything. I blessed you. Now you need to forgive yourself, if only for Lucas’s sake. Can you do that?”
Molly pondered the question, then nodded. “Yes,” she said. “But it won’t be easy.”
“Nobody said anything about easy,” Psyche responded. “Lucas will have fevers, and skinned knees, and all manner of required boy-experiences. Dealing with Keegan won’t be any stroll through the lilies either, but then, I suppose you’ve deduced that already.”
Ruefully Molly nodded again.
“I’ve asked Keegan to be the executor of my estate,” Psyche confirmed. “He wanted to adopt Lucas himself, you know. Leave you completely out of the picture. I refused, because I believe a child needs a mother.”
“How—” Molly choked, cleared her throat, started over. “How can you trust me, after all that happened?”
Psyche smiled. “This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision, Molly. I’m not giving Lucas to you just because you happen to be his birth mother. You’ve been checked out by the best private investigators in Los Angeles.”
“But you said something about not knowing my financial situation.”
“I lied,” Psyche said sweetly.
Molly laughed. Suddenly, unexpectedly, a raw, soblike guffaw escaped her, and she put a hand over her mouth, too late.
Psyche’s pain-weary eyes twinkled. “Perhaps we can be friends, even this late in the game,” she said. “What do you think?”
“I think I’d be honored to be your friend,” Molly answered.
“Know what?” Psyche asked.
“What?”
“Thayer wasn’t good enough to lick your shoes, either.”
Once again Molly laughed. She laughed so hard that she finally had to lay her head down on her folded arms and cry as though her very soul were bruised.
Which, of course, it was.
* * *
AT SUNSET, KEEGAN STOOD looking up at the Ferris wheel looming in the middle of Indian Rock’s small park, trying to work up a celebratory mood. Try as he might, he couldn’t.
Psyche was dying.
McKettrickCo was being torn apart from the inside.
Shelley wanted to take Devon thousands of miles away and install her in some institution so she and the boyfriend could walk the streets of Paris and hold hands in the rain.
What a load.
Keegan, meanwhile, was on tilt, like a pinball machine with a phone book under one leg.
“Dad?”
He looked down, saw Devon standing beside him, flanked by Rianna and Maeve. Rance and Emma would be along later. In the interim, all three of the kids were munching on big pink fluffs of cotton candy, and would most likely be puking up their socks any second now.
“Can we go on the pony ride, Uncle Keegan?” Rianna asked.
“It’s a donkey ride, ding-dong,” Maeve said importantly.
“There’s only one donkey,” Devon pointed out sagely, “so we’ll have to stand in line.”
Keegan sighed. “Sure,” he said.
The girls raced away across the lush grass of the park, past the barbecue being set up under a canvas canopy, and he ambled after them, feeling foolish in his white shirt, dress slacks and gray silk vest. The rest of the men were wearing jeans or chinos.
The donkey was small, and its hide was mangy. It lumbered doggedly around and around a metal center-pole, chained to the mechanism. The creature’s ribs showed, its hooves needed trimming and it kept its head down, as though slogging into the face of a heavy wind. The child on its back kicked it steadily with the heels of his sneakers.
As the animal passed Keegan, making its endless rounds, it turned its head, gazing at him with dull brown eyes. It stumbled, and a wiry little man standing to one side whacked it on the flank with a stick and growled, “Wake up!”
Keegan, in the act of taking out his wallet to give Devon and his nieces money to buy tickets, stopped cold.
The donkey keeper’s gaze sliced to the wallet, as if magnetized, then slithered, snakelike, up to Keegan’s face. Passing him a second time, the donkey stumbled again.
The man raised the switch.
Keegan, without realizing he’d moved at all, was there to jerk it out of the keeper’s hand. He might have flung the stick halfway across the park if there hadn’t been so many kids standing around. Instead, he let it drop to the ground, opening his fingers slowly.
“You got a problem, mister?” the man asked. He wore grease-stained jeans and a grubby white undershirt, and his upper arms were tattooed with intertwined serpents, apparently consuming each other. A plastic name pin pinned to his shirt identified him as “Happy.”
Keegan made a mental note to appreciate the irony later.
“No,” he replied flatly, keeping his voice down. “I don’t have a problem. But you will if you pick up that stick again.”
Happy ruminated, spat. “Old Spud belongs to me,” he said. “I reckon I can do as I please with him.”
“Do you, now?” Keegan inquired, still holding his wallet in his free hand. “You traveling with this carnival? It’s been coming here twice a year for as long as I can remember, but I’ve never seen you before.”
A stream of tobacco juice shot out of the man’s mouth, narrowly missing Keegan’s shoe. “I’m an independent contractor” came the answer. “Not that it’s any never-mind of yours.”
“You have any other donkeys?”
“Just old Spud here. Truth is, he’s about worthless. Gotta pop him one every once in a while, just to keep him going.”
“Dad?” Devon asked at Keegan’s elbow. “Are we going to buy tickets? The line’s getting really long.”
Keegan took in the queue of impatient kids.
“I’d sell him for the right price,” Happy volunteered cagily.
“I imagine you would,” Keegan drawled.
“Dad?” Devon prompted.
Keegan handed his daughter a bill without looking away from Happy’s beady little eyes. “Forget the donkey,” he told her. “Ride the Ferris wheel.”
“But, Dad, we want—”
“The Ferris wheel, Devon.”
Devon heaved a dramatic sigh, but she obeyed. She and Rianna and Maeve immediately headed for the ticket booth.
“How much?” Keegan asked.
Happy named his price, which was, as expected, astronomical.
Keegan counted out the money, flourished it, but didn’t hand it over. “I’ll need a bill of sale,” he said. Then he crossed to the donkey, hoisted the overzealous rider off its back and turned to face the straggling line of kids. “Spud,” he told them, “has just retired.”
There were a few groans of disappointment, but in general the crowd took the news well.
Keegan removed the donkey’s harness, stroked his rough, nubby hide with one hand while the keeper wrote out a receipt on a scrap of paper pulled from his pocket. Spud, barely reaching Keegan’s middle, looked up at him, then nuzzled his arm.
“You didn’t waste much of your profits on feed, did you, Happy?” he asked, looking at Spud’s ladder of ribs while swapping the money for the bill of sale.
“You just made a fool’s bargain,” Happy said, ignoring Keegan’s remark, folding the fat wad of bills and tucking them into a battered wallet attached to one of his belt loops by a tarnished chain. “That critter is stupid, and he’s lazy. Good for nothin’. Now he’s your problem, not mine.”
Keegan took off Spud’s saddle and the worn blanket beneath it, tossed them both aside. That left the bridle. Taking a loose hold on the reins, he turned to walk away, and the donkey followed willingly.
Rance had just arrived with Emma, and he spotted Keegan and his four-legged purchase right away. Grinning, Rance approached.
“If you’re short on horses,” he said, looking Spud over, “I could lend you one of ours.”
“You know, Rance,” Keegan replied tersely, “sometimes you’re just so freakin’ hilarious, I can’t stand it.”
Rance’s grin broadened. “What the hell do you want with a jackass?”
“Damned if I know,” Keegan said. “But I’ve got one now.”
“How are you planning to get him out to the ranch?”
Now it was Keegan’s turn to grin. “Well, I figured since you own a horse trailer, you’d haul him out there for me.”
Rance chuckled. Then he took a closer look at Spud and frowned. “He’s half-starved,” he said. “And it’s a wonder he can walk, with his hooves grown out like that.”
“My thoughts exactly,” Keegan said.
Expertly Rance lifted one of Spud’s feet and inspected it. Did the same with the other three. “I’ll go back to the Triple M and hitch the trailer to the back of my truck,” he said when he was finished. Dusting his hands together, he looked Keegan in the eye and grinned again. “If you’re going into the ranching business, Keeg, you’re off to a pretty pitiful start.”
Keegan made a this-is-me-amused face. “Want me to ride out with you? Help with the trailer?”
“In those dandy duds?” Rance joked, shaking his head at Keegan’s clothes. “Do you own any jeans or a decent pair of boots?”
“Never mind my wardrobe,” Keegan said. Until he’d taken up with Emma just a few weeks before, Rance had lived in custom-tailored suits himself.
Rance looked over toward the barbecue area, where the picnic was starting up in earnest. Folks were loading up their plates, and the bar and the cold-drink stand were already doing a brisk business. “There had better be some beer left when I get back,” he warned.
Keegan laughed. He’d added a mangy donkey to all his other problems, but his spirits had risen a little, just the same.
Go figure, he thought.
Rance crossed to Emma, said something to her and headed back to his truck.
Emma wobbled toward Keegan on a pair of pink high-heeled shoes, which matched her cotton-candy dress, sticking in the grass every few steps. Cautiously she reached out to pat Spud on the nose. Then she smiled, and Keegan figured the fireworks would suffer by comparison.
“Molly’s here,” she said. “And the new people.”
Keegan looked around and, sure enough, there was Molly Shields over by the picnic tables, looking delectable in a floaty blue dress and a straw hat with a bent-back brim. Psyche was there, too, seated in a lawn chair, with a blanket covering her lap. Florence, intent on lifting Lucas from his stroller, wore her usual starchy uniform.
As though she felt him watching her, Molly looked his way.
Smiled, probably because of the donkey.
Keegan hooked a finger under his shirt collar, trying to loosen it. It was the heat, he figured. The air seemed charged, and he actually looked up, expecting to see storm clouds.
The first stars winked in a clear, placid sky.
Emma tugged at his sleeve, whispered, “Keegan. You’re staring.”
Molly spoke to Psyche, then strolled his way.
“I guess it’s never too soon to start practicing for the Christmas pageant,” she said, her eyes warming as she took in poor, bedraggled Spud. “Are you playing Joseph this year?”
“I’d better go and find the girls, make sure they don’t eat too much cotton candy and spoil their supper,” Emma said before Keegan could respond, and promptly vanished.
Keegan swallowed.
Molly smiled, clearly enjoying his discomfort. Then, as Emma had done, she stroked Spud’s long face, threw in an ear-ruffling for good measure.
