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It had been a mail-order special, that guitar; probably hadn’t cost more than twenty or thirty dollars, even when it was brand-new. It had also been the last thing Tyler’s mother had given him, before she’d gone off to some seedy motel, evidently too weary of being a Creed wife to go on for even one more day, and swallowed a bottle of pills.
“I’ll let you know,” Tyler finally responded, his voice tight, “when bygones get to be bygones. In the meantime, don’t hold your breath.”
Bonnie, picking up on the change in the atmosphere, went back to Kristy, her small face solemn with worry, jamming a thumb into her mouth as she settled against her stepmother’s shoulder.
Kristy’s expression turned troubled, too.
“Bad vibes,” she remarked softly, looking from Tyler to Dylan and back again.
For Kristy’s sake, and even more for Bonnie’s, Tyler worked up what he hoped was a reassuring smile, not a death grimace. “Thanks for the loan of your car, Kristy,” he said. “I do appreciate it.”
Dylan lingered near the open door, ready to leave, now that he’d delivered the rig and thus done his good deed for the day. “If you change your mind about supper, you know where we’ll be,” he told Tyler, and then he went out.
Kristy gave Tyler another puzzled look, then followed with Bonnie.
Tyler waited until they’d all left in Dylan’s truck before grabbing up Kristy’s keys. “Come on, boy,” he said to Kit Carson. “Let’s go find out if I’m somebody’s dear old dad.”
T ESS FELL INTO THE BED in Lily’s old room, the stuffed animals Tyler had won at the carnival so long ago tucked in all around her.
“Can we stay here, Mom?” she asked, when Lily sat down on the edge of the mattress, which was still covered in the ruffly pink-and-white-polka-dot spread she’d received on her eighth birthday. “In Stillwater Springs, I mean, with Grampa?”
Lily stroked a lock of hair, still moist from an after-supper bath, back from her daughter’s forehead. Kissed the place she’d bared. “We have a condo in Chicago,” she said. “And your grandmother Kenyon would miss you something fierce if we moved away.”
“She could visit me here,” Tess said, with an expression of resigned hope shining in her eyes.
The thought of Eloise Kenyon roughing it in a cow-town like Stillwater Springs brought a wistful smile to Lily’s face—the woman probably didn’t own a pair of jeans, let alone the boots or sneakers most people wore. As far as her mother-in-law was concerned, the place might as well have been in a parallel dimension.
“Why do you want to stay in Montana, sweetheart?” Lily asked. “You have so many friends back home—”
“It doesn’t feel lonely here,” Tess told her. She had a way of making statements like that, of pulling the figurative rug out from under Lily’s feet with no warning at all. “I like this house. It feels like it’s hugging me. And Grampa said I could help him take care of all the animals, when he goes back to work.”
Silently, Lily counted to ten. Of course Hal was behind this whole idea of her and Tess moving back to the old hometown—now that he’d come face-to-face with the grim reaper, he was suddenly a family man. Once, he’d taken her, Lily, on his rounds, just as he’d promised to take Tess. Then one day he’d gotten tired of having a daughter, apparently, and written her off, just like that.
By God, he wasn’t going to do that to Tess. He wasn’t going to win the child’s love and trust and then shut her out of his life.
“You were lonely in Chicago?” Lily asked helplessly, because she’d need some time to think before she addressed the other issue. How on earth was she going to warn Tess, a six-year-old child, not to get too attached to her own grandfather? Especially when she so obviously needed a father-figure of some sort?
“It always seemed like Daddy should have been there,” Tess said sagely, with a little shrug. “And I could make new friends right here. Kristy said there were kids around for me to play with, and I really liked story hour, too.”
Lily tried, but tears came to her eyes anyway, and Tess saw them.
She sat up, threw her little arms around Lily’s neck and hugged her tightly. Another child might have clung; Tess was giving comfort, not taking it.
Now, it was Lily who did the clinging.
“Don’t cry, Mom,” Tess pleaded, her breath warm against Lily’s cheek. “Please don’t cry.”
Lily sniffled bravely. “I’m sorry,” she said. “ I’m supposed to be the strong one.”
Tess settled back on her pillows—the very pillows where Lily had dreamed so many Tyler-dreams—and regarded her mother with that singularly serious, too-adult expression that troubled Lily so much.
“Nobody’s strong all the time, Mom,” Tess said. There she was again—the Wise Woman, posing as a child. “You can be happy if you’ll just let yourself. That’s what Grampa said, while you were taking your nap and we were getting supper ready.”
Privately, Lily seethed. Thank you, Parent of the Year, she told her feckless father silently. “I am happy, honey. I’ve got you, after all. What more could I want?” She fussed with the covers a little, looked around at all the mementos of her childhood, thinking, to distract herself, that the room could use updating. New curtains, fresh wallpaper, a few framed watercolors instead of all those dog-eared rock-star posters from her teens…
“You could want a husband,” Tess suggested, in answer to Lily’s question, which had been rhetorical. Not that a six-year-old—even one as precocious as Tess—could be expected to understand rhetoric. “And more kids.”
“I have a job in Chicago, remember?” Lily pointed out. “One I happen to love. And I don’t think I want a husband, if it’s all the same to you.”
Skepticism skewed Tess’s freckled face, wrinkling her nose and etching lines into her forehead. “You don’t love that job, Mom,” she argued. “You’re always saying you’d rather have your own company, so you could do things your way and set your own hours. And anyhow, we don’t need money, do we? Nana Kenyon says you have plenty, thanks to Daddy’s trust fund and the insurance payment.”
Behind her motherly smile, Lily added Eloise Kenyon to the mental hit-list headed up by Hal Ryder. Why would Burke’s mother mention matters like trust funds and insurance settlements to a child, unless she’d wanted the remark to get back to Lily? Using Tess as a go-between was inexcusable, downright passive-aggressive.
As for Burke, whatever his other failings, he had kept his will up to date. He’d looked out for his daughter and, to some extent, his wife.
The trust fund was safely tucked away for Tess, and Lily had used the insurance money to pay off Burke’s many credit card debts and the mortgage on the condo. Her job, though it sometimes made her want to tear out her hair from sheer frustration, paid well, and she and Tess lived simply, anyway.
Lily was nothing if not sensible.
Except when it came to Tyler Creed, of course.
Why had she agreed to have dinner with him, when she knew no other man on earth, not even her own father, had the power to hurt her the way Tyler could?
Was pain getting to be a way of life with her? Had she started to like it?
“We’re both tired,” she said at last. “Let’s talk about this another time.”
She saw the protest brewing in Tess’s eyes. You always say that…and later never comes.
Lily laid an index finger to her daughter’s lips, to forestall the inevitable challenge.
“We’ll talk about it tomorrow,” she said. “I promise.”
Mollified, though barely so, Tess sighed a little-girl sigh. Relaxed visibly.
Lily kissed her again. “Want me to leave the light on for a while?” she asked. Tess had never been afraid of the dark, but the house was strange to her, after all, however much she claimed to love it, and she’d had a very big day.
“I’m not scared, Mom,” Tess said. “I told you, this is a hugging house.”
A hugging house.
For a moment, Lily yearned for the innocence of youth, ached to feel the way Tess did about the old place. As a child, she had—she’d loved living there. Until her parents had torn the concept of home into two jagged pieces, each taking half and leaving her scrambling in midair.
Lily simply nodded, not trusting herself to speak without crying again, and stood. She switched off the bedside lamp, with its time-yellowed, frilly shade, and headed for the hallway.
“You can leave the door open, though,” Tess volunteered gamely, from the darkness.
Lily smiled, knowing she was visible to her daughter in the light from the hall. “Good night, pumpkin.”
“Night,” Tess murmured, in a snuggling-in voice.
A few moments later, Lily joined her father in the living room at the front of the house. He was seated at his ancient rolltop desk, going over what appeared to be a stack of bills.
Lily, who had a bone to pick with him, swallowed. Was her dad all right for money? He ran a small-town veterinary practice, after all, and if she remembered correctly, collecting his fees wasn’t a high priority with him. Especially if his clients happened to be hard up.
Times being what they were, folks were scrambling just to hold on.
“I could help,” she heard herself say. “If you’re a little behind or something—”
Hal smiled and again, something moved in his eyes. Something that seemed to hurt him. “I appreciate the offer,” he said, his voice sounding a little hoarse. “But I’m solvent, Lily. No need for you to fret.”
Lily nodded, embarrassed now. Kept her face averted as she sat down in an overstuffed armchair that was probably older than she was. “Tess is talking about staying in Stillwater Springs for good,” she ventured. “Is that your doing?”
Hal chuckled, sounding wistful. “It’s still a fine place to raise a child,” he said. “Safe to trick-or-treat at Halloween. You can say ‘Merry Christmas’ to folks without somebody getting in your face for being politically incorrect, and every Fourth of July, there’s a big picnic and fireworks in the park.”
Lily’s face heated. “So is Chicago,” she said, unable to meet her father’s gaze, even then. “A good place to bring up a child, I mean.”
Hal blew out a breath. “ You were happy here,” he reminded her.
“Yes,” she retorted stiffly. “Until I suddenly became persona non grata.”
The moment the words were out of her mouth, Lily regretted them. Truthful or not, Hal was recovering from a major heart attack. This was no time for digging up and rattling old bones.
Hal didn’t speak for a long time. When he did, his words made Lily’s throat tighten painfully. “You were never a ‘persona non grata,’ Lily,” he insisted, his tone ragged and weary. “Your mother and I loved you very much. We just didn’t love each other anymore, and you took a lot of the fallout. For that, I am truly sorry.”
She wanted to ask him right then why he’d shut her out all of a sudden, soon after her breakup with Tyler, but she wasn’t sure she was strong enough to hear the answer.
“I guess divorce is never easy on anybody,” she said, conceding the obvious. “Adults or children.”
With a sigh that snagged at Lily’s heart, her father hoisted himself up from the desk chair, crossed the room and sat down in the second armchair, facing her. “Tell me about your divorce, Lily,” he said. “How long were you unhappy with Burke before you finally decided to cut your losses and run?”
Lily lowered her head. “Too long,” she whispered.
“He cheated, didn’t he? Ran around with other women?”
She swallowed hard, nodded. Looked her father straight in the eye. “Mom claims you were ‘running around with other women’ when she left you. Is that true, Da—Hal?”
Hal’s smile was rueful. “It wouldn’t throw the earth off its axis, Lily,” he said gently, “if you called me ‘Dad’ again.” He shifted in his chair, took a pipe from the holder on the table beside him, and at Lily’s fierce expression, put it back. “To answer your question, I was faithful to your mother, at least in the literal sense of the word.”
“What does that mean?”
“That we were too different from each other, Lucy and me,” Hal said slowly. “She liked bright lights and big cities, and I liked being a country veterinarian. She wanted to drive a fancy car, and I refused, even though we could have afforded one, because I didn’t like the statement it would have made among people who struggle just to keep food on the table. When it got down to the brass tacks, Lily, the only thing your mother and I had in common was you.”
Oh, right, Lily wanted to say, but she bit the words back.
Hal chuckled, but he sounded so tired. It was time he took his medicine and went to bed. Lily started to get up, fetch the bag full of pill bottles the doctor had sent home with them.
“Sit down, Lily,” her dad said firmly.
Lily dropped back into her chair.
“I still want to know about Burke. Not the public version. Scion of a great New England family, and all that tripe. What was he really like?”
“Shallow,” Lily said, after some thought. “Funny. Smart. Self-assured.”
“And very popular with other women?” Hal put the question gently, but at the same time there was no doubt that he expected an answer and wouldn’t let her off the hook until she replied honestly. Clearly, he wasn’t going to be thrown off the trail.
“Very,” Lily agreed. “There were a lot of little signs, looking back on it—the usual hang-ups on the phone, odd charges on his credit card statements, condoms in his suitcase when we never used them, things like that. I pretended not to notice—I guess I couldn’t face the truth about us. But it was almost as though Burke wanted me to know he was running around. I’d call his room when he was out of town on a flight, and a woman would answer. He’d say the whole crew was in his room, that they were celebrating somebody’s birthday, or anniversary, or retirement….” She stopped, blushed, shook her head at her own naiveté. “Until he crashed his plane, I thought he was trying to maneuver me into making the first move, so he wouldn’t have to be the first Kenyon in history to file for divorce. But when I finally did see a lawyer, he—”
“Killed himself,” Hal supplied gently.
“Yes.”
“You’re sure of that? Maybe it was an accident.”
“I wish I could believe it was,” Lily said, very softly. “There wasn’t a note or anything, but he called me a couple of hours before he went up that last time. He was upset, begging for another chance, making all sorts of crazy promises.” She stopped, swallowed hard. “He said—he said it wouldn’t be right to break up Tess’s home—that we should have another child—”
“And?”
“I said I didn’t love him anymore. That it was no use trying, since we’d had counseling after his last affair.” Lily bit down so hard on her lower lip that she felt a sting of pain, and half expected to taste blood. She’d wanted more children so badly, but Burke had always refused. One was enough, he’d said. As though Tess were a mortgage with a balloon payment, an object of some kind. “What’s the old saying? ‘Act in haste, repent at leisure’?”
“Even if Burke did crash that plane because you were divorcing him, Lily, it wouldn’t be your fault.”
“I keep telling myself that,” Lily admitted. “But a part of me knows it’s a lie.” The truth burst out then, all on its own, too big to contain. “I didn’t love Burke—I never did. I loved the idea of love, of being someone’s wife, someone’s mother. Having a home and a family. But deep down, I never cared for Burke the way I should have, and I guess he knew it.”
She’d never loved Burke because she’d never stopped loving Tyler, and she was the kind of woman who mated for life.
“You must have had feelings for Burke,” her dad reasoned gently. “After all, you married him. You had Tess with him.”
“I guess in the beginning, I thought I’d fall in love with him in time. But it didn’t happen.” A tear slid down Lily’s cheek, and she didn’t bother to brush it away. “I shouldn’t have gone through with the wedding. He might be alive today if I hadn’t.”
“There’s no way of knowing that,” Hal told her. “Let yourself off the hook, Lily, if only because there’s no way you can change the past, and because Tess needs a happy mother, one who’s looking ahead, not backward.”
“I am happy,” she insisted, for the second time that evening.
Hal’s sigh was heavy with bittersweet amusement, and a certain degree of resignation. “No, you’re not,” he argued. “Your mother was all for the marriage, but I remember looking down into your face, just before I walked you up that church aisle and gave you away, and seeing something in your eyes that made me want to put a stop to the whole shindig, then and there. Tell all those Kenyons and their fancy friends and relations to eat, drink and be merry, but there wouldn’t be a ceremony.”
Hal Ryder had given his daughter away long before her wedding day, but that was beside the point. Still another old, dusty skeleton that shouldn’t be exhumed.
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Lily asked softly. “To me, at least?”
Hal sighed again. “Because I didn’t have the right. You were a grown woman, with a college education and a good job. And because I’d already interfered in your life once before that.” Just when Lily would have asked what he’d meant by that last part, he stood, stretched, yawned. “I’m worn-out, Lily,” he confessed. “I need some rest.”
“I’ll get your pills,” Lily said, rising, too.
“Oh, yes,” Hal replied, with grim humor. “My pills. Let’s not forget those.”
In the kitchen, she opened the pharmacy bag, studied the labels on the little brown bottles and carefully counted out the appropriate doses while her father set the coffeepot for morning and locked the back door.
