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“Burn off chocolate cake, actually.” Melba was surprised to find a smile creep onto her lips. Nothing was going to solve itself anytime soon, so she was going to have to learn to cope while knee-deep in uncertainty. Uncertainty over what to think, what to do, where to find the answers she sought. And most of all, uncertainty over how to deal with the revelation that she was now certain was true—that Dad wasn’t her father after all. She needed time to think, to pray, to start pulling at all those knots in front of her, and she did that best while running.
Chapter Four
Chad Owens kept jogging. “Forget about it. What do a bunch of old ladies know?”
Clark held out a hand to halt Chad’s steps as they jogged together on the river bank path. He wanted Chad to take more offense at what he’d just heard. “Those old ladies know how to make a fuss, how to complain to other people, and probably how to write letters to the editor of the town newspaper. I’m going to pay for the fact that they aren’t happy about the idea of me as fire chief.”
Chad shook his head and kept running. “The town council’s already voted. You’re already hired. You’re in uniform. You formally take over in a month. It’s just noise.”
“I go to that church.” Clark dashed to catch up. “I spent three hours mopping out the basement from the last flood. Why do they still think of me as some kind of hooligan?”
Now it was Chad who stopped. “You can’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.” He wiped his forehead with one sleeve. “You didn’t exactly leave here Prince Charming. Did you think everyone would come around in the first month?”
Clark didn’t really have an answer. “I suppose I figured once the hiring became official, that’d be the end of it.”
Chad put one leg up on the park bench beside him and stretched a calf muscle. “Come on, Clark, I didn’t even grow up here and I could have told you this was going to happen.” He looked straight at Clark. “You have some pretty big fire boots to fill.”
“Tell me about it.”
Chad cuffed Clark’s shoulder. “He’s been fire chief around here for ages. You’d constitute a big change even if you were identical to him.”
It wasn’t much of a help.
“And you’re completely different from him,” Chad continued as he stretched the other leg.
Clark started running again. “Thanks for the vote of confidence there.”
“Hang on.” Chad caught up. “What I’m trying to say is this is an uphill battle no matter who steps in as chief, so don’t worry about a little bit of friction.”
“Oh, so I suppose that’s why you didn’t step up to take over as chief? Didn’t want to take the hit but happy to watch me go down in flames?” Clark didn’t really feel that way, but life didn’t offer up too many chances to rib Chad Owens, so he had to find his targets when he could. It had gotten a bit easier since he’d married just before Clark came back to town.
“I’m too busy to be chief.”
“Too busy playing the happy newlywed. You’ve put on a few pounds being married to the candy store lady.”
Chad smirked. He smirked a lot more since his wife, Jeannie, and stepson, Nick, had come into his life, and Clark was truly happy for the guy. “I can handle it. And what about you?”
“Oh, that’s the last thing I need right now. I’ve got to play the straight-and-narrow for a while. One hundred percent work and no social entanglements for the first six months, that’s my plan.”
“Funny thing about plans...” Chad said.
“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before, but this is Gordon Falls. I’m safe. I’ve been here three weeks and so far the only single woman I’ve met is Melba Wingate.” He tried to put disinterest in his voice, but the truth was Melba’s chocolate-brown eyes and cascades of hair entered his memory far too easily.
Chad turned and jogged backwards in front of him, raising a teasing eyebrow. “Melba Wingate, huh?”
Clark reached out and nearly pushed him over. “Her dad’s sick—she’s got enough on her plate. And besides, you know I don’t go for the artsy, esoteric types.”
Chad stumbled but caught his footing. “I seem to remember athletic blondes being your specialty. In alarming numbers.”
“Before,” Clark corrected a bit too sharply, but it was a sore spot and Chad knew it.
“Before you cleaned up your act.” Chad stopped and caught Clark’s shoulder. “And you have. Look, you’ve pulled the biggest U-turn of anyone I know, Clark. I respect that. Everyone else will, too, you just have to give them time to see the change I’ve seen. Come on, even your dad came around. You’re supposed to be here. Some old stories from who you were ten years ago aren’t going to change that.”
It was as much of a speech as Clark had ever heard from Chad. He clasped Chad’s hand on his shoulder, thankful for their friendship. “Thanks.” Before things got too gooey, he ducked under Clark’s arm and started running at a faster pace. “But you’re still fat and married.”
“Yeah, well, you’re still skinny and obsessive.”
“Lean and focused,” he called as he turned a corner of the riverside path, “lean and focused.” He turned back to see Chad was not following him. “What?”
“I’m done for the morning. You take that final mile on your own.”
Clark pumped his fists in the air victoriously. “Because I can.”
“Because you need to. See you at the station at two for the meeting with P.A. Crimson.” They had a meeting with a safety equipment company that afternoon—Chad was seeing to it that Clark met all the vendors and suppliers.
Clark began thinking of all the ways he could kid Chad for “going soft” as he kept running. It wasn’t hard; Chad was an easy target these days. Once a somber, serious loner, Chad had fallen hard—and completely against his will—for Jeannie Nelworth and her young son. Now the three of them were the poster family for happy endings, all sugary happiness and love-struck smiles. It was nice, in a make-your-teeth-hurt kind of way. Chad had known a lot of pain in his life, had lost a fiancée to a fire and shut down for too many years. It was fun to rib him for his newfound light-heartedness.
The perfect taunt had just come to Clark, and he was actually laughing out loud as he turned a corner on the jogging path and nearly tripped over Melba Wingate. She was sitting on the path clutching one ankle and he almost tumbled over top of her but managed to catch himself to stumble alongside.
“Whoa....you okay?”
Melba looked up at him with the same eyes he’d seen that first night at the hospital. Strained, weary, hanging on by a thread. And now, physical pain laced her expression as well. “That depends on your definition,” she winced.
* * *
“Well, then, let’s see.” Melba watched Clark kick into first-responder mode, tugging at the sweatshirt now tied around his waist to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He crouched down beside her, lifted her ankle and gently removed her shoe, then tucked the bunched-up sweatshirt under her leg to cushion her foot as he set it back down. She tried not to wince, but ended up sucking in her breath sharply when he ran an assessing hand over her throbbing ankle.
“Ouch.” She hated how weak and wobbly her voice sounded. She hated that she was on the verge of tears. Not because her leg hurt that much—although it was painful—but because it was a last straw of sorts. She’d thought the run would clear her head of her problems, but all it did was add another one on top. One more ding in an already battered-feeling life.
“No break, but you’re swelling a bit. I’d say ‘ouch’ is justified.”
Somehow, it was the exact wrong thing to say. Melba’s fragile emotions took it as permission to overflow. She tried to hold it back, but a small sob escaped from her tight throat. This is a really bad place to lose it, she told herself, but the admonition only made things worse. She looked away, pointlessly trying to hide the tears that stole disobediently down her face.
“Hey.” Clark’s voice dropped its clinical tone completely. The warmth of it only made things worse. That kind of tone always got to her these days. The best nurses in Dad’s hospital—the ones for whom crisis caring was a true gift, not just a job—could bring on tears just with a hand on her shoulder. “Whoa there, you just turned an ankle, you’ll be...” He stopped and sat down beside her. “Well, I was gonna say ‘fine’ but I think maybe that’s the wrong word here.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Running from, huh?”
“What?” His odd question made her turn and look at him. It broke the tension of trying to keep her emotions in check—there was no hiding the tears once she turned. There had been no hiding them earlier, really, but the trick served to loosen the knot in her throat. Clark’s eyes were full of compassion, without a hint of judgment. Why must Clark Bradens always find her at the end of her rope?
He sighed and rested his elbows on his knees, as if ready to stay a while. “My fire chief in Detroit said that when you run, it’s best to know if you’re running to or running from. He had a theory that you never got hurt running to something, you got hurt running from something.” It was an odd thing to notice at the moment, but Melba could see that rescuing was deep in Clark’s nature. The urge to help—either here or at the hospital vending machine or on the street corner yesterday—seemed to leap from him without effort. This Clark was a bit of a shock—it felt so much at odds with the careless trouble-seeker the high school Clark had been.
“From.” She pointed to her ankle, surprised to find a damp little laugh bubbling up from the tide of tears. “The theory holds.”
“That’s been my experience.” He offered a half-hearted shrug. “Done my share of ‘running from,’ too.”
Melba waited for Clark to ask her what she was running from, but he didn’t. They sat there for a moment, quiet amid the pale green of the Gordon River’s waking spring. She hadn’t even noticed before now that it was a pretty morning; her thoughts had been inwardly focused. The chief’s theory made plain and painful sense. She sighed and flexed her foot, feeling foolish. It startled her that some part of her wanted Clark to pry, to give her an excuse to blurt out the storm of questions brewing inside her. They wouldn’t surface on their own—raw and deep as the pain and uncertainty were—but they wanted to be pulled out of her. Running from. It seemed almost inevitable now that she tripped and turned her ankle.
Clark picked up a twig and began spinning it in his fingers. “You’ve got a lot chasing you.”
It was a perfectly phrased comment, opening the door for her to say more but not requiring it. The urge to tell him everything—to open up about leaving Chicago and the torture of her fading father, about disappointment and postponed travel plans and the bone-deep suspicion that she wasn’t who she thought she was—pushed at her like a sudden squall. The tears burned behind her eyes again. “Yeah.” It was a gulped whisper, a last-ditch effort to hold it all in. She nodded—twice—rather than attempt any more words.
“This whole parent thing, the coming back when you’re not a kid anymore, it’s rough. The roles get all tangled. Add your dad’s...condition...and, well, it’d be easy to see how ankles get turned.” Clark shifted himself down toward her foot again. “Flex it and see how it feels.”
She did. “It hurts less now.”
He looked back up at her with something close to the charming wink she remembered from high school. “See, better already.” He’d been bad-boy hunky as a teen; a flame of too-long red hair that tumbled behind him as he tore through town helmetless on a loud motorcycle. Now, his short hair and stunning features were strong rather than wild. He was as handsome as ever, but in a completely different manner. And far too appealing for someone already struggling with more than she could handle.
He stilled for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to say something. The same hesitation she’d seen at the coffee shop when she asked him about his accident. “Not too many people our age here to talk to. Not who get what it’s like to come back. It’s kind of a tight fit to squeeze back into Gordon Falls, don’t you think?”
Melba merely nodded again, the squall pushing harder. Clark felt so easy to talk to. He was an outsider newly forced in, just like she was. It’d be so simple to let it all spill out of her on the quiet of the riverbank. How much she wanted one other soul on earth to know she hadn’t imagined what her father blurted out in his delusion. Clark had no stake in the secret. He’d been a dangerous young man; he probably had a closetful of past secrets himself. Melba ventured a long look at him, noting that his green eyes had a singed quality around the edges. He had secrets and scars. Melba’s forefinger found Dad’s wedding band still on her thumb and tried on the thought of betraying the secret to just one other person.
“It’s hard,” she managed. How many times had she said that phrase lately? “He’s...” She couldn’t think of a way to start, and wasn’t even sure she should start at all. There was an odd, tenuous space between them—too close and yet too far apart at the same time.
“Everybody loves your dad,” Clark said after a moment, his eyes returning to a professional assessment of her ankle as his warm fingers tested muscle and joint. “They were praying for him in church while he was in the hospital and Barney told me people have been by to help.”
“Sure, now. What about weeks from now when he’s still sick? Sicker.”
“The help will still be there. Honestly, you’ll probably get more help than you need, the way folks like to poke their noses in around here.” He looked up at her again as he reached for her running shoe. “It’s going to be okay.”
His eyes were intense, focused, compelling. She had a vision of him reaching a victim in a cloud of smoke, extending a hand, saying those words with the same lure of confidence he exuded now. Trouble was, Clark only saw part of the fire burning around her—the disease, the logistical challenge. He had no idea of the full-blown firestorm licking at her heels. How she wasn’t the least bit sure it was going to be okay ever again.
It wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t fair to make it his problem, either.
Melba took the shoe, stuffing the urge to tell all back down with the same effort she forced her swollen ankle back into its shoe.
Both hurt far too much.
Chapter Five
Charlotte Taylor was a sight for sore eyes. Melba hugged the stuffing out of her coworker and best friend as she got off the train in Gordon Falls. “I’m so glad to see you!”
Charlotte, who was an urban girl to the core, spun around on her black leather boots to squint at the little train station with her mouth open. “Wow, girl, you live in a postcard. I feel like I’m on a movie set.” She nudged Melba. “You grew up in this place? Really?”
It was a funny thing, living in a place like Gordon Falls. People thought of it as peaceful and perfect, not at all ready to think of it as having bumps and warts like any other community. “Mom used to say Gordon Falls was like a duck swimming upstream. Peaceful and charming on the surface, furiously paddling with big clumsy feet underneath.”
Her words must have had more of an edge than she realized, for Charlotte dropped her overnight bag and took Melba by both shoulders. “That bad already?” she said quietly. Charlotte had lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s two years ago, and as such she’d become Melba’s go-to shoulder to cry on. Just the look in Charlotte’s eyes returned the lump to Melba’s throat.
She shook it off, picking up Charlotte’s bag and putting an arm around her friend instead. “Yes and no. I’ve got an hour before we have to be home, so let’s go introduce you to some excellent apple pie.”
“Pie. This really is a movie set. We’re riding in an actual car, aren’t we? Not a horse and buggy?”
Charlotte was the kind of friend who could make Melba laugh even in the worst of circumstances, which was exactly why she’d called her to come out for an overnight visit. Besides, she knew the daily life of Alzheimer’s, so Melba felt comfortable bringing her to the house where she still wasn’t comfortable with lots of company yet. Dad could be so unpredictable, and not everyone could handle that. “My car is right there. We’re quaint, but not that quaint.”
Charlotte tucked herself into the passenger seat. “I half worried I’d find you in a bonnet and apron or something.”
Melba rolled her eyes. “I went ninety miles down the interstate, Charlotte, not back in time.”
Turning to look at her for a long assessment, Charlotte sighed. “You look tired. How are you holding up?”
“Some parts are okay, others have been...” Melba didn’t know how or where to begin. “...startling.” She put the car in gear. “You know what it’s like.”
“Still, it hits everyone different. It hits every day different.” Charlotte reached out a fingerless-gloved hand to give Melba’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’m glad you called. You need backup to do this. It’s just too nuts to handle alone. I have Mom, but for you...well, it’s just you.”
“I have Barney. And a month’s worth of church casseroles.” Melba seized the chance to talk about something happy. “How—and where—is Mima?”
“Oh, you know Mima.” Charlotte exhaled. Her grandmother had taken life by the horns after her husband’s long decline, and become a world traveler. “Where’s Mima?” had become a grown-up version of the children’s search book Where’s Waldo? at Melba’s office. Half of Melba’s yearning to travel the world had been nurtured by Mima’s tales of adventure. “Indonesia at the moment, then home for the holidays, then I think it’s Greenland.”
Melba laughed. “Greenland? Why?”
Charlotte shrugged her shoulders, setting her long blond hair swinging. “Why not?”
“Your grandmother never did need a reason.”
Charlotte whipped out her ever-present smartphone, fingers flying. “I’m sending her a message right now, asking her to flood you with postcards. What’s your address here in Charmingland?”
“Mima texts?”
“Mima is a thoroughly modern woman. I bought her a smartphone for her birthday.”
Melba gave the address as she pulled into Cafe Homestead, informing her friend that it was the purveyor of the state’s most delicious apple pie as well as an impressive selection of tea. Life felt a bit more in place now—good tea and a good friend made a world of difference.
* * *
An hour later, pie consumed, introductions made, and Dad happily dozing in front of the television set, Melba and Charlotte sat across from each other on the bed in Melba’s room. Melba leaned back against the headboard and fingered the eyelet lace on a yellow throw pillow left over from her teenage years. “I feel like I’m fifteen and having a sleepover,” she said, staring around at her once-beloved butter-colored walls and cream curtains.
Charlotte ran her hands through the fringe on one of the fabrics Melba had draped over those cream curtains. “It’s like you just spread the Melba I know overtop a lemon meringue pie or something.” She laughed when Melba moaned. “No, it’s sort of fun. I bet you thought this was fab-u-lous when you were that age.”
“It’s a bit weird to me now. It’s home, but then again it’s foreign territory. Like the layers won’t fit together right anymore.” She caught a photograph of her and her mother—a sunny, smiling scene from a visit home just after she’d moved to Chicago—and felt her throat tighten.
Charlotte rolled over to perch on her elbows. “Okay, we’ve done all the preliminary niceties, so why don’t you tell me what’s up?”
Melba swallowed hard. “I thought this would be easier, you know? Like a list of tasks or coordinating medications or just being around.” It was the tip of the iceberg—the big, dangerous emotional iceberg waiting to sink her Titanic—but she couldn’t think of another place to start.
Charlotte’s smile held the edge of remembered pain—her grandparents had lived with her right up until the end. “It’s hard stuff. Taking care of Grandpa was like going to war some days. With an enemy you can’t see or predict or even fight. You can only duck out of the way and hope you survive.”
The metaphor seemed to offer a way to say the unthinkable out loud. “I didn’t duck, and I’ve already been hit.” The tears came out of nowhere, like they seemed to too often these days. “A big bomb dropped on me, Charlotte, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
Charlotte scrambled across the bedspread to pull Melba into a fierce hug. “Yeah, you did know what to do. You called me. We saved the Colorado Alpaca Fleece account, girl, and that means we can tackle just about anything.”
Somehow pacifying an irate alpaca fleece supplier whose product had been mislabeled—twice—didn’t seem a match for what Dad had dumped on her, but Melba let the feisty energy of Charlotte’s hug soothe her soul. She cried on her friend’s go-to shoulder for a minute or so, then pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That was a monster of a problem, wasn’t it? This problem is a bit harder to solve, though. This bomb has...real damage potential.”
Charlotte sat up. “Okay, start at the beginning.”
Pulling her knees up to hug them, Melba let the words crawl out, small and vulnerable. “Well, you know Dad got pretty sick last week, and his mind sort of...short-circuited.”
“Good way to put it,” Charlotte sighed. “I always thought ‘dementia’ sounded so gruesome.”
“He said some things. One thing, actually, that was a big shocker.” Melba steeled herself with a deep breath, sure it would make the thing more awful to hear it spoken out loud. “He said...he said I wasn’t his.” There. She’d said it and not melted into the carpeting.
It took Charlotte a few excruciating moments to grasp what Melba was saying. “You mean, not his daughter? Biologically?”
