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Sick at the sight of him.
Hell. He deserved the Biggest Heel on the Planet Award, to have hurt her all over again this way.
It had been a stupid idea, to call her. He should have had sense enough to consider the source when the old man started in on him about her. Even on his deathbed, Blake Bravo wouldn’t give up his petty mind games.
And now, for your other surprise…
Right.
The surprise wasn’t much of a surprise, after all. Tory couldn’t forgive him and wanted nothing to do with him.
Big news.
“I don’t…I’m sorry,” Tory stammered, her stomach still churning, all her senses on overload.
She kept thinking, He doesn’t know. But he is Kimmy’s father. And she wants to know him. And he has a right to know her. I will have to tell him, somehow….
But it was all just too much, right then. Seeing him. Remembering things that were better forgotten.
She couldn’t do it. Not tonight.
She needed…a little time. To pull herself together, to get her stunned mind around the fact that he really had come back.
“I don’t…I’m sorry.” She sucked in a breath, swallowed. “I have to go now. Later, I can…”
He was watching her as if she was mentally deranged—and maybe she was at that moment. She sure did feel like it, like a woman who had gone clean out of her mind.
She edged out from behind the coffee table, between his chair and the sofa. “I’ll talk to you later…” She was already halfway to the door. He stood, took a couple of steps toward her. She flung out a hand in a warding-off gesture. “I’ll call you. I will. Tomorrow, all right?”
She fled—there was no other word for it—leaving Marsh staring at the door she had shut in his face.
Chapter Three
Marsh’s instinctive reaction was to follow her.
But he held instinct in check. She clearly wanted out of that room—and away from him.
Who was he to try to hold her there?
He went back to the bar and poured himself another drink—a double that time. He sipped it slowly, thinking that he should probably get over to the hospital. He should check on his father one more time tonight, as he’d planned to do.
But no. He felt a little too edgy for a visit with the old man right now. What had just happened had been too unsettling.
Tory had acted so strangely.
If she hadn’t wanted to see him, couldn’t she have just said so, on the phone, right up front?
Why even agree to meet him? Why come up to his room with him? Why put herself through that? It didn’t make any damn sense.
Marsh shook his head, sipped from his drink, decided that the remark about calling him tomorrow must have been something she’d said without thinking, without meaning it. She wouldn’t be calling him. He’d never hear from her again.
Which was probably for the best.
He certainly wouldn’t be idiot enough to try calling her again.
The past truly was another country, one he had no business trying to revisit. They were two different people now, with nothing to connect them except memories that were better left to fade, finally, into nothing.
Marsh finished his drink. Then he called the hospital. He spoke to the night nurse assigned to his father’s care. Blake Bravo was sleeping peacefully, the nurse said.
“If he asks, tell him I’ll see him tomorrow.”
The nurse said she’d be happy to pass on his message.
The misty drizzle had stopped by the time Tory got home. Betsy said she had checked on Kim fifteen minutes ago and Kim was sound asleep.
Tory paid Betsy and walked with her out the front door. The night air was moist and warm and the wind had died down. Tory stood on her front walk, watching Betsy stroll away up the street. The girl turned and gave Tory a carefree wave before she disappeared into her own house.
Betsy was fifteen. The same age Tory had been when Marsh first asked her out…
Tory shook her head. Better not get started down memory lane again. She turned and went back up the curving walk to the house. Inside, she locked up and turned off the lights.
She looked in on Kim before she went to her own room, creeping in and then waiting in the dark by Kim’s bed, until her eyes adjusted. Kim lay on her side, facing the wall, the yellow comforter she had chosen herself, when the two of them redecorated her room just last fall, pulled up close around her chin.
Mother love welled up in Tory. So sweet. And yet painful, too. A child grew so fast. Nine years took forever—and went by in an instant.
When Tory’s parents had learned that their daughter was going to have a baby, they had first tried to convince her to give the baby up. Tory had refused. And eventually her parents accepted the inevitable. In the end Audra and Seth Winningham had been honestly supportive, helping to take care of Kimmy in the first years, so that Tory could finish high school and even earn a business degree at OU.
And Norman, after all, was the third largest city in Oklahoma, a progressive university town with a population nearing ninety thousand now. Tory’s single-mom status may have been looked at askance by the people in her nice upper-middle class neighborhood at first. But over time she had found acceptance.
It had been rough, yes, in the beginning, being a mom at seventeen. All her high school friends felt sorry for her. They were out, running around, having fun. And she was home with a baby, longing, hungering, praying for Marsh to come back to her.
Kimmy stirred, sighing, pushing down the covers and flopping one arm out behind her. Tory resisted the urge to cover her again. The room wasn’t cold. And covering her might wake her.
Quietly Tory turned and tiptoed out.
Tomorrow, she thought, as she crossed the hall to her own room. I will call Marsh tomorrow, in the evening. I’ll make arrangements to meet with him again. And I’ll do a better job of it this time. This time I won’t run out without telling him what both he and Kimmy need for him to know.
“You get together with the redhead?”
Blake was sitting up in bed, looking considerably better than he had the afternoon before. The oxygen tube was gone from his nose. Though the old man still wheezed with each breath, Marsh was beginning to think that maybe the heart surgeon had been right. Blake Bravo wasn’t quite ready for the grave, after all.
“Well, Mr. Big Shot? Did you see her or not?”
“Feeling better, huh, Dad?”
“You’re not going to answer me, are you?”
“No. I’m not.”
“You didn’t see her.”
Marsh said nothing.
“Wait a minute,” Blake wheezed. “I get it. You saw her. But she held out on you. You didn’t get your surprise.”
“Dad.”
“What?”
“Either drop it or explain yourself.”
“Where the hell’s the fun in that? I’ll give you a hint—no. On second thought, I won’t. Go see her again.”
To keep himself from saying something he would later regret, Marsh stepped over to the window and looked out. Today the sky was a broad expanse of clear blue, dotted here and there with small, cotton-like clouds. Spread out below was a parking lot. And near the building, attractive landscaping: nandinas, a redbud tree, flower beds mulched with cedar chips.
He waited, looking out, observing the progress of a big black Buick as it rolled between the rows of parked cars and finally nosed into an empty space. A man got out and strode toward the building.
Marsh turned to his father again. “You are feeling better, aren’t you?”
Blake grunted. “Doctor said this morning that they’ll be sending me home soon—as long as I make sure there’s someone there to look after me.”
“I’ll see about hiring you a live-in nurse.”
“Forget that. I don’t want any stranger in my house.”
Marsh looked at his father levelly. “Don’t get any ideas about me taking care of you. It wouldn’t work.”
Blake closed his eyes, wheezed a sigh. “Don’t worry. I know it. You and I wouldn’t last twenty-four hours under the same roof.” He looked at Marsh again, pale eyes stranger than ever—far away. And far too knowing. “Doesn’t matter. Let it go. We’ll see how right that doctor is….”
Marsh shook his head. “You do feel better. You look better.”
“I don’t want a damn funeral, you hear what I say? Who the hell would come to my funeral anyway? I want cremation, and I want you to dump my ashes in Lake Thunderbird. Got that?”
“You’re not going to die now, Dad. Your doctor said so.”
“What the hell does a doctor know? What do you know? You’re dense as a post, you know that, Mr. Big Shot? You haven’t even figured out the secret that little redhead’s keeping from you.”
Marsh turned back to the window.
“Go see her again,” Blake commanded.
Marsh studied the redbud tree below. He’d always liked redbuds, liked the twisted forms the trunks could take and the pretty heart shape of the leaves.
Marsh stayed in his father’s room for another hour. It was a true test of self-control, and Marsh was pleased to find himself passing it. His father jeered and goaded, and Marsh looked out the window. Somehow the time went by.
Finally Blake dropped off to sleep again. Marsh sat in the chair in the corner and watched him for a while, listened to the labored, watery sound of his breathing, wondered what he was going to do about home care now that it looked as if Blake was going to cheat the devil, after all—at least for a while.
Marsh also wondered at himself. That he had come here, in the first place. That he found he felt accountable for the care of a hardhearted SOB who had made his childhood a living hell and driven his mother to an early grave. Evidently, some bonds were nigh on impossible to completely sever. A man felt a responsibility to a parent, period, even if that parent had always been a damn poor excuse for a human being.
When he got tired of sitting, Marsh left the hospital room. He hung around in the waiting area for a while, got out his cell phone and called Chicago.
He spoke with his second in command at Boulevard Limousine. Nothing going on there, other than the usual—drivers who didn’t report in when they were supposed to, one breakdown on a trip in from O’Hare. But somehow they always found another driver to cover, and breakdowns, with the fleet of top-quality new vehicles he owned now, were few and far between. This most recent one had caused a delay, but only a short one. They’d immediately dispatched a replacement vehicle, and the problem car had been towed to the shop.
It occurred to him that he wasn’t really even needed anymore at the company he had created. He’d put together a system that worked and now it could pretty much run without him. Soon it would be time to focus his energy on expanding. Or maybe to get into something else altogether.
He went back to Blake’s room, where lunch was being served. He sat in the chair and watched his father pick at his meal, tuning out the gibes and taunts, pleased to find that he was getting pretty good at not listening to things he didn’t need to hear.
As a child and a badly troubled teenager, he used to practice tuning out the old man. He never got a chance to get very good at it back then, though. At that time Blake hadn’t been confined to a bed. And if Marsh tried not listening to his harangues, Blake had no compunction about using whatever was handy—his fists, his belt, a baseball bat—to get his rebellious son’s undivided attention.
By one Marsh was ready for lunch himself. He considered giving the cafeteria a try, but then decided he’d just as soon get out of the hospital for a while. He drove down Porter, crossing Gray and Main and continuing on toward the university. He found a certain landmark restaurant he remembered, a place that was a little dark inside, but really nice out on the patio under the clusters of red-white-and-blue Cinzano umbrellas.
The lunch rush seemed to be winding down, so he didn’t have much difficulty getting a table to himself. The waitress settled him beneath an umbrella with an iced tea, a basket of chips and a menu. He crunched on the chips and considered his choices, thinking that later in the afternoon he’d start looking for that live-in nurse his father would be needing.
He glanced up from the menu to signal the waitress—and saw that he was being watched. By some character a few tables away, a guy with a broad, ruddy face and a salesman’s smile.
The character squinted. “Marsh? Marsh Bravo?”
Suddenly the face was familiar. Take away forty pounds and add long hair and—“Bob Avery.”
Bob nodded at the three other men at his table. “Be right back.” He got up and strode toward Marsh. “I don’t believe it.”
Marsh stood. “It’s been a long time.” They shook hands. “You’re looking good.”
Bob laughed. “I’m lookin’ fat. But you. Hey. Doing all right, huh?”
“Getting by.”
“What did you get into?”
Marsh told him. “What about you?”
“What do you think? Insurance.”
“Like your dad.”
“That’s right. I went in with him. Got my name on the door, two assistants and four clerks. He’ll be retiring in a few years, then I’ll be on my own.”
“Sounds good.”
“It’s a living—and I married Steffie.” Marsh remembered. Bob and Stefanie Sommers had been an item Marsh’s senior year.
Marsh asked the next logical question. “Kids?”
“Two. A boy and a girl.”
“What do you know? A lot can happen in ten years.”
“Ain’t that the truth.” Bob was looking at him a little oddly now, it seemed to Marsh. “So,” he said, and coughed into his hand. “You married?”
