A Man to Hold on to (A Tallgrass Novel) (34 page)

Jessy didn’t know. Though all the margarita sisters knew LoLo, none of them knew anything about her personal life. She was compassionate, kind, supportive, and a mystery.

“Any other kids?”

“Two daughters, both in Tulsa. She doesn’t have their phone numbers.” Jessy fixed her own coffee, with lots of sugar and creamer, then peeled an orange from a bowl on the counter. She hadn’t gotten anything to eat yet, and her stomach was grumbling. She glanced toward the doorway. Down the hall in the living room, Patricia was sitting with the chaplain, their low voices punctuated time to time by a sob. She lowered her own voice. “Her son didn’t know she was living in Oklahoma.”

“Any other family?”

“No one on George’s side besides some nieces and nephews she doesn’t really know. Her sister lives in Vermont, her brother in Florida. They’ll both be in sometime tomorrow. And some nieces and nephews of her own. Her sister’s going to contact them.”

LoLo leaned against the counter, cradling the coffee cup, and studied Jessy. “You know her from the bank?”

“No. Never met her before today.”

“So you picked a stranger up off the floor, dusted her off, and brought her home. That’s a tough thing to do, Jessy.”

With someone else, Jessy could have been flippant.
Tougher than you know.
Or
Not tough at all; I am Superwoman.
But LoLo did know. She’d done way more than her share of picking people up off the floor. Instead of saying anything, Jessy focused on sectioning the orange.

“I was at the bank yesterday,” LoLo said.

Heat flooded Jessy’s face, and her gut clenched. “I thought you banked on post.”

“I do. I went there with one of my wives.” Always supportive, doing anything she could to help the women whose tragedies brought them into her life. “Someone else’s nameplate was on your desk. So were his things.”

“Yeah.” She mumbled around a piece of orange, sweet and juicy.

“You making a career change?”

Reaching deep inside, Jessy summoned the strength to meet her gaze, to smile brashly. “Yeah. I always hated that job.”

“You have any plans?”

Besides falling apart?
“I’m thinking about it.” She thought about a lot of things. She just never found the energy to actually do anything. Going to get groceries today had been a big deal—and look how that had bitten her on the ass. Two hours now she’d been tied up with Patricia Sanderson, and she didn’t know how to extricate herself. She’d hoped the son would head this way as soon as he got the news, but she might as well have told him there were clouds in the sky for all the concern he’d shown.

As long as LoLo and the chaplain were there, she could leave, she told herself. Even knowing that eventually they would both have to leave, too. Knowing that eventually Patricia would have to be alone in her house, surrounded by memories of her husband, drowning in her grief. Eventually everyone had to be alone.

But not yet. Jessy could cope a while longer. It wasn’t like anyone else in the entire world needed her.

“Maybe this time you’ll find a job you like.” LoLo drained the last of her coffee and squared her shoulders. “I should get back in there.”

Jessy watched her go, figuring that in a few minutes the chaplain would come in for coffee and a break. Kind of a tag-team comforting. With her stomach still too empty, she opened the refrigerator, located a couple packages of deli meat, mayo and mustard, some pickles and cheese. Sooner or later, Patricia’s friends would start showing up with casseroles, fried and rotisserie chicken, sweets from CaraCakes, pop and doughnuts and disposable dishes, but in the meantime, a sandwich or two would stave off hunger for her, LoLo, and Lieutenant Graham. If Patricia was like Jessy, she wouldn’t eat for days. If she was like Therese, she would be sensible and eat even though she had no appetite, and if she was like Lucy, bless her heart, she would stuff herself with food to numb the pain.

Sure enough, about the time she finished putting together the fourth ham-and-turkey sandwich, Lieutenant Graham came into the kitchen. He wasn’t as experienced as LoLo; his lean solemn face showed the bleakness of his burden.

Chaplains made Jessy uncomfortable. She hadn’t been raised in church and had never found a reason to start attending as an adult. Aaron’s services had been held at the chapel on Fort Murphy, and the memory didn’t make her eager to return. Besides, chaplains were good people. Earnest. They didn’t make the mistakes Jessy couldn’t seem to escape.

“We didn’t get lunch. This looks good,” the lieutenant said as he accepted a plate. “We called one of her neighbors, who’s coming over as soon as she can get away from the office. I think she’s asked about as many questions as she’s capable of processing at the moment.”

“She’ll think of more.” Jessy’s first questions had been simple: how had Aaron died, and why. The how had been understandable: he’d been shot by a sniper. She still struggled with the why.

There had been more questions, of course. When would he get home? What did she have to do? How did one arrange a funeral? Where could she bury him?

And more: had he died instantly? Had they tried to save him? Did he suffer? How did they know he didn’t suffer?

Would she be able to see him, touch him, kiss once more when he got home?

Could she tell him how very, very sorry she was?

The chaplain took a seat at the breakfast table, ate a bite or two, then gazed at Jessy. “LoLo says you’ve been through this.”

Her hands tightened around the coffee mug. She forced her fingers to loosen, to pick up a plate, to join him at the table and take a bite to settle her stomach. “Two and a half years ago,” she said at last.

“I’m sorry.”

Why did the words sound so much more sincere coming from him than they did from her? Because he was a chaplain. He’d probably never let anyone down. Never failed to live up to others’ expectations. He was a man of God.

She was just a woman.

With way too many flaws. Way too many regrets.

A Hero to Come Home To

“Pappano shines in this poignant tale of love, loss, and learning to love again…[She] creates achingly real characters whose struggles will bring readers to tears.”

—
Publishers Weekly
(starred review)

“Pappano’s latest is a touching story about loss, love, and acceptance. Tender to the core, her story is filled with heartwarming characters who you can’t help but fall in love with, and she tells their stories candidly and poignantly. The ending will simply melt your heart.”

—
RT Book Reviews

“A wonderful romance with real-life, real-time issues…[Pappano] writes with substance and does an excellent job of bringing the characters to life.”

—HarlequinJunkie.com

“Poignant and engaging…Authentic details of army life and battle experience will glue readers to the page.”

—
Library Journal

Dear Reader,

One of the pluses of writing the Tallgrass series was one I didn’t anticipate until I was neck-deep in the process, but it’s been a great one: unearthing old memories. Our Navy career was filled with laugh-out-loud moments, but there were also plenty of the laugh-or-you’ll-cry moments, too. We did a lot of laughing. Most of our tears were reserved for later.

Like our very first move to South Carolina, when the movers lost our furniture for weeks, and the day after it was finally delivered, my husband got orders to Alabama. On our second move, the delivery guys perfected their truck-unloading routine: three boxes into the apartment, one box into the front of their truck. (Fortunately, Bob had perfected his watch-the-unloaders routine and recovered it all.)

For our first apartment move-out inspection, we had scrubbed ourselves to nubbins all through the night. The manager did the walk-through, commented on how impeccably clean everything was, and offered me the paperwork to sign. I signed it, turned around to hand it to her, and walked into the low-hanging chandelier where the dining table used to sit, breaking a bulb with my head. Silently she took back the papers, thumbed through to the deduction sheet, and charged us sixty cents for a new bulb.

There’s something about being told my Oklahoma accent is funny by multi-generation Americans with accents so heavy that I just guessed at the context of our conversations. Or hearing our two-year-old Oklahomaborn son, home for Christmas, proudly singing, “Jaaangle baaaa-ulllz! Jaaan-gle baaaa-ulllz! Jaaan-gle
alllll
the waaay-uh!”

Bob and I still trade stories.
Remember when we did that self-move to San Diego and the brakes went out on the rental truck in 5:00 traffic in Memphis at the start of a holiday weekend? Remember that pumpkin pie on the first Thanksgiving we couldn’t go home—the one I forgot to put the spices in? Remember dropping the kiddo off at the base day care while we got groceries and having to pay the grand sum of fifty cents two hours later? How about when you had to report to the commanding general for joint-service duty at Fort Gordon and we couldn’t find your Dixie cup anywhere in the truck crammed with boxes—and at an Army post, no less, that didn’t stock Navy uniforms?

Sea life was great. We watched ships leaving and, months later, come home again. On one homecoming, the kiddo and I watched Daddy’s ship run aground. We learned that all sailors look alike when they’re dressed in the same uniform and seen from a distance. We spied submarines stealthing out of their bases and toured warships—American, British, French, Canadian—and even got to board one of our own nuclear subs for a private look around.

The Navy gave us a lot to remember and a lot to learn. (Example: all those birthdays and anniversaries Bob missed didn’t mean a thing. It was the fact that he came home that mattered.) I still have a few dried petals from the flowers given to me by the command each time Bob reenlisted, as well the ones I got when he retired. We have a flag, like the one each of the widows in Tallgrass received, and a display box of medals and ribbons, but filled with much happier memories.

I can’t wait to see which old
remember when
the next book in this series brings us! I hope you love reading A MAN TO ON HOLD TO as much as I loved writing it.

Sincerely,

MarilynPappano.com

Twitter@MarilynPappano

Facebook.com/MarilynPappanoFanPage

Dear Reader,

Much has been written about angels. When I realized that angels would be part of my mythology and hidden world, I knew I needed to make mine different. I didn’t want to use the religious mythos or pair them with demons. Many authors have done a fantastic job of this already.

In fact, I felt this way about my world in general. I started with the concept that a confluence of nature and the energy in the Bermuda Triangle had allowed gods and angels to take human form. They procreated with the humans living on the island and were eventually sent back to their plane of existence. But I didn’t want to draw on Greek, Roman, or Atlantean mythology, so I made up my own pantheon of gods. I narrowed them down to three different types: Dragons, sorcerers, and angels. Their progeny continue to live in the area of the Triangle, tethered there by their need to be near their energy source.

My angels come from this pantheon, without the constraints of traditional religious roles. They were sent down to the island to police the wayward gods, but succumbed to human temptation. And their progeny pay the price. I’m afraid my angels’ descendents, called Caidos, suffer terribly for their fathers’ sins. This was not something I contrived; these concepts often just come to me as the truths of my stories.

Caidos are preternaturally beautiful, drawing the desire of those who see them. But desire, their own and others’, causes them physical pain. As do the emotions of all but their own kind. They guard their secret, for their lives depend on it. To keep pain at bay, they isolate themselves from the world and shut down their sexuality. Which, of course, makes it all the more fun when they are thrown together with women they find attractive. Pleasure and pain is a fine line, and Kasabian treads it in a different way than other Caidos. Then again, he is different, harboring a dark secret that compounds his sense of isolation.

Perhaps it was slightly sadistic to pair him with a woman who holds the essence of the goddess of sensuality. Kye is his greatest temptation, but she may also be his salvation. He needs to form a bond with the woman who can release his dark shadow. I don’t make it easy on Kye, either. She must lose everything to find her soul. I love to dig deep into my characters’ psyches and mine their darkest shadows. Only then can they come into the light.

And isn’t that something we all can learn? To face our shadows so that we can walk in the light? That’s what I love most about writing: that readers, too, can take the journey of self discovery, self love, right along with my characters. They face their demons and come out on the other end having survived.

We all have magic in our imaginations. Mine has always contained murder, mayhem, and romance. Feel free to wander through the madness of my mind any time. A good place to start is my website, www.jaimerush.com , or that of my romantic suspense alter ego, www.tinawainscott.com.