A Matter of Trust (7 page)

She had once stood hand in hand with her
community, dead set against this pipeline project, but having Ben
Wilde here, talking to her, listening to her, inserting himself
into her life, had her rattled. For the first time ever, she was
questioning her decisions. She wondered, too, if some of what she
was feeling had to do with the fact that she had never been allowed
to drive this truck. Her father obviously had more faith in this
man, this stranger, an enemy to this community, than he did in her.
She hated herself for wanting to be around Ben. This entire
situation bothered her.

“A penny for your thoughts?” Ben asked,
cutting through the silence.

She glanced across the bench seat of the
pickup, feeling her tongue thicken and her jaw clamp shut. She
swallowed.

“You didn’t say much after our dinner
arrived.” He looked back at the road and then over to her
again.

No, she hadn’t said another word, struggling
to choke down what she could only assume was good meatloaf. She had
been drowning in memories of her mother, which had turned every
bite to sawdust. She shut her eyes again as a wave of grief washed
over her. She remembered her mother’s warm, smiling eyes, her round
face. She had been a woman who gave everything of herself to
Carrie. It had always been the two of them, day in and day out,
when they lived overseas. Her father had worked an eighty-hour week
then. To him, his job had come first, and Carrie and her mother had
always come second. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I just don’t like
thinking of all that heartache. It’s water under the bridge,
anyway.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’ve gotten past
any of it, Carrie,” Ben said. “Sounds like a whole bunch of grief
and hurt and misunderstanding bottled up, not allowing you to move
forward.” He rubbed his hand over his jaw, and she could hear the
scrape of his whiskers. He needed to shave. The silence created a
tension in the vehicle.

“I suppose someone with a perfect family,
whose father never cheated on his mother, may not understand,” she
said.

Ben slammed on the brakes and pulled to the
side of the road. The motion had Carrie putting her hand on the
dashboard in shock. Ben tossed his arm over the back of the seat,
and he seemed to grow a few inches as he moved toward her. All the
tension wound up in him seemed ready to snap. She seemed to have a
knack for pushing people’s buttons. Maybe she should have been
worried, but there was something about Ben that made her want to
talk to him, to fight with him. He had a passion she hadn’t felt in
another person before. She found it too easy to be around him,
though she knew he could hurt her badly.

“Let’s get something straight,” he snapped.
“My mother and father, Olivia and Raymond Wilde, are amazing
parents. I wouldn’t trade them for anything, but they aren’t and
never have been perfect. None of us are. There were a lot of things
said and done that they both regret.” He looked away. “My dad left
us.”

She wondered if her shock showed on her
face. She hadn’t expected him to say something like that. He seemed
so grounded, as if he’d had the most stable upbringing. Even though
her dad had married the other woman, Jack had never left her or her
mother. Carrie could only imagine the fear that would have put in a
little boy.

“I’m so sorry, Ben, but your parents are
together again?”

He leaned against his door as if pulling
away. “Yeah, they are now, but it was almost a year he was gone. It
was hard—hard on my mother.”

A shadow of something seemed to settle
between them in the cab of the truck. She waited, wondering if he
would speak again. He was a man who bottled things up, held on to
things. Ben Wilde was far from one dimensional.

“What did your mother do?” she asked.

He was shaking his head, moving to start the
truck, but she reached out and touched his hand to stop him. She
realized her mistake the moment she touched his skin. His fingers
squeezed around hers, and it nearly took her breath away.

When he looked over at her, he didn’t seem
as affected, staring at her with those intense eyes. She took a
breath, her heart pounding. His very male scent was taking over the
smell of her father’s truck.

Ben was still holding her hand when he
leaned back. “Mom did the best she could, but with five boys—and we
were a handful—it was hard. She at least had Logan, my older
brother, to lean on. He, uh…” He smiled as he scratched his head.
“He started looking after us when Mom had to get a job in town. He
picked up a lot of the slack, and he was the one we turned to, who
knocked our heads together when we got into trouble.”

“How old was your brother?” She wondered if
her voice sounded as husky to Ben as it did to her own ears. He let
go of her hand. Maybe he realized what he was doing to her.

“Logan was only fifteen. Then there was Joe,
me, Samuel, and baby Jake. He was five at the time.” Ben was
shaking his head, and she noticed how he seemed lost in thought. “I
forgot how young he was. Logan was the one who would take him to
kindergarten. I think that was when Jake started to look to him as
a dad. I think we all did. He never let on how hard it was on him,
because I know he watched Mom and worried about her. He was always
getting after us to leave Mom alone. She had enough to worry about.
As a little kid, you know how you feel your parents’ stress and
worry even when they try to hide it? Mom did, or she tried to. We
just didn’t understand everything then, only that our own world
wasn’t as solid as we thought. That’s terrifying to a kid.”

“And you understand it now?” Carrie asked.
She couldn’t stop herself. Maybe she was prying, crossing the line,
being way too personal, but he’d opened the door, and he still
hadn’t told her it was none of her business or that she was being
too nosy.

“I do.” He clenched his jaw. “You see, my
mother was dependent on what my dad would send for money to put
food on the table, pay the heating, pay the mortgage, put gas in
the car. Dad had been gone for…I don’t know, seven, eight months,
maybe, and Mom went out on a date with a farmer up the road. We
were shocked and angry, as if she’d done something wrong.” Ben was
shaking his head. When he looked over at her, she didn’t miss the
change in his expression. “My dad found out, and the next week he
wouldn’t pay her.”

Carrie was stunned. She couldn’t imagine
something like that happening. There were laws! Just as quickly,
she realized how naive she was being. “So what happened?” she asked
with dread, wondering what the boys had had to give up. For a
moment, she felt Ben’s mother’s anguish.

“It was the first time I understood what
going hungry meant, but then Logan started cutting school. He and
Joe went hunting for the first time—out of season, too. They
brought home a deer.” He roughly wiped his face, leaned against his
door, and really looked at her. “They broke every law to get food
on our table. After that, Mom couldn’t much tell Logan what to do,
but I’ll never forget the moment Logan and Joe dragged that deer
into the yard, tied to one of the horses. That was the first time
that I saw Mom cry.”

“But your mom and dad are back together?”
she said. If a man did that to her, she would never take him back.
Letting his kids go hungry…even with all the issues she had with
Jack, she knew he’d never, ever do something so awful.

“Yeah, they worked it out.” The way he said
it, she knew there had to be more, way more.

“And your brother Logan? He sounds like an
amazing brother,” she said. Carrie could respect any teenager who
would step in like that and do what Logan had done. She wouldn’t
mind meeting him one day.

“Logan and Dad…well, it was rough for a bit.
They gave each other a wide berth, but there was no room for two
heads of the household. It was a confrontation that had been long
coming. I guess my dad had just had enough of all of us boys going
to Logan all the time. Old habits, you know? We could always depend
on Logan. We knew he would never turn his back on us. You know how
there’re just people you know are rocks? There were fights, though,
battles between him and Dad. Logan never gave him the respect he
had before. On his eighteenth birthday, Logan enlisted in the
marines and was gone. It was never the same. He’s still my big
brother, though, and every time he had leave, it was us he came to
see. It was always us he wrote to. I’d do anything for him.”

“I envy you having a brother like Logan, all
your brothers,” Carrie said. “You must be so close.”

He started the truck as if letting her know
he was done talking about it. “Not as close as we should be,” he
said, and he pulled back onto the road to drive her home.

The full moon against a clear, dark sky had
Ben just staring upward outside his darkened cabin, considering all
that he’d shared with Carrie. He was unsettled, and maybe the
mystery exuding from the moon only added to that feeling. He didn’t
know why he’d told Carrie everything he had about his childhood.
Those had been dark times, a past he never shared. The memory was a
giant ripple that affected the bond between Ben and his
brothers.

The fact was that they’d come through so
much, and his parents were happy now. Those bad times were years
past, and he believed his father felt bad for how he’d treated
their mother and them. As Ben stared up at the sky, he tried to
remember what had made their dad come back to them. He still
remembered the day his dad had driven in with his suitcase and his
mom had opened the front door. Nothing had been said as they
watched each other, and whatever it was that passed between them in
those moments had terrified him. But then his mother had taken a
step back and let his father in. They never spoke about it to Ben
or his brothers, though the boys had wondered, of course.

Maybe one day Ben could take his dad out and
the two of them would sit with a couple of beers and talk. Not that
Raymond was a talker—he was far from an open book. He was a quiet
man who held everything in, but now Ben recalled something his
father had said not long ago: “There isn’t a man around who hasn’t
done something he’s ashamed of, and saying you’re sorry doesn’t
always work. It’s a start, a way to make things right, but it’s
what you do next that makes the difference. It’s actions that
separate a boy who knows nothing from a man.”

Ben hadn’t really understood then what he
was saying, but he knew his father carried a world of regrets, and
their mother…well, Olivia had only told them that it took two to
create a problem, and sometimes the right thing to do was to
forgive.

There was one thing that had come out of
that hard year: Logan would always be the one Ben and his brothers
would look up to, and he was also the one always checking up on
them now. Ben would have to call Logan and his new wife, Julia,
maybe stop in and see how they were doing, when he was done
here.

He opened the door to his cabin and flicked
the lamp on, taking in his room. The bed was made, and even the
fireplace was ready to go, with kindling, paper, and cut wood all
arranged. All he needed to do was light a match. Alice and Jack
were thoughtful, nice people.

Ben listened to the fire crackle for a
moment and then slid his coat off before opening his laptop to
check his email. One from his boss caught his eye:

From: Peter Stillwell, CEO, Kootenai Kounty
Oil

To: Benjamin Wilde, President, Kootenai
Kounty Oil

Subject: Update on Settling the Natives

Ben,

What’s the news? Good, I hope. Call me
anytime and update me. We want to get this project started and the
problems there put to bed.

Best,

Peter

Short and sweet, right to the point. Peter
wasn’t going to be happy with what Ben had to report. The fire had
just started to throw off some heat when he sat on the bed. He
pulled his cell phone out and called Peter. Maybe his boss was
sitting by the phone, as he answered on the first ring. Ben could
hear voices in the background.

“Ben, was wondering when I’d hear from you.
So tell me, how did the presentation go? Did you work your magic?
Tell me you have good news.”

Yeah, he was anxious. Peter was a man who
wanted answers.

“The presentation took a different turn than
expected,” Ben said. How could he explain to Peter that these
people wouldn’t have listened to a slideshow or to someone singing
KKO’s praises for the jobs and security that they would bring to
the community? These people just didn’t buy that kind of fluff
after the curveballs life had thrown their way. These people didn’t
trust outsiders.

“Different in which way?” Peter asked. He
was direct, and he always came across as gruff when things didn’t
go as smoothly as he expected.

“Well, you already know I wasn’t welcome
here. This is a tough community. The folks here are pessimists,
always looking for what can go wrong. They already brought up our
track record and that of every other oil company—though, in all
fairness, all oil companies do have a history of leaving damage.
The townsfolk pointed out every example they could.”

“Sounds like you might be on their side,”
Peter snapped.

“No, Peter, listen. That’s not what I’m
saying. You need to understand these people first before you can do
something like what we want to do. You can’t just steamroll over
these people and believe they’ll go away. It won’t work, not here,
not in this town. They’ve been misunderstood for so long, beaten
down, kicked in the head, and they know what struggling is. They
won’t just roll over, not on this one. They’ve dug their heels in.
Besides, someone in the community already suggested they ask for a
bigger cut from us before there’s any further negotiation.”

There was silence on the other end, long
enough that Ben could feel the energy, the annoyance. He suspected
Peter was going to take a hard stand.