A Place to Call Home (36 page)

I stared at the spread. “Is that hamper bottomless?”

He inclined his head. “No, but my intention to take good care of you is unlimited. You always brought food to me. Now I want to bring food to you.”

“Well, then, I’ll just have to eat it,” I said softly, singing inside, helplessly.

The letters
, my common sense whispered.

• • •

We talked all afternoon.

The day grew more peaceful with each glass of wine; the sky’s blue seeped down into the air until the light had the quality of prisms through a stained-glass window; and the clean scent of water and woods and the raw clay of the cleared earth combined with the wine and the emotions to make me suddenly turn close to Roan, grasping his hands and looking at him tearfully. There was nothing deceptive about him as I’d worried; there was kindness and a brand of troubled restraint, as if he had to measure every word and gesture.

I told him I was anchored and so was he; we came from the same people, even without a direct bloodline. My line of conversation clearly dampened the mood, although his large, strong fingers stroked my hands urgently. Frowning, he said I thought that anyone who had Irish roots was related, and I said of course they are, I’m being philosophical from the alcohol, just listen.

He knew how it was with my family. The kindest things they say to one another are rarely said out loud; they bring food and personal support, small gifts and photographs. I took a photo album from my bulky cloth purse and laid it open on the table. “There,” I said, thumping the album. Parades, ceremonies, reunions, garden club initiations, Civitans, Kiwanis. Church, state, community. “You’re part of all that,” I told him.

“You don’t see me in the pictures, do you?” he countered wearily.

“If you hadn’t run away from the church home you’d have been brought back to the farm. Everything would have been all right. If you’d only trusted me more.”

“Trusted you? Peep, you’re the only person I did trust. But you couldn’t change what happened to me, no matter what you think.”

Peep
. Tears slid down my face. I brushed them aside angrily. “You will feel at home here soon,” I insisted. “I’ll
bring you rootings from shrubs in the yard at the farm. Offspring from plants my great-grandparents cultivated from cuttings their grandparents were given by kin and neighbors.”

“Rootings?” he echoed with a ferocious half-smile. “I’ve got enough Maloney influence around me.”

I went on urgently, telling him that polite compromise can be a virtue; feuds are traded in silence, because nothing is more important than preserving the root. We remember how we came here, I insisted; your Sullivans must have settled the same way—alone and poor, strangers in a mountain wilderness where a soul could freeze alone in the winter, a widow and her babies could starve unless people worked together.

Now we move away and around; the roads are fast, the satellites bring distant peoples into our lives, there are planes to take; the world is much smaller than it was when he and I were kids, and much closer. My father and his brothers sit in the town diner discussing computer software and the Internet. Mama corresponds by e-mail with potters all over the country and elsewhere. Daddy’s llamas forget how far north they’ve come from their Peruvian homeland; Daddy files their hooves with an iron rasp forged by his blacksmithing grandfather before he was born; Josh squires visiting Japanese officials to dinner in Atlanta, then comes home to the farm and sits in the dark in the bedroom where he slept as a boy, smoking a soapstone pipe one of our great-great-grandfathers purchased from a Cherokee as soldiers marched the last of the Indians away from their homeland, these mountains.

And because Roan was born with my parents’ help, because my mother held him in her arms before his own mother did, he was ours. We had let him down once, but there was hope for the future. I told him so.

He said very little, but something shifted and settled between us. “You don’t really believe I’ve come back here to stay,” he said. “This isn’t permanent. I’m setting up
housekeeping just long enough to persuade you to leave with me.”

“You’ll stay,” I said. “And right now I can’t stand to think about you being out here alone at night. Come to the house. You’ve been invited. Come on. Make the effort.”

“You’re a grown woman. You don’t have to be discreet. Stay here. Keep me company.”

“I’m living under my parents’ roof. That was my choice. I don’t want to upset them or make them think badly of you.”

“I don’t care what they think of me,” he countered quickly. “If you won’t stay here tonight, then how about this? We’ll get in the plane and I’ll fly us over to the coast. We’ll find a hotel right by the ocean.”

“Are you trying to seduce a woman who only has one good leg to stand on?”

“If I seduce you, you won’t have to stand on it.”

The rush of sensation was addictive. To fed again—the leftover memory of his mouth, the relaxation of the champagne, the May warmth, the delirium that hadn’t sorted everything out yet and sought to make sense. I got up, took my cane, and made my way along the lake’s edge, just moving because I needed to move. He walked beside me, between me and the lake; it wasn’t much of a stretch to worry I’d fall in. “I’ve got a lot on my mind,” I said. “The rest of me has trouble getting my attention.”

“All right,” he said, moving around to my left side and offering me his arm. “I’ll give you an arm, you loan me the rest of you, and I’ll show you around the cabin.”

I looked from him to the cabin, sitting beautifully in its new, pristine state. Renewal. Trust. Comfort. The lure of privacy between us. The fear of intimacy between us, because there’d be no room for common sense then.

I should leave. Keep my distance for now.

Bats and swallows flitted overhead, through streams of late-afternoon sunshine. An evening mist began to gather
on the lake; a lone mourning dove flew into the forest, as if headed across the ridge that led to the Hollow.

The Hollow. Suddenly we were connected to the same earth as the Hollow; the terrible memories were too close by and I saw them in Roan’s eyes and felt them in my own. “Stop thinking about it,” I said suddenly, as much to myself as to him. “You’re not alone here now.”

He looked at me gratefully. I slid my hand around the crook of his elbow, and we walked slowly up the slope.

I sat with queenly luxury in an overstuffed armchair in the cabin’s refurbished main room, next to the fireplace, my feet propped on a plush ottoman. Roan moved among the room’s brass lamps, heavy woven rugs, and dark furniture with a kind of charming masculine vagueness about the decor.
That’s a chair, that’s a table. They’re made of wood
.

“You’re almost as bad as I am. You’d never cut it as an antiques dealer,” I said gently. “That thing in the corner’s an armoire, not a
clothes box.
”

“Good God.” He tapped a knuckle on the armoire’s heavy doors. “So that’s why it cost so much.”

“You’re not talking to Martha Stewart here, believe me. I can only say that you have some nice sturdy old-fashioned furniture, and you don’t go in for froufrou, and it looks like mostly pine and oak to me, maybe Shaker or country style, and I like that floor lamp with the iron vines around the base.”

“They never let you write for the home section of the newspaper, did they?” His mild teasing brought up a bad subject—my discarded career. I smiled but quickly focused my attention on an old rug spread under my chair. “Turkish,” I said lamely, pointing. “Or some type of English Victorian design.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “I liked it because the pattern was green and white.” He angled between a thick coffee table and a deep, plush couch, then went to the door to the second room and gestured inside. “You should see
the bedroom,” he said. “And I’m not being coy, I mean you should see how good it looks.”

I got to my feet, went to the door, and peered in at a large bedstead of thick square posts in pale wood, possibly pine. The bed’s mattress was covered in dark green sheets and a voluptuous green comforter. Roan studied me quietly, his hands on his hips. “I like green,” he repeated. “Wolfgang’s wife got it all together for me last month. To bring here. She’s a decorator in Portland. I described the cabin and told her I liked
plain
and I liked green. But the first time I sat down on that comforter I felt like a big damned rabbit in an Easter basket.”

I laughed, then thought of Easter baskets, the McClendon sisters and Big Roan, Uncle Pete’s bastard son, the violence that Easter at Steckem Road. I turned and went back to my chair, sank down in it unsteadily, and looked at him. He came over and dropped to his heels beside my feet. We studied each other in acute silence for a few seconds. He picked my feet up and placed them back on the ottoman, then removed my hiking shoes and my socks as I stared, speechless and enthralled. He curved his hands around the foot of my injured leg and pressed gently with his fingers, massaging. “I’ve got no plan other than a foot massage,” he told me. “I want to help, if you’ll let me, because you keep shifting your leg as if it’s aching.”

Scattered warnings moved through my thoughts, but they couldn’t overcome the power of temptation. His hands felt so good. “The muscles twitch sometimes. The surgeon told me to expect it. He says it’s the nerves test-firing while they get their act back together. Growing pains.” Hurting and healing. We couldn’t have one without the other.

Roan molded his fingers around my scarred ankle. The sunset-streaked sky felt closer outside the enormous frame of a large new window in one wall; the warmth spreading through my breasts and belly became full, rich, and urgent. I closed my eyes to block him out, but that only magnified the stroking pressure of his hands.

I was letting him have his way with me, so to speak, poised on the chair with no willpower to stop him. He not only knew what he was doing, he was caught in the same spell. “I don’t know what to do about you,” I whispered. “I’m just so glad you’re alive.”

He went still; a chasm opened, mocking the charade of his restraint. He bowed his head slowly to my foot cradled in his hands, then rested his cheek against the pink line of scar tissue. “I almost lost you forever. I don’t want to let you out of my sight again. I don’t give a damn whether anyone understands how we can be this way with each other so fast. I want you.”

I was shaking. I feathered my hand over his hair, traced the outline of his features with quiet devotion as he raised his face to my touch. It was incredibly intimate, the rush, the energy we shared. Tender, shattering, the acceleration of emotion, a stark, sexual prowling unleashed by invisible signals. He got up, bent over me, and we kissed in long, smooth sequences of exploration. “Let’s be simple tonight,” he whispered as he reached for my hands. And I had my arms halfway up, to slip them around his shoulders, when I remembered how many years he’d let me agonize over him.

I pushed back from him. “Don’t do this to me. This isn’t fair and you know it.”

Roan gazed down at me with bitter amusement on his face. “Has our situation ever been fair?”

“
I love you
,” I yelled. “I know I do, whether it makes sense to love a man I haven’t seen in two decades or not. I love you. And if you’re using me to prove you can own me, I’ll still love you, but I’ll never touch you again.” I was pulling at him violently. “If you can’t tell me why you disappeared for twenty years, then what we are to each other is a lie.”

He straightened slowly. There was a stillness between us filled with challenge and expectation. Then he turned and walked into the bedroom. I moved to the edge of my chair and grabbed my cane, planning to follow him, but he
returned carrying a deep metal file box, dented and rusty at the corners. He set it on the ottoman in front of me, then dropped to his heels beside it and spun the dial on a small combination lock dangling from the lid clasp.

He looked at me for a moment without speaking. His jaw worked. “You may not want to touch me after you read these. There are more boxes. This one is just the letters from the early years.”

He opened the box and riffled through bulging file folders until he pulled out several wrinkled sheets of paper marked with a red tab. “This is a letter you need to read first,” he explained, laying it on my knees.

My hands shook. I looked down at yellowed sheets of old business stationery with R
ACAVAN, INC
. printed across the top. Slanted, passionately haphazard handwriting filled the pages as if Roan had put his thoughts down in a flood of emotion.