A Place to Call Home (37 page)

I couldn’t breathe. I lifted my gaze to Roan’s stark scrutiny. “You have a son?” He hesitated, then nodded. My heart twisted. “You could have told me.”

His eyes held my fixed gaze. “I adopted him.”

“All right. Then you knew his mother? You must have loved her. Who was she?”

“I didn’t love her,” he said flatly. “I lived with her and the boy for a few years. The years right after I ran away. Then she died. The boy was only about seven then.”

“Why couldn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t you risk having the family find out where you were and that you were raising a child? Did you really think I’d reject you because you—”

“Claire, listen to me.” Roan’s face was brutal in the shadows sliding into the old cabin. “His name’s Matthew.”

I blinked. “Matthew?”

Roan put a hand over mine and gripped hard. “Sally McClendon was his mother.”

I sat back, stunned. The truth sifted through me. “
Matthew
,” I whispered. My cousin. My Uncle Pete’s son.

Roan had raised Matthew Delaney.

T
he moon was a high, white coin in the night sky, its light cast down as shimmering silver on the lake’s black mirror. Frogs sang their high-pitched chant in celebration of the new season, fresh, urgent life seeking company in the darkness. A soft, sweet-scented breeze moved through the water oaks. Deceptive serenity.

I sat on the edge of the new porch of the cabin. Roan stood on the thick carpet of sod in the yard, his hands shoved in his trouser pockets and his shoulders hunched. We’d hammered facts into meaningless strings of words; it was time to be still, be quiet, sort through the labyrinth of emotion.

There are brands of jealousy too primitive for reason; I remembered Sally so well, the big-breasted, hard-eyed teenager from the shacks of Steckem Road. She and I had recognized everything that was special about Roan when we were growing up. She deserved sympathy, but I sat there scalding myself with images of her wrapped around Big Roan and then Roan
. Did you? With her
?

As a boy he’d listened to Sally talk about her daydreams; when she left he had ideas about where she’d gone. He found her living in a small apartment and working at a strip club in some town he didn’t name.

And she took him in, hid him, and he stayed with her for the next few years.

“I’m glad Sally helped you. Thank God for that,” I said.

Roan came over and sat down on the porch steps beside me. “I’m no saint,” he muttered. “But I didn’t sleep with her. Room and board. That’s all it was. She knew I was always remembering her and my old man.”

“I was thinking you were only human. And you owed her.”

Roan turned and eyed me quietly. “I didn’t owe her that kind of debt. My old man had already made a few payments.”

“I’m only saying—”

“I know.” He scrubbed a hand over his face wearily. “But she didn’t need anybody else pawing her. She got plenty of that at her job. She needed me to be her friend and baby-sitter.”

I nodded, relieved. Sally got him a job, the only job where no one asked questions. He worked in a back-alley garage, a chop shop, dismantling stolen cars. He was good at that, very good, the boy who had a way with mechanical things, and could make a lot of money at it.

“I went out with the Jacksonville cops one night,” I offered, “when they busted a chop shop.” It was a lame effort to convey empathy. I hesitated. Then, “I don’t give a damn if you cut up stolen cars. It doesn’t matter now.”

“I’ve reformed,” he answered with a certain bleak humor.

I felt feverish. “What happened to Sally?”

“She was killed.”

“How?”

“Drugs, booze. She got stoned and picked up the wrong guy at a bar one night, and he beat her to death in a motel room.”

“How old were you then? How long had you been living with her?”

“I was about nineteen, so I’d been with her and Matthew
for maybe four years. Matthew had counted on me for as long as he could remember. Hell, Claire, I’d changed his diapers, fed him, taught him games, read bedtime stories to him. Sally loved him, she really did, and she was as good to him as she knew how to be, but she’d disappear sometimes. I took care of him. I always did.”

“You could have asked me for help after I was old enough to make my own decisions. And the family—”

“Don’t tell me that. I’ll never believe it about the family. Your folks wouldn’t publicly admit Matthew was their own blood kin, much less take him in to raise. They’d have turned him over to foster care just like they did to me. They wouldn’t have let me raise him either.”

“You’re wrong. They’d have loved him. They’d have welcomed you and him back. They wouldn’t have made the mistake they made before, when they hurt you.”

“I’m not going to argue a useless point. It’s done. I pretty much stole him after Sally died. Got him a fake birth certificate, changed his last name to Sullivan, and we headed west as far as we could go.”

“Oh, Roan.” A man accustomed to extremes of loyalty and rejection doesn’t deserve a glib assurance that there’s nothing left to fear or a promise of simple solutions. He hadn’t stolen Matthew, he’d saved him. When the family learned what he’d done, he’d be showered with more love and admiration than he could imagine. And so would Matthew. “We have to tell them,” I said desperately.

“They don’t want him. And believe me, he doesn’t want them. He knows all about his history. He’s not bitter, he just understands that there’s nothing for him to come back to.”

“Oh,
Roan
. There’s so much, and so much has changed. Uncle Pete was killed years ago in a hunting accident. Harold was killed on the stock-car track. Arlan’s pretty much deserted the family. He’s in Louisiana and he’s not coming back. You don’t have to deal with any of them.”

“I know all about Pete and his boys,” Roan said darkly.
“I made it my business to find out about them over the years. About the whole family. There’s not much I don’t know.”

“I see.” Silence. “I can’t promise that the whole Maloney-Delaney clan will throw open their arms to Matthew, but I
know
my folks will—”

Roan laughed harshly. “You’re wrong. I’ll take any shit anybody can dish out, but I don’t want him treated like shit, Claire. And I don’t want you put in the middle of a mess either.”

I moved around in front of him on the steps, pushing his thighs apart and balancing on the knee of my good leg, leaning into his chest with my hands curved around his face. “You’ll feel better when we’ve talked all this over a few times. We can resolve this. It will be all right.”

He covered my hands gently. “I’ve wanted to see you every day for twenty years. I didn’t know how in the hell we could deal with what I had to tell you, and I still don’t know. But I do love you. Don’t ever doubt that.”

I put my arms around him. For twenty years he’d hidden the truth from everyone, even me, when I could have been trusted, I would have helped him. But no one had given him many choices. He had offered an incredible act of devotion and sacrifice to protect a child’s innocence in return for the innocence he and I had lost. And we had lost each other for twenty years because so much trust and hope had been hammered out of him.

“I’ve never cared what other people said about us,” I whispered. “All that matters is that I know
who you are
again. Hello.
Hello, boy
.”

His eyes glittered. He laughed hoarsely and then kissed me, and we were frantic with relief, clinging to each other. He stroked my hair and face, the years fading and shifting, sugar between our tongues, children’s memories burned away in a flash.

“You want simplicity?” I asked. “Then stop talking and do something.”

He carried me inside and put me on that deep green new bed in the old cabin. Slowly, while I watched him, he removed his clothes and then, slowly, he helped me undress. “Well, here we are,” he said quietly, looking at me in ways that brought goosebumps to my skin.

I touched him between the thighs with my fingertips. “This is about the only part of you I never got to see when we were kids.”

“Explore all you like,” he answered, and carefully cupped his hand over me. “As long as I get the same opportunity.”

Breathless, I placed kisses down his body and he did the same to mine. We lay together, naked, our hands moving over each other. We were trembling, both of us, caught up helplessly in the sensations and newness of each other’s sexuality; it was awkward at moments, intense, blindly compelling to share, signaling with touch and breath, small sounds and movements, lost in a place as hot and emotional as a summer night filled with lightning. His eyes darkened to the color of old pewter, endlessly searching my face for clues. “We would have been like this years ago—the first time—if we’d had the chance,” he said softly. “Not a whole lot of grace to it, but plenty of love.”

“A little grace and a lot of love is all I need right now,” I told him. “This is our first time. This is our time tonight.”

He eased a pillow under my injured leg; it didn’t hurt, I told him, and he swore he’d be careful, and I knew he would be. He made my body bend like a flower. When he was poised between my thighs, I curled my fingers around him, my other arm draped around his neck. I urged him gently forward. He put his arms under my shoulders, cradling my head, his mouth just above mine. “Help me go where I belong,” he whispered.

And I did.

T
here was room for hope and reconciliation. I would coax Matthew McClendon Delaney Sullivan back home. I would bring him back—Uncle Pete’s abandoned boy, my grown cousin, Roan’s adopted son, a testament to our faith in each other and to Roan’s own large heart. All of Roan’s mysteries would be explained, and anyone who had ever doubted him would be ashamed of themselves. I felt more serene and hopeful than I had in months. In years.

I took so much for granted.

My parents had formed a protective wall around their children when we were small, and Mama always told me that someday I would be big enough to see over her and Daddy and then I’d climb out and move beyond them. But the thing about parents, she said, is that their wall would always be there, backing me up, no matter how old and ignorant and small I might think they had become from my view outside their boundaries.

“Thank you for calling last night to let us know you’d be home by morning,” Mama said briskly when Roan and I returned to the farm at dawn. “We appreciate the courtesy.”

“Roan and I had a lot to talk about,” I answered, which at least proffered a dignified alibi. “And I read some
of the letters he wrote to me over the years. There are a lot of them.”

But Mama and Daddy stood there sphinxlike in their bathrobes, both of them obviously struggling to deal with the fact that we were adults who had spent the night together, probably committing acts they didn’t want to imagine. Mama expected it, of course, and was just relieved we hadn’t left town.

Daddy looked unhappy but all he said was, “I’m sure y’all talked up a storm.”

Roan stepped ahead of me, facing them, and I put a hand on his shoulder. “I asked Claire to visit the West Coast with me for a few days,” he said quietly. “Seattle.”

Mama’s face turned white. Daddy thrust out his chin. “Seattle?” he barked. “You’re taking her to your place in Seattle? Why?”

“It’s all right,” I said gently. “Don’t worry. It’s just a trip we need to make.”

“You promised,” Mama reminded me.

“We’ll be back,” I repeated. “And we’ll bring y’all a gift.”

By early afternoon we had flown more than halfway across the country, turning back the clock in more ways than artificial time zones. There’d been little debate about the choice of travel: Roan’s Cessna was out of the question—I wasn’t up to a couple of grueling days spent airport-hopping from coast to coast in a cramped private plane. We flew first class.

My voice was a hoarse croak, and Roan’s deep, faded drawl had the rasp of a too-tightly-strung cello. My leg throbbed from negotiating the cavernous terminal and concourses at the airport in Atlanta. I refused to use a wheelchair.

His mood was brittle. So was mine. At that moment it was hard to believe we’d been in bed together not many hours earlier, as close and intimate as two people can be.