Forever After (7 page)

She presented her hand, turning her wrist so the stones caught the light.

“How long have you been carrying this rock around?”

“Since about nine o’clock last night. Isn’t it beautiful?”

He shielded his eyes, pretending to be blinded by the glare.

She rewarded him with a schoolgirl giggle.

“I’m happy for you, Ma. I really am.” The sudden lump in his throat took him by surprise. He swallowed over it and cleared his throat. “So, have you set a date?”

“Not yet, but we don’t want to wait too long. It will be a quiet, private ceremony. We’ve talked about one of those wedding cruise packages.” She looked up at him with a little shrug, as if trying to gauge his opinion of the idea.

“Well, let me know when you decide. I’m trying to set up some people to come in and tear out a couple of walls, maybe paint a room or two black.”

She stared at him. “You’re going to paint—?”

“Kidding, Ma. You can breathe now.”

“Oh, you!” She landed a playful punch to his shoulder.

“Ow!” He rubbed the spot in feigned agony.

But she turned serious, cupping his unshaved cheek in her palm. “It’s good to have my Luc back. Even if I do want to clobber him sometimes.”

He wrinkled his nose and grinned at her.

She looked at the clock. “You’d better get moving. Don’t you have PT this morning?”

He nodded. “I don’t know why I’m bothering, though. I don’t think it’s helping.”

“Yes, it is.” She shook a finger in his face. “You’re just too close to see it. You’re so much better, Lucas. Don’t you dare give up now.”

He rolled his eyes. “Okay, I’m goin’, I’m goin’. …”

“That’s more like it.” She slung her purse over one shoulder. “Speaking of which, I’d better get a move on, too. I might be late tonight—don’t wait up.”

He shook his head. “Man, is
that
a strange switch of roles.”

“Hey, at least I never miss curfew, which is more than a certain young man I remember can say.” Laughing, she went out through the garage.

He went to the sink and watched her car back out of the driveway. As hard as it was to think about Ma married to anyone but Pop, he had to admit it was good to see her smiling again. And Geoff was a good guy. A little stuffy, maybe—especially compared to Pop. But he was good to Ma, and he obviously made her happy. He wouldn’t begrudge her that.

He thought about what his mother had said. He
was
better, at least emotionally. There had been some dark days after the fire. He didn’t remember a lot of them, didn’t want to remember. Even after he’d graduated from the wheelchair to the walker last spring, he’d plunged into a depression so deep he hadn’t been sure he would ever find his way out.

He’d never told his mom—maybe she’d guessed—but there had been days he’d prayed to die. He never could have done anything … desperate. That would have killed Ma after losing Pop. But he could beg God to take him. And he had.

But it wasn’t his mental health Ma had been talking about this morning. She meant his physical condition.
Was
the physical therapy making a difference? Was he still improving, getting more mobility back? His legs were a mess. Flesh and muscle had been torn and scarred, and he was full of enough plates and pins to send airport metal detectors into conniptions.

It would have been bad enough if he’d only injured one leg, but to have both of them messed up was too much to deal with. His left leg was the worst. Since the surgeries, he’d had almost a year to heal. His doctors said he’d likely seen most of the improvement he was going to see. If that was true, those hunks of concrete had crushed more than his legs.

But maybe the doctors were wrong. He dumped his coffee in the sink and put his mug in the dishwasher. He needed for them to be wrong.

He couldn’t let himself think too hard about what life would be like if he had to live with this limp, with the cane, if he couldn’t get in good enough physical shape to get back on with the fire department. It was the only thing he’d ever wanted—from the time he was a kid. To be a firefighter like Pop. And with Pop gone, he wanted it even worse.

Otherwise, nothing made sense anymore. Nothing.

She’d become an actress … to the point that sometimes she even convinced herself.

7

Friday, November 21

J
enna stared at the boxes stacked five-deep in the living room and wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her T-shirt.

As relieved as she was to have sold her house in less than two weeks—and for the asking price—it was sobering to realize that as of next week’s closing she would officially be homeless. Not homeless as in needing the homeless shelter, of course, but homeless in the sense that she was twenty-nine years old and couldn’t even provide for herself. Thank goodness she still had Bill and Clarissa.

For some odd reason, as she’d packed up her belongings and looked around this place that had been her home for a decade, she’d had flashbacks of her childhood home.

Sometimes when she closed her eyes she could smell the stale cigarette smoke and the mold growing in the corners of the bathtub in the two-bedroom mobile home in a run-down trailer park in St. Louis. She
could hear the mice skittering behind the walls, and the Jacksons next door launching words at each other that even her mother didn’t use.

Shaking off a reality she didn’t want to claim any longer, she reached for the goldfish charm at her throat and rubbed it till it grew warm beneath her fingers. She ran her palm over the smooth finish of the dining room table and its matching chairs and hutch. Dug her toes into the plush carpeting as if she could tether herself to the luxury it represented.

This house wasn’t rich by many standards, certainly not in Bill and Clarissa’s eyes. But compared to where she’d grown up, it was a mansion. It had taken years of pinching herself to believe she could possibly deserve to live someplace like this. That she could be trusted to care for a real home with nice furniture and original paintings on the wall, and carpet that wasn’t embedded with oil and spaghetti sauce and blood.

She wouldn’t be here to watch the trees grow tall, or to see the flowers and perennials she’d planted come to life next spring.

It was beginning to hit her: she’d be at the mercy of Bill and Clarissa—for everything—while she was in their home.

She still hadn’t mentioned Bryn Hennesey to Zach’s parents. Every time she and Bryn got together, she was afraid Clarissa would ask where she’d been, and afraid Bryn would ask if she’d told the Morgans they’d been spending time together. She feared running into Clarissa when she and Bryn were together, though that was unlikely, since they didn’t frequent any of the Morgans’ high-class haunts.

She wasn’t about to give up her friendship with Bryn, but something told her she’d better wait until she was firmly ensconced in the Morgans’ house before she let that cat out of the bag.

She hauled three boxes out to the garage and came back inside to start working on the kitchen. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, she separated stacks of newspaper and began wrapping breakables. Thanksgiving was next week, but she wouldn’t need her dishes since the Morgans had invited her to spend the holiday with them. Last year, Thanksgiving—and Christmas, too—had gone uncelebrated with Zach so recently buried.

Oddly, packing up this house that she and Zach had shared, wrapping dishes that had been wedding gifts, and storing away decorative items she would have no use for at the Morgans’ had made her think more about Zach than she had in months.

She took a small measure of comfort in the fact that in the act of leaving this home they’d shared, she felt twinges of the emotions she’d feigned so well in the past year. Perhaps she’d loved Zachary Morgan more than she gave herself credit for.

But shouldn’t a woman
know
whether or not she loved the man who’d been her husband for more than ten years? She’d thought she was over the agony of wondering why Bryn and Susan Marlowe, Emily Vermontez, and even Garrett Edmonds could all mourn the loss of their spouses passionately and publicly, while she had to pretend.

Why couldn’t she have loved her husband wholeheartedly? Even with the tension that was sometimes between them, Zach treated her with kindness. He had been a good man in life—and a hero in death.

Lucas’s words about how much Zach had loved her were disturbing. In a deep way. She hated that she’d grown so adept at pretending. She’d become an actress … to the point that sometimes she even convinced herself.

The phone rang, echoing in the empty space. Crumpling the last sheet of newsprint, she jumped up and grabbed the phone on the third ring. “Hello?”

“Jenna? Hey, it’s Bryn. How’s the packing going?”

“It’s going.”

“Do you need a break?”

“I need one … not sure I have time to take one.”

“What if I bring pizza over? I can help you pack until five or so.”

“Hey, I can’t turn down an offer like that!” She smiled into the phone. “Make it half pepperoni and you’ve got a deal.”

Thirty minutes later, the two of them sat on barstools at the kitchen counter washing down pizza with Diet Coke.

“I keep forgetting to tell you.” Bryn wiped pizza sauce from the corner of her mouth. “Remember that day we stopped by the shelter and Sparky found that gasoline?”

Jenna nodded, remembering how anxious the dog’s barking and growling had made her.

“He did it again the other day. At the shelter. Sparky almost never acts like that, so I let him take the lead. It was the craziest thing. … It was like he was a bloodhound or something. He led me to a pile of debris beside the Dumpster east of the building—sniffed out a can of paint solvent that was buried in all the remodeling trash.”

“Somebody needs to haul that stuff off before there’s another fire.”

“No kidding. But you should have seen Sparky. He just stood there beside the Dumpster, waiting for me to praise him.”

“Why would a dog sniff out something like that? I could see if it was a rabbit or a cat or something, but paint solvent?”

“I know. It’s almost like he’s been trained to detect it.”

“Maybe he was. Does anybody know where that homeless guy got him?”

“No, I’m pretty sure Sparky was just a pup when Charlie got him.” She frowned. “But now that you mention it, I’m not sure where Charlie adopted him from. I always assumed it was the Humane Society, but I’ll ask him.”

“You still see him?” Charlie was a homeless guy Bryn had taken a liking to when she volunteered at the shelter. He’d been moved to another shelter in Springfield after the fire.

“Once in a while,” Bryn said. “We’re trying to move him back to the Falls once the shelter is up and running. Susan Marlowe wants him to come on staff.”

“On staff? She has a budget for that?”

“Well … not exactly paid. We’re still dependent on volunteers. But she could give Charlie room and board. That’s the arrangement he has now in Springfield, and Susan said she’d offer him the same.”

“Maybe Charlie could take Sparky back. Aren’t you still trying to find a new home for him?”

“I thought of that, but Susan wasn’t crazy about the idea. She’s not sure they’re even going to let clients keep animals this time around. Since we’re coming up against a lot of opposition to reopening the shelter, she’s trying to avoid anything the least bit controversial.”

“What will you do about the dog then?”

Bryn’s shoulders slumped. “I don’t know. I feel bad Susan is having to fight every step of the way. If it wasn’t for the fire—”

“Hey, it’s not your fault. From what I hear, it’s really not the fire that has everybody so skittish.”

“Well, it sure hasn’t helped.”

Rightfully or not—Bryn shouldered some of the blame for the community’s resistance to the shelter. Letters to the editor in the
Courier
had been running two-to-one against the shelter, and some of them bordered on malicious.

Jenna tried to reassure her. “From what I’ve heard, it has a lot more to do with the assault.” A few months before the fatal fire last winter, a man staying in the shelter had tried to rape a teenage resident. After that, Bryn’s husband had forbade her to volunteer at the shelter. She’d secretly continued against Adam’s will, which only added to her guilt. “People are just worried about the kind of people a homeless shelter brings in to town.”

Word got around that James Friar had been convicted of the assault at the shelter, and when people learned that Friar was not only mentally ill but an addict as well, opinions of the shelter and its mission soured quickly. It didn’t help that Friar’s family had been vocal about the shelter’s supposed negligence in protecting the teen. The Friars were long-time residents of the Falls, but they lived—in Clarissa’s words—on the wrong side of the tracks. A ranting letter to the editor from Friar’s mother had been published with embarrassing misspellings and grammatical errors intact. Jenna had to wonder if the paper edited letters from people on the “right side of the tracks.”

“I don’t have a clue what I’m going to do about the dogs.” Bryn seemed eager to change the subject.

“You really can’t keep him?”

Her friend shook her head. “There is no way Garrett and I can have both of the dogs at his place. And believe me, it will be easier to find a home for Sparky than for Boss.”

Jenna grinned. “I see your point.” Boss was Garrett’s bulldog mutt.

“Besides, Garrett’s a lot more attached than I am. I’m more worried about how my dad will feel to see Sparky go to someone else.”

Jenna frowned and an idea started brewing. “You don’t think the fire department would take him, do you? I remember Zach talking about Springfield using arson detection dogs. He was always wanting to get something like that started here. Maybe somebody at the station could train Sparky to be an arson dog?”

Bryn lit up. “That’s not a half bad idea. He’s definitely got a nose for it.”

“Maybe I could talk to someone for you. Actually, I ran into Lucas Vermontez the other night at Java Joint. He might know who to talk to at the station.”