The Cedar Tree (Love Is Not Enough) (20 page)

"Katie's smarter than he is, and not as tired. Besides, he's not used to her lyin' to him and sneakin' around. He didn't believe me."

He flinched. "Why didn't you say somethin' to me?"

"Wouldn't have done no good…you've been lyin' to me, too." His grandfather paused. "Didn't reckon I could hog-tie you."

The ticking of the wind-up alarm clock on the bedside table sounded loud in the silence.

The tension in his body gradually relaxed. "I guess I'm kind of relieved."

"Sneakin' around with a good girl don't make you feel like much of a man."

"No."

The old man cleared his throat. "Katie's been under a lot of strain for a long time. That deal with Dave's been hard on all of 'em. And then her Mama bein' so frail carryin' this baby, and school…she's had a heavy load."

He nodded.

"You blowin' in like a hurricane, too, and then the thing with Lance couldn't have been easy. He's been her friend all her life. Lot of changes."

He tensed, waiting.

"It's been my experience in life that the number one reason young girls get married is to escape a situation."

The old man's words lay heavy between them.

"How'd you know about that?" he asked, at last.

"She wouldn't be carryin' on with you if she wasn't aimin' on marryin' you."

He swallowed hard. "Are you sayin' what she…feels for me ain't real?"

"I guess we'll see."

He closed his eyes as a thin layer of cold sweat oozed from his pores. He swallowed again. "I think I'm gonna puke."

His grandfather reached for the puke bowl on the table beside the bed and wordlessly handed it to him.

***

He woke later that morning to Katie sitting on the chair beside the bed in jeans and boots, her hands in the pockets of the coat she wore over her white sweatshirt.

He gave her a groggy half-grin. "Did I die and go to heaven?" he murmured.

Her eyes, already red and swollen, filled with tears again. She cast a quick glance over her shoulder then fell to her knees beside the bed. Leaning over him, she pressed her face to his un-bruised cheek.

"Gil, I'm so sorry," she whispered. "Are you okay?"

"I am now." He moved his aching head against her smooth, cool cheek. "Nice."

"Your poor face." She gently touched his cheek and then his shoulder. "This is my fault."

"It's not," he mumbled through his swollen mouth. The beautiful depths of her eyes mirrored real distress—his grandfather hadn't known what he was talking about. "I wanted to see you. I always wanna see you. How'd you get here?"

"I had a big fight with Dad and he finally brought me." She began to cry in earnest and pressed her lips gently to his. "They're trying to break us up. Gil, please don't go away somewhere. I love you."

"Shh…" He tasted her desperation on his tear-salted lips. "It'll be okay."

"I can't stand to lose you." 

"Katie, I'm not goin' anywhere."

She drew back a few inches, searching his gaze.

He rubbed his thumb across the smooth skin of her jaw, steadily holding her eyes. "No matter what."

She slowly nodded. He drew her to him and kissed her, sealing his promise with all the unsuspected tenderness she had found and unburied in him.

"Get your butt in the chair, Kate." Her dad's voice from the doorway lashed across the room.

She whirled to face her father's angry gaze. With his face chapped and reddened by the cold wind outside, Jon wore his chore clothes—worn brown coveralls sprinkled with hay bits and wet below the knees, and a heavy brown coat. He pulled off his black stocking cap and stuffed it in the back pocket of his coveralls, leaving his dark hair in disarray. Katie slowly rose to sit in the chair, her hands in her lap.

Jon's gaze leveled on him. "This level of…friendliness—" he bit out the words contemptuously, "didn't happen from just meetin' my girl in the barn one time, now did it?" He looked at Katie, shaking his head in disbelief. "Every time I think we've heard all the lies, there's more. Why d'you keep lyin' to me and Mom, Kate? I don't understand—"

"This is my fault, sir," he said.

Jon turned on him. "You don't have to tell me that. Before you came along she was a good kid. She's never lied to me or been sneaky in her life," he said, the anger in his haggard expression unable to hide his confusion. "I knew I couldn't trust
you
, but I never would've thought in a million years she'd…" he said thickly. He stopped and cleared his throat. "When Gene told me what he thought was goin' on, I didn't believe him."

Katie's head drooped toward her hands gripping on her lap.

"It won't happen anymore, sir," he said.

Jon's dark circled eyes, heavy with strain, narrowed. "I told you what I expected of you a few weeks ago and you didn't pay a lick of attention to it, so that don't mean much to me today."

"If it helps at all, sir, I—" he swallowed—"kept my pants on."

"I guess that'll have to do, won't it? If it's true."

"It is true, Dad," Katie flared. "Nothing like that happened. And it was me that wanted to meet him. It's not his fault."

Jon winced.

At her dad's expression, her jaw set. "I mean it. If you don't let him start coming to see me, I'll run off with him. For good."

"Katie…" he protested from the bed with a groan.

Her dad rasped his hand across the whisker stubble on his jaws, staring down at her as if seeing her for the first time…and the sight was a bewildering heartbreak.

"Go get in the pickup," Jon said, finally. "Your mother needs you at home."

She turned toward the bed and held his gaze for a long, distraught moment. Then she slowly rose and left the room.

Her dad looked at him. "If you weren't layin' there all busted up I'd thrash you within an inch of your life."

"Yes, sir."

"You meet
my
daughter—" Jon's piercing gaze blurred with tears that didn't fall—"my only little girl…in
my
barn…"

He looked away, ashamed as he had never been before in the presence of an angry father. "I meant it when I said I love her." He raised his eyes, swallowing hard. "I wanna marry her."

"Oh, God," Jon muttered, turning away. He rubbed the back of his neck as a minute passed. Then he jerked his handkerchief from his back pocket and blew his nose. "She thinks she's in love with you—" his lip curled disgustedly as he turned, shoving the handkerchief back into his pocket—"so thanks to that, I can't do anything with her short of tyin' her up in her room. If you wanna see her, you'll have to come to the house once a week where I can keep an eye on you. I guarantee she won't be sneakin' out of the house at night again." Her dad turned, heading for the door.

"Before you go?" He cleared his throat. "I appreciate you helpin' Gramps and Irvin with my arm last night."

Jon turned, his eyes narrowed. "They needed the help, but if I'd known all this other stuff—" he nodded in the direction Katie had gone—I would've come over just to break the other one."

***

The arm his grandfather and Irvin had set didn't give much discomfort, but the bruised knee, now the muddied mix of colors on an oil slick, proved a different matter. The knee throbbed with pain all night, a counterpoint to the turmoil of his thoughts, and on Saturday it prevented him from doing much besides lying in his grandfather's bed with it propped on a pillow. Katie didn't return.

On Sunday morning, he rose, determined to go to church to see her. He couldn't leave her to face all that on her own. His grandfather waited expressionlessly in the doorway while he struggled, one armed and sweating, to pull on his jeans. The room began to spin and his legs buckled. His grandfather caught him, hauled him back onto the bed, and then left for church.

He studied a crack splintering like a jagged lightning bolt across the yellowed plaster of the tall-ceilinged room. The crack ended at a dusty spider web. He turned his head to moodily eye the clock beside the bed. Ten thirty.

Was Katie at church? Sitting there small and defiant while everybody worked at getting her away from him?

The clock's ticking thumped dully inside his ears like he'd stuffed them with cotton. He scowled. Reaching for the clock, he hurled it into the hallway. It jangled indignantly for a second or two then fell silent.

He awakened later when his grandfather entered the room holding a grease-spotted paper bag. The old man sat on the chair beside the bed and bowed his head to offer a long blessing.

"Feelin' any better, Son?" his grandfather asked, finally, as he removed a paper bag of onion rings from the sack.

"Yeah."

"Brought you a double cheeseburger, mayonnaise, and large fries. That's right, ain't it?"

"Yeah." With an effort he pulled himself up on a pillow and reached for the paper wrapped burger. "How was church?"

"Fine." His grandfather poked an onion ring into his mouth. "Had a few visitors. Let's see, now…"

The old man launched into the family histories of the people involved, spending a lot of time trying to remember how they were related to the family they were visiting.

Who cared? He didn't even know any of them.

"Was Katie there?" he asked, interrupting the flow of words.

The old man nodded, stretching out his legs.

"She look like she was doin' okay?"

"Well—" his grandfather fished around in his shirt pocket for a toothpick—"she looked stubborn."

He wadded his paper wrapping and threw it at the empty bag. It missed. Lying back on the pillows, he scowled up at the ceiling, his jaw tight.

His grandfather cleared his throat. "'Bout like that."

"What else d'you expect?"

"Nothin'." The old man regarded him steadily, chewing his toothpick. "I've seen more star-crossed lovers than you could shake a stick at. They all look the same." His grandfather's eyes held a sudden shadow. "In fact, you remind me a powerful lot of somebody I used to know.

"Who? You?"

"No," the old man chuckled. "Me and Gramma wasn't never star crossed. She knew what she wanted and had me brought up to scratch right quick."

"Well, Gramps, when you're about a hundred years old, you've just about seen everything," he said testily. "I'm gettin' up."

"Suit yourself, but you'll have to put on a shirt. You're havin' company later."

His grandfather fetched a wooden crutch from the closet under the stairs and one of his collarless shirts then tore off the shirt's arm at the shoulder to fit over the cast.

A few minutes later, he hobbled to his living room chair and propped his foot on an overturned bucket that had once held five gallons of motor oil. Almost instantly, he slept again.

Just at dark, a knock on the door awakened him. The room filled with noise and laughter as the church's youth group filed in. He straightened in his chair and rubbed his hand over the whisker stubble on his jaws, seeking Katie. She entered last, her anxious gaze flying to his. Their eyes held, oblivious to everyone else. She handed a plastic container to one of the girls then crossed the room to his chair.

"Are you better?" She considered him with her head to the side as she slipped off her coat to reveal a blue sweater and a long, black skirt hugging her slender form. The soft sweater provided a dark backdrop for the shining fall of unbound hair down her back and set off the blue of her eyes.

"Yeah." He grinned, mindful of his sore mouth. Then he lowered his voice. "You look good. I wish I could see you out of both my eyes."

She smiled. "You
are
better. I made you some cookies."

"This's my lucky day."

"You look it," she said with a laugh. She leaned to hand him her coat, filling his senses with the smell of frosty air and scent from her perfume. Her fingers clung to his. "Don't let anything fall out of the pocket," she murmured.

He grinned. "I'll take care of your pocket."

Her fingers slowly brushed away from his while he searched her gaze. His grandfather had been so wrong. Everything was exactly the same between them. Better even.

He gradually became aware of Karl speaking to him from a seat at one end of his grandfather's dusty sofa.

"…your pickup hauled down to the body shop," Karl said.

He reluctantly turned. Karl's direct gaze showed knowledge of what had happened in the barn, but most of his disgust seemed to be directed at Katie in the gaze he raked over her. She coldly returned her brother's look then turned toward the kitchen.

"Thanks for takin' care of it, Karl. I owe you," he said. "Is it pretty bad?"

"The guy didn't think the frame got tweaked," Karl said. "He thought he'd have it finished by the end of the week."

Lance sat on the other end of the sofa with his gaze—oozing misery—fixed on Katie as she crossed the room.

"Sweet," he said, frowning. That tall scarecrow had better quit looking at Katie like that… "I should be able to drive by then."

Lance stared at the doorway until Katie reappeared a few minutes later, and then watched her cross the room with a plate of cookies and a glass of milk.

"You remembered I liked these from that day we moved cows and you dumped the ice chest on me?" He took the goodies from her, grinning.

She smiled and glanced at him from beneath her lashes. "Maybe."

He drank deeply of the cold milk then bit into a chocolate chip cookie. "I thought you were indifferent to me."

"Maybe I wasn't."

He glanced up, intercepting a look of stark pain behind Lance's thick glasses. The other man's Adam's apple bobbed convulsively and his prominent ears reddened. He jerked to his feet and stumbled toward the kitchen, bumping into a young woman entering the room with a notebook.

"Katie, we've got to get this Christmas program figured out," the girl said, crossing the room.

"I don't want to organize it this time, Laura," Katie said with a pained expression.

"You don't want to do anything with us anymore—" Laura eyed her with an irritated frown—"but that's too bad. You're the best at organizing this stuff."

Katie reluctantly took the notebook and sat next to her brother on the sofa.