The House Near the River (15 page)

She closed her eyes, aching inside. Never before had she admitted even to herself that the choice had been a hard one, that if it had just been about her she might have stayed with Matthew.

Her life was not complete without him. She caught the thought and stomped it down. What a thing for a modern woman to think! She was complete in herself.

She tried to focus on David, refusing to more than glance through the car windows. She wished Dad would hurry and they could leave, but he’d gone around to the back porch.

Then her glance was caught, locked in place and she saw dimly through the increasing rainfall the dim figure of Clemmie, her hand across her forehead as though shading her eyes from the too bright sun. Her sunbonnet dangled from its strings down her back. She looked worried and Angie wondered what was wrong.

Then she was gone and other flashes moved before her eyes. She saw Danny and Tobe, looking like they were arguing with each other, and then in another scene, Sharon, her sweet face
seeming
concerned.

Sharon! Grandma! She found herself weeping for the loss that suddenly
was
so final and for the words left unsaid.

“What’s wrong, Ange?” David’s little voice asked and, anxious not to alarm him, she brushed the tears away and looked up with an attempt at a smile. “Just missing Grandma,” she said.

“Gone to be with Mommy
in Heaven,”
he
tried to reassure her.

She hugged him and then was grateful when Dad came back to the car, not commenting as they started down the road again.

In the months since she’d come back, Angie had worked hard on focusing on the real world around her, knowing it wasn’t healthy to linger in thoughts of the 40s. But the drive back home from the Oklahoma farm was a time of being lost in those memories. David slept most of the way and Dad seemed absorbed in his driving and his own thoughts. He and his mother had been close. She knew he felt her loss keenly.

She watched the modern highway unwind in front of her and thought of th
e
old roadways, rutted with mud and studded with bumps, and the Nash that would be a collectible if by chance it still survived.

Sometimes it seemed to her that those days in the past were more real to her than the day around her. Ice pellets turned to rain as they traveled further south and she peered past flashing windshield wipers and pouring rain, factors that added to her sense of unreality.

The fact was that she was homesick. She longed to hear Matthew’s voice, to feel his arm around her shoulders. She wanted to make him feel better and she felt very sure he was missing her at least as much as she missed him.

They’d just cross
ed
the river bridge, the speed limit
going
up
by five miles an hour and she knew they were back in Texas. She was going further from Matthew with each mile they drove.

“Dad,” she choked out the word, then when he glanced at her didn’t know what to say.

“I’m so sorry
about Grandma,” she finally thought of something she wanted to say.

“Right back at you.” His look was serious. “You know you meant the world to her. In fact, it was only because of her that you came to us.”

She stared in him in bewilderment. “What d
o
you mean?”

“I figured your mom had told you the story about how you were adopted.”

She shook her head. “I always knew I was adopted, you make certain of that, but even as a little girl I knew Mom wanted to pretend that I’d been born to her and that if I talked about being adopted, she would be sad.”

He frowned, then shook his head.  “Sorry, honey, guess we both liked to pretend a little that you were always ours.”

“I was,” she assured him. “That’s why I never felt the need to go looking for my biological parents the way some adoptees do.”

He shook his head. “Or maybe we managed to give you the impression that you would be betraying us if you went looking.”

She couldn’t bear to see him blaming himself.
She nodded to where David was slumped in sleep in his car seat in the back. “Looks like the little guy gave it up.”

He nodded.

“It was a hard choice whether to leave him with Ivy or take him along. I’m glad you let him go. At least the three of us were together.”

He reached over to touch her hand. “You were very much wanted, Angie. You’ve never seen a couple as happy as your mom and I were when Rose told us about you.”

“Grandma told you.”

He nodded. “It seemed a young woman she knew was having a baby and couldn’t provide a good home so she wanted to find the right parents. She knew Rose and believed her son and his wife would be that.”

It was s
omething
like
she’d always supposed the story to be. So common and yet uncommonly painful. “You agreed and there was an adoption. Did you meet my . . .the woman?”

“No, it was a private adoption, arranged by our lawyer. Your grandmother was the go-between, the woman didn’t want anyone else to know her identity. You’ve got to understand, we were so eager. We weren’t about to botch the deal by insisting on anything, but it was all perfectly legal.”

“And that’s all there was to it. It was just that simple?”

He nodded.

“I think Grandma started to tell me about it, just before she went to sleep and then had the stroke
,
” her sentence ended on a quaver.

“Tell you what?”

“Who my mother was. Doesn’t it occur to you, Dad, that she was probably someone you knew if she was a friend of Grandma’s.”

He frowned. “No, I don’t believe that. Mom was the kind of woman who befriended total strangers and those same strangers sat down and confid
ed
their life stories to her. I’m sure she was no one in our circle of acquaintances.”

Feeling exhausted, Angie leaned her head back. “Considering everything, Dad, if you don’t mind, I would like to find out what I can about my biological family.”

“Why should I mind?” He grinned. “You can’t go looking for your ‘real’ father, Angie, because that’s who I am.”

She smiled. “My biological father,” she said. “I believe that’s the correct term.”

The rain slackened and a stream of light broke through the thick clouds.  “It’s going to be tough because we have so little information, but I will do what I can to help you.”

As she took her turn at the wheel and Clarence slipped into a snooze in the passenger’s seat, Angie tried to concentrate on how she would go looking for her own history. As an adult and with her adopted father’s agreement, surely she would have a right to see her own birth certificate, the original one where her birth parents would be named.

But even as she planned, her thoughts and feelings seemed to steal out like tendrils of a plant seeking the spring sun. It was the strangest feeling, but it was almost as though in leaving the farm and driving back home, she was not moving away from Matthew but toward him.

The intensity of her need to be close to him grew inside her until she thought she would die of it.

He considered the fact that it was only a couple of months to Pearl Harbor Day, the anniversary of the Japanese attack in 1941. He and Ange had met on the next day.

The next day five years ago. Somehow it seemed important that the meeting happened so that she remembered it, so that it wasn’t just his memory.

But what could he do about it? He wasn’t the one who walked in time, but was powerless
;
all he had was this homing instinct that seemed to lead him to her and which
now
was failing him big time.

Matthew tried to make himself focus on the matter at hand. He had to build some kind of life for himself or else be a burden on his family and today was important to accomplishing that goal.

The wind blew cold, a blue norther moving through his new clothes and threatening to tug
the hat from his head. He wore his usual
khaki
pants and cotton shirt, he didn’t want to look like a man too rich to need a loan. But
neither
did he want to look like such a deadbeat that nobody would want to lend him a dime.

He’d found the right spot. A little over a hundred acres with a shack
to live in
and a little tree
-
lined creek that ran across the back  of the property. Somebody else had given up on it, but it was good land and , strangely enough, it adjoined the country school he’d found that day.

He hadn’t look
ed
any further. It was the only place where he could go and feel
the closeness
of the woman he loved. Others would think he was insane if he told them, not that he was about to say a word to anybody, but he felt as though he could almost keep going if that sense of
nearness
could be sustained.

That made getting this financing doubly important. He needed land and
e
quipment to start his own  operation and be independent. He knew that working for somebody else, no matter how successfully, he would eventually crack and all the pain of the last few years would come running out of his head.

But to be able to work alone and to feel Ange’s closeness, even if it was some kind of delusion, was something to keep him going.

He took a deep breath and walked into the office where, with his current boss’s backing, the money he’d put away, and his history as a veteran, he was welcomed.

He walked out with the loan arranged and the farm as good as his. He would continue to work
away from home
part-time for the next year while he got his farm started. He felt little elation, but only a certain stability under his feet, as though he would manage to keep going even if he had to fight off despair each day of his life.

“Are congratulations in order?” a feminine voice rang across his thoughts and
he
looked up to see his boss’s daughter standing on the pavement in front of him.

Salina
Henderson
Jordan,
a dark-haired beauty who like his sister, had lost her husband during the war, kept books for her father, but lived in the nearby town with her small son. She and Matthew were speaking acquaintances and he’d gotten the feeling she’d like to get to know him better
so that he’d been careful to be only polite, no more.

He squirmed at the idea that she knew about his business, knew about his attempt to get a loan, but supposed it was only natural that  the widowed
Henderson
talked about what was going on with his only daughter.

He owed
John
a lot so he had no choice but to be courteous to Salina. He nodded. “Congratulations, if you consider taking on a burden of debt cause.”

Her laughter sounded like water rippling over stones. “It’s a start,” she said, “I’m sure you’re going to be very successful. My dad has a high opinion of your skills.”

His nod
ded acceptance of
the compliment.

She slipped her arm under his. “Let’s go celebrate,” she suggested, “a  cup of coffee somewhere downtown.”

As always, he only wanted to be alone, to at least go back to work where he could drown encroaching thoughts in labor. But he thought of all he owed Harry and he nodded. “Just a quick cup.”

She shivered elaborately. “It’s so cold out, I could do with a warm
-
up.” She led the way, clinging to his arm as they walked the couple of blocks downtown to the square that surrounded the old courthouse. The scent of cotton burrs burning was in the air and the stores buzzed with activity, even on a weekday. McKinney was a prosperous little town, its money coming from the solid agricultural community that surrounded it. The soil was no better than back at home, but the rainfall was more than doubled. If he could pour water from Texas onto the farm back home, life would be a whole lot easier for Clemmie and her family.

It was mid-morning and he hadn’t had breakfast so he ordered biscuits and ham gravy to go with his coffee and she did the same. He didn’t say much, she kept the talk going, chatting about her father and his farms, non-threatening conversation that he could let roll over him while he ate.

“I thought we’d live happily ever after,” she said matter-of-factly and he realized that he’d lost the thread of what she was saying.

“Mark was my boyfriend from the time we were in junior high. He went to A&M and planned to go into the farms with my dad and we lived that life for a little while, long enough to have Harry Jo
e
, then the war came.”

The very last thing in the world he wanted to talk about was the war. Clemmie had never said more than half a dozen words about her lost husband and the war once she’d broken the news of his death. That was her way of dealing.

Apparently this woman thought because he was in the war, he was someone in whom she could confide.