What a Man's Gotta Do (24 page)

He wouldn't be worthy of Miss Mala otherwise.

After a second, Eddie got up, yanked the
Rand McNally Road Atlas
out from under the phone book.

If he hauled ass, he could make it to Albuquerque in seven hours.

 

He parked in front of the modest, flat-roofed house, its earthy stucco echoing the Sandia Mountains bordering the city to the east, stark against the blazingly blue sky. Just barely leafing out, a pair of ash trees studded a small, still thatch-gold lawn neatly rimmed in junipers. An older neighborhood, Eddie surmised, one in which the inhabitants were, if by no means wealthy, at least managing okay.

Sitting in his car, he took in the satellite dish perched on the roof, the daffodils and tulips crowding a small flower bed underneath a picture window bordered in bright turquoise. In the side yard next door, somebody's dog started yapping its fool head off.

He'd wiggled out of the job in Vegas, never mind that he had no idea what he'd do next. Something'd come up, he imagined. It always had before, no reason to think it wouldn't now.

Wish he could be as sure about Mala, though. It hadn't been long enough for her to get herself involved with somebody else or anything like that, but he doubted she was sitting around, pining for him. She wasn't that type. Besides, maybe she'd had
enough time to think things through, realize he really wasn't any good for her, anyway.

And maybe he needed to deal with the situation staring him in the face before he got to worrying any more about that one.

He got out of the car, stuffed his sunglasses in his jacket pocket.

A pudgy, dark-haired woman, her black eyes cautious behind overlarge glasses with a lot of flashy gold trim, opened the front door, leaving the screen door as a barrier between them.

“The sign says no solicitors,” she said, but not harshly.

“I'm not tryin' to sell anything, ma'am. I'm looking for Rudy Ortiz.”

“Why?”

“My name's Eddie King, ma'am—”

The woman's hands flew to her face as she gasped, then began rattling in Spanish. “
Dios mio!
You're Eddie? You actually came?” She slammed back the screen door, nearly knocking him over before she grabbed his wrist, and yanked him inside a tiled entryway that smelled of fried onions, chili powder, cumin.

“Rudy!” she shouted down the short hallway, off to their left. “Get out here,
pronto!
”

Then she turned back to Eddie, tears glimmering in her eyes. “I'm Rosalita, Rudy's wife. Lita, most people call me…” She covered her mouth for another second or two, then let her hand drop. “Oh, my God, you have no idea what this will mean to your father. I told him, a million times, he needed to tell you, to make you understand…but no, he said. I need to leave the decision entirely in his hands. And God's.” Then she turned, shouted down the hall a second time, her voice almost frantic.

“I'm coming, woman,” boomed a deep male voice laced with good humor. “You know this damn thing only goes five miles an hour on a good day!”

Eddie barely had time to puzzle over the whirring sound before his father—and his wheelchair—came into view.

 

Declaring the two men needed to be alone to “hash things out,” Lita had pushed them outside onto the backyard deck she
said Rudy had built before his accident. The yard wasn't enormous by any means, but the garden, ablaze with hundreds of tulips and just-flowering fruit trees, was meticulously groomed and obviously loved.

“Pretty, isn't it? If I'm good, Lita lets me sit on the ground and dig in the dirt,” Rudy said, his voice edged with laughter. “I got in two hundred bulbs last fall, nearly killed me.”

Eddie turned back to this stranger who accounted for half his genes, a broad-shouldered man with granite-colored hair and deep-set eyes the color of wet wood.

“Why didn't the P.I. tell me?” he asked quietly.

“That I was…what's the term they use these days? Physically challenged?”

Eddie nodded, sipped the iced tea Lita had handed him five minutes before.

“Because I didn't want you to come see me out of pity. Or guilt. That tea okay? I've got beer—”

“No. No, this is fine.” He nodded toward Rudy's useless legs, sympathy, if not much else, fisting in his gut. “When did it happen?”

“Ten, eleven years ago. Drunk driver. They didn't think I would make it.” He grinned, showing off straight white teeth against his dark skin. A handsome man, still. And, Eddie had to admit even after only a few minutes, a nice one, too. “They underestimated me…good
God,
you look exactly like your mother. The eyes… Hey,” he said when Eddie turned away. “I loved her. You gotta believe that.”

“You
left
her,” he said to the back wall. “Left us.”

“Yeah, I figured that's what you thought.” At his father's quietly spoken words, Eddie twisted back to see his father's face twisted in consternation. “I didn't know about you until you went to live with that cousin of your mother's up there in Michigan.”

“You expect me to believe that?”

“It's true, swear to God. Terese never told me,
nobody
told me. Except Molly, she remembered your mother and I were goin' together about then. If you can call it that.”

Eddie's gaze tangled with the older man's for several sec
onds before agitation propelled him over to the edge of the deck. “Come to think of it, maybe I will have that beer.”

“Good thinkin'. Lite or regular?”

“Whatever's handy. You want me to get it?”

“I'm crippled. Not dead.” On that note, Rudy wheeled himself up the ramp leading into the kitchen, retrieved a couple of cans of Bud, wheeled back. “You ready to listen now?”

Eddie set the glass of tea on a nearby table, then leaned his hips on the deck railing, popped the top of the beer. “Yeah.”

Rudy took a long pull of his beer, then squinted out over the yard. “I wasn't exactly who your mama's family had in mind for their daughter to be hanging out with. The son of a Mexican migrant worker? No way. But the minute I saw her, workin' out at the Dairy Queen, I was a goner. We started seein' each other, in secret, y'know? God, she was so pretty. And sweet as they come. Anyway, one thing led to another…” He let out a sigh, then fixed Eddie with his gaze. “We thought we were bein' careful. I loved your mother, sure, would've married her if there'd been a way, but I was twenty years old. She was seventeen. Neither of us needed a kid to worry about, that was for damn sure.”

His jaw tight, Eddie stared hard at his beer can.

“But that doesn't mean I would've ever walked away from her. Or you, if I'd known about you. But when I drove by to see her at the Dairy Queen that day, and they told me she'd quit, that she'd moved away…what was I to think? I may have been in love, but I wasn't completely
loco.
I figured she'd come around to their way of thinkin', that she didn't want to see me no more. So I tied one on for three days, and after I sobered up, I enlisted in the Army.

“Time goes by.” He took another swallow of beer. “I get out of the Army, decide to move here, meet Lita, fall in love again. Me and Lita, we figure we'd have a batch of kids, only it didn't happen. Suddenly I get this letter from Molly, a couple months before you turned eighteen. How she found me, I have no idea. I never got a chance to ask her. But anyway, she tells me she has every reason to believe that you're my son, if I want to see you, I'd better get my butt up to Spruce Lake. Only
she told you about me, and you took off before I could get there. Never even gave me a chance to explain.”

Eddie looked down, tapping the can on the railing. “I was scared.”

“Of
what?
”

Two little words, even packed with twenty years of bitter disappointment, weren't about to wipe out a lifetime of doubt. He met Rudy's troubled gaze. “That all you wanted to do was satisfy your curiosity, then you'd take off again.”

“Then maybe you shoulda trusted a little more—”

“In what, dammit? I'd been kicked around from place to place my whole life. Nobody'd ever wanted me, except my mother, and she was gone by the time I was six. So why should the man I had every reason to believe had
never
wanted me suddenly change his mind?”

“So it was easier to run than take the chance that maybe you were wrong? It was easier to just give up, to curse fate and God and everybody else, because you'd gotten the shaft?”

Eddie looked at his father's legs and felt a great wave of shame wash over him. “Yes,” he said softly.

“And that's what you've been doing your whole life, isn't it? Runnin' away?”

There was little point in pretending otherwise. “Yeah.”

“And now you've stopped?”

A shrug. “Thinkin' more seriously about it, that's for sure.”

Rudy chuckled. “A woman?”

“Yeah,” he said again.

“She why you're here?”

Eddie turned. Nodded. “She's one of those…persuasive types.”

Another laugh rumbled up from Rudy's barrel chest. “Yeah, I know all about those. Been married to one for nearly thirty-three years.” He paused. “What's her name?”

“Mala,” Eddie said, completely unprepared for what simply uttering her name would do to him. And apparently whatever thunderstorm was going on in his head was showing on his face, because his father's expression changed, too. Not that Eddie could put it into words, but it had.

“Once I knew you existed,” Rudy said quietly, “I was determined to find you. But it costs money to track somebody down, money that kept running out as fast as you kept changin' where you lived. And there were long stretches of time when I was dead broke, when I had to give up the search. And believe me, that hurt far more than this—” he swiped at his legs “—ever did. To know I had a son I'd never seen, could never seem to catch up with…”

His father scrubbed his hand over his face, then finished off his beer. “But, hey, that's all in the past, right? Good things come from bad, like the phoenix from the ashes. I used part of the settlement I got from the accident to find you, to finally get my chance to tell you my side of the story, which is all I ever wanted.”

Eddie kicked back the rest of his beer as well, crushed the can against the top rail of the deck. “You expect me to believe that?”

“I don't expect anything, Eddie. Certainly not for you to feel something for somebody you don't even know. Maybe still don't wanna know. But even if you walk outta here today and never come back, never want to talk to me again, you're gonna understand that you and me, we're part of each other. If I'd known about you, I would've wanted you, no matter what. And if anybody'd bothered to look me up, tell me I had a son—a
son,
” he said, wonder softening his features, “you better believe nobody would've taken better care of you. You wanna know the biggest mistake of my life?”

“What?”

“That I didn't try harder to find Terese. Or at least, find out where she was, what'd happened to her.”

Scraps of bitterness swirled through him. “Why didn't you?”

“I dunno. Because maybe it was easier to let myself believe it was for the best, that it probably wouldn't've worked between us, anyway?” He batted at the air. “Who knows? But if I'd had the
cojones
to look for her, I would've at least known about you.” His intense brown eyes seared into Eddie's. “I know you don't think of me as your father, maybe you never
will. But if I can leave you with one piece of advice, a legacy, you could call it, it'd be this—in the long run, the safe way is usually the dumbest.”

After a moment, Eddie chuckled, then looked out over Lita's pretty backyard, thought of another woman more than a thousand miles away, planting pansies when it was still the dead of winter.

A woman who embodied the word
hope.

“Hate my guts if you want, but don't repeat history,” his father said softly behind him.

 

Tax season was always nuts, but this year seemed nutsier than most. No matter how much Mala nagged her clients to get her all their information as soon after January 31 as possible, every single one of them, it seemed, had called her this past week with a frantic, “I have no idea where the time went, when can we get together?” plea.

Today it was the Hinkles, who'd called about five minutes after she'd picked up the kids from school. She already had a five o'clock, but she could squeeze them in at four, if she hurried.

Correction: if the
kids
hurried.

“Carrie! Lucas!” She jabbed her arms back into her sweater coat, quickly checked herself in the hall mirror to make sure what little lunch she'd gotten wasn't gracing her skirt and sweater. “You've gotta go to Nana's!”

Glass of milk in one hand, cookie in the other, Carrie's jaw dropped. “But we just got home!”

“I know, I know, but this is an emergency. And I've got like zero minutes to get you guys over there—Lucas? Where the heck
are
you?”

The toilet flushed, answering that question.

“Okay, guys,” she said when Lucas emerged from the bathroom, “grab your backpacks if you've got homework and let's get out of here.”

“Your job sucks,” Carrie muttered.

“At the moment, I'm inclined to agree with you. Come
on,
Luc, geez!”

The frigid, sleety day had started out with pre-breakfast itchy-ickies and gone steadily downhill from there. That it should end in the current state of chaos came as no suprise. Mala shoved the grumbling, whining kids out the door, the dog back in, then herded them down the stairs and toward the car.