What the Heart Wants (3 page)

He nodded into the phone. “Well, anyway, I left one of those school photos with her in case Lolly shows up.”

“Jase, what about your old house?” Maxie's voice perked up with hope. “Lolly might remember us talking about renting it out.”

“That's where I am now. She's not here.”

“Think we should contact the police?”

“I did, and they won't even talk to me. She left home on her own, even wrote that damn note about how she was going to Bosque Bend to find her mother and would be back later this evening. Officially she's a runaway and the police won't get involved.”

“So what are you going to do?”

“I don't know, but I'll tell you this much—I'm not leaving Bosque Bend till I find her!”

He put the phone down on the floor beside the bed and lay back on the pillow. Brave words, but what should he do next? Drive every street in Bosque Bend, calling out her name like she was a lost puppy?

But maybe she hadn't even made it to Bosque Bend…

He looked out the window at the dark sky. It had been a long day, and the night would be even longer. He was exhausted, but there was no way he could sleep.

It was all his fault. He'd wanted Girl Child to have everything Laurel Harlow had—a beautiful home, financial security, the respect of the community, a stable family. But somewhere along the line, he'd screwed up. Somehow he'd done such a shitty job as a father that Lolly had taken off a hundred miles down the freeway in search of a mother who didn't give a flying fuck about her. He didn't know where Lolly's mother was now or even if she was still alive, and he doubted if anyone in Bosque Bend did either.

But what if Lolly was hiding somewhere, avoiding him because some bastard had told her why he'd been run out of town? Was it already too late? Had he lost his daughter at the same time that he was busting his butt trying to give her the world?

Even as he watched, the wishing star was beginning to fade.

His spirits sagged. He prayed that Lolly was safe, but in his heart, he'd begun to fear the worst.

L
aurel switched on the porch light and opened the heavy door enough to see a bedraggled teenager with tangled yellow curls and big, apprehensive eyes standing in front of her.

She looked like a fashion ad gone mad: shiny pink shorts, a bandanna halter top in a black-and-white splashy print, dangly pink plastic earrings that glowed in the dark, flip-flops glittering like Fourth of July sparklers. From one hand hung a bulging pink backpack and from the other, incongruously, a Louis Vuitton shoulder bag.

Almost certainly this was Jase's Lolly. Not the flirtatious, sexy Lolly of the school picture, but a younger, more vulnerable version. Laurel pushed the door the rest of the way open. Her visitor looked at a crumpled piece of paper in her hand, then at the numbers on the side of the door, then stepped forward to stare at Laurel just as Jase had done two hours ago.

“Are you Laurel Elizabeth Harlow?” The girl's voice came out thin and edgy.

Laurel stared back. “Yes. Who are you?”

The girl wet her lips and darted her eyes away.

Laurel tried not to smile. It
was
Jase's daughter, and she was trying to figure out what to say. What was it going to be? Magazine subscriptions? A lost dog? How does one explain landing on a total stranger's doorstep at nine o'clock at night?

The girl ducked her head a little and looked up from under her long, movie-star brows, as if unsure how Laurel would react. “I'm…I'm Lolly. I think you, like, used to know my dad, Jason Redlander.”

Those were the magic words.

Laurel unlocked the screen, flung it wide, and greeted her visitor with a big smile. “Welcome to Bosque Bend. Your father dropped by a couple of hours ago and told me you might come by. You look as though you've had a long day.”

“Dad? Is he here?” Lolly's eyes went wide with alarm, and she shifted her balance to her back foot.

Laurel caught her tongue between her teeth.
Wrong thing to say.
Would Lolly make a run for it? Obviously she was not overjoyed at the prospect of returning to the bosom of her family. The situation must be more fraught than Jase let on.

Continuing to hold the screen open, Laurel did her best to seem harmless. “No, I'm quite alone, I promise. I think your father's spending the night at the family homestead.”

“Did he tell you I ran away?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to call him?”

“I can wait a while if you'd like, but your father is worried about you, and I feel obliged to let him know you're safe.”

Lolly took another look down the hall, as if Jase might be lurking behind the antique umbrella stand, then let her shoulders slump in surrender. “Well, okay.”

Laurel closed the door and turned the lock, just in case Lolly changed her mind, but by the looks of her, she couldn't have made it much farther, poor thing. She'd stumbled on the threshold, and her face was drawn and pale. Once inside, she sank onto one of the Victorian corner chairs just inside the door. Her eyes closed, her yellow head drooped like a wilted daisy, and her purse and backpack fell to the floor beside her.

Laurel blinked in surprise. The chairs—squat, square, and stodgy—were basically decorator pieces. She'd never seen anyone actually
sit
in one of them before, much less fall asleep on their lumpy cushions.

She jiggled Lolly's shoulder gently.

“Um, honey, would you like something to eat?” No way she was going to let Jase's daughter spend the night in the foyer.

Lolly raised her head slowly, as if it were very heavy. Her eyes were still half-shut. “Yeah, I guess so.” She yawned and scooted to the edge of the chair. “I haven't had anything but Red Bull since breakfast.”

“Let's get you into the kitchen. I think I can rustle something up. Here, I'll help you with your gear.” She grabbed the straps of the pink backpack.

Good grief! The thing weighed a ton! No wonder Lolly was tired.

Lolly rose from the corner chair in slow motion and retrieved her purse from the floor. Glancing up at the arched entryway to the kitchen, she smiled weakly, then staggered toward the big round table in the center of the room. Laurel hurried over to pull out a chair, at the same time depositing the backpack on the one next to her.

Lolly flopped down, whispered her thanks, then rested her head on her folded arms and closed her eyes again.

Maybe some caffeine would help—at least enough to keep Lolly awake till Jase came for her. Laurel took a pitcher of sweetened tea out of the refrigerator, filled a tall glass, and added ice and a slice of lemon.

Lolly probably needed some solid food too. She glanced around the kitchen. Darn—where were Harry Potter's house elves when you needed them? She didn't have much of anything in the house, and cooking was not her strong suit. A well-paid housekeeper had presided over the kitchen when she was a child—except for the fancy baking, of course, which Mama, being a proper Southern lady, had reserved for herself. And when Laurel was married to Dave and both of them were working, they'd either gone out or ordered in.

She sighed. Some women were born to cook and some women learned how to cook, but she was neither. Thank goodness for microwaves, but right now her freezer was totally empty—she'd been putting off going to the supermarket till she pawned the Meissen clock.

She touched Lolly's shoulder. “Honey, do you like peanut butter?”

Lolly's head stayed down, but a weary voice answered her. “Yeah, but no jelly.”

Laurel couldn't help but smile. “That's good, because I don't have any.”

Uncapping a plastic container of Jif, she spread a smooth scoop across a piece of bread, slapped another slice on top, and cut the sandwich diagonally. A paper plate, a handful of potato chips, and a yellow napkin from the holder in the center of the table completed her presentation.

Apparently the pungent smell of peanut butter did the trick. Lolly raised up as if from the dead and pulled the plate and glass toward herself.

Laurel breathed a sigh of relief—at least Lolly wouldn't die of starvation on her watch. Now to fix herself some tea and sit down so they could get acquainted.

But Lolly's sandwich was disappearing so fast that she immediately returned to the counter to make another one. This one went down a little slower, after which Lolly delivered a hearty sigh of satisfaction and a soft burp, then beamed across the table at her hostess.

“Thanks. That was good. I didn't know I was so hungry.” Her peanut-buttery smile widened.

A pang of recognition pierced Laurel. Lolly may be fair while Jase was dark, but she had the same clean bone structure across the cheeks, and, when she chose, the same brilliant smile.

Don't go maudlin, Laurel Elizabeth. Now you have to convince her to call her father and let him know she's here, safe and sound.

She glanced at the clock on the wall across the room, and her internal alarm bell rang. Grabbing her glass, she took a couple of big swallows to wet her suddenly dry throat.

Two hours was the max by car between here and Dallas, three hours—maybe four—by Greyhound. Jase had said she'd left home in the morning. That meant there was a fair amount of time unaccounted for. Maybe it would be better to get a handle on the situation before Jase arrived. Besides, what else did they have to talk about? She wasn't about to let Lolly get onto the topic of her parentage.

She schooled her tone to sound light and casual. “Did you travel by bus?”

“Well, partway. I paid the brother of a friend of mine to drive me here from Dallas, but”—Lolly's pretty face twisted—“he got, like, mad at me and drove off and left me at a service station in the middle of nowhere. Stole my iPod too.” She shrugged carelessly, as if iPods grew on trees. “The station didn't have much business, so it took me a couple of hours to pick up a ride, but a lady who was heading to Grapeland agreed to take me as far as Waxahachie—even dropped me off at the bus station.” Lolly paused to gulp down the last of her tea. “I bought a ticket to Bosque Bend, and got off at a furniture shop downtown.”

Laurel's eyebrows lifted. The roofed bench that served as Bosque Bend's bus drop-off was attached to the side of Josie's Muebleria Usada, a used furniture store across the street from Ulrich's Drive-in Beer and Grocery, where the Friday-night bad boys hung out. The way Lolly was dressed, it was a miracle they hadn't given her a hard time. Must be a quiet weekend. Of course, it was—everyone was recovering from the big Fourth of July blowout.

“How did you get here from the bus drop-off?”

“I walked.”

Laurel shivered. Ten blocks on a moonless night with the streetlights few and far between? Mama and Daddy would have grounded her for life. And what exactly had happened regarding the kid who took her iPod? She had the feeling Lolly was glossing over something.

“The boy who was giving you a ride—are you all right? Did he…try anything with you?”

Lolly made a sound of contempt. “He thought he was so studly!” She looked at Laurel out of the corner of her eye. “Don't tell Dad.”

“Why not?”

“He wouldn't understand. He'd get all bent out of shape and say I should have known better.”

“Honey, until this morning I hadn't seen your father in sixteen years, but I don't think he's changed so much that he'd be mad at you because some sleazeball made a pass at you.”

Lolly's lower lip pouted out. “He hates me.”

“Your father?”

“He's always yelling at me about stuff.”

“What kind of stuff?”

“Oh, my grades, my friends, boys, what I wear—that sort of thing.”

Laurel couldn't help but smile. When was it she and Sarah had started viewing their parents, especially their mothers, as demanding, irritating people who didn't understand them? Who purposely embarrassed them and stood in the way of everything they wanted to do?

Sarah complained that her mother was such an old fuddy-duddy that she wouldn't let Sarah invite boys to her slumber party like the Fassbinder twins did, and her father, the county attorney by then, made her dip into her birthday money to pay her speeding ticket rather than get it dismissed, which anyone who really loved her would have done.

Laurel, in turn, insisted that Mama ruined her life when she nixed buying her a strapless dress for junior cotillion that looked exactly like the dress on the cover of one of her favorite romance novels. Then there was the battle of the shorts. Her mother absolutely refused to let her walk out of the house in shorts, and Daddy backed up Mama with a lecture about modesty and how she should set a model for other girls rather than try to be like them. But the greatest injustice of all was that Sarah received a new Thunderbird after she passed her driver's test, while Laurel's only reward for finally getting her license six months later was being allowed to share her mother's car, Grampa's old Lincoln Town Car, which was as big as a boat and looked like a hearse.

Yes, Laurel understood where Lolly was coming from. Adolescence was hard.

Putting on a bright smile, she charged into the fray as gently as she could. “Isn't that the usual thing parents and teenagers disagree on? I bet the other girls feel the same way about their parents.”

“Yeah, but…”

“But what?”

“They have mothers.”

It was a blow to the gut. As angry as Laurel had gotten about the car and the clothes, she always knew Mama was there for her. Daddy had been more prominent publicly, but he had his church and his parishioners and his good works to tend to. Mama's primary concern was her.

“Mothers are very special,” she finally replied.

She missed her mother so much, but Mama's world had turned against her, and, almost exactly a year ago, she swallowed every pill in the house to escape. Couldn't she have stuck it out? Or put the house up for sale so they could move someplace that people didn't know them?

No way. In the same sweet voice she always used, Mama said she had been born in Kinkaid House, and she would die here. And she did, preferring to join her parents and grandparents in the cemetery along the river rather than stay in a world that had turned against her. Thank goodness the burial plot had been prepaid, but strongly Protestant Bosque Bend had a Catholic abhorrence of suicide, and Laurel had a heck of a time finding a clergyman who would perform the simple graveside rite. Finally, Mrs. January, who'd retired as their housekeeper when Laurel was in middle school, had prevailed upon her son, who headed a small AME congregation in Waco, to lay Mama properly to rest.

“My dad doesn't want me to meet my mother,” Lolly continued, building up steam. “He told me she wasn't ready to take care of a baby so she sent me to him, and that he lost track of her, but he won't even tell me her name. He says she asked him not to tell me and that he's honoring her wishes. But I think that's
bull crap
!”

Lolly spit out the last two words defiantly, her eyes blazing blue.

Laurel stifled a smile. Was “bull crap” the best Lolly could come up with? She'd heard worse from second graders. “This is all very personal, Lolly. Maybe you need to wait and discuss it with your father.”

“Or with my mother.” Lolly stared meaningfully across the table.

“Or with your mother,” Laurel repeated, folding her arms Indian-style in warning.

Somehow she'd been lured into dangerous territory. What Lolly said was logical, but the way she said it implied a lot more. But if she launched into a denial, it would seem she was being unduly defensive, making Lolly more certain than ever that she really was her mother.

She let it pass. This was really Jase's business, not hers.

Lolly's eyes wavered and she licked her lips. “Aunt Maxie—Aunt Maxie said you were a friend of my dad's when he lived here in Bosque Bend.”

A change of subject. Maybe Lolly had realized it was terminally rude to try to lay claim to someone as your mother less than an hour after meeting her.