“Hey there, fella,” Lola Anderson said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”
He sat up at the lunch counter and she automatically poured him a cup of coffee. “I didn’t know it was your day,” he said.
“I’m working at Home Depot tomorrow and the next day,” she said, speaking of her second job. “You have a day off?”
“I’ve been putting in a lot of time at Cal’s barn. I took the day to catch up on a few other things since Cal’s spending the day in Denver with Maggie. Her car’s in the shop and he drove her in on Wednesday and will bring her back tonight. While they’re there, they’re looking at tile, carpet and flooring.”
“It must be coming along nicely,” she said.
“Looking good. And pretty much on schedule. How’s school?”
“Slow and steady, but I only take a few credits a semester and I’m taking the summer off from classes. I have a kid starting at community college in the fall—I can’t believe that.”
“Tell me about it—Jackson’s twenty already and Nikki starts in the fall.”
“Pretty soon we’ll be empty nesters,” she said, leaning on the counter.
“Not for a while,” Tom said. “I’ve got younger kids at home. But if we ever get caught up, we should try meeting for a movie or an ice cream or something. Something adult but without kids.”
Lola smiled patiently. “I’ve heard talk like this before,” she said.
“I mean it. It’s just finding the time, that’s all.”
Lola shifted her weight to the other leg. “How’s Becky?”
“Fine,” he said. “Great.”
But Becky was neither fine nor great, he thought. And he knew exactly why Lola had brought her up. Tom and Becky had been divorced for years but everyone was of the opinion they were still a couple, that Tom was never going to be finished with that relationship. It was his own fault. He’d been letting Becky come around, visit and stay with him and the kids and people just assumed they were not quite divorced.
That was all changing, but there wasn’t a delicate way to explain that. And he liked Lola. He’d known her most of his life. They both grew up around here.
The door to the diner opened and Connie Boyle walked in. He was wearing his navy blue fire department shirt. Now Connie might be a lot younger than Lola, and younger than Tom, for that matter, but Tom didn’t miss the way Lola’s eyes lit up and how she grinned when she saw him. All the women seemed to have that reaction—he was good-looking, a firefighter and single.
“Hey,” he said, sitting at the counter beside Tom. “What’s up?”
“Not too much. I just grabbed a couple of kids from school, got them home and started on their chores because they both want to go to friends’ houses since there’s no school tomorrow. I thought I’d take a run out to Sully’s and meet the new family member.”
“Sierra?” Connie asked. “You haven’t met Sierra?”
“Not Sierra—of course I met her, she’s been here two months already. And I’ve been at Cal’s most days so I’ve seen her plenty. It’s Molly, the new addition.”
“There’s another sister?” Connie asked.
“You haven’t heard?” Tom asked with a laugh. “I don’t usually get the drop on you when a new female comes to town. Molly’s a golden retriever pup about a year old. Sierra rescued her from an abusive camper.”
“Oh, this should be good,” Lola said. “That explains why she charged out of here the other day when I showed up to relieve her. She never said a word.”
“Happened about a week ago. Sierra was keeping an eye on the camper because he treated the dog badly. Here’s how Sully said it went—the camp quieted down except for the dog, crying and barking from the kennel she was stuffed into, a kennel about big enough for a little cocker spaniel. Sierra didn’t even go to her cabin—she hung close by. And when the guy came out of his camper and started beating the dog to shut her up, she challenged him. When he wouldn’t stop, she jumped on him. Sully said she hung on him like a tick on his back and he couldn’t shake her off. At the end of a scene right out of a bad movie, the camper and his family left and Sierra has herself a completely untrained, abused, young and crazy golden.” He sipped his coffee. “Gotta be worth seeing.”
“Sierra attacked him?” Connie asked.
“So it’s told. No surprise there, I guess.”
“No surprise,” Lola said. “She might be young and small but she has no shortage of guts. We like that here.”
“She might be a little stupid,” Connie said. “What if he’d turned on her, knocked her senseless just in self-defense?”
“Sully was waiting up, too. He does that when things don’t feel right at the campgrounds. He wanders around with his handy dandy baseball bat, the only weapon he carries. I wonder if he’s ever used that thing.”
“How’d you hear about this if you haven’t seen the dog?” Lola asked.
“I work with Cal every day. Cal keeps tabs on his sister, almost every day. And Maggie is at Sully’s on days she’s not in Denver. Trust me—there’s no shortage of conduits for the news.” He drank the last of his coffee and checked his watch. “Time to see if the kids ran out on their chores.” He put a dollar on the counter, gave Connie a slap on the back and told Lola he’d see her soon. He walked the two blocks home.
One of these days he should make good on all his promises to take Lola out, but it was awkward. Ever since Becky left eight years ago, he’d been acting like a married man even though his wife lived elsewhere. But like every small town, people noticed when she came around, when she stayed a few nights or a weekend. Once one of the old biddies in town asked his Nikki where her mother slept when she visited. Tom told Nikki to politely say, “None of your business, ma’am.” But the truth was, Becky slept with him. Even though he knew Becky had boyfriends, knew she wasn’t a faithful wife or a wife at all, knew he was just a fool. He’d told himself they were divorced, it was her choice to date, see men. It was his choice not to date or have girlfriends. He had secretly kept hoping she’d realize she’d been hasty and come back to her family.
But everything had changed last year. Last year when he learned Becky hadn’t had boyfriends, not really. No matter how Becky referred to these men, they were customers. She had explained herself as an escort, just a little company, not necessarily an intimate. No matter what she said, Tom knew what she was.
And speak of the devil. When he rounded the curve to his street, whose car was parked in the drive behind his truck but Becky’s. She had stopped warning him of her visits, stopped asking if it would be all right. He hadn’t had the heart to tell his kids, not even the oldest ones, not for his sake or Becky’s, but for theirs. They loved their mother. And why wouldn’t they? She was probably the prettiest, sweetest girl in town.
He walked in and found her in the kitchen, rinsing out a coffee cup. She turned toward him, smiled and said, “Tom.”
“Where are the kids?”
“They’re finishing their chores. I told them I’d take them out for pizza if their chores were done.”
“But unfortunately, you’ve been called away,” Tom said. “You can’t do this, Becky.”
“They miss me. I miss them.”
“I know. But you can’t pretend nothing has changed. At least I can’t.”
“I told you, that’s over now.”
“You do as you please, Becky. But you can’t change the past eight years and I can’t change the way I feel.”
“Nothing was ever different with us. It had nothing to do with us.”
He laughed hollowly. “Seriously? Yes, everything changed with us. How many were there, do you think? A hundred? Two hundred?”
“Not even close. Hardly any,” she said.
“Do you know how many women were in my life? From the day you left till now? Zero. Well, there was you—pretending you were working in a doctor’s office and going to yoga classes with girlfriends.”
She shook her head sadly and tossed her beautiful red hair, hair that was not really red. Her blue eyes teared—she was the only blue-eyed redhead he’d ever known. She affected duplicity with such an air of innocence it still shook him. “I was not pretending.”
“I won’t let you do to them what you did to me, Becky. You can see them, only here and only if you make plans with me first. And you can’t spend the night anymore.”
“I’ll sleep with the girls...”
“No, Becky, no. Don’t force my hand.”
“Why are you doing this to me?” she asked, a catch in her voice.
He almost laughed. She was arrested three times for solicitation and thought that having the charges vacated, the third time with the help of Cal Jones, criminal defense attorney, meant it had never happened.
But it had happened.
“I’m not going to talk about this now, with our youngest two kids upstairs. Take them to pizza and then tell them you can’t stay. Leave. Or I’ll tell them now, tell them why I don’t agree to let you spend the night or let them stay with you. I’ll tell them. I’m going to have to tell them eventually.”
“Even though it’s all in the past?”
“Well, I can’t be really sure of that, can I? It’s in the past until you’re arrested again, right?”
“It must be nice to have never made a mistake,” she said in a mere whisper.
He gave a huff of laughter. “Oh, I’ve made plenty and you know that. I just never had to be bailed out for any of them.”
His youngest son, Zach, came bounding downstairs. “I’m done,” he announced.
“I’m almost done!” his fourteen-year-old daughter, Brenda, called from upstairs.