The Way Home (56 page)

“You love Eldin, don’t you?”

“Yes.” Patsy shrugged. “He’s a sweet man. And so good to me. Yes, I love him. But not the way you love Ty.”

“If you felt that way, why did you marry him?”

“For the same reason you married Ty.” Patsy’s mouth twisted bitterly. “To get away from home. The only difference is that your white knight happened to be the man you loved. Mine was a dear, sweet friend.” She sighed abruptly and forced a brighter smile. “But he loves me. And I do love him.”

Meg didn’t even hear the last of what her sister said. She was busy absorbing the idea that Patsy had married a man she didn’t love to escape the terror of their stepfather’s abuse. Would she have done the same? If Ty had been nothing more than a friend, would she have married him? She didn’t know.

“There was someone else, wasn’t there?” Meg asked, looking at her sister. “Someone you loved?”

She saw the truth flicker in Patsy’s eyes in the instant before she shook her head. “No. Nothing so dramatic.” Her smile shook around the edges. “I just wonder, sometimes, what it would be like to be married to someone you loved the way you love Ty.”

“I can’t imagine being married to anyone else,” Meg said simply. She considered pressing Patsy for the truth but decided it would be cruel to do so. Whoever she might have loved before she married Eldin, it was much too late to do anything about it. Talking about it would surely be like rubbing salt into an old wound.

“I saw Mama day before yesterday,” Meg said, changing the subject.

“How was she?” There was more duty than interest in Patsy’s question.

“Not good. The bank foreclosed on the hotel and he’s taking it out on her. I think maybe he’s drinking.”

“Just like Pa used to do,” Patsy said, shaking her head. “Funny, how people repeat the same mistakes over and over again.”

“I asked her to come stay with Ty and me.”

That announcement jerked Paty’s eyes to her face. “Oh, Meggy, you didn’t! You don’t want somebody else living here, not when the two of you are just getting started.”

“You don’t have to worry. She turned me down, said she couldn’t leave her husband.” Meg got up to fetch the pitcher of tea from the icebox. After bringing it to the table, she topped off Patsy’s drink. There was ice left in the glass so she didn’t bother to chip any more from the block that had been delivered the day before. “But I couldn’t see her like that and not offer to help her,” she said stubbornly.

“Let her help herself for a change,” Patsy said, her words hard with old anger.

“You don’t mean that!” Meg protested.

“Yes, I do.” Patsy’s fingers clenched into a fist on the table. “Where was she when we needed her? Where was she when Pa took his belt to one of us? Or when
he
— “

Her voice broke and she stopped abruptly, drawing in a shuddering breath. Meg was momentarily speechless in the face of her sister’s pain. When she spoke, she chose her words with care.

“I can’t say that she was right to make the choices she did,” she said slowly. “But I know she did the best she could for us.”

“Well, it wasn’t good enough!” Patsy snapped.

“Maybe not but it was still the best she could do and you can’t ask anyone for more than that.”

“She should have left him,” Patsy muttered.

“I imagine she was scared. How would she have taken care of the two of us?”

“She still should have left him,” Patsy insisted, but the anger was gone from her voice.

“Yes. I think she knows that,” Meg said, remembering the haunted look in her mother’s eyes. “She’ll have to live with that guilt for the rest of her life.”

From the look in Patsy’s eyes, she thought that perhaps it was the first time she’d considered that possibility. Meg glanced at the clock on the wall and stood up with an exclamation about getting lunch started.

After a moment, Patsy offered to help. Meg put her to work peeling potatoes to be boiled and mashed. She thought Patsy was probably as relieved as she was to have an excuse to drop the subject of their mother and the choices she’d made.

Despite the emotional intensity of the conversation that had gone before — or perhaps because of it — the two women worked in companionable silence, preparing fried chicken, mashed potatoes and gravy, and a salad of lettuce thinnings mixed with the first sweet green scallions and topped by a hot vinegar dressing.

Meg fried the chicken while Patsy set the table. Glancing over her shoulder, she noticed that there were only three plates on the table.

“We’ll need another plate,” she said, turning back to the chicken sizzling in a skillet of melted lard. “Jack always has lunch with us.”

“Jack?” Patsy’s voice was sharp but Meg was too busy turning the browned chicken to notice.

“He works with Ty just about every day. I don’t know what we’d have done if he hadn’t come back from California to help us.”

Before Meg had a chance to do more than register the silence from her sister’s direction, the back door was pushed open and Ty and Jack entered. Jack was in the lead and, when he saw Patsy, he stopped so abruptly that Ty ran into his back.

“What the — “ Ty broke off when he saw his sister-in-law. “Hello, Patsy.” He stepped around Jack’s frozen form and continued into the kitchen.

“Hello, Ty.”

Meg had watched the byplay from her place in front of the stove, but she wasn’t quite sure what it was she’d just witnessed.

“I could smell that chicken frying halfway across the field,” Ty said as he walked to the sink to wash his hands. “I’m so hungry I think I could eat a bear. How about you, Jack?”

The question seemed to break the spell that had held Jack in one place. With a sound that could have been either a yes or a no, he dragged his eyes from Patsy and joined Ty at the sink. Patsy turned to get another plate from the cupboard, and Meg was left to wonder if she’d imagined the entire scene.

But the finely drawn tension at the lunch table was definitely not her imagination. It was nothing she could put her finger on, unless she counted the way Jack and Patsy avoided looking at each other or the fact that neither addressed so much as a single word to the other.

At one point, Meg glanced up to find Patsy’s head bent, her attention apparently absorbed by the contents of her plate. Jack was looking at her and the pain in his eyes was so raw that Meg felt it as if it were her own. Her glance skidded from his face to Ty’s, their eyes meeting for a moment. She thought she read something in his gaze — sympathy? And then he glanced away and said something to Jack.

Meg picked up a forkful of mashed potatoes. They tasted like paste in her mouth, but she chewed, paying no attention to the conversation going on between the two men. The most incredible idea was turning around in her head. Ty had said that the cause of Jack’s unhappiness was a married woman. And hadn’t Jack spent time in Regret not long before Patsy suddenly married Eldin Baker? It was impossible, of course. Not Jack and Patsy. And yet …

Meg was sure she wasn’t the only one who was glad to see the meal end. And she wasn’t surprised when, the moment the last dish had been cleared from the table, Patsy announced that she really should be getting home.

“Just let me put the dishes in to soak and I’ll take you,” Meg said.

“I can take you home, Patsy.” Jack’s offer fell into a pool of silence, like a stone into water, the ripples from it spreading outward.

Meg spun away from the sink, feeling her heart beating much too fast when she saw the look that passed between her sister and her husband’s best friend.

“That’s okay, Jack. I don’t mind taking Patsy home. There’s no sense in you making a special trip.” She hoped her words didn’t sound as rushed to everyone else as they did to her.

“I was quitting after lunch, anyway,” Jack said, giving Meg an easy smile that did nothing to reassure her. From the way Ty’s brows rose, Meg guessed it was the first he’d heard of Jack’s plans to quit early. “How about it, Patsy?” Jack asked.

Meg held her breath, willing Patsy to tell him no, to say that she’d been looking forward to Meg taking her home. Patsy hesitated and then nodded slowly. “If you’re sure it’s no trouble, Jack.”

Meg opened her mouth — to say what, she couldn’t have said. But she caught Ty’s warning look and closed it again without speaking. She was probably making something out of nothing at all. And even if it was something, she could hardly forbid her sister to let Jack drive her home.

But she couldn’t prevent a worried frown as she and Ty stood on the front porch and watched Jack help Patsy into his car. Ty slid his arm around Meg’s waist as Jack circled the hood and pulled open the driver’s door. With a wave of his hand, Jack slid behind the wheel.

Meg nibbled on her lower lip as he backed the car around and then sent it bumping down the lane. What if her suspicions, crazy as they were, were right? What if Jack was the man Patsy had loved when she married Eldin, the man Patsy had said didn’t exist?

She was so lucky, Meg thought, suddenly fiercely grateful for the weight of Ty’s arm against her waist. Ty might not love her the way she loved him, but she could still hope for that to change. What if she’d married someone else? What would there be to hope for then?

Patsy watched the fields drift by beyond the window of the car. Though neither of them had spoken a word since leaving Ty and Meg’s, she was vividly aware of Jack’s presence just across the seat. If she stretched out her arm, she could touch his shoulder, she thought. She didn’t do anything of the sort, of course, but that didn’t prevent her from feeling a tingle of awareness at the possibility.

Oddly enough, the silence was not thick with the tensions that had lain between them the last two times they’d seen each other. It had more of a waiting edge to it, a feeling of expectation. Patsy was reminded of a tornado that had touched down near Regret when she was a girl. She’d seen the funnel cloud from a distance and had watched it approach, fascinated by the power it represented, the terrible beauty of it.

She’d felt this same kind of expectation then, the breathless feeling of teetering on the brink of a huge new discovery. Her mother had come and snatched her up and carried her into the cellar to wait out the tornado, keeping her safe. This time there was no one to shield her from danger but herself. The question was: Did she want to be shielded?

They still had not spoken when Jack pulled the car to a stop in front of her home. Patsy stared at the little white house, paint gleaming in the midaftemoon sun. For almost six years her life had revolved around that house, cleaning it, tending the garden, keeping it neat and tidy, inside and out. When she looked into the future, she saw the rest of her life being lived out within its simple walls, her horizons never expanding beyond what could be seen from its windows.

“Would you like to come in?” She didn’t look at Jack as she proffered the invitation. She felt, rather than heard, his indrawn breath.

“Yes.”

Such a simple response to a such a simple question, she thought as he got out of the car and came around to open her door. Only there was nothing simple about it and they both knew it.

As she opened the front door and stepped into the dim interior of the house, Patsy was very conscious of what she was about to do. There was nothing impulsive about her decision, and there’d be no pretending that it had been out of her control.

She heard Jack close the door behind them as she dropped her handbag on the small table in the entry. She stepped out of her shoes as she walked past the living room doorway. The house was warm with the accumulation of a day’s heat. If she’d been home, she would have opened windows to let the heat escape. But even if she’d opened every window in the house, it wouldn’t have cooled the heat she felt.

Still without speaking, she reached the hallway that led to the bedrooms. Patsy didn’t have to look back to know that Jack hesitated a moment before following her. She’d known he’d hesitate and known just as surely that he’d follow her. After all these years, she still knew him so well.

Patsy walked past the bedroom she shared with her husband when he was home. It was foolish, considering what she was about to do, but it would have seemed like a betrayal to take Jack in there. Instead, she pushed open the door to the seldom-used guest room. As if the location could soften the sin she was committing, she thought, amused by her own foolishness.

She stopped in the middle of the room and turned to face Jack. He stood in the doorway, as if he could still turn and walk away. But he wouldn’t, she thought, almost dreamily. They’d both lost this battle a long time ago. They’d just been too stubborn to admit it.

Patsy reached behind her and began unbuttoning her dress, hearing the sudden catch in Jack’s breathing as his eyes dropped to her breasts, which were thrust forward by the awkward angle of her arms. He didn’t offer to help but only stood there, not moving, not speaking, hardly breathing as she stripped to her skin. She saw his throat work as he swallowed, his eyes moving down her body, trailing fire wherever they touched.

“Patsy …”

“Don’t.” She moved toward him, reaching out to take his hand and draw him into the room. “Don’t talk. Not now.”

She saw the protest in his eyes, the knowledge that what they were about to do was wrong. And she saw a reflection of her own hunger, of the need that burned inside her.