“So I guess your mom doesn’t hear
everything
.”
“Guess not. Did Sam know about you?”
Something that felt uncomfortably like shame touched Cody. It pissed him off that he had been conceived so carelessly and then dismissed, no more important than a foal to a stud. “Nope. He and my mom lost track of each other.”
“Do you have a stepdad?”
He thought of Brad, with those clean hands and that fat wallet. And those eyes that didn’t trust him. “Nope.” He poked the toe of his boot at a coil of rope on the floor.
“So are you happy about it or what?”
“He’s just some guy my mom used to know. It doesn’t change anything.”
Molly put her empty can in the recycle bin. “Are you sure?”
“What, you think they’re going to pick up where they left off and fall into each other’s arms?”
“What if they do?”
“They won’t,” he said quickly, fiercely. “We live in a different state. We’re here temporarily.”
“I really like Sam. Everybody does.”
“I don’t even know the guy.”
She paused. “He was seeing my mom last summer.”
Cody’s head jerked up; he narrowed his eyes. “Yeah? Are they still together?”
“Nope. They’re good friends and all, but they don’t really go out. I heard he sees a lot of different women.” Her cheeks glowed pink. “That’s what I heard, anyway.”
“What about your dad?”
She shrugged. “Ditched us when I was little. I barely even remember him.”
“I guess you know Sam a lot better.”
“I guess.”
Cody waited, wishing she’d say more. Since learning about Sam, he’d been on fire with curiosity. There was so much to wonder about. Where was Sam from? How had he grown up? Did he have any brothers or sisters? What did he eat for breakfast?
Why didn’t he come looking for me?
He slammed his can into the recycle bin and stalked out of the barn office. “I better get to work,” he said, growing short-tempered with all the thoughts swirling through his head.
“Want some help?” Molly asked.
“Nope.”
“I could—”
“No.”
He turned and faced her. She stood in the doorway, backlit by sunlight. He wished she’d leave in a huff, but she stood her ground. “There’s not much to be done,” he said lamely.
“See you around, then.” She walked out of the barn. A tall Appaloosa with a shaggy winter coat stood tethered to the paddock rail. She untied the horse and swung up into the saddle, turning him and walking him away with unhurried dignity.
T
he illness was the enemy. The moment he had been diagnosed, Gavin had envisioned it as a living thing, a monster stalking him through the dark. Initially, he’d wasted a lot of time in denial and rage. Humiliated by the disintegration of his body, he had cursed the universe, embraced a death wish. A binge of drinking and tomcatting had nearly brought him to his knees. He had awakened one morning in an emergency clinic in Kalispell to find that they’d dragged him back from the edge of a coma—temporarily. The rest was up to him.
He went home and got down to the business of survival. He waged a battle against his disease, planning strategy with the precision of a film director blocking out a scene.
Yet he was losing ground. Hiring a special nutritionist, participating in special therapies had only postponed the inevitable. His kidneys were useless. Dialysis wasn’t getting the job done. He was slowly poisoning himself. If the transplant didn’t work, he’d be dead in a matter of months.
Driving down the highway away from town, he flexed his hands on the steering wheel. Part of his strategy for dealing with this was to act as if everything was fine, as if he didn’t carry around a bag of dialysis fluid connected by a tube sticking out of his side. He still went to the feed store, still placed his stock orders and gossiped with the cow buyers and rodeo directors who came through town. Still stopped in at the diner for a cup of tea—coffee had been banned long ago.
He was a fixture in Crystal City. Even now, years after his last film, he was regarded as the town celebrity. People liked coming up to him and saying hi. They liked telling their kids he was the guy on all those tapes at the video store.
They kept his movies in the Classics section.
He drove along the empty road, thinking about Michelle and wishing like hell for some alternative to the surgery. Christ, she didn’t owe him a thing, least of all a frigging
kidney.
But the minute she’d figured out the score, she’d latched on like a tick, and she wasn’t about to let go.
Why was that? Filial love and devotion didn’t explain it. A sense of duty—maybe. The trouble was, they were doing this ass-backward. Forgiveness should come first.
Then
the transplant. Sad to think it took a crisis to bring them both to the table.
He pondered the long gap in their relationship, a gap that spanned the years of Cody’s life.
I’m pregnant, Daddy.
I’m not surprised. Your mother was careless, too.
Christ. What the hell had he been thinking, speaking to his young, frightened daughter that way? Worse, Gavin had made sure she didn’t have Sam McPhee to turn to. No wonder she had left, erecting a wall of silence that had endured for years. He didn’t blame her.
He had responded to her departure by finding a mistress nearly as young as Michelle and becoming the resident playboy of Crystal City. He threw himself into work, producing a few small-studio independent films and giving the rest of his attention to the rodeo stock breeding program on his farm. There had barely been time to come up for air. And he sure as hell hadn’t been inclined to let her know her old boyfriend had made good and moved back to town.
He’d salved his guilt about Michelle in equally typical fashion—by setting up a massive college fund for her child. He knew better than to suppose he could buy her forgiveness, but at least the boy would never have to worry about paying for his education.
Many times since his diagnosis, Gavin had picked up the phone, even dialed the number. It was a terrible thing, a pathetic thing, to use pity and compassion to bridge the gap. He’d held off telling her as long as he could. Michelle caught on when Gavin had set up a new trust fund in Cody’s name. Within hours of receiving the papers to sign, she had called.
On some insane level, he was grateful for the illness that had brought her to him so swiftly and unquestioningly. If the transplant didn’t work, he’d feel like a failure. But that was asking for a guarantee, and for once in his life, he knew better than that.
The sight of a breakdown at the side of the road startled Gavin from his musings. He recognized the beige Chevy Celebrity parked on the shoulder with its hood propped up. He eased off the road and parked behind the car.
“Car trouble?” he asked the woman bent over the engine.
She straightened up. Instant recognition froze her face. Tammi Lee Gilmer was in her fifties and looked it, with tired skin and overtreated hair teased high. She was slender and pale-eyed, a wary smile playing about her mouth. In the years since she’d moved back to Crystal City, she had lived a quiet life, never showing any signs of the out-of-control partying that had once made her the talk of the town.
She worked in a fabric shop—Gavin had never set foot inside it. On the rare occasions that he saw her, they dismissed each other with a nod and a murmured hello. Now he was trapped.
“It just died on me,” she said. “I can’t think what happened.” Her voice was husky. As far as Gavin could tell, she’d given up drinking, but the habit still haunted her voice.
He opened the passenger door of his truck. “I’ll give you a lift.”
She slammed down the hood and grabbed her purse off the seat. “Thanks, Gavin. I was on my way out to Sam’s. I can call McEvoy’s Garage from there.”
It was a tall step up into his truck, and he held out a hand to steady her as she climbed in. Her arm felt small and bony, but she was spry enough as she settled into the passenger seat. She smelled of cigarettes and drugstore perfume, and he found the fragrance unpretentious and therefore slightly welcome. He came from a world where women donned formal dress to go to the mailbox. He didn’t miss that world at all.
He walked around the truck and got in, easing back onto the highway.
“You know the way to Sam’s?” she asked.
“Yeah, I know where Lonepine is. I’ve been out there once or twice.” Gavin had bought a couple of horses from Sam. Beyond that, they hadn’t spoken.
Tammi Lee crossed one leg over the other, adjusting the wool cuff of her snow boot. Gavin kept his eyes on the road, but he found himself remembering, almost against his will, one of the meetings he’d had with his transplant team. The psychologist had pretty much guaranteed him he’d have no interest in sex for a good long while—maybe never again. The antirejection meds had a motherlode of side effects.
“But it’s life,” Dr. Temple had said, his painfully earnest face animated by optimism. “Preferable to the alternative.”
Gavin hadn’t smiled. “Shoot me now,” he’d grumbled, and the psychologist had scribbled something on his clipboard.
Gavin missed Carolyn, who had lived with him until he’d been diagnosed. A former first-runner-up Miss California, her favorite things were riding horses, watching movies, shopping, and having imaginative, recreational sex.
When he told her about his illness, she had looked at him in horror, left that same day, sued him for eight thousand a month in palimony, and sold her story to a magazine.
His attorney had negotiated a much cheaper settlement, and Gavin had set up the second trust fund for Cody.
“I guess you know why I was headed out to Sam’s,” Tammi Lee said, bringing his thoughts around full circle.
“To see the boy, I imagine.”
“I’ve been told the boy’s name is Cody.” Her voice held a gentle censure. “Cody Jackson Turner. So it’s lucky I ran into you. Now you can tell me all about him, sort of prepare me.”
“I haven’t seen much of my grandson, Tammi Lee.”
“Yeah, well, he’s my grandson, too, and I’ve
never
seen him.”
“A word to the wise. Don’t expect a bunch of hugs and kisses.”
“From a sixteen-year-old boy who doesn’t know me from Reba McIntyre? Don’t worry, Gavin, I’m not that stupid.” She was pensive for a few moments. “When Sam was that age, he acted more grown up than me. Quit school and went to work for you. I took that boy’s childhood away from him. No. I never let him have a childhood in the first place.”
The frank regret in her voice made him wince. “Hey, take it easy on yourself. Sam’s fine. Not every mother raises a boy to become a doctor.”
“He did it all on his own. I never forget that. Never.”
“You have a right to be pretty proud of Sam,” Gavin remarked.
She laughed briefly, shaking her head. “I keep thinking he was left with me by mistake, that he was actually meant for some couple with a nice house full of books and a piano and supper hot on the table every night.”
“I bet that would have made him too soft to do everything he’s done.” Gavin wished she’d drop the subject. He knew what she’d been like when Sam was coming up. Though she’d been his full-time mother, in a way she had been as absent from Sam as Gavin was from Michelle. Because when you were a drunk, you weren’t there. Simple as that.
“Okay, here we are.” He turned down the drive to Sam’s place. It wasn’t a showy spread, not like Blue Rock was. A battered mailbox was the only indication that it had a name;
LONEPINE
was stenciled on the side and the flag was up. In the middle of the front pasture, the huge old lodgepole pine tree that had given the place its name stood draped in snow.
A slim girl on a tall Appaloosa rode in the opposite direction, leaving the ranch. Gavin recognized her as Ruby Lightning’s girl.
“Wonder if she was keeping Cody company,” Tammi Lee murmured. “If the youngster’s anywhere near as good-looking as his dad, he’ll have no trouble in the girl department. How about that daughter of yours?” she asked suddenly. “I hear she’s some big-shot ad executive in Seattle.”
“Uh-huh. But I didn’t have anything to do with that.”
“Nice she came back after all these years.”
He pulled up to the barn and parked. A Border collie scampered out, barking and leaping in the snow.
Turning to Tammi Lee, Gavin forced himself to level with her. “Michelle didn’t come back to be nice.”
“Oh… ?”
“I’ve been sick.” He hated saying it, nearly gagged on the words. “You probably heard that.”
“There was talk of it in the shop.”
“I’ve been on dialysis, but it isn’t doing it for me. I could go toxic anytime. I need a kidney transplant. Michelle’s going to be the donor.”
“My God—”
“I’ll never be able to thank her.”
“Just get yourself healthy, Gavin. That’ll be thanks enough. I know that for sure.”
Sam’s partner, Edward Bliss, came out hefting an extra large Havahart wildlife trap. Gavin opened Tammi Lee’s door for her.
“Hey, folks,” Bliss said, his greeting light, his stare heavy with curiosity.
“Hey yourself, Eddie.” Tammi Lee tucked her knitted hat down over her ears. “My car broke down. I’ll use the phone in the barn office.”
“Sure. Sam’s at work today.”
“I know. I came to see Cody.”
Bliss’s interest was so intense it was almost comical. “He’s in the barn.”
Gavin said, “You want some help with that trap?”
“No, thanks.” Bliss shuffled away on reluctant feet. “I’ve got it.” He deposited the trap on a flatbed sled hitched to a snowmobile. “Better be going. We’ve had a cat prowling around lately.”
“Let me know if that thing works. I’ve had trouble with mountain lions myself the past couple of years,” Gavin said as Bliss started the engine and rode off. Gavin stood between the truck and the barn, undecided. There was no need for him to stay, but he didn’t feel like going just now either.
Tammi Lee hesitated at the barn door. “Hey, Gavin?”
“Yeah?”
“Maybe you could, um, introduce us.”
For the first time since finding her on the side of the road, he smiled. He didn’t blame her, feeling nervous about meeting a sixteen-year-old grandkid she never knew about. Cody was enough to make anybody nervous. “Sure,” he said. “Of course.”
They went into the barn together. The fecund smells of hay and molasses oats and manure filled the air and, somewhere, a radio played terrible music designed to drive people crazy.
“I’m no square in the music department,” Tammi Lee whispered to Gavin. “Does this count as music?”
He made an exaggerated show of covering his ears. “Welcome to Cody’s world.”
They spotted him cleaning a stall. Oblivious to the visitors, he had a pretty good rhythm going with the shovel, bending to load, then swinging up to deposit the load in a wheelbarrow.
“Too bad Sam got to the kid first,” Gavin commented, surprised to see him working so industriously. “He would be pretty useful around Blue Rock.”
“You should give him some chores,” said Tammi Lee, her stare devouring Cody. “I bet he’d work for both of you.”
“When I first laid eyes on the boy, I didn’t think he’d turn out to be good for much of anything. To me, he looked like every reason I never watch MTV.”
Tammi Lee crossed her arms in front of her, leaning against a post. “Then you forgot the cardinal rule of kids.”