A Love to Call Her Own (18 page)

It was beautiful, shades of blue, purple, violet, red, delicate gold. Jessy had gone up on the roof and taken a hundred pictures of sunsets, and no matter how gorgeous the photos were, they couldn't match the real thing for taking her breath away.

“Every time Scott went away, even if it was just a few weeks' training, we would watch the sun set the night before, and he'd say, ‘Distance doesn't matter. Wherever you are, wherever I am, that same sun is going down on both of us, and it'll remind you that I'm thinking of you.'” Fia laid one hand flat against the window. “Every night when the sun sets, I think of him and how much he loved me. He was the first person who ever really did. The first person who thought I was worthy. Who made
me
think I was worthy.”

“He was lucky to have you,” Jessy murmured.

The smile that touched Fia's mouth was shaky. “Yeah. We were both incredibly lucky.”

Jessy was sad enough to cry, except that life was too short to waste on…Oh, hell. Surreptitiously she wiped away a tear…then noticed that Fia's hand against the window was trembling. Not emotional-shaky, but uncontrollable-shaky. Fia realized it, too, and withdrew it, wrapping her fingers tightly around the glass in her left hand. The result was tea splashing on the wood floor.

“I'm sorry. I'll get…” The words came out slurred.
Ah'm suhrry. Ah'll ge…

After taking the glass from her, Jessy slid her arm around her waist. “I'll do it. Right now let's get you back to the couch.”

Fia leaned heavily against her, and Jessy glanced down, surprised to see that the girl's left foot was turned up so that she walked on the outside edge of it. Two questions took turns pounding in her brain. What was wrong with Fia? And what the hell qualified Jessy to guarantee help?

Once she was settled on the couch, Fia smiled crookedly. “Ah jus' need rest. Ah'll be okay.” With effort, she touched her involuntarily curled fingers to Jessy's arm. “You're gon' be okay, too.”

Dalton woke to a quiet house Monday morning. Noah, home for the weekend, had stumbled in sometime around 3 a.m., and Dalton had hauled his ass upstairs to his room.
Did you drive?
he'd demanded, and Noah, swaying unsteadily, had grinned.
'Course not.
Those were the last words he'd said before getting dumped on his bed.

Oz gave Dalton a look when he rolled over, then stood and stretched from the tips of his whiskers to the end of his tail. After a good shake, he jumped to the floor and trotted out the door.

It was Memorial Day, and it ranked right up there with Veterans Day as Dalton's least favorite holiday. When he was younger, Memorial Day had always seemed more about family and fun than remembering the dead. His mom had dragged them to the cemetery to place wreaths on various long-gone relatives' graves, but then they'd watched the parade before going to the lake for a picnic with their still-living relatives. Hell, he'd been out of high school before he'd really gotten the meaning of the day, and by then he'd long since managed to avoid those trips to the cemetery.

Now he was back to doing them. He put yellow flowers on Sandra's grave year-round, so she would forgive him for skipping this week, but her mother and his wouldn't. Besides, the idea of her grave being one of the few flowerless ones on this particular day was just sad.

All of the graves surrounding Sandra's were from the war on terror, all fairly recent. Few would go unmarked, including that of Corporal Aaron Lawrence. Leaving flowers in honor of memories that would never be lost was how Dalton and Jessy had met.

He hadn't seen her since Thursday night. He had intended to drive into town—and finally ask for her phone number—Friday after work, but Noah had shown up with a couple of friends majoring in agriculture who'd been full of questions about the ranch. Saturday and Sunday, it seemed everything that could go wrong had. A couple of cows had gotten out and decided life on the other side of the fence was too interesting to easily surrender. While he and Noah were rounding them up, Noah's horse had bolted at the sound of an oncoming vehicle and unseated him on the road, giving him a nasty knot on the back of his head. The colt who'd injured his leg had opened it up again, requiring a visit from the vet.

Sunday morning, Dalton had gone downstairs to the sight of water rippling through the hall. The hot water tank had burst in the utility room, flooding the first floor. They'd used the wet vac, mopped, and swept water out the back door, making a nice muddy puddle for Oz to wander through every time he came in.

Through all the work, Dalton had anticipated seeing Jessy today. It was a strange feeling, one he hadn't experienced in a long time, one he'd never expected to experience again. But damned if it didn't feel good.

After getting dressed, he followed Oz downstairs to the kitchen, where, major surprise, Noah was dressed, bright-eyed, and cooking bacon and eggs. “I figured you'd be down soon after the mutt. Coffee's ready. Biscuits will be done in five.”

Dalton glowered at him as he filled his mug with strong coffee. “You're not even hungover.”

“Would you feel better if I was puking my guts out instead of cooking your breakfast? Not that I was anywhere near that shit-faced.” Noah set a tub of margarine on the kitchen table next to a hot pad made from one of their grandmother's old quilts.

“You going back to Stillwater today?”

“Yeah. In a couple hours. You have any plans besides taking flowers…”

Dalton sat down at the table and studied the hot pad. Cut from a crazy quilt his grandmother had made, it was roughly eight inches square, wools and cottons and small strips of velvet stitched this way and that, well used, often washed, faded but holding together. He liked to think the same could be said of him fifty years from now.

“Yeah,” he answered at last. “This guy I know and his fiancée are having a cookout this afternoon.”

Noah turned from the stove, his eyes wide open and his mouth gaping. “Who?”

“No one you know.”

“I know
everyone
you know.”

That had been true until recently, Dalton acknowledged. He'd cut himself off from everyone except the people he was forced to deal with—family, buyers, suppliers—and Noah did know every one of them. “Not Dane. He's a soldier at the fort, he likes palominos, and…” Deep breath. “I'm going to be the best man at his wedding next weekend.”

Leaving Noah speechless was a rare occurrence, and Dalton was appreciating it now. It only lasted until the kid caught a whiff of overcooked bacon, when he turned back to the stove and words came flooding out. “How could you get to know someone well enough to be his best man without me knowing it? Where did you meet him? A soldier? For real? And you're going to a
party
?”

He chose to answer the easiest question and ignore the rest. “Yeah, a party. With people and food and everything.”

“And a wedding. Man, you haven't even been to a wedding since—” Noah shot a glance over his shoulder as he began dishing eggs and bacon onto plates.

“Since Sandra and I got married,” Dalton said evenly. “I haven't known many people who got married since then.”

Noah delivered the plates, then returned for the hot tin of biscuits, setting it on the crazy quilt pad. “Is the maid of honor good-looking? Any chance you'll get laid?”

His little brother always had getting laid on his mind. Granted, the kid was nineteen. And to be fair, it had been on Dalton's mind a lot more than it should have been since Thursday night.
Next time…

He cleared his throat. “I haven't met her. She's some kind of genius scientist from Utah, and she's married.”

Noah slid into the chair across from him and dug into his breakfast. “There are bound to be other women there. Single women at weddings are always easy pickin's.” He shook his head disbelievingly. “Damn. You meeting people, going to parties, being in weddings…Next thing I know, I'll come home and find a woman here.”

Heat spread through Dalton, and he shifted uncomfortably in his chair. He had no obligation to tell Noah anything about Jessy. He didn't even know where they were headed yet. It could just be a thing. A few dates, sex, it's-been-nice-good-bye. Though in his gut he didn't want that to be the case. There was just something about Jessy…

Lucky for him, Noah was too interested in eating to notice his response. Dalton followed his lead, so for a while, the only sounds in the kitchen were them scarfing down food and Oz's occasional lip licking as he waited for the scraps he knew were coming.

Dalton was spreading butter on his last biscuit when Noah finally spoke again. “Does anybody ever put flowers on Grandma and Grandpa's graves?”

“I don't know. Never thought about it.” They hadn't had a lot of relatives in town to start with—the Smith and Reynolds families were spread wide over Oklahoma—and of the ones who'd lived in Tallgrass, the older folks had died off and the younger ones had moved away.

After another silence, Noah pushed his chair back and propped one ankle over the opposite knee. “You think…Do you think Dillon's buried out there somewhere, with nobody to put flowers on his grave?”

Dalton slowly chewed the biscuit in his mouth, then washed it down with a gulp of coffee. He hated talking, even thinking, about his twin, but that didn't keep him out of his mind. Noah had been so young when Dillon took off. In the beginning, he'd asked about him every day—
Where'd he go, when's he coming home?
—but now he rarely mentioned his name. Part of it was just time passing, and part was a desire not to stir Dalton's bitterness. Obviously, Dillon wasn't far from Noah's thoughts, either.

“I don't know,” Dalton said at last. “Odds are just as good he's alive.”

“Don't you
feel
something? You're his twin. You're supposed to have some kind of connection.”

Dalton's first response was derision, his second surprise they'd never had this conversation before. No, no surprise. He'd never given Noah the chance to ask. “Maybe it works that way for some twins, but not us. I never knew what was going on with him, even when we were kids and shared a room.”

“Why'd he leave like that? Why didn't he ever let anyone know he was okay?”

“I imagine part of the reason he sneaked off in the middle of the night was because he took my girlfriend with him. Her daddy would have met him with a shotgun if he'd had any clue what was happening. As for not calling…that's just Dillon. He never thought about anyone but himself.”

Noah's eyes went big at the girlfriend part. Had their parents never told him the whole story? Had he been too concerned about bringing up painful memories to ask them? Unlike Dillon, Noah did think about other people's feelings. He might get pissed and pop off something smart on impulse, but as a general rule, he respected people's emotions.

“Sometimes I'm not even sure I remember him,” he confessed. “I remember a lot of stuff, but sometimes I'm not sure whether I'm remembering him or you. I mean, you looked alike, acted alike. Like, I don't remember if it was him that threw me in the lake in my church clothes or you.”

“Him. It was him who shaved your head while you were asleep. And him who hung you up by your overalls strap on a hook in the barn. And him who told you Santa Claus liked to steal little boys and take them back to his workshop to make toys.” Abruptly Dalton grinned. “In fact, if the memory is of someone doing something
to
you, it was him. I was the good twin.”

Noah snorted, then leaned down to set his plate on the floor for Oz. “Were you in love with her?”

It took Dalton a moment to realize which
her
he meant. “I thought I was. Turned out, it was just that I was nineteen.” Exhaling, he brought the image from the long-past-relevant section of his mind: blond hair, blue eyes, a fondness for fire engine red lipstick, dancing, country music, and fun times. “Her name was Alice, she chewed gum all the time, and every sentence she said, ‘you know?' We wouldn't have lasted another month before she got bored or I strangled her for saying ‘you know?' one time too many.”

“But it's the principle,” Noah argued. “She was
your
girlfriend. You don't mess with your brother's girlfriend.”

Dalton remembered warning Jessy away from Noah last month. Now he knew there'd been no need. She might have flirted with him, had a beer with him, even danced with him, but Dalton knew his little brother wasn't her type.

He knew, because
he
was.

Jessy had a blast at the Memorial Day parade with the margarita group staking out a good-sized chunk of sidewalk in front of Jessy's building for themselves and their families. Dane and Keegan, Therese's sweetie, talked a lot of Army stuff, and her kids, Abby and Jacob, entertained Keegan's little girl, Mariah, while visiting with their own friends. Bennie brought her grandmother, a sharp old lady whose cocoa brown eyes seemed to see everything. After that first soul-deep look when they'd been introduced, Jessy had avoided making eye contact with her again. Lucy and Marti were their usual selves. Fia was having a good day, though Jessy had provided her with a chair just in case, right between Bennie's grandmother and so-very-pregnant Ilena.

It seemed all the girls were celebrating this day of remembering with only good memories, or at least they were putting on a damn good show. Jessy's own were bittersweet, as always. A lot of love and good times, sorrow and regret. One surprising thing: She wasn't feeling so much the fraud. Maybe she'd finally hit bottom in her well of guilt. Maybe her psyche was starting to realize that she might be worthy of forgiveness. Of doing enough rights to offset those major wrongs.

After the parade ended, the ones who lived close enough to walk home did so, while the others waited to let traffic thin out. That was how Jessy found herself seated next to Bennie's grandmother.
Call me Mama Maudene,
the old lady had said, clasping Jessy's hands in hers, but Jessy had too much of the old-fashioned Southern girl in her and found the name
Mama
darn near impossible to use.