A Love to Call Her Own (2 page)

Her smile was a grimace, really, but she patted Patricia's hand, feeling like the biggest fraud that ever lived. “I know,” she admitted. “I'll stay.”

Dalton Smith gave the palomino colt one last assuring rub, then headed toward the house. The animals were all cared for, including the colt who'd opened a laceration on his leg, so now it was time to feed himself before he went to work on the tractor sitting uselessly inside the shed. The hunk of machinery was as cantankerous as its owner and broke down a lot more. He ought to give in and buy a new one, or at least new to him.

But in this economy, ranchers didn't pay the bills by giving in, not without a hell of a fight first. Besides, he'd been working on old hunks since he was ten. Ranching 101, his dad had called it.

When he cleared the barn, the first thing he noticed was Oz, the stray who'd adopted him, stretched out in a patch of lush grass. He lay on his back, head tilted, tongue lolling out, all four legs in the air, letting the sunshine warm his belly. When he'd come limping down the driveway, the shepherd had been painfully scrawny and covered with fleas and ticks. Five weeks of regular meals had turned him into a new dog. His coat was thick and shiny, his ribs no longer showing through his skin. He had retired his herding instincts, suckered Dalton into giving him a cushy new home, and was making the most of it.

The second thing Dalton saw was the dusty RV parked behind his truck. He groaned, and Oz opened one eye to look at him. “Some watchdog you are,” he muttered as he passed the dog. “You could've at least barked.”

Not that he really minded a visit from his parents. Since they'd retired to South Texas six years ago, they'd spent more than half their time traveling the country in that RV, and any time their route wandered near Tallgrass, they dropped by. His dad helped with chores, and his mom filled his freezer with home-cooked meals. There wasn't a piece of equipment made that David couldn't fix or a house that Ramona couldn't make feel like home.

It just took a bit of effort for Dalton to make himself sociable.

Unfazed by his criticism, Oz jumped to his feet and fell into step with him, heading for the back door. As Dalton pried his boots off on the top step, he scowled at the dog. “You're gonna wish you'd warned me. Mom doesn't allow animals in the house.” He might have bought the house from his folks, but that didn't make it any less Ramona's house.

The first thing he noticed when he walked inside were the smells. The house never stank; he wasn't that bad a housekeeper. It just sometimes smelled a little musty from the dust accumulated everywhere. At the moment, though, it smelled of beef, onions, jalapeño peppers, sugar, and cinnamon, and it made his mouth water. How many times had he come home to the aromas of hamburgers, Spanish fries, and cinnamon cookies in the oven? Hundreds.

Dad was sitting at the kitchen table, reading glasses balanced on the end of his nose, the Tallgrass newspaper open in front of him, and Mom stood in front of the stove, prodding the sliced potatoes, onions, and peppers in a pan filled with hot Crisco. She looked up, smiling brightly. “Sweetheart! I thought I was going to have to send your father looking for you. I hope you haven't eaten lunch yet because there's way too much food here for just your dad and me.”

Before Dalton could do more than hug her, her gaze shifted lower to Oz. “Didn't I already tell you once that you couldn't come in?”

As Oz stared back, Dad spoke up. “Ramona, you're the queen of the house on wheels parked out there, not this one. If Dalton doesn't mind having him in here, then you don't get to mind, either.” He folded the paper and laid it aside as he stood. Tall, lanky, his face weathered from years working in the sun and wind and cold, he looked the way Dalton expected to look in thirty years. “How are you, son?”

No handshakes for David. He was a hugger. It used to drive Dillon, Dalton's twin, crazy, being twelve, sixteen, eighteen, and getting hugged by his dad in front of everyone. Knowing that was half the reason Dad did it was enough to make it bearable for Dalton. Noah, the baby, never minded it at all. He was more touchy-feely than the rest of the family combined.

“Good,” Dalton replied as Oz defiantly pushed past Ramona and went to his water dish. “I wasn't expecting you guys.”

“Don't worry, we're just passing through.” Mom spooned the Spanish fries onto paper towels to drain, then tossed in a second batch. “Our friend, Barb Watson—do you remember her? She and her husband, Trey, stopped by here with us a few years back. Anyway, Barb died yesterday, so we're heading home for the funeral.”

“Sorry.” Dalton went to the sink to scrub his hands.

“It's such a shame. She was only eighty-three, you know, and she got around as well as I do. She was too young to die—”

In an instant, everyone went still in the room, even Oz. Mom's face turned red, and her hands fluttered as if she could wave away the words. “Oh, honey…I didn't mean…”

To remind him of his wife's death. No one in the family talked about Sandra, not because they hadn't loved her or didn't miss her, but because it had always been so hard for him. It had been four years this past January—four years that his grief and anger and the secret he'd guarded had made tougher than they had to be.

She'd been a soldier, a medic, on her second combat tour when she'd died. Twenty-seven years old, way younger than his parents' friend Barb, bleeding out in the desert thousands of miles from home. Losing her had been hard enough. Knowing she'd died in war had made it worse. Finding out she'd chosen to die had damn near killed him, and keeping that knowledge from everyone who'd loved her had almost finished the job.

What had eaten at him the most? The heartbreak of losing her so young? The ache in his gut that she hadn't trusted him? The anger that she hadn't given him any say, hadn't cared a damn about what he wanted? Most days he wasn't sure, but at the moment he thought maybe it was the guilt every time he lied by omission to the family. Her parents, her sisters, his parents, and Noah—they all believed she was a hero, tragically killed doing the job she loved, saving fellow soldiers. They believed she would have done
anything
to come home to them.

They didn't know she'd lacked the courage to come home. They didn't know she'd chosen to die in that damned desert and leave them forever.

And though it hurt soul-deep, Dalton intended for them never to find out. He wished like hell he didn't know. He would make damn sure their families didn't.

“It's all right, Mom. I know what you meant.” Shutting off the faucet, he dried his hands on a dish towel. He took care to rehang it perfectly straight on the rod, then slipped his arm around his mother's shoulders. “Oz and I are starving. Are those burgers about ready?”

Benjamin Noble was dictating notes in the small workspace outside the exam rooms that made up his pod of the clinic when the office manager came around the corner. He paused, wasting a moment trying to decipher the look on her face. Luann was competent, capable, and faced crises on a regular basis without so much as a frown, but this afternoon the smallest frown narrowed the space between her eyes.

“Dr. Noble, you got a call from a Jessy Lawrence. She asked you to call your mother. Said it's urgent.”

She offered him a pink message that he hesitated to take. His cell phone was on vibrate, as it always was while he saw patients, but he'd felt it go off three times in the last half hour. Jessy Lawrence's name had shown up on caller ID, but since he didn't know anyone by that name and she'd left no voice mail, he'd ignored it.

“Urgent” messages from Patricia were common enough, given their relationship, that this one didn't concern him. It could mean she wanted a diagnosis of her cough over the phone or information about hormone replacement therapy, despite his polite reminders that he was an orthopedic surgeon. It could mean she'd made the acquaintance of a friend's children or grandchildren and wondered about her own or that she was feeling a rare moment of remorse.

Remorse that had come way too late.

“Thanks, Luann. I'll take care of it when I get a chance.” He pocketed the number, breathed deeply to clear his head, then picked up the dictation where he'd left off. His exam rooms were filled with patients, and they'd run out of chairs in the waiting room an hour ago. Clinic days were never good days for dealing with his mother.

Honestly, he couldn't imagine a good day for dealing with his mother.

Twenty years ago she'd walked out on the family. She hadn't just left his father for another man. She'd left all of them—Dad, him, and his sisters. Ben had been fifteen, old enough and busy enough with school to not be overly affected, but Brianne and Sara, eleven and nine, had missed her more than any of them could handle.

Not the time to think about it. He put on a smile and went into room one. “Mrs. Carter, how'd you do with that last shot?” Picking up the needle his nurse had waiting, he sat on the stool and rolled over in front of the patient on the table. She was fifty-five—Patricia's age—and had severe osteoarthritis in her right knee, bone grating on bone. The injections weren't a cure but helped delay the inevitable surgery. Though she'd recovered beautifully from the total knee replacement on her left, she was hoping to put off a repeat of the brutal rehab as long as she could. He didn't blame her. It was human nature to put off ugly things, the crinkle of paper in his pocket reminded him.

He positioned the needle, deftly pushing it in, and was depressing the plunger when his cell phone vibrated again. His hand remained steady. Whether giving shots, inserting appliances to strengthen badly fractured bones, or sawing through the femur or tibia to remove a diseased knee, his hands were always steady.

The nurse blotted Mrs. Carter's knee and applied a Band-Aid while they exchanged the usual chatter—
Don't stress the joint for twenty-four hours, call me if you have any problems, see you in six months if you don't
—then he returned to the workspace to dictate notes again. There he pulled out the cell and looked at it a moment.

He routinely told his patients to call him if they had any problems, but that courtesy didn't extend to his mother. Granted, his patients didn't abuse the privilege—most of them, at least. There were a few for whom hand-holding was part of his job, but when Patricia was needy, she did it to extremes.

He was still looking at the phone when it began to vibrate. Jessy Lawrence again. He might ignore her, but she apparently had no intention of remaining ignored. Since he had no intention of being stalked around his office by a stranger on a smartphone, he grimly answered. “This is Benjamin Noble.”

There was that instant of silence, when someone was surprised to get an answer after repeatedly being sent to voice mail, then a husky, Southern-accented voice said, “Hey, my name is Jessy Lawrence. I'm a—a friend of your mother's over here in Tallgrass.”

He'd heard of the town, only an hour or so from Tulsa, but he couldn't remember ever actually having been there. “I didn't know she was back in the state.”

Another moment's silence. She clearly thought it odd that he didn't know where his mother was living. When Patricia had left them, she hadn't made much effort to stay in touch except when guilt or selfishness pushed her, and he'd learned not to care.

“She is,” Jessy said at last. “If you've got a pen, I'll give you her address. Ready? It's 321 West Comanche—”

“What is this about, Ms. Lawrence?”

“I'm sorry, Benjamin— Dr. Noble. There's no easy way to say this. Your stepfather was killed in Afghanistan. Your mother just found out. She needs you.”

A bit of shock swept through him, momentary surprise, the instinctive reaction a person felt upon hearing of someone's death. Though he'd met George only three times—at his, Brianne's, and Sara's high school graduations—Ben could feel regret that the man had died, that Patricia now found herself a widow.

But not a lot of regret. Patricia's loss couldn't possibly equal what he and his sisters had gone through when their father died. Rick Noble had stayed when Patricia left. He'd loved them, taken care of them, been both father and mother to them, and losing him had broken their hearts.

And it was Rick's own heart, broken when the love of his life abandoned them for another man, that had led to his death at forty-six. Yet Patricia expected Ben to mourn that man's death? To drop everything and rush to her side to be with her?

That wasn't going to happen.

“Give her my condolences, Ms. Lawrence. If you'll excuse me, I've got patients waiting.”

“But—”

He hung up, returned the phone to his pocket, then on second thought laid it on the counter beneath a stack of charts before heading to room three. Out of sight, out of mind, the old saying went. He hoped it held true today.

Patricia, Jessy had learned in the past hour, was Patricia Sanderson, wife—now widow—of Colonel George Sanderson. He'd been in the Army twenty-nine years and would have been promoted to general or retired by the end of thirty. Patricia had been in favor of retiring. She'd grown tired of traveling from assignment to assignment and never wanted to face a moving van and a stack of cartons again.

And she had a bastard of a son.

Immediately Jessy regretted that thought. She was proof that not all parent/adult child relationships were healthy. She hadn't spoken to her own parents in years and had had LoLo Baxter, the casualty notification officer, inform them of Aaron's death. They hadn't called, come to Tallgrass for the funeral, sent flowers or even a damn card. That didn't make her a bitch of a daughter.

It had just made her sorry.

“Is that coffee about ready?” LoLo came into the kitchen, bumping against Jessy deliberately on her way to choose a cup from the wooden tree. The major had the toughest job in the Army: telling people their loved ones had died. The first time—delivering tragic news, watching the surviving spouse collapse, getting dragged into the grief—would have destroyed Jessy, but LoLo had done it countless times with grace and great empathy.