Читать книгу Welcome Home, Cowboy - Karen Templeton - Страница 8

At least the house smelled good. Damn good. Like strong coffee and baking and that flowery stuff women liked to keep around. But man, being here was doing a number on Cash’s head. In fact, as he watched Emma serve up a huge piece of pie, he felt like somebody with ADD was controlling the remote to his brain.

Cats lazed and groomed in the midmorning sunlight splashing across the dull butcherblock counters, the gouged tile floor—old, faded dreams struggling for purchase in a scary sea of color. Orange walls. Turquoise cabinets. Yellow curtains. Hell, even the table was fire-engine red—

“Bright colors help stimulate the brain,” Emma said quietly, setting a plate in front of him and licking her thumb. “We did it mainly for Hunter.”

“Did it help?”

Through the calm, Cash caught a glimpse of the worry that was most likely a constant companion. “I don’t think it hurt,” she said with a slight smile, and his heebie-jeebies about being in the house morphed to apprehension about what she wanted to tell him, which then slid into a skin-prickling, inexplicable awareness of the woman herself—

“Let me get you a refill,” she said, whisking away his mug.

—which in turn stirred up a whole mess of conflicting feelings, most of which he’d pretty much lost touch with over the years … none of which he was the least bit inclined to examine now. If ever. The weird, inexplicable spurt of protectiveness notwithstanding—even more weird since he doubted there was a woman on the face of the earth who needed protecting less than Emma Manning—he wasn’t the protective type.

More than one shrink had told Cash his self-centeredness was a direct outcome of the hell he’d been through, the old survival instinct clawing to the surface of the toxic swamp that had been his childhood. Although how that survival instinct jibed with an equally strong bent toward self-destruction—at least, early on—neither he nor the shrinks could figure out. Other terms got bandied about a lot, too. Trust issues and emotional barriers and such.

A highfalutin way of saying he sucked at relationships.

At least, that was how his last ex had put it, Cash pondered as he watched the dark, rich brew tumble into his mug, in the note she’d left on the custom-made glass-and-iron dining table in their ritzy Nashville condo eight years ago. Yeah, the tabloids had been all over that one.

The self-destructive tendencies, Cash had finally gotten a handle on. Mostly. The putting-himself-first thing, however … not so much.

Which was why it was taking everything he had in him not to bolt. From the house, the woman, whatever she had to tell him. But before he could, she slid into the seat across from him with a glass of milk. He met her frown with one of his own.

“Well?”

“Eat your pie first.” The brutal, midmorning light showcased the fine lines marring otherwise smooth skin, the faintly bruised pouches cushioning those odd-colored eyes. Not gray or blue or green but some combination of the three. “Cleaning up after my husband wasn’t exactly on my chore list this morning. So I’m working up to it. Besides, I don’t know you, Mr. Cochran. I have no idea how you’re going to react to what I’m about to tell you.”

“Sounds ominous.”

“It’s not that, it’s …” She sighed. “Eat. Please.”

So he took a bite of the still-warm pie, letting the smooth, tangy-sweet fruit and buttery crust melt in his mouth. “Damn, this is good.”

“Thanks.” After watching him for a second, she said, “It really doesn’t feel any different? Being here, I mean.”

“Looks different, sure,” Cash said, reaching for his coffee. “Feels different?” He shook his head. “My brain knows my father’s not here. That it’s been twenty years. But it’s like no time’s passed at all.”

“You still have some serious issues, then?” When he looked over, she shrugged and swept a strand of hair off her face. “I’m not judging. Just trying to get a feel for where you’re coming from.”

Cash set down his mug. “How much did Lee tell you?”

“That your daddy got religion when you were little. The kind that gets hung up on the hellfire-and-brimstone stuff and kinda misses the memo about loving one another. That he took the ‘spare the rod and spoil the child’ thing a little too literally.”

Despite being oddly grateful for her directness, Cash had some trouble swallowing the last bite of pie. “He also mention how my father made sure I felt like a worthless piece of garbage?”

When Emma didn’t answer, he glanced up, seeing something in her eyes that could suck him right in. If he let it. “That, too.”

Sitting back, Cash released a breath. “God knows I’ve tried long and hard to let go of the bad feelings. But apparently the roots run too deep to dig ‘em out completely. Like that old yellow rosebush alongside the fence out front.”

Emma curved her hands around her glass, smiling slightly. A farmer’s hands, blunt-nailed and rough. Strong. An indentation marked where her wedding ring had been.

“Lord, I hate that thing. A thousand thorns to every bloom. Every year, I’m digging up runners, cussing it the entire time. But I swear nothing short of napalm’s gonna kill it.”

From the living room, Annie got after one of the cats. Her lips still curved, Emma shook her head, then sighed. “When you’re a kid, you assume everybody’s life is like yours. That since your parents are loving, everyone’s are—”

“Trust me, the opposite doesn’t hold true. I knew other kids didn’t have fathers whupping the ‘sin’ out of ‘em. Knew, because it hadn’t always been that way.” Cash paused, letting the wave of nausea play on through. “Worse though …” He swallowed, then met her eyes again. “Worse, was that I couldn’t understand why my mother never did anything to stop it. Eventually—when I got older, I mean—I realized she was scared to death of him. Of what he might do.”

Emma’s brow creased. “He abused her, too?”

“Enough.” As many times as he’d vomited the story to assorted therapists, you’d think it wouldn’t hurt anymore. Wrong. “I never told Lee that part, and he had no reason to guess since he never came over here. I had cause to hate my father, Emma. He was … obsessed, is the only way to put it. That everybody was a sinner and he was the instrument of God’s wrath.”

“So you ran away.”

“I stayed as long as I could, for Mama’s sake. But once she died, it was either leave or lose what little self-respect I had left. Not to mention my sanity. This house … it’s like you said. It was infected with his craziness. His meanness. I couldn’t … I couldn’t be good enough for him.”

Or for anybody, it turned out. Including himself.

Cash stood, carrying the plate and mug to the sink, noticing the full dish rack despite the dishwasher right under it. Taking his cue, he bumped up the faucet handle, squirted dish soap on the plate, into the mug. His throat clogged. “I’d loved him,” he said over the thrum of running water, “before the craziness started. And for a long time, all I wanted was for him to love me again. Until I realized that wasn’t ever gonna happen. Lee …”

The stab was quick, but for different reasons this time. Apparently regret hurt every bit as bad as self-righteousness. The dish and mug rinsed and in the rack, he faced Emma again.

“Lee was the only person who kept me going back then. Hell, Emma … leaving him and our friendship behind nearly killed me. I doubt …” He almost smiled. “I doubt he had any idea how much I worried about him those first few months. Then to find out—” His nostrils flaring, he shook his head. “I felt like I’d been sliced open with a dull knife. Especially since I couldn’t make head nor tail of it. Why Lee’d do that to me.”

“Then why didn’t you ask him?”

Beneath the calm, Cash heard the vexation bubble to the surface. The loyal wife defending her husband. Envy flashed, receded, replaced by anger of his own.

“Maybe I ran away, but the crap my father left in my head came right with me. That I was worthless, that I’d never amount to anything. I’d already been through hell and back by then, more times than I wanted to admit. How I even got a career going …” He punched out a breath. “Frankly, it was a damn miracle I didn’t end up dead in a ditch somewhere. Not sure anyone would’ve cared if I had. Except my manager, maybe.”

“You don’t mean that—”

“I’d barely begun to get my head screwed on straight when I heard the old man’d died, that Lee’d inherited this place. What he’d done for that to happen. Guess I took it a little hard.”

Emma leaned back, rubbing her belly, and Cash thought with a start about that “And?” earlier, when she’d asked him if there was anything else in the letter. There was, but if she didn’t know he wasn’t about to tell her. Not yet, anyway. Not until he figured out what to do about it.

Obviously, though, she’d meant something else. Something Lee hadn’t seen fit to mention, would be his guess. Not that anything would change how he felt. Yeah, he’d come in search of explanations as part of some lamebrained attempt to make sense of his past. Hell, of his present, for that matter. But that was it. Some hatchets were too big to bury.

Emma had gotten up to cover the pie before a big gray tiger cat got to it. She stood still for a moment, then turned, her arms crossed over her bulging belly.

“Mr. Cochran, your father … he really was crazy.”

“Tell me something I don’t know.”

“No, I mean, he was sick. Mentally ill. Some kind of chemical imbalance that made him act the way he did. Only nobody knew about his illness until a couple of years after you left.”

For the second time that day, Cash reeled, Emma’s words sparking off the wall of hurt and hate he’d kept in perfect repair for most of his life. “What are you talking about?”

“I wasn’t here yet—this was before I’d even met Lee—but apparently one Sunday Dwight came to town and kinda crashed the Baptists’ church service, ranting and raving and whatnot. I gather it got pretty ugly.”

Cash softly swore. “He hurt anybody?”

“No. Scared the bejeebers out of a lot of folks, though, if the way some still talk about it is any indication. Anyway, long story short, he ended up in a state facility. Lee said they tried to find you or your brothers, but it was like all three of you had vanished.”

“That was the idea,” he muttered. They were both gone now, but even before their deaths they hadn’t been close. Not when they’d saved their own butts but couldn’t see their way clear to save their baby brother’s. If he’d talked to either of ‘em more than a handful of times after they’d split, that was saying a lot.

“Once they got Dwight on the right meds,” Emma was saying, “he started acting as normal as you or me or anybody.” She paused. “When he did all those things to you, said all that stuff … that wasn’t your daddy talking. That was the sickness.”

“So, what?” he flung at her. “I’m supposed to just say, ‘I see,’ and forget it ever happened?”

“I’m only telling you what I know. What you do with it is your business.”

The rebuke hit its mark. Breathing hard, Cash turned away, grinding his fingers into the back of his neck.

“Anyway,” Emma continued, clearly unperturbed, “Lee and his folks were in the congregation that Sunday. In fact, Lee and his daddy helped the sheriff subdue Dwight, and Lee’s folks felt compelled to take responsibility. Because if they didn’t, who would?”

Yeah, Lee’s parents had definitely had a handle on the whole “Love thy neighbor” thing. Even neighbors nobody else wanted anything to do with.

“Lee’d started down at New Mexico State by that point,” Emma said. “And it was some months before the doctors felt Dwight was stable enough—and could be counted on to take his meds—to release him. So he came back here, even if there wasn’t a whole lot left to come home to by that point. Still, he needed looking after. Lee’s folks did it at first, but after they died, Lee and I took over. At least until Dwight went into a home a year or so later. Place down in Albuquerque. Nothing fancy, but Dwight seemed to like it well enough.”

Smoothing the wrinkled flannel shirt over her stomach, she said, “I assume your father left the house to us because we were the closest thing he had to family. But I had no idea Lee’d never told you what was going on.”

“Like I said, we weren’t in touch—”

“He could’ve gotten a message to you, if he’d wanted. Somehow. But it wasn’t until after Dwight’d left us the place that Lee finally admitted you didn’t know. We had words about that, believe you me.

“So, knowing the cat would be out of the bag once the lawyer contacted you, Lee asked him if he’d send along a note of explanation. Again, I assumed Lee had been forthcoming at that point. Clearly I was wrong.”

“Why?” Cash lashed out, not even fully understanding the pandemonium threatening to break loose inside him. “Why didn’t he just tell me the truth?”

“I don’t know,” Emma said as a dryer buzzer sounded from the closed-in porch behind them. “At least, not for sure. Um … do you mind? I’ve got at least four more loads, and if I lose my momentum I’ll be doing laundry at midnight.”

Bile rising in his throat, Cash watched her disappear into the add-on his father had built before everything went haywire. The splintered plank floor probably bore the imprints of Cash’s knees from when he’d been made to kneel for hours, reflecting on his sins. He drew a deep breath and followed her, standing in the doorway.

The warm, cluttered room smelled clean. Sweet. Dozens of Ball canning jars lined the pantry shelves, lined up by their contents’ color like a child’s crayon box—yellow to red to orange to green—glistening against the bright, white walls … and white tiled floor.

“What do you mean, you don’t know for sure?” he asked at last.

The dryer open, Emma pulled out a peach-colored towel, efficiently folding it into fourths. “Like I said, I thought Lee had told you. Although I know your father didn’t want you to know about his illness.”

“Why not? After all, it gave him the perfect out.” At her sharp glance, he sighed. “You may as well know, I’m not a nice person. Not saying I go around kicking puppies or taking people’s heads off because I’m having a bad day or anything. I’m not a total SOB. But my milk of human kindness has always run several quarts low. Finding out about my father. it doesn’t change anything. Certainly it doesn’t make me feel, I don’t know … whatever you think I should be feeling.”

Another towel clutched to her chest, Emma considered how little the man in front of her lined up with the image she’d carried of him all these years. Of course, nearly twenty years was bound to change a person. She wasn’t the same she’d been at sixteen—why would Cash be?

But whereas marriage and motherhood had softened her, made her more malleable, clearly Cash’s experiences had produced the opposite effect. She could practically see the accumulated layers of caution hardened around his soul, like emotional polyurethane. And yet, as impenetrable as he thought they were, their translucence still allowed a glimpse of the aching heart beating inside.

“I don’t think anything, Mr. Cochran.” At his snort, she dumped the folded towel into a nearby plastic basket, then shooed away The Black One before he settled in for a snooze. “Who am I to say what you should be feeling? I didn’t go through what you did. Anyway …”

She hauled out the rest of the towels, heaping them on top of the washer. “As I was saying, your father didn’t want you to know. According to Lee, once he was in his right mind again and started piecing together what he’d done to you and your mom and your brothers, he was horrified. Ashamed. Didn’t matter to him, either, that he hadn’t been responsible for his actions back then. I guess he figured what was done, was done. That some things, you couldn’t fix.”

The towels folded and in the basket, she clanged up the washer lid, transferred the wet clothes to the dryer, slammed the dryer closed, then dumped the next load in the washer. When she went to pick up the heavy basket, however, Cash grabbed it from her.

“Oh! You don’t have to do that—”

“Where’s it go?”

“Our—my—bedroom.”

A shadow flickered across his eyes before he carted the basket to the master bedroom, the soft pastels and thick comforter on the king-size bed a far cry from the cold white walls, brown spread and worn hooked rug from when Dwight still lived here.

“Looks nothing like I remember.”

“That was the idea.”

Several beats passed before he said, “Lee still should’ve told me. No matter what my father wanted.”

“I agree. But …” Separating the towels and bathroom rugs into three piles on the bed, she spared Cash a quick glance, then returned to her task. “Lee and I, we had similar childhoods in many ways. Loving parents, stable home life, all of that. But we were both also teased a lot when we were kids. For being fat—”

“You’re not—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said on a light laugh, “I’m big as a house. Especially right now. No sense in pretending otherwise. And as a kid I was downright roly-poly. Just like Lee.” She looked up, swiping a hunk of hair out of her face. “But he said you were the only kid who never made fun of him. How you stuck up for him when the other kids did.” She carted clean towels and rugs into the phone-booth-size master bath, then returned. “That you gave him the confidence to get his first girlfriend. In other words, Lee felt he owed you.”

Cash’s brows pushed together. “You think Lee saw taking care of the old man as a way to pay me back for being friends with him? That’s nuts. Especially since it kinda worked both ways. Lee stuck by me, even though I was the kid other kids’ parents told them to stay away from. Like what my father had was contagious.”

“Okay, then maybe Lee figured there wasn’t any point in telling you. Because he didn’t think the damage could be undone, either. To ask you to come back, when the wounds were still so fresh …” She paused. “Would you have? If you’d known?”

Not surprisingly, he didn’t answer right away. Instead he hefted The Big Fat Gray One, who’d been twining around his ankles, into his arms, scratching her under the chin until her purring seemed to swallow the room. Emma took pity on him. “It’s okay, you don’t have to answer that—”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t much like that somebody else got burdened with looking after him. But back then …” He blew out a breath. “By the time I left, I doubt I would’ve been much good to anybody. Let alone the man who’d left me in that condition. Which still doesn’t answer why Lee didn’t tell me the truth after my father died.”

“I know,” Emma said, sighing. “Especially since he knew how much it would’ve ticked me off to find out he hadn’t.”

Cash almost smiled. “I take it you’re not one for keeping secrets.”

“No, I’m not. Although I suppose I understand Lee’s loyalty conflicts. The Christian duty he felt he had to take care of your father versus his high esteem of you. For overcoming everything you did, for making a name for yourself … if you’d been blood kin, he couldn’t have been any prouder of you.” Other words bunched at the back of her throat; if she’d been as good as her husband, she’d swallow them. But she wasn’t, and if she didn’t let them out she’d choke. “Although frankly it got a little tiresome, hearing him talk about you all the time like you were some kind of god.”

Only the merest flicker of Cash’s eyelids indicated her words had hit home. But her husband’s constant adulation of his old friend had irritated Emma far more than she’d let on in the name of matrimonial harmony. Yes, Cash had suffered as a kid—what it must’ve been like for him growing up, she couldn’t imagine. But he wasn’t a god, he was just a man—a man who’d made, from everything she could tell, some really poor choices along the way.

At some point a person has to stop using the past as an excuse for his bad behavior. Whether Cash had done that by now, she could hardly tell from a single conversation. But he sure as heck hadn’t during all those years of her listening to Lee’s ballyhooing about how great he was—

The baby walloped her a good one, a little foot trying to poke right through her belly button. Grabbing the bedpost, Emma stilled, slowly breathing through the Braxton-Hicks contractions that inevitably followed.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said when it ended, straightening. “Getting crowded in there, is all.”

She gathered the rest of the towels to stuff in the tiny linen closet in the hall; Cash stepped aside, but the space was too cramped for them not to invade each other’s personal spaces. Especially as between them they took up enough space for at least four average-size people. Cash was all hard and lean where Lee had been more on the marshmallow side, but still, there was a lot of man there.

A lot.

The towels crammed into the closet, Emma started back toward the living room. Silently, Cash followed her, ducking into the kitchen to retrieve his jacket, his face creased into a scowl when he came back out.

“I didn’t ask Lee to put me up on some kind of pedestal, Emma. God knows I didn’t deserve to be on one. But if listening to him talk about me got up your nose, then maybe you should’ve said something instead of staying silent for so long. Or does your thing about the truth only work one way?”

As Emma stood with her mouth open, Cash hunched into his jacket and said his goodbyes to Annie, whose only reply was a waved paintbrush over her shoulder. Then he faced Emma again, his eyes all sharp. “That it?”

“I think so, yes. No, wait,” she said the second he got through the door. “There’s one more thing.”

“And what’s that?” he said, still scowling.

“After Dwight went into the home, Lee took him a copy of your first CD.”

Cash actually flinched. “Now why on earth would he have done that? Considering Dwight destroyed my first guitar.”

Emma laid a hand on her belly as old memories, old hurts, darkened his eyes. “I know, Lee told me—”

“Millie Scott gave it to me,” he said to no one in particular, palming the porch post. “I was eleven, twelve, something like that. It’d been her son’s before he moved away. Gave me all his how-to-play books, too. Took the better part of the summer to get the hang of it.”

With a short, dry laugh, he looked back at Emma. “I was so bad when I started, I’d play in the barn so nobody’d hear me. Except one day Dad did.” The glimpse of humor vanished. “God knows I’d seen him mad plenty by then, but that was nothing compared with that time. You’d thought he found me …” His face reddened. “Well, I suppose you can fill in the blanks on that one.

“Anyway, he grabbed the guitar, told me to git. Later I found it smashed to pieces in one of the garbage cans. Took another two years before I could buy another one—Mama’d slip me a couple of dollars every week from the grocery money. Bought it one of the rare times she and I went to Santa Fe by ourselves.” His mouth stretched. “My first Fender.”

“That the one you hid at Lee’s?”

“Yep. I think the old man knew. Or at least suspected. Because whenever he felt the need to get in a dig? He brought up how bad I was. That who’d ever want to listen to me, anyway? Cows and horses, maybe, but that was it.” His gaze narrowed. “So why on earth would Lee give him my album?”

“Because that wasn’t the same man who destroyed your first guitar! Or got off on belittling you. Mr. Cochran,” she said when he turned away, shaking his head, “you’re not listening—the drugs, the treatment … they banished the monster who’d lived inside your father all those years! Or at least subdued it. And the man left behind, the real man who’d been there along … he listened to the whole album straight through, tears running down his face.”

Her arms crossed against the chill, Emma stepped closer, half tempted to smooth a hand across those hard, tense shoulders, half tempted to cuff the back of Cash’s head. “Believe me or not, it’s no skin off my nose … but your father died a humbled man. And as proud of you as he could have possibly been. I heard him say it myself more times than I can count. He never expected you to love him again, but at the end of his life he loved you more than he could say.”

Silence shrilled between them for a long moment before Cash said, “Just not enough to let me know.”

“Hey. You wanted answers? These are the only ones I’ve got.”

Another second or two of that hard, unrelenting gaze preceded his stalking to his SUV. After much door-yanking and slamming, he gunned the car out of the drive, mud spraying in a roostertail of epic proportions.

Zoey came onto the porch, snuggling up against Emma’s hip. “What was that all about?”

Good question, Emma thought on a sigh, fingering her daughter’s soft, tangled hair. “When I figure it out, I’ll let you know.”

Although what was there to figure out? she mused as they went back inside. Wasn’t like she’d ever see Cash Cochran again. And thank God for small favors.

Because some aggravations, a body does not need.