A Family For The Sheriff. Elyssa Henry

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СКАЧАТЬ out here changing this tire.” Joe backed out of the argument.

      “Mom!” Sam pleaded. “We’re just a few miles from home, and you’ll be behind us. Can’t I go with him? Just this once?”

      Maria decided later that her headache had brought about insanity and that was why she’d agreed to the request. Nothing else could account for it.

      “All right.” She shook her head. “All right. You can ride home with him and then you can get in the shower and go to bed.”

      “Yes, ma’am!” Sam whooped and jumped out of the truck.

      Maria leaned her head against the cool window and closed her eyes. A light rap on the glass brought her head up with a start.

      “Sorry it took so long,” Joe apologized. “We’re ready when you are.”

      “I’m ready,” she replied. “You won’t—”

      “Go a hundred and sixty?” He chuckled, his face nearly invisible in the darkness. “I promised a sedate fifty. You can track me.”

      “I will,” she vowed, rolling up the truck window.

      Sam waved to her from the lighted interior of the expensive car, then Joe started the engine.

      True to his word, Joe drove the car carefully down the highway, the old truck a dark shadow on the car’s bumper.

      There were no streetlights, so she couldn’t see into the car, but she felt sure her son was making conversation lively for Joe.

      Maria trailed them to her driveway. Sam and Joe were already out of the car by the time she’d parked the truck.

      “I just want to show Joe my award,” Sam said.

      “No.” Maria was adamant “We had an agreement, remember? You wanted to ride in the car, but in turn you had to go straight in, take a shower and go to bed.”

      “Mom,” he groaned.

      “Another time,” Joe promised. “It’s getting late.”

      “All right.” Sam glanced at his newfound friend in the halo of the porch light. “I’ll see you later.”

      “I think my place is the next one up from here,” Joe told him cheerfully. “We’re neighbors. We’re bound to run into each other.”

      Maria’s heart sank. It was true. The old Hannon farm was the next place up the road, about a mile away. However, they wouldn’t be all that likely to see one another.

      “I appreciate your help, Maria,” Joe told her when Sam had gone inside the house.

      “I did what anyone would have done. But I don’t see what good it will do for you to stay here.”

      He laughed lightly. The sound sent a shiver up her spine, which she attributed to the late hour and the cool breeze that had picked up after the rain.

      “I don’t give up so easily,” he told her bluntly.

      “No one wants you here,” she replied in as blunt a fashion. “How can you get anything accomplished like that?”

      “Sometimes people have to swallow the medicine even if it doesn’t taste like cherries,” he replied in a cheerful tone. “I guess I’m that medicine.”

      Maria thought about the state of the old Hannon place but bit her tongue. She didn’t have the nerve or the heart to tell him the home he was looking for wasn’t to be found there.

      “I guess everyone has to do what they think is best,” she said, and turned to the door. “I don’t envy you.”

      And you wish I’d go to hell and get it over with, he thought. He wondered if he’d actually consigned himself to that hot spot by staying when his every instinct was telling him to leave.

      “Good night, then,” she said, her voice a whisper in the darkness as the rain began to fall again.

      “Good night,” he told her quietly. He added, “I’ve seen the house, Maria.”

      After she’d closed the door, she thought she might have imagined the last part. How could he have seen the old house without his car? It didn’t make sense. Had he walked there from town?

      Probably her guilty conscience putting words in his mouth. She had been part of the scheme. Or if not actively part, then at least she didn’t raise any protest.

      But then she had never been one to purposely stand out or get people upset over anything.

      She sighed when she saw the number of messages on her answering machine, having a good idea what those messages might be.

      She stared at the little black box for a long moment, her head still pounding. Then she turned off the light without listening to the calls and slowly walked up the stairs to bed.

      The rain was gone the next morning. Bright September sunlight flooded the changing leaves of the big oak trees around the farmhouse.

      Maria got Sam off to school then went out to her garden. The sun was warm on her head as she worked, beginning what would probably be the last harvest of herbs for the year.

      It had been a good year, a profitable year. The first since Josh’s death. With any luck and a mild winter, she might be able to afford a new truck by next year.

      After selling off the livestock Josh had accumulated, she had changed the old barn into a crude greenhouse that would enable her to go on raising some of her best cash crop even after the first heavy frost of fall.

      Over the summer, she’d finally managed to work out a long-term deal with two of the restaurants in Rockford. They would buy whatever she could raise and deliver of fresh parsley, sage, oregano and thyme.

      Being able to grow her herbs all year would ease the financial setbacks since Josh’s death.

      And maybe, she thought as she sat on her heels and stretched her back, she would even have enough to buy Sam a computer for his birthday next summer.

      Like many couples, Maria and Josh hadn’t planned for his early death or what the loss of income would mean to the ones left behind. The first year, she and Sam had barely survived while Maria had tried to patch their lives back together.

      By the second year, she was fighting back and finding that she didn’t have to be a victim after all. It wasn’t the life she had planned, but it was the life she had, and she was going to make the best of it.

      Many people, including her own family, had said that she wouldn’t be able to make a go of it on her own after Josh’s death. She was determined to prove them wrong.

      Maria walked into the house, knowing Sam wasn’t due home for another hour. She threw her dirty gloves into the washing machine then ran upstairs for a shower.

      Muddy jeans and T-shirt went down the laundry chute while the water heated, making its strange gurgling and whining sounds.

      It СКАЧАТЬ