A Family of Her Own. Brenda Novak

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СКАЧАТЬ driven her around on his Harley and shown her one heck of a good time. But he was somewhat remote, and she’d always approached their relationship with a sense of inevitability, believing that it wouldn’t—couldn’t—last. Then he’d shown up at her door and proposed! She didn’t know how to explain it, except that his widowed grandmother, Hatty, had just died. He and Hatty had been so close throughout her final years that Katie could only suppose his sudden marriage proposal was triggered by his loss.

      Now he was obviously holding a grudge that she’d turned him down at a difficult time, or been the one to cut things off between them. “I make a left at 500 South?” he asked after several minutes.

      She pulled her attention from the rain beading on the windshield. “What?”

      “Your parents still live in the same place, don’t they?”

      Last she’d heard they did. But she didn’t know. She hadn’t talked to them since a year ago last Christmas, when they’d told her not to call again. “They’ve been on Lassiter nearly thirty years,” she said, infusing her voice with as much confidence as she could muster. “Knowing them, they’ll be there another thirty.”

      “Seems I heard your father say something not too long ago about building a cabin a few miles outside of town.” He shifted his eyes from the road to study her. “They give up on that?”

      Apprehension clawed at Katie’s insides. Her folks still had the same telephone number. She’d definitely heard her mother answer when she used the pay phone yesterday. She’d wanted to tell her family she was on her way home. Only she’d lost her nerve at the last moment and hung up.

      “Yeah.” Having the same number didn’t necessarily mean they hadn’t moved within a certain geographic area, but Katie was sticking with the gamble. Doing anything else would reveal a rift she preferred to keep private. “They like living so close to their bakery. That bakery is their life,” she added.

      The Arctic Flyer appeared on the right, evoking bittersweet memories. Katie had worked there the summer of her junior year because she’d wanted to try something besides her parents’ bakery, and she’d broken the ice-cream machine her first week. Harvey, the owner, had complained every day about the money she was costing him, until the part to repair the darn thing finally came in.

      Booker turned up the radio, and she glanced surreptitiously in his direction. Her memories of him didn’t go back nearly as far as her Arctic Flyer days. She’d heard tales of him visiting for several months when he was about fifteen; he’d raised enough hell that the entire town still regarded him as trouble. He’d mentioned a few things about that visit himself, like stealing Eugene Humphries’s truck and wrecking it only a few hours later. But Katie was nine years old at the time. She hadn’t met Booker until years later when he moved in with Hatty.

      “Aren’t you curious to know what I’m doing back?” she asked, turning to conversation to stanch the flow of memories.

      He looked pointedly at her two suitcases, which he’d wedged into the back seat of his extended cab. “That’s pretty obvious.”

      “Actually, it’s probably not what you think. San Francisco was fabulous, for the most part,” she said. Which was true—if she confined her comments to the city itself.

      When he made no reply, she plunged ahead. “It’s just that I’m a country girl at heart, you know? I decided that San Francisco is a great place to visit, but nowhere I’d want to stay.”

      He slung one arm over the steering wheel, and she supposed it was his rebel attitude that made him look both bored and on-edge at the same time.

      “Don’t you have anything to say?” she asked.

      His toothpick moved as he chewed on it. “Where’s Andy?”

      “He—” she scrambled for something to crack Booker’s reserve “—he’s laid up and couldn’t come along.”

      Booker arched an eyebrow. “Laid up?”

      “He was…um…hit by a cable car,” she said with a grin to let him know she was joking.

      She’d hoped to elicit a smile, but the line of Booker’s lips remained as grim as ever. Slowly he slid the toothpick to the other side of his mouth. “You mean life in San Francisco wasn’t the nirvana you expected.”

      She resisted the urge to squirm in her seat. “We all make mistakes,” she muttered as he parked in front of her parents’ white-brick rambler.

      He easily yanked the suitcases that she could barely lift out of his truck, carried them to the door and punched the doorbell. Then he pivoted and headed back, leaving her on the doorstep without so much as a “goodbye” or a “good luck.”

      “Haven’t you ever done anything you regret?” she called after him. She knew he’d done plenty; she just didn’t know if he regretted any of it. He certainly had never acted as though he felt any remorse.

      But she didn’t listen for a reply. The door to her parents’ home opened almost immediately, and her stomach knotted as she saw her mother’s face for the first time in two years.

      “Hi, Mom,” she said, praying that Tami Rogers would be more forgiving than Booker.

      Her mother’s expression didn’t look promising. And when Tami glanced at Booker and his truck, her features became even more pinched. “What are you doing here?”

      Katie peered over her shoulder at Booker, too, wishing him gone, well out of earshot. “I…” The pain inside her suddenly swelled. She couldn’t even remember, let alone recite, the eloquent apology she’d prepared on the way from San Francisco. All she wanted was for her mother to reach out and hug her. Please…

      Her mouth like cotton, she searched for the right words. “I…I need to come home, Mom…just for a little bit,” she added because she thought it might make a difference if her mother understood she didn’t expect any long-term help. Just a place to stay and some kind of welcome until she could find a job that wouldn’t require her to be on her feet.

      “Oh, now you want to come home,” her mother replied.

      “I know you’re angry—”

      “Andy called here looking for you,” she interrupted.

      “He did?”

      “He told us you never got married.” She folded her arms and leaned against the lintel. “Is that true?”

      “Yes, but only because—”

      “He also said you’re five months pregnant.”

      Instinctively Katie’s hand went to her abdomen. She hadn’t gained any weight yet, so the pregnancy wasn’t apparent, especially in Andy’s baggy sweatshirt. “It—it wasn’t something I planned. But once it happened, I thought maybe Andy would—”

      Her mother put up a hand to stop her. “I don’t want to hear it. I raised you better than this, Katie Lynne Rogers. You used to be a good girl, the sweetest there was.”

      Katie tried not to blanch as her mother’s rejection lashed a part of her that was already terribly raw. “I’m still the same person, Mom.”

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