Heron's Landing. JoAnn Ross

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СКАЧАТЬ He missed touching her. Tasting her...

      No. Don’t go there. Remembering making love to his wife while having dinner with his mother and her maybe boyfriend, who she might even be having sex with (and didn’t that idea make him want to wash his mind out with bleach?), made this already awkward situation even weirder.

      He cleared his throat as he approached the table. They moved apart, but easily. Naturally. Not at all as if they’d been caught in any inappropriate display of affection. Yet another possible indication that they’d moved beyond dinner dates that ended with a chaste good-night kiss at the door.

      “There’s my handsome boy now!” Looking like a wood nymph in a long green suede dress and some sort of colorful stone hanging on a black velvet cord around her neck, his mother rose with a warm and welcoming smile. It had been a long time since he’d seen that smile. Having been wallowing in his own dark pit of grief for two years, Seth hadn’t paid all that much attention to gradual changes in his mother.

      Seeing her now, so vibrant and joyful, as she’d been while he’d been growing up, he realized that her vibrancy had been fading away the last few years.

      “I’m so glad you could join us!” Despite having lived nearly four decades in the Pacific Northwest, Caroline Harper’s Southern roots occasionally still slipped into her voice, bringing to mind mint juleps on a wide wraparound porch while a paddle-bladed fan spun lazily overhead.

      Seth had visited his mother’s childhood home a few times as a kid, but hadn’t been back to the South since his grandparents had died. Both on the same day, he remembered now. His grandmother had died of a sudden heart attack while deadheading roses in her garden. Her husband of sixty years had literally died of a broken heart that same evening.

      Maybe, he considered now, deep, debilitating grief ran in his family’s DNA. If so, his grandfather Lockwood had been more fortunate than he. At least the old man he remembered always smelling of cherry tobacco from his pipe hadn’t had to linger for years and years, suffering the loss of his soul mate.

      Unlike so many in the Pacific Northwest, whose wardrobes tended toward hoodies, flannel, T-shirts and jeans, his mother had started dressing all New Agey, which could have looked ridiculous, but suited her perfectly.

      Going up on her toes, she kissed his cheek. Then leaned back and sniffed what he realized was undoubtedly the aroma of grilled beef he’d brought with him from the pub. Laughter danced in her green eyes. “Seems this is your second meal of the night.”

      “Consider yourself busted,” Mannion said on a laugh as he stood up and held out a hand. “I stopped in Port Angeles on the way back from the coast last week for some ribs and brisket and I’d no sooner walked in the door of your mother’s place when she asked me if I had a death wish.”

      “You smelled of pit smoke,” she scolded him. “And that barbecue platter is a heart attack waiting to happen. At our age, we have to start taking care of ourselves. I don’t want you keeling over on me.”

      “Not going to happen,” the older man countered. “You’re not going to get rid of me that easily.”

      His mother’s obvious concern, along with that casual mention of him spending personal time at the apartment she’d moved into, as if they might already be a couple, was yet more indication that she’d moved on. While meanwhile her husband continued to insist that his wife had merely gone menopause crazy and would return home any day.

      “What do you mean, at your age?” Seth asked, determined to stay out of his parents’ personal lives as much as possible. “You look as terrific as you did back when I graduated high school.”

      “And isn’t that exactly what a dutiful son is supposed to say,” she said, dimpling prettily. He’d heard it said, down at Oley Nilsson’s barbershop, that when Caroline Lockwood had hit town, there’d been a stampede of single men vying to pass time with the pretty Georgia peach. But for some reason he’d never figure out, his gruff, uncommunicative contractor father had won not just Caroline Lockwood’s hand, but apparently her heart, as well.

      Until recently.

      As he slipped into the booth next to Mannion, she turned toward him, her smiling eyes turning as serious as a heart attack as they moved over his face. “How are you?”

      “Fine.” Another thing that might be in his Harper DNA was that the men in their family would rather have their fingernails pulled out with a pair of needle-nose pliers than ever talk about their feelings.

      He’d never cried over Zoe. Not even when he’d insisted on seeing inside the polished wooden casket that didn’t carry her body, because it had been blown to pieces, but merely an empty starched green uniform carefully pinned to the sheet and blanket inside which, he knew from reading up on the topic online, carried a plastic bag with what little searchers were able to find of his wife after the explosion. Some caring soldier—who had to have one of the toughest, most unappreciated assignments in the military—had shined the buttons to a bright glossy sheen, never knowing if anyone would see them. It was, Seth had recognized, even through the cloud of pain, a matter of respect.

      He hadn’t cried when he’d placed her wedding band, which had been recovered and delivered to him in person, along with some rescued uniform patches, into the casket. Although the heat of the blast had turned her ring into a metal lump, since she’d never taken it off from the moment he’d slid it on her finger during their Crescent Lake ceremony, he’d felt it belonged with her. And truth be told, he wasn’t about to let her parents see it. They probably had the same horrific images in their mind as he did in his and the least he’d felt he could and should do was spare them this one piece of pain. He did, however, save out the Purple Heart and Bronze Star he’d received, knowing the Robinsons would want them. As far as he was concerned, they were of no comfort and he wouldn’t mind never seeing them again.

      He hadn’t so much as misted up when the uniformed officer had handed him the flag that had seemed to take freaking forever to fold. Nor during the ceremonial volley performed by a team of eight volunteer soldiers who’d shown up from Fort Lewis-McChord to honor one of their own.

      All around him, people, even men, had been sniffling. Others, like his mother, had openly wept, while Helen Robinson, Zoe’s mother, keened in a way that had him afraid she’d throw, prostrate, herself over her daughter’s casket. Brianna Mannion, Zoe’s best friend, who’d flown in from Hawaii, had had silent tears streaming down her cheeks.

      Burke, Brianna’s older brother, who’d gone on from being a high school quarterback to play in the NFL, had flown in from a spring skiing vacation in the Swiss Alps, arriving in town minutes before the funeral due to flight delays. Even he’d been uncharacteristically somber and had bitten his bottom lip during the gravesite military ceremony.

      But not Seth. He’d felt as if he’d turned as dry as dust. As dry as that damn violent, fucked-up country that had killed her. His only emotion was a low, seething anger that Zoe hadn’t just taken out a student loan like any normal person.

      It wasn’t like he didn’t have a good job, he’d told her during their many heated arguments over her decision. With his income from the construction company, and her earning a civilian nursing salary, they could have paid off the damn loans. Sure, it would’ve taken time. But they could have done it. Together. Unfortunately, that same tenacity he’d always admired had a flip side. She was, hands down, the most stubborn person he’d ever met. And once Zoe Robinson decided on something, heaven and earth couldn’t have budged her.

      Now, as a line furrowed his mother’s forehead, СКАЧАТЬ