Their Child?. Karen Rose Smith

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      Brody scratched the dog some more. “Aw, Mom…”

      “Come on. Back in the car.” Lori stuck the credit card in the pump slot as Tucker clucked his tongue at the dog.

      “See you later, Brody,” Tucker said, turning. The dog fell into step behind him.

      “Bye, Fargo.” Brody rose and stared after the man and the dog as they headed around the convenience store, most likely on their way to the pumps on the other side. Once they disappeared, Brody looked at his mother. “Cool dog.”

      Relief flooded through her. She’d made it through meeting up with Tucker again. He’d even seen Brody. And nothing terrible had happened. Her knees felt like strings of overcooked spaghetti. She braced a hand on the gleaming hood of the car.

      “Mom. You okay?”

      She drew herself up. “You bet.”

      “We should get a dog, Mom. I could take care of him. You wouldn’t have to do anything ‘cept pay for his food.”

      “Nice try,” she said wryly, though she was thinking that maybe he was right. Maybe he was ready for a puppy and all the responsibility that came with it. But she’d been a mother long enough to know that if she told him now, she’d never hear the end of it. “Want to help me pump this gas?”

      “Sure.”

      As Brody unscrewed the gas cap for her, Lori told herself she didn’t need to even think about Tucker again—not until after the wedding.

      Not until she made herself call him and set up a time to tell him what she should have told him years ago.

      It happened again the next day. Sunday.

      In church, of all places, which just made Lori feel guiltier and more cowardly than ever. Her eleven-year deception seemed all the more reprehensible when she had to confront it while sitting in the Billingsworth family pew with those two big pictures of a dewy-eyed Jesus behind the altar looking down on her reproachfully.

      In church. It was the last place she’d expected she might see him. The Tucker Bravo she remembered from all those years before never went to church.

      Organ music filled the high-ceilinged sanctuary as folks settled into the rows of pews. To Lori’s right, beyond Brody, Lori’s mother, Enid, and her dad, Heck, nodded and murmured hellos to the friends and neighbors who filed past on the way to their own seats.

      Lena sat to Lori’s left, with Dirk on her other side. Lena’s auburn hair fell in soft waves to her shoulders and her face seemed to glow with happiness. She and Dirk were holding hands, constantly turning to look at each other, sharing secret smiles and goo-goo-eyed glances of mutual adoration.

      Lori probably wouldn’t have believed it if she hadn’t seen it for herself. But now she had seen it. She knew it was true: for the first time in her mostly self-absorbed twenty-eight years, Lena Lou Billingsworth was in love. Not since high school, when Lena was so gone on Tucker, had she ever lavished so many bright smiles and enchanting glances on a man. And with Tucker, there had always been as many scowls and pouts as there had been smiles.

      With Dirk, Lena was all shining eyes and happy grins. Dirk Davison, no doubt about it, was the man Lena had been waiting for all her life.

      Lena’s fiancé was thirty-five, big and beefy and gruffly good-natured—a whole lot like Heck Billingsworth, as a matter of fact. Both men had broad, always-ready salesman smiles. They both laughed too hard and talked too loud and sometimes made you wonder if they actually heard a thing you said.

      “He’s just like Daddy,” Lori had whispered to her twin the day before, after being introduced to the jovial Dirk.

      “He is,” said Lena, looking pleased as a little red heifer in a field of tall alfalfa. “Exactly like Daddy.”

      Lori just didn’t get it. How could her twin fall so hard for a man so much like their dad?

      But then, Lena didn’t have the issues with their father that Lori had. Lena, after all, hadn’t gone and gotten herself pregnant at the age of seventeen by a mystery lover whom she staunchly refused to name.

      Heck had blustered and ranted and delivered all kinds of scary threats and ultimatums when he learned that Lori was pregnant. But Lori never did tell him who her baby’s father was. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone—for a number of reasons.

      And when he finally realized she would never tell him, Heck had packed her off to stay with his sister, Lori’s dear now-deceased Aunt Emma, in San Antonio—as if they were all living in the dark ages or something. As if it was the ultimate shame on a family, for a daughter to have a baby without getting herself a husband first.

      Eventually, Lori had found happiness in San Antonio. She’d gone to work for Henry and married him and Henry had always treated Brody as his son. Though Lori didn’t make it home to Tate’s Junction much, she and her father had pretty much made peace with each other.

      But that didn’t mean she’d ever marry someone like Heck. Uh-uh. No way. Never in a hundred million years.

      But Lena was doing just that and apparently couldn’t have been happier about it.

      Lori found Lena’s love for her car salesman fiancé truly weird—as well as yet another example of the many ways she and her identical twin were nothing alike. She slid a glance at the two love birds to her left just as Dirk raised the hand he had twined with Lena’s and pressed his fleshy lips to it. The two gazed deep into each other’s eyes.

      Just as Lori was reminding herself not to stare, Tucker appeared in the aisle, directly in her line of sight. Her stomach did a nasty roll. She blinked. Tucker spotted her—and he winked.

      Why? she wondered, feeling sick and suddenly desperate. Why would he wink at her?

      Oh, please, she argued with herself, as she actively resisted the powerful urge to leap to her feet and stumble along the pew away from him, not caring whose feet she stepped on as she made her escape. Why shouldn’t he wink? What does it matter? He’s just being friendly, for heaven’s sake.

      “Mom.” Brody’s skinny elbow poked into her ribs. “Look,” Brody whispered. “It’s the guy with the cool dog. Tucker.”

      She almost—almost—turned and snapped at her son to be quiet. But she caught herself just in time. “Yes,” she said, with marvelous calm, considering the tangled, frantic state of her emotions at that moment. “It’s Tucker.” She raised her hand and gave Tucker a wave.

      He waved back—and then he moved on by.

      “Sure did like that dog of his,” said Brody wistfully. “Hope I see that dog again…”

      Lori stared after Tucker, though she knew she shouldn’t, admiring in spite of herself the wide set of his shoulders, the proud way he carried his tawny brown head. He slid into a pew near the front, with his older brother, Tate, and Tate’s pretty blond wife of ten months, Molly. Molly’s family was also there: her mother, her mother’s husband, her grandmother and a tall, thin old fellow that Lori didn’t recognize.

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