Jilted (7 page)

“You think we're on the right track?” Two hours later, Clyde pulled back a mesquite branch so I could pass without getting scratched. After twenty-some-odd years, we were having a dickens of a time locating any landmarks to help us find our way to Picnic Hollow.

“Maybe.” We had gained access through a Corps of Engineers service site, driven through a bumpy pasture as far as we could, then took off hiking. I shielded my eyes from the late-afternoon sun. “Who owns this land?”

“Way back when, it belonged to Hector Chavez's grandpa. I reckon it's still in the family.”

Obscured below a rocky bluff on our left side lay the lake, but even though we couldn't yet see it, the fishy scent of the water wafted on the breeze, filtering through the crags and crannies as we searched for the declivity that would lead us down to the hollow.

“Here we go.” Clyde ran-walked up a boulder, then jumped from the back side. He turned to wait for me. “Remember that time Hector used this rock as a stage? We're almost there.”

I laughed, partly from remembering our old escapades and partly from relief that we weren't going to be hiking much longer. “I never would have thought he'd turn out to be the sheriff.”

“Sure enough.” Clyde looked behind us as though we were being followed. “I bet he's been busy out here this week.”

“Not this far east,” I said. “Those bones were found closer to Rock Creek.”

I scooted past him and hurried the last few yards, my steps quickening because of the sloped curve of the solid rock beneath my feet. I figured the lake to be less than twenty yards away, but because we were sheltered in a tiny canyon of sorts, we still couldn't see it. Waves lapped against the sandstone at the water's edge, sending wet echoes bouncing off the walls to tease us with the sound of its coolness.

“Take it slow, Lyn.”

But I couldn't. I hurried around the bend, curving to the right, where I stopped in the broad hollow created years ago by wind or water or time itself. I turned around and gazed at the sheer cliff behind us. A sandy wall rounded down from fifteen feet above our heads, creating a slanted ceiling of rock and sheltering us from the late-afternoon sun. I smiled.

“Ain't that something?” Clyde's fingertips brushed along the surface as he studied the names carved in stone. “There's my grandpappy right there. And Ma.”

“And my parents.” I pointed to their names, carved deeper than some, one above the other, with a heart in between. “How old do you suppose they were?”

“If I had to guess, I'd say teenagers.” He chuckled. “Don't seem like a grown man would carve that heart.” Unexpectedly Clyde slid one arm around me and firmly gripped both my elbows.

I stiffened.
What on earth?
I hadn't yet had time to set him straight about my feelings toward him, but I'd done nothing to give him the impression I wanted him to
touch me
. But when he tilted his head toward the ground where the wall sloped at a sharp angle, I realized he was only trying to keep me from screaming. A diamondback rattlesnake lay coiled in the shade of all those names.

Clyde dropped his arms to his sides, leaving me feeling un­protected. “He won't bother us, if we don't bother him.”

I knew that to be true, but I took three steps backward anyway. My attention was divided then between the carvings and the reptile, but I forced myself to drink in the sights and the memories, knowing I might not be out there again soon. Slipping my phone from my back pocket, I spent the next ten minutes zooming and focusing and clicking, but then I stopped to examine a picture once cut deeply into the stone but now weathered away. One of the oldest markings, a wagon train, toiled endlessly from east to west, complete with oxen pulling the covered Conestogas and a set of initials below each of the wooden wheels.

I imagined settlers, stuck in the area for days because of sickness. Maybe a couple of them found this little spot, pulled out a pocket knife they brought from back home, and started whittling to pass the time. Maybe they even settled in the area. I searched the wall, deciding they probably hadn't. The next identifiable time frame was a bold
1927
far above my head. “How do you reckon?”

Clyde looked where I pointed. “Probably sitting on horseback.”

My gaze bounced to the rocks at my feet, then to the jagged ravine above and below us, then to the snake still pretending to sleep. “Life was so hard back then.”

“Hard now, too.” Clyde wore a canteen over his shoulder, and pulling its strap over his head, he offered me a drink and then let the water pour into his own mouth. “Funny you can't see the lake from here, and we're so close.” He held the jug above his head, just long enough for a splash to wet his hair, and then he blinked as droplets clung to his eyelashes.

“A lot of things aren't what they seem.”

“But a lot of things are.” He sat on a rock and crossed his arms, and I knew he was looking at me.

“Is your name up there?” I asked.

“I reckon.”

My gaze skittered across the rock methodically, left to right, up and down, searching for any rendition of the name
Clyde Felton
.

And then I found it.
C.F. + S.S.

“You and Susan. That day.” My voice sounded as hollow as the nook where the rattlesnake rested, and I instantly regretted calling attention to the double date that echoed so gracelessly through my memory. Even though the evening had been innocent enough—two young couples hiking together—the weeks following it were so filled with pain that I wished it had never happened.

“Long time ago,” Clyde said.

“Yeah, it was.” Without wanting to, I let my eyes wander to the bottom left corner where the wall slanted parallel to a boulder. Neil and I had been in our early twenties then, and we had sat there together. I had lain back on the rock, sunbathing, while he carved
L.B.
Nobody but the two of us knew it stood for
ladybug
, and I wasn't about to share that tidbit with Clyde. I squinted at the letters, realizing Neil hadn't carved his own initials.

“I bet your name's up there a time or two,” Clyde said.

I studied his profile, wondering what he meant, what he knew. Two years after I sunbathed on that rock, I had come to this place with Hoby. We were married then and brought our baby daughter way out there for old times' sake. Hoby insisted on carving our names—probably to prove to himself and the world that we were really together—but he barely got started before Ruthie needed a diaper or a bottle or had some other urgent baby crisis. Half an
H
would forever mock me from the middle of the cliff, two shallow scratches among the solid indentations of all the others.

“Lyn—”

Clyde's words were interrupted by a loud noise—an explosion—from down near the lake. We turned in time to see a geyser of water shoot above the rock line, bringing with it the foul scent of rot from deep in the lake and showering us with fine mist. Just as quickly as the spout appeared, it fell back to the water level, but my heart didn't stop racing from the surprise.

“Holy cow.”
Clyde watched as the snake slithered slowly away from us to disappear into a crevice between two rocks.

“What was that?” I asked.

“Must be the Tarrons dynamite fishing again. The game warden was talking about it at the DQ last week, and I reckon if those boys get caught, they can kiss the military good-bye.”

Rowdy shouts and whoops bounced up the crevices.

“Where do they get the dynamite?” I asked.

“Don't know. Might not be dynamite, seeing as how it's hard to come by these days. Could be C-4 or even hand grenades for all I know.” Clyde put his fists on his hips and stared at the carvings, but I could tell this time he wasn't seeing them. He was frustrated about something, and it wasn't the Tarron boys' fishing methods. “Lyn?” He cleared his throat, and for some reason, the sound sent a tremor of apprehension through my mind like the rumble of distant thunder. “I've been wanting to ask you out, but every time I start, something always comes up.”

My gaze landed on his hand, where it rested near his belt, and I mentally slapped myself for hugging him at the Dairy Queen. For giving him the wrong impression. For making him think anything could ever happen between us. I frowned at the letters near the boulder, wanting to tell him no but unable to flat out reject him. “We're here, aren't we?” I shrugged. “And we went to the windmills the other day.”

“The side of Highway 84 don't count, and this”—he glanced to the crack where the rattlesnake had disappeared—“this is closer, but it still ain't right.”

Irritation spread through my core like an angry infection, but close to the surface, a calming balm covered my pain, and I yearned for his baritone voice and strong hands. Squeezing my eyes shut, I blocked out the names that all seemed to be whispering advice, and I tried to focus on the sound of the breeze through the ravine, the waves slapping against rock, the call of a scissortail flying overhead. Real sounds.

Without meaning to, I sighed. A frustrated release of breath, not a dreamy one, and I spoke quickly to cover my error. “Well, what did you have in mind?” My eyes snapped open.

“Dinner maybe? I heard about a new steak house in Lubbock. Supposed to be pretty good.”

The whispering voices fell into silence, leaving me with no answer. No rebuttal. No excuse. I felt helpless, with no real reason to refuse him. My mind told me to say yes, but the ghosts in my past insisted against it. I crossed my arms, shook my head, and started counting the names. One, two, three …

I heard him take a step, and he paused a few seconds before moving in front of me, turning his back on the crowd of names to look me in the eye. When he spoke, his voice was deep and rough. “Will you go out with me, Lyn?” His eyes were sad and determined at the same time, and it hurt to look into them. Instead, I peered past his bicep to the wagon train and the lightly scratched
H
.

He stood motionless, towering over me, and I sensed his sadness changing to fear.

Our eyes locked for a few seconds before mine wandered to a few hairs hanging down the side of his cheek, having pulled loose from the tie at the base of his neck. The wind nudged them an inch toward his ear, then an inch back, and my gaze followed his jawline down to his chin, covered with stubble. Clyde almost always had stubble. I wondered what it would be like to touch his chin and feel the roughness of his face. What it would feel like to be the one buying him shaving cream at the United. What would happen if I rubbed my lips against his cheek.

Almost without thinking, I stepped toward him and slipped my hand into his, wrapping my fingers safely around one of his.

For a second it seemed as though he leaned away from me, an automatic reaction to approaching danger, but then his eyebrows lifted slightly and he grinned.

I shook my head, already regretting my actions, but Clyde's laughter bounced off the walls and echoed through my heart, and I realized I hadn't heard him laugh like that since before he went to prison. His voice boomed as if his happiness came from deep inside, and the sound startled me so much, I took a step back and stared.

Wanting to hear more.

I could have kicked myself for holding Clyde's hand.
Good grief.
He and I were not hand holders. We didn't touch each other. Or hug. Truth be told, nowadays I never touched anyone except for bumping elbows with Ruthie when we sat too close at football games.

But Clyde's hand felt different than Ruthie's elbows.

I had lain awake thinking what his skin felt like against mine. The moistness of his palm. How my fingers smelled like him afterward, an unrecognizable scent that teased me until late into the night. Was it cologne? Deodorant? Some kind of cleaner from the Dairy Queen?

By lunch on Monday, it had long since washed away, but I ran the back of my forefinger beneath my nostrils, pretending to rub my nose. All I smelled was hand sanitizer.

I stood in front of Velma's living-room window watching the skies darken over her back pasture. Drops of rain plopped quarter-sized circles on the top of the old picnic table, and a metal lawn chair rocked back and forth in the grass, threatening to tumble. Through the thin panes, I could feel the temperature dropping, but Velma—always the older sister—was too busy interrogating me to pay any attention to the weather.

“What time do you go in today?” She sat at the computer desk in the corner of the room, her head tilted back as she looked through her bifocals.
Paying the bills was typically Ansel's job.

“One thirty.”

“You worked much overtime lately?”

“Not really.”

“What you been doing with your free time then?”

Even for Velma, she was extra-inquisitive, but I began to understand. I let my head drop to one side as I crooned, “What have you heard about me?”

Her lips puckered. “Clyde Felton.”

It hadn't been twenty-four hours since I held Clyde's hand at Picnic Hollow—not to mention we had been alone—so she must have heard from the Parker sisters about the stroll down Highway 84. “We were just walking down the road.”

She stopped clicking her mouse but didn't look at me. “They were saying you held his hand out at the lake.”

“But nobody was even—” In my voice I heard the whine of my fourteen-year-old self, insisting to my older sister that I would be good if only she gave me permission to go to the skating rink in Lubbock.
But I wasn't asking permission for anything.

“Aw, it don't matter, Lynda. You and Clyde were bound to end up together.” She leaned back in the oak desk chair. “Does Ruthie know?”

“It's not like we have anything to tell.” I frowned at the box monitor. “We're just talking, that's all.”

She reached for a Kleenex and wiped the computer screen, scrubbing firmly on a few fingerprints, and I wondered if Ansel had been eating popcorn while he played solitaire. “It's clear Clyde's crazy about you. Has been for a while now.” She let her palms fall to her thighs. “But I bet he has a thing or two he'd like to say to Hoby.”

Naturally she would cut straight to the crux of my worries. Even though I no longer had feelings for my husband, I did still have … a husband.

“A lot of us have a thing or two we'd like to say to Hoby.” I leaned my forehead against the cool surface of the sliding-glass door. Outside, dirt and gravel swirled across the porch, and in the distance, lightning shot starkly through the blackened sky. The pasture was alive with frenzied movement, and a dull grumble sounded every now and again, but in contrast, things lay still in the house. Only the faint scent of dust gave any indication that the storm brewing outside might ever reach us in our cozy nest. If I dated Clyde, I might be creating my own storm.

“I can't go the rest of my life waiting for Hoby,” I said.

“Clearly he ain't coming back.”

Her words cut like a knife across my pride, but I said nothing.

My sister was silent for a moment, and without looking I figured she had that stop-feeling-sorry-for-yourself expression on her face. She exhaled softly. “I reckon I'm borrowing trouble, but if you ever try to legally separate yourself from Hoby, he could mess with your mind again.”

My body wilted like a day-old carnation, and I slumped against the doorframe. It had been quite a while since I considered the notion that my husband might come back to Trapp. Right after he drove away in that bright-red wrecker of his, I had hoped and prayed he would come back, but after a while, I stopped praying.

The bedroom door down the hallway creaked open, and Ansel hobbled into the living room. “You girls solved all the world's problems?” He chuckled at his own joke.

“Not just yet, but we're working on it,” Velma said.

I smiled at the gray coveralls my brother-in-law wore. Velma had purchased the gently worn garment at Harold Porterfield's yard sale, but when she sat down with her seam ripper to remove Harold's embroidered name from the front pocket, she had stopped short halfway through the task and decided there was no need to continue. Over the years the coveralls had become Ansel's favorite work-around-the-house uniform, partly because they were comfortable and partly because his wife had teasingly labeled him
old
.

Ansel sat in his recliner and raised the footrest, and I imagined his joints rusted like an old tractor. Within a few minutes, he was snoring softly.

“How's he doing?” I asked.

“Same.”

I glanced at the churning clouds and noticed Ansel's cattle making their way to the barn. A calf jumped and kicked, adding to the maelstrom in the sky.

Velma, a little rusty herself, stood and took four slow steps to the adjacent kitchen. She glanced back at the recliner, and her eyes turned into empty pudding bowls, scraped clean of their usual rich, chocolaty goodness.

“I'm not going to change,” I said.

“I know you're not.” She smiled gently while she used a hand-cranked can opener on a can of pork and beans. “But I sure don't know what I'd do without you, Lynda.”

It wasn't like Velma to talk that way. Her strength and independence defined her motherly take-charge attitude in all she did, and she never needed anyone. Certainly not me. I stepped to the kitchen and pulled a pitcher from the cabinet just as a gust of wind pelted sand against the house like mosquitoes on a screen door. “Do you think we should take shelter in the bathroom?”

Velma waved the can opener toward the computer desk, her determination renewed now that I needed advice. “The weather radio will let us know if it gets that bad, but lawdy, I hope I don't have to wake Ansel.”

I tore open a packet of lemonade mix and spilled the yellow powder into the pitcher, inhaling the lemony cloud it produced. As I let the faucet water run, I coughed to clear the bitterness from my lungs, wishing it were so easy to cleanse the bitterness from my heart.

“You'll make it all right when Ansel's gone,” I said softly, unsure of this new role I was taking on as the encouraging sister. It felt like a lie. It
was
a lie. “You won't be alone.”

She reached into the refrigerator for a package of wieners, and her silence echoed as though the tiny kitchen were a vast underground cavern.

I didn't know what else to say. My feeble words couldn't prevent Velma's pain any more than they could save Ansel's life.

“I'll be fine,” she said.

I stirred the lemonade with a wooden spoon, watching specks of powder spin on the water's surface, unable—or unwilling—to dissolve. “Maybe I won't talk to Clyde again. We sure don't need any more drama around here.”

Velma wielded a paring knife to cut small pieces of wiener into the saucepan with the beans. She said nothing, so I tossed the spoon into the sink.

“No.” A sigh slid from her lungs with that one little word, and it sounded as if the rest of her strength went with it. “You need Clyde.”

I stared unseeingly at the calendar above the sink, wanting to be a source of encouragement to her, yet unable to pull my selfish thoughts away from my own problems. “I'm scared, Velma. What if he's like Hoby?” A sob made its way up from my stomach, but I quickly stifled it. “What if I just get hurt again?”

Her spoon gently scraped the bottom of the saucepan. “Aw, Lynda. Clyde Felton's not going to hurt you.”

“He could have changed.”

“Nobody changes that much.”

I wanted to believe her. I wanted to embrace her words and hold them close until they seeped through my chest and nestled in my heart. But I couldn't. Somewhere in the back of my mind, a silent demon still whispered.

“He even goes to church now.” Velma calmly removed a blue serving bowl from the cabinet. “Now that I think about it … if you and me went to church, you'd see Clyde more often. And I'd see JohnScott more, too.”

What on earth?
She jerked me from my thoughts and tossed me under a speeding locomotive. “What are you saying?”

“The folks down there are different now, right?”

I bit the inside of my cheek, not hard, just enough to worry the skin. Velma and Ansel weren't churchgoing types, and she knew better than to suggest I was. “From what I hear, a lot of them have changed, but I'm sure a few are still holding out for Christ to come back.”

She lifted the saucepan with one hand and spooned beanie-weanies into the bowl with the other. “I don't mean to beat a dead horse, but I'd kinda like to see JohnScott somewhere other than the sideline of a football game. Don't you think it'd be worth it to see Ruthie more often? And hear her husband preaching the words?”

I didn't need to attend worship service to hear Dodd Cunningham preach at me. Clearly I was his number-one target recruit, and he pelted me with subtle encouragement nonstop. But as Velma rinsed her Revere Ware under the faucet, I realized she wasn't talking about me. Or Clyde. Or even JohnScott. After all I had been through with that stinking church, she would never shove me toward that white-frame building unless she had a darn good reason. And that reason was snoring in the recliner.

“Ruth Ann knows where to find me.” I mumbled the excuse, not wanting to think about the true source of our discussion.

Velma smacked her lips as though her tongue were covered in taffy. “What's that mean?”

“She's married, going to college, wanting a baby.” I shrugged. “She's got a full life.”

“You want a cart of cheese to go with that whine?”

“I'm not whining. Just stating facts, and she don't need me.”

Ouch.
I hadn't meant to say that last part.

A spray of angry raindrops pelleted against the window as the clouds finally dumped their water on the ground below, beating the dry grass as the wind moaned against the roof. Velma and I both froze for a few seconds, awed by the power of the storm, and then she carried our gourmet lunch to the table and plopped the bowl down on the vinyl tablecloth. “Hmmph.”

I sat next to her and peeled a paper plate from the stack in the middle of the table. “I hate it when you make that sound.”

“I know.”

Of course she knew. The woman had raised me since I was fourteen, and we'd been through hell and high water together. She knew what irritated me, what worried me, what made me happy. And she knew, without my telling her, that I'd like to see Ruthie more often. That I wanted to see Dodd, too. That I even wanted to hear him preaching the words. But she also knew my frazzled emotions had more than they could deal with just thinking about Ansel.

And she knew I couldn't … wouldn't … go back to the church. Not yet.

“I know,” she repeated.