The Comforts of Home (2 page)

After a time, everyone stopped looking at the mirrored river and began only to see themselves the way others saw them.

Visitors often commented that the people of Harmony grew better looking, for their beauty came not from what they saw for themselves, but from what they felt through others’ eyes.

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FEBRUARY 17, 2010

TYLER WRIGHT MANEUVERED HIS NEW BLACK

RANGE ROVER through the silent streets of Harmony, Texas. A light rain tapped on the windshield like a ticking clock. He knew he should stil be trying to sleep, but with the dawn his life might be about to change forever, and he wanted to be ready to meet it wide awake.

He drove out of town and headed toward Amaril o’s airport, warning himself to calm down. The day held no guarantees. He’d had his hopes crushed a dozen times over the years he’d known Major Kate Cummings. Almost two years ago she’d stepped back into his life, and he had no idea why she’d returned or, for that matter, why she’d left. Maybe she wasn’t ready to start more than a casual relationship, maybe she never would be, but that didn’t stop him from hoping. He was in midlife. He was ready.

Only, last night when she’d cal ed asking him to meet her plane, he’d heard something different in her voice. An excitement about seeing him. A longing to come home to Harmony. This was the first time she hadn’t rented a car and driven in on her own, almost as if she’d just decided to stop in town and had not come just to see him.

This time he’d pick her up and drive her to Harmony.

Everyone would know she was there because of him.

Rol ing down his window, Tyler smiled into the dawn. In the past two years since he and Kate had become good friends, she’d started talking about Harmony as if it were her home. It had taken him months of asking to get her to just come spend a weekend in his town. It might be 2010, but part of him knew people would talk if she stayed at his place, so Tyler always booked her a room at the Winter’s Inn Bed-and-Breakfast. Surprisingly, his proper Kate and the crazy innkeeper, Martha Q Patterson, got along perfectly. Each looked at the other as a curiosity.

After that first visit, every month Tyler invited her back and every month she came. Once she was in town, they’d join friends for dinners, and go to concerts in the park or movies at the little theater where their feet always stuck to the floor. They would take walks in the cemetery where he’d tel her the stories of al the people of Harmony, and then they’d stop at the magnolia tree he had planted just because she’d told him once magnolias were her favorite tree. On each visit Tyler hoped she’d take root and stay as wel .

As he drove across the flat plains of the Texas panhandle, now dressed in winter browns, he thought about how wonderful his Kate was. He might be in his midforties and more than a few pounds overweight. He might not be much of a conversationalist and he knew he was probably the world’s worst dancer, but he had a perfect woman in Kate.

To the world she was Major Katherine Cummings, an arson expert with the army. To him she would always be the hazel-eyed beauty he’d met one night at Quartz Mountain Lodge during a storm, with whom he’d talked half the rainy night away. Their friendship blossomed through e-mail.

Months later a fire had rol ed across the open land around his town, and Major Cummings had come to help. But afterward she broke off al contact.

Then one night he’d e-mailed her of a danger the folks she had met faced and she’d responded. Their friendship seemed patched together with spiderweb thread, but with each e-mail, each visit, Tyler felt they added one more thread—one more bond.

He never asked about why she’d stopped e-mailing after the fire. He was afraid he’d hear that he wasn’t half the man she thought him to be. Over the two years since, she’d stood him up almost as often as she’d come to visit. Her answer was always simply that her work kept her away.

He set no restrictions on Kate. No rules. No promises.

He knew she had an important job she couldn’t talk about and, as Harmony’s only funeral director, he had a job he didn’t want to talk about, so when they were together they talked of other things.

Tyler dreamed of what she might say if he asked her to stay with him in his apartment above the funeral home and not go to the inn tonight. She’d visited him several times.

His housekeeper had even cooked them a meal one night when Kate stayed late watching a movie in his quarters.

He’d felt like a teenager walking her back to the inn and saying good night on the porch.

Deep down, he knew he wouldn’t ask her to stay with him this time. They didn’t have that kind of relationship, not yet, maybe not ever.

The day had warmed by the time he reached the Amaril o airport. He pul ed to the side of the road and cut the engine. He could go inside and wait by the luggage claim, but he’d be among strangers there. Here, he could watch the planes and wait alone with his thoughts. He glanced in the rearview mirror. Alex Matheson, the town’s sheriff, had mentioned yesterday that he looked like he’d lost a few pounds. Maybe Kate would notice as wel .

An hour later hunger overtook him. He gave in and drove around to a little café next to the strip cal ed English Field. He took his time ordering and eating. In his daydreams he was busy planning how to ask Kate to marry him someday. He thought, as a fourth-generation undertaker, it might be proper to say simply, “Kate, how would you like to be buried in the Wright family plot beside me?”

She might think it was funny. She might never come back to Harmony.

Maybe it would be best just to ask if she’d like to grow old with him by her side. They liked the same books, the same movies, even the same kinds of food. They never ran out of anything to say. Maybe they weren’t as romantic as two young lovers, but she’d kissed him good-bye on the lips a few times and she never seemed to mind when he took her hand.

As Tyler drove through airport security and parked in front of the luggage pickup area, he made up his mind that after two years of talking it was time for the next step.

He’d try to keep it light. “Kate, if you’re going to cal my border col ie your baby every time you see her, maybe we should marry and make the poor dog legit.” No, he frowned. That was too light. She’d be here for a few days. Surely he’d think of something before she left.

He stepped from the car as people began to circle around the luggage carousel. Halfway to the door, he spotted her through the glass. His Kate. She stood al straight and stil like the soldier she was, but he knew her laughter and the way she talked to Little Lady as if the dog were a baby. He knew the feel of her hand in his.

Before he could reach her, she pul ed her luggage from the moving ribbon. Tyler rushed forward. “I’l get that,” he said, covering her fingers for a moment before she let go.

He set the suitcase down and checked the name tag.

When she didn’t move, he looked up into her face.

For the first time since he’d met her, Tyler saw tears in her eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he whispered, not wanting to draw attention.

She pressed her lips together and slowly shook her head, then said just loud enough for him to hear, “Take me home, Ty.”

Tyler knew grief. Bone-deep grief so overwhelming a person can’t express it. He’d worked with it al his life. He knew how to handle it.

Without a word, he put his arm around Kate and walked her slowly to the car. When they were away from the airport, he looked at her. She sat as stil as stone. He said the only thing he needed to say. “I’m here, Kate. I’m right here.” She reached across the seat and took his hand. They drove to Harmony in silence.

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MORNINGS IN THE MIDDLE OF FEBRUARY

ALWAYS STARTED out cold, making some of the residents of Harmony want to sleep in like hibernating bears, but by midmorning the prairie sun usual y warmed enough to have people shedding heavy coats in favor of sweaters and sweatshirts.

Ronel e Logan, dressed in her drab once-black-now-gray coat, left the post office and marched toward Main Street barely noticing the weather, or the people passing her. She knew them al . Strangers were as rare as chain stores in town. Ronel e could list what magazines most folks got in their mail, but she didn’t want to talk to anyone.

In fact, she didn’t even want to look at them. People in general frightened her. One on one they were terrifying.

When they waved, Ronel e lowered her head and kept walking. She couldn’t remember one day in her twenty-seven years of life that she’d wanted to talk to anyone in town. She’d been born here but didn’t cal one of them by name. Her mother had pul ed her out of school in the second grade because, in Dal as Logan’s opinion, there were far too many germs in schools.

For a few years Ronel e thought the kids were the germs her mother talked about. She made no effort to make friends with any of them. By the time she got her first and only job at eighteen, she’d developed a habit of avoiding people as if they were no more than the germs her mother harped about.

Except maybe the funeral director, Tyler Wright. He brought her crossword puzzle books from as far away as Kansas City and Albuquerque sometimes, and he’d told her how sorry he was when her father died eight years ago.

Al the other people who came to the funeral tried to calm her mother, but Tyler had walked right up to her and talked to her. While her mother was wailing over her father’s casket, Tyler Wright gave Ronel e the last hug she’d probably ever get.

Ronel e remembered how she and the funeral director just stood quietly side-by-side while three pal bearers tried to pry three hundred pounds of weeping widow off the casket.

Ronel e shifted the box of mail in her arms and pushed the memory aside as she stepped onto the town square.

She wished she’d taken the dol y to haul the mail like Mr.

Donavan, the postmaster, had suggested, but her pride wouldn’t let her after she saw Chatty Jerry smiling at her. He was always tel ing Mr. Donavan how much harder delivering the mail was than sorting it in the back like she did. Jerry seemed to think that anyone who worked for “the service,” as he cal ed it, and didn’t face the weather daily was a lower life form around the office.

The old postmaster usual y ignored Jerry. Everyone knew Jerry would probably be taking his place in a year or two. Ronel e figured that would be about the time she got fired. Her father and Mr. Donavan had been friends. They’d started working together when they both returned from Vietnam. When her father became il and suggested she start working in the mailroom, Mr. Donavan had welcomed the idea. In the years she’d worked for “the service,” the postmaster had sometimes been indifferent to her, but never unkind.

Chatty Jerry, however, only frowned at her now and then.

Once he commented that if he could palm off one house to another postman, it would be Dal as Logan’s place. He’d said it just loud enough to make sure she heard.

Ronel e wasn’t surprised that Jerry, along with half the people in town, hated her mother. Most of the time she hated her too. Dal as Logan never had a nice thing to say about anyone, including her only child. When Ronel e’s father became il , he probably figured he was doing her a favor getting her the job so she could be out of the house nine hours a day.