Moonlight Road

Aiden reached into the refrigerator and got his brother a beer. He handed it to him, and into the phone he said, “And after six months?”

  “Obviously I wouldn’t do this if I didn’t expect to fall in love with this lifestyle, traveling around, seeing the sights and the family. George will be here tomorrow with a brand-new motor coach. I’ve seen pictures of it and I can’t wait to see it in person. He’ll help me oversee the packing and moving of my household, which is all arranged. Then we’ll be off. Of course, we’ll head straight to Virgin River, but it might take us a while to get there—we’re going through Sedona, Oak Creek Canyon, Flagstaff, the Grand Canyon, Hoover Dam and maybe a stop off in Las Vegas. Can you believe I’ve never seen Sedona or the Grand Canyon, though I’ve lived in the same state for years?”

  “You must be looking forward to it,” Aiden said. “Luke wants to know if you’re getting married.”

  Luke choked on his beer and began to violently shake his head.

  “Actually, not that I know of. George is very considerate—he said if it was important to me to do that, he would certainly understand. But I think we’ll just wing it.”

  Aiden laughed sentimentally. “Have you ever winged anything in your life?” he asked his mother.

  “I don’t think so,” she said. “And if you’d asked me a year ago if I ever would, I would have said no. Emphatically no. But here we are. Aiden, how is Shelby doing?”

  “Big as a house,” he said, winking at his sister-in-law. “She says she’s feeling good and is very excited about the dishes. Oh—and Luke says that if things don’t work out with George, he just wouldn’t be able to sleep at night if you didn’t agree to come and live with him.”

  Luke shot to his feet, his eyes as big as dinner plates. His cheeks actually reddened and he shook his head again.

  “Tell him I’ll go to a nursing home first—he’s a pain in the butt even to visit, much less live with!”

  “This is very unlike you, you know,” Aiden said with a kind of tenderness he reserved only for his mother.

  “I know. Isn’t it perfect?”

  “As long as you’ve thought it through,” he said.

  “Of course I have, Aiden. Now, don’t hesitate to call if you want to discuss it further.”

  “I won’t. And would you like Luke to call if he has concerns to discuss?” he asked, lifting one dark brow toward his brother.

  “Actually, no. But thank him for the offer. Luke is not exactly the man I’d take relationship advice from, although he has certainly landed on his feet. Hasn’t he?”

  “Absolutely. And yet you’re willing to discuss it with me?” Aiden asked her. “I haven’t hit any home runs lately.”

  “I suspect you just haven’t been up to bat enough, sweetheart,” she said with a laugh. “Now, I have to run. Give everyone my best and I’ll see you in a week or ten days, something like that.”

  “Please be careful, Mom.”

  “Have you ever known me to be careless? Now, enjoy yourself until I get there and turn the whole family upside down with my wild ways.”

  He laughed as he said goodbye. Then he looked at Luke, who seemed to be fuming.

  “I can’t believe you told her I wanted her to live with us,” Luke said.

  “Listen, if you’re going to tell her how to live, you have to be prepared to be responsible for her living conditions. Big step, Luke. Lucky for you, she’s not interested.”

  “I can’t believe this,” Luke said. “Our mother, who was almost a nun, living in sin with a retired Protestant minister?”

  Aiden cocked his head to one side and shrugged. “She’s sixty-three and he’s seventy. There’s probably not nearly as much sin involved as they’d like.”

  There were a number of things in addition to a terrible headache that put Erin in a cranky mood. Like the fact that they had shaved a little bit of her hairline in the middle of her forehead to put in three tiny stitches. She wasn’t planning on going anywhere except her hideaway in the woods, but still! She was very particular about her hair. Now she had the opposite of a widow’s peak—very ugly.

  And she didn’t feel like spending the night in a hospital, wearing a hospital gown. Gown? They should not insult high fashion by calling this rag a gown. Her absolute worst painting clothes were nicer.

  And she had a roommate. The roommate, who had had a hysterectomy and was staying two nights, had visitors. She was staying two nights, lived ten miles away and her entire freaking family had to come to the hospital to visit her? And there was apparently no rule about how many visitors one could have.

  If she ever saw that vagrant again, she was going to bean him with a flowerpot.

  By now she had been informed by a very testy emergency-room nurse that he wasn’t exactly a vagrant, but rather a man who had just left the navy and was visiting a relative in Virgin River. So he was a perfectly respectable bad-smelling, horrible-looking, out-of-work man with nothing better to do than impersonate a serial killer, sneak up on her and scare her to death.

  It was possible that she was crabby in general. The whole escape-to-the-mountains-alone-for-the-summer idea was probably not the best one she’d ever come up with. At the time she’d thought of it, it had seemed the most logical thing to do. Erin was a woman who had never learned how to achieve that serene, Zen-like acceptance of what the universe tossed at her, and she had reason to believe she’d better figure that out. A summer on a beautiful isolated mountaintop, out of the Chico, California, heat, away from all the pressures of her professional life, should show her how to slow down, learn to relax and enjoy doing nothing. It was time to develop a strong sense of autonomy and remind herself that hers was the life she chose. And she was in a big hurry to get all that nailed down. Besides, it was cheaper than going to Tibet.

  There were very logical reasons Erin was wound a little tight; the habit of overachieving could take its toll. When Erin was eleven, her mother died. That left her the woman of the house, with a grieving father, a four-year-old sister, Marcie, and a two-year-old brother, Drew. She wasn’t solely responsible for them; her dad was still the parent, albeit a little less conscious right after his wife’s death. And there had to be a babysitter during the day while Erin went to school.

  But Erin rushed home from school to take over and had a ton of chores in addition to child care. She felt it was up to her to be the mother figure in their lives whether they liked it or not. As a matter of fact, as her siblings got older, she concentrated harder on their needs and activities than her own, from soccer to piano lessons to making sure they got good grades and didn’t live on junk food. She rarely went out, never seemed to have a boyfriend, skipped all the high-school events from football and basketball to the dances. She did, however, always make the honor roll. She had decided at an early age that if she couldn’t be f-u-n, she would be s-m-a-r-t.

  She was twenty-two, a new law-school freshman, and still living at home so she could keep an eye on the kids who were then thirteen and fifteen, when their father died during a routine knee-replacement surgery. Erin was again in charge. Not that much had changed, besides missing her dad dreadfully. But technically, she was even more in charge than before, because being over twenty-one, she actually had custody.

  Friends and colleagues were in awe of all she’d been able to accomplish. After her younger sibs had survived their teen years, she’d helped her sister, who was married to a marine who had been wounded in Iraq and had lingered in a vegetative state for years in a nursing home before he died. She’d gotten her younger brother through college and medical school. And during this time she’d built herself a sterling reputation as an attorney in a very successful firm. The local paper wrote some sappy article on how she was one of the most amazing and desirable single women in the city—the head of a household that depended on her, brilliant in tax and estate law, gorgeous, clearly the woman to catch.

  It had made her laugh. She could count on one hand the number of dates she’d had in a year—all of them ho
rribly dull.

  Erin had accomplished what she’d set out to do. Her little sister was remarried to her late husband’s best friend, had moved into her own home in Chico and was pregnant with her first child. Her younger brother had completed medical school with honors and was an orthopedic resident in Southern California, a tough five-year residency that rarely let him loose. Drew was twenty-seven and lived with his fiancée; he would be a family man in another year.

  Erin had fulfilled a great deal by the age of thirty-six; for herself and her brother and sister, this was exactly what she had worked so hard toward. Why, then, did she still feel like something was missing in her life?

  Was this how it was supposed to feel when your life was really just beginning? Uncertain and as wobbly as a newborn fawn? Or was this, as she sometimes feared, the end of the road? Nothing much to strive for now? She felt more like a grandmother to Marcie’s expected baby than an auntie. She was a bit panicked and didn’t know where to turn. But of course, Erin had the best poker face in the profession of law and never let it show.

  Marcie’s new husband, Ian Buchanan, had left behind a dump of a cabin that he held on to when he’d moved off the mountain and back to Chico with Marcie. Erin had seen it. It was a disgusting little shack with no central heat, no indoor plumbing, a small gas generator for a little lighting, and it was only one room. But it was on its own mountaintop and had hundreds of acres with a magnificent view. Marcie and Ian loved it. Though they admitted they’d love it a little better with indoor plumbing and electricity, which they could never afford, but that mountaintop was priceless.

  Erin had a little money; she’d been working hard, plus she’d guarded and invested what her father had left in retirement, insurance and savings. She’d gotten bonuses from the firm and an impressive salary—all that had helped her get the kids through hard times and school. She thought it might be worth the investment to raze the old cabin and rebuild something nice—a summer place that could be in the family for decades. But Ian said, “Believe it or not, Erin, the cabin is solid. It could probably use a new roof, bathroom and electricity, but it’s in pretty good shape otherwise.”

  So she asked him if she could have an engineer look it over and maybe fix it up. She didn’t say, Because I can’t stay even a weekend in that hovel. The way Ian had smiled at her when he replied, “Knock yourself out,” indicated she didn’t have to say it.

  It turned out that Ian was right—the cabin was ugly, but well built. She got some remodel designs off the Internet and put the job out for bid to four local builders. A man by the name of Paul Haggerty gave her a competitive price, was able to work via e-mail and phone, and was willing to sign a contract promising the remodel ready on June 1 when Erin wanted to move in. And he had finished early!

  She never even drove up once to look at the progress. That alone should have told her she was doing this for all the wrong reasons and it wasn’t going to work. But she had told Mr. Haggerty, “I’m a busy attorney with a full schedule until the first of June. Then I’m taking the summer off, my first vacation in over ten years. That’s why it has to be right and on time.”

  It had been a crazy idea. Erin couldn’t seem to function without a full schedule and she didn’t know how to take time off. Every time she tried to take a day off, she was twitching by noon.

  But she was determined. She was going to learn to unwind, damn it. She was going to learn to embrace solitude and kick this feeling that if she didn’t have far too much to do, she wasn’t worthy.

  “Knock, knock,” she heard a small voice say. Erin had the curtains drawn around her bed to block out the hysterectomy patient and her extended family. The curtains parted and her redheaded sister’s smiling face popped in. “Are you decent?”

  Erin sat up in the hospital bed. “What are you doing here?”

  “The E.R. nurse called me—you named me as your next of kin. Y’know?” Marcie let herself into the tiny space. She bent close and narrowed her eyes at the bandage on Erin’s forehead. “Hmm. Not so bad,” she said. “How do you feel?”

  “Ugly,” she said, plucking at the gown. “And I have a headache.”

  Marcie laughed at her. “Not such chichi hospital attire, huh? I meant the head wound doesn’t look too bad. Small bandage.”

  “Shaved head!”

  “Less than a half inch, Erin. Take it easy, it’ll grow right back.” Marcie sat on the end of the bed and ran her little hands over her big, pregnant tummy. “Your doctor said if we spend the night with you tonight, we can check you out and take you home. I thought that was reason enough to drive up. I knew you wouldn’t want to be in the hospital. Have you ever been in a hospital? Like, in your life?”

  “There was Bobby,” Erin said, speaking of Marcie’s late husband. “Lots of hospital time there.”

  “I meant, as a patient, Erin!”

  She rolled her eyes upward, thinking. “No,” she said, shaking her head. “No, I don’t think so. Good thing, too. It’s very boring and like being an inmate.” She plucked at the gown again. “The nurses don’t like me, I can tell. And can you believe this? They haven’t graduated to anything better than this for patients? For God’s sake!”

  Marcie just chuckled.

  “Are you feeling all right?” Erin asked her little sister.

  “Great. I’m sorry you got hurt, but I can’t wait to see the cabin. I hope it’s not too froufrou. I liked the old place.”

  “Guaranteed you’re going to think it’s too froufrou,” Erin said. “It’s completely livable, unlike before. There are lights and everything. Where are my clothes?”

  “I’ll find them. Don’t get up.”

  “Where’s Ian?”

  “He’s at the nurses’ station, getting your release instructions. I think we mainly have to check to be sure you’re still breathing about every seven minutes throughout the night. You’ll be a completely cooperative patient, won’t you?”

  “Just get me out of here,” she said. “They were going to have to hit me in the head again just to keep me here another hour.”

  “I think Ian was right.” Marcie found Erin’s folded clothes and shoes stuffed in her bedside chest of drawers along with her purse. “We’re not so much rescuing you as the nurses. I bet you’re no fun, as patients go.”

  Marcie drove Erin home to the cabin in her big SUV and Ian followed in his truck. He was impressed with the way the cabin looked, amazed by the impossible transformation. Very classy; very Erin. “God above,” he said in a whisper. “When I was thinking of fixing it up, I was thinking in terms of adding a septic tank for a toilet. Look at this place!”

  “But do you like it? Do you really like it? The rug is an Aubusson, the leather furniture is Robb & Stucky, there’s a whirlpool tub and what do you think of the fireplace?”

  Ian didn’t know from Aubusson or any Robb whomever. He stared out the newly installed French doors in the kitchen. Right outside the west end of the cabin was a deck that stretched the length of the house, taking advantage of the awesome view. “Incredible, Erin. Can we use it sometime?”

  She looked shocked. She blinked. They didn’t want to be there the same time as she was? “I thought…we’d all use it, now and then,” she said cautiously. “I mean, I didn’t want to wait to fix it up a little because I was taking vacation this summer, but, Ian, it’s your cabin. I think I have to ask your permission, not the other way around.”

  “Okay,” he said, smiling. “When I married Marcie, I married the family, Erin, and what’s ours is yours. You don’t have to ask permission.” He turned full circle, looking around. “I can’t believe you completely remodeled the whole place by e-mail! It’s amazing!”

  “I’ll be sure and ask if you’re already using it before I make any plans,” she said.

  “He was kidding,” Marcie said. “Ian, you’re such a dork. We’ll all come together. And when Drew visits, he can sleep in the shed.” She grinned.

  “But you like it?” Erin asked again.

/>   “I think it’s great,” he said. “You made it beautiful.”

  Marcie did a lot of oohing and aahing, and Erin seemed to puff up from that. “I don’t know how I made it without a real kitchen for so long,” Ian said, opening the refrigerator door. When he’d lived here, there was a sink with a pump handle and he’d cooked on a Coleman stove. His mind-set and the emotional landscape of his life back then had been all about deprivation. It hadn’t been so much a form of self-punishment as a paring down of baggage. The less he could make it on, the more competent he felt. It had been like an endurance test. And he had passed with flying colors; he had endured like crazy.

  Erin had been here almost a week. In the refrigerator he found yogurt, cottage cheese, egg substitute, skim milk, a loaf of thinly sliced low-cal bread, salad fixings, celery and carrot sticks, apples, cheese singles, tofu and hummus. His stomach growled; he wondered if it made her feel more competent to starve to death.

  For the hundredth time he asked himself what was really up with Erin, this isolation on the mountaintop, because this whole “well-deserved vacation” story just didn’t add up. Not with Erin.

  “Let me cook tonight, okay?” he said. Both women agreed that would be wonderful. So he continued, “Tonight I’m cooking something Preacher whipped up. I’m going to run into town and grab dinner.”

  “Um, I’m watching my calories,” Erin said unnecessarily. “Does he make anything kind of, you know, low cal?”

  Preacher was the cook at Jack’s bar, and he made one thing every day. Well, one breakfast item, one lunch item, one dinner item. Preacher did what he pleased, and it was always fantastic but none of it was low cal. “He’s very conscientious that way,” Ian fibbed, and his wife tilted her head toward him, making a face that said shame on you.

  Ian was dying for food. Real food, not rabbit food. But then, he could hardly blame Erin; she hadn’t been expecting company.

  “You girls enjoy your visit,” he said. “I won’t be gone long.” And he headed for town.