He smiled, a little naughty. “Maxie went to town to shop. All the way to the coast. No one’s watching me, making assumptions.”
“Ah,” she said, chewing. “You’re afraid Maxie will think you like me.”
“I’m sure she already thinks that. She’s noticed I give you rides. She notices everything. But a ride and a lunch—I don’t want her getting all worked up, like I’m taking it to the next level. Because I’m not taking it to the next level.”
“Because we’re employer and employee,” she said, helping him out.
“Uh-huh, and friends. Come on, we’re friends. Aren’t we friends? I watched you blow your nose—that’s very intimate. Isn’t it?”
She laughed in spite of herself. She also took another bite of her sandwich. “You’re a very sensitive man, underneath it all.”
He gave her a serious look. He shook his head. “I don’t know about sensitive—but I’ve been to Iraq and Afghanistan with the Marines. I’ve seen grown men cry for their mothers. I’ve promised to visit their wives if they don’t make it.”
She was frozen, he could see that. She coughed and nearly choked, swallowing hard. “God,” she said. “I can be so selfish. What I’ve been through is nothing compared to war.”
He gave another stroke to her long, wonderful hair, hoping he didn’t get mustard or pickle juice on it. “Don’t do that to yourself, Nora. You’ve had your own war. You’re allowed to feel the weight of it. This has been traumatic for you.”
Her eyes filled again, but she seemed to will them to dry right away. “See? Very understanding of you.” She handed her half sandwich toward him.
“I think you took three bites. Small bites. Can you try a little harder? I really worked to build that thing.”
She laughed again, but she took a bite. And she thought, Oh, this is scary. Because if someone like Tom could actually like her, it would be unimaginably wonderful. If a genuinely good man who happened to live inside a very large, hard, sexy body felt the slightest attraction…
But she took another bite. “It’s very good, in fact.”
“What’s in the sandwich you bring every day?” he asked.
“What do you think? PB and J. Berry’s favorite. I make her have a banana or, these days, apple slices with it. Protein, carbs and fruit.”
He took a giant bite of his half. After he swallowed he said, “Teach her how to spread the peanut butter right on apple slices. Or, take some apple butter home today—peanut butter and apple butter make a mean sandwich. And let’s hook you up with some cider. It might be too much for the baby, but Berry can handle the cider—so full of vitamins, it’ll rock her world.” He lifted his eyebrows. “Could eliminate the nap—it seems to fill little kids with energy. But it’s good energy.”
“You are definitely the apple man,” she said.
“I love apples.” He grinned and nodded toward her. “One more bite. And can I have a slug of that water?”
“Of course.” She handed him the bottle. And she took yet another bite. “You have a gift here, as well,” she said, nodding toward the huge sandwich.
“Are you feeling a little better?” he asked.
She nodded. “I apologize. It hit me out of nowhere. The memories, then the crying, then the anger, then grief, then… I don’t know what happened. But thank you. I’m a lot better.” She held the sandwich toward him. He lifted both brows and she took one more bite. “That’s it,” she said. “Kill it. If I get hungry again a little later, I have my PB and J.”
He started on what was left of her half. “Why’d you name your daughter Berry?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said with a shrug. “I was alone, scared out of my mind and the only friends I had were the people in the drug-infested motel where I lived or the ones I met in the welfare or Medicaid lines and I just wanted a cheerful, happy name for the baby I had no idea how I would support or take care of. I liked it. The name.”
He frowned. “You were in a bad place.”
“Bad. Place.”
“And now?”
“Good place. The nicest job I’ve ever had, though I might not be saying that in a couple of months when the cold sets in. The kids are happy, healthy. I support them in a town that has welcomed us in spite of the fact that we really come from nothing. I’m very grateful. Life is actually good, despite the fact that I have some issues to work through.” She took a sip of water and handed it to him. “I need to get to work.”
“Not yet,” he said. “I think the best thing to do is for you to take the afternoon off—check in with Reverend Kincaid. Talk to him awhile…”
“I’d like to, but you pay better,” she said, smiling tolerantly.
He stood up and held out a hand to help her to her feet. “The investment will be worth it,” he said. “If Noah is helping you navigate this minefield, as you say, today’s meltdown might be worth the time away from apple picking.”
“You’re probably right,” she said. “That sandwich. That was nice. Even if you only did it when Maxie wouldn’t know.”
“Well, a guy has to be crafty when he has a grandmother like Maxie. She’s a little on the pushy side. Come on, we’ll swing by the house and grab some cider and apple butter and I’ll give you a ride back to Virgin River.”
* * *
A few days later, after talking to Noah and thinking things over, Nora phoned her father. “I remember now,” she said. “I sent you away.”
“You can’t take responsibility for that, Nora. You were only six. And I could see how difficult our situation had become. I thought you were terrified of my visits and rightly so—not only was Therese impossible at times, I was the one who punched a hole in the wall. Our relationship was out of control. I had to leave it—I was the kerosene on the fire.”
“How did you two end up together, anyway?” she asked.
“I asked myself that often enough,” he said. “We met at a college fair, a large presentation to potential freshmen by area colleges. I was one of many people working the UC Berkeley booth. I was walking around the area, looking at the other presentations, and bumped into her. Your mother was a very attractive woman. She made me laugh… .”
“She could be so funny,” Nora remembered. “There were times, between her white-hot rages, we could laugh together. She was at times so destructive that it’s hard to remember some of her good traits. But how did you end up married?”
He sighed into the phone. “We married too quickly. We had several dates, talked about the fact that here we were, older at thirty-nine and forty-four, both had wanted to marry and have a family and yet had never come close. A few months later had us running off to the courthouse to get married so we could try to get a start on that family before it was too late. And then it was living together as husband and wife that allowed me to see there was a lot more to Therese than met the eye.”
“No kidding…”
“For a little while, I was on a cloud. I’m not an exciting guy, I know that—I’m a nerdy, quiet, boring history teacher. I’m excited by things very few other people care about. And then this pretty, funny, intelligent woman liked me. Liked me a lot. Wanted to be with me, have a family with me… It was such a powerful feeling. I couldn’t resist—I thought I’d finally found the life I’d been waiting for. She was pregnant immediately. And then I thought a lot of the high drama and tantrums had to do with that.”
“Nah,” Nora said. “Trust me—the temper came out of the blue. I never knew what a day would hold. We’d go for days, sometimes weeks, and everything would seem so normal. Maybe not a happy circus, but normal. And then there’d be some incident—fight with the neighbors, disagreement at work, an argument with a friend… Once a traffic ticket had her in a state for weeks! She ranted on the phone to anyone who would listen right up to her court appearance. She performed for a traffic judge who threatened to throw her in jail. I might never have known about tha
t, but I was with her. It was regular. Frequent. I don’t know what made her so crazy.”
“There were also lies—things she said people did to her, that hadn’t been done. I’m sure she claimed that traffic cop abused her in some way,” Jed added.
“Um, yes,” Nora said. “She had an elaborate story. But there are cameras in the patrol cars. That got her in trouble…and produced a long running rage. If there was one thing Therese hated, it was being caught.”
“And there you have it,” Jed said. “After four years of trying to be the ballast in the drama of the day, I finally told her I couldn’t take the mood swings, the anger, the crazy-making. And it wasn’t always directed at me—but fifty percent of the time there was some enormous melodrama that I didn’t understand and couldn’t deal with. And I was the most convenient person she had to dump it on. I suggested we try a trial separation. I said I thought the pressure of working and parenting was wearing on her and I could take some of that stress off her hands. I wanted to take you. I might as well have launched a missile—she went into an immediate defensive posture. She saw a lawyer right away. We were instantly at war.” He took a breath. “You’d think after the number of years I spent studying historic battles, I’d know better than to draw first blood. I’m sorry, Nora. I’m the one at fault for all of it.”
“Well…apology accepted, but I know you were no more capable of making things different than I was. Life was sometimes so hard with her… .”
“I’m so sorry, Nora. I’d give anything if I could’ve been smarter. If I’d been a better father.”
“What if I inherited it? Her instability?”
“According to her sisters, whatever it was, it was there since she was a just a girl. Her sisters were older than she—larger, stronger, presumably smarter—and yet they were sometimes afraid of her. When we got married, she didn’t want any family there… . Nora, I don’t know what caused your mother’s problems, but if you don’t have those issues now… I trust you’re free of it. I hate that I had to miss so much of your life.”
“I have something to tell you,” she said. “There are… I have…” She swallowed. “I have children. Two girls. Ten months and almost three years. And no, I haven’t been married. Their names are Fay and Berry.”
She heard a strange sound on the phone. “God,” he said in a whisper. “Oh, my God…”
“They’re very smart and beautiful,” she told him.
“Can I… Will you let me meet them?”
“You can visit for an afternoon when I’m not working,” she said. “Even though you’re my father and we’ve been talking for a couple of weeks, I’m not ready to leave you unsupervised with them, so that’s the best I can do. I work a lot. I’m not close to Stanford—I’m in Humboldt County. A little town called Virgin River. There are a couple of motels on the coast a good half hour away, but no guest room and no bed-and-breakfast.”
He sniffed loudly. “Don’t worry about that. Tell me when I can come. I’ll take time off. Oh, Nora, thank you for telling me. Thank you for giving me a chance.”
“Yeah, don’t screw up,” she said. “I’ve somehow survived one really mean parent. The first time it looks like it’s going down that road with you, it’s over.”
Chapter Six
Nora rode to the orchard with Tom and said, “I’m going to let Jed visit for a couple of hours on Sunday afternoon while I’m there.”
“Jed?” Tom asked.
“It might be quite a while before I call him Dad.”
“But you’re going to let him meet your daughters…?”
She laughed lightly. “I’m not going to give him my daughters, I’m just going to let him see them. And let them meet him. I think it’s the right thing to do.”
“Want me to be there? Just in case you get nervous?” Tom asked.
She smiled at him. “I could have sworn you found me annoying… .”
“Well, maybe I did. At first. But you’re not a bad kid.”
“I’m not a kid,” she said with patience. “And I’m a little unsure of him, but I’m not afraid of him. My memories of him are good. Reverend Kincaid has checked him out—I guess Jed’s telling the truth about everything.”
“Does it feel like the truth?” Tom wanted to know.
“It does, but I’m not relying on that. I don’t think I quite trust my instincts about truth versus lies. I’ve been wrong too much. How do you think I ended up just about penniless with two little kids and no husband or partner?”
Tom surprised her by pulling the truck to the side of the road. “As a matter of fact, I’ve been wondering. I didn’t think it was polite to ask. But since you brought it up…”
“Curious, huh?” she said.
“I won’t say anything to anyone,” he said. “And if you don’t want to talk about it—if it’s none of my damn business…”
“It probably isn’t,” she said. “Your business, I mean. But, six months ago I could hardly talk about it at all. Noah has me slowly coming out of my shell. I’m starting to put things into perspective, giving myself a break sometimes. I was so hard on myself at first, but—well, here’s the thing—I was a college freshman, away from home for the first time. I had only had a couple of very brief boyfriends up to that point. I never had dates or anything. I wasn’t one of the popular girls in high school, so…” She shrugged. “So—I went with some friends to a baseball game. They knew a couple of the players because they’d been on the local college team and had their eyes on going to the big league. But first, the minor league. And one of them, a real handsome, athletic, talented guy flirted with me. And boy—I just bit the dust. I fell for him. Bam! Five months later, before the start of my sophomore year, I was pregnant and he was traveling with the team.” She looked down and gave another shrug.
“And?” Tom said. “Then what happened?”
“Well, I held my stomach in till he was back in town. I was living in a campus apartment at UC Berkeley and I guess I thought he’d marry me or something, take me with him. But he said, ‘You’ll have to get your mother to look out for you—I’m on the road all the time.’ So he went with me to my house. And my mother went crazy. She started throwing my stuff out the front door. She told me to get out. She said if I thought she was taking on a baby while I went to college, I was crazy. Everything went out the door, on the lawn.”
“What stuff?” he asked.
“I’d already moved into my campus apartment so there wasn’t a ton of stuff left at my house. But my mother said there wouldn’t be any more money for school or anything. She said I was obviously not smart enough for college anyway. So, we threw it all in Chad’s trunk and backseat and he said he knew a place I could stay.” She made a face. “It was a terrible place, but I guess there was a part of me that felt like I deserved it—I’d made a terrible mistake in judgment. So, I moved into this awful motel in a bad section of town. I went to social services for help and medical benefits and…and Chad went back to his team. I didn’t hear from him for months.”
“Really?” Tom said. “He didn’t call you or anything?”
“He called a few times, but it seemed like he wanted to know about other people, not me. Like a couple of his friends who lived around there. But they weren’t really friends—they were guys he got pot from.” She met his eyes. “Before I found out I was pregnant, which by the way I found out right away, we used to smoke a little pot. That’s something I’m sure you never did…”
Tom laughed. “Oh, of course not—not a good old boy from Humboldt County! Where we grow our own.”
“You mean you did?” she asked, stunned.
“You should keep that to yourself. Maxie wouldn’t be too happy about that, even though I was just a stupid kid.”
“Seriously? You did?”
“I was not a pothead, all right?” he said, somewhat indignantly. “I was a kid, a boy. There might’ve been a little beer, a join
t. I never got in trouble.” He shook his head. “Maxie would kill me. Even now.”
She laughed at him. “Your secret is safe with me. And that describes my dabbling exactly. I realized I was pregnant with Berry and there hasn’t been any of that since. Not anything. But Chad? I had absolutely no idea, but he was a sinking ship. Since I never saw him, how would I know? But when he came back later, when I was pregnant with Fay, his appearance had changed. He’d gotten so thin—his teeth and skin were terrible. He said they were working him to death, and I believed it, but that wasn’t what it was. I found out too late—he had fallen headlong into all kinds of drugs, had been kicked off the team, was doing some dealing to cover his own habit. He was not the same guy who rang all my chimes at a baseball game when I was nineteen.” She looked at Tom and just tilted her head. “I was young and dumb, no experience. I didn’t know anything. And I didn’t have anyone to lean on.”
“And then what happened?” Tom asked.
“Then?” she said.
“Well, you have two kids… .”
“Oh,” she said. “Well, by the time I realized what was going on I had a one-year-old and was pregnant, living on assistance in a hovel with my useless boyfriend living off me. I was twenty-one, broke, had no family and no money and Chad said we were coming to Humboldt County because he had found work, but Fay came before. It was winter in the mountains and he left me with a newborn baby and a toddler in a house that didn’t even keep the wind out. If it hadn’t been for the kindness of strangers, I don’t think we would have survived.”
“What work did he come here to do?” Tom asked.
“He said he got a job with a farmer,” she said with a rueful laugh and a slight flush. “I don’t think it was your regular kind of farmer—it was Christmastime! Do farmers hire hands at Christmas when the snow is four feet deep? I think it was a grower and I think Chad either got fired or ran or maybe even robbed the guy before he ran. He abandoned us, but he came back about six months later looking for money and the men in town caught him trying to shake some money out of me. Jack, Noah, Preacher. Mike V., the town cop, was there, the sheriff was called and Chad is now in jail. He’s going to be in jail for a while. Hopefully long enough to forget about us.”