A Place to Call Home

  I got to my feet, went to the door, and peered in at a large bedstead of thick square posts in pale wood, possibly pine. The bed’s mattress was covered in dark green sheets and a voluptuous green comforter. Roan studied me quietly, his hands on his hips. “I like green,” he repeated. “Wolfgang’s wife got it all together for me last month. To bring here. She’s a decorator in Portland. I described the cabin and told her I liked plain and I liked green. But the first time I sat down on that comforter I felt like a big damned rabbit in an Easter basket.”

  I laughed, then thought of Easter baskets, the McClendon sisters and Big Roan, Uncle Pete’s bastard son, the violence that Easter at Steckem Road. I turned and went back to my chair, sank down in it unsteadily, and looked at him. He came over and dropped to his heels beside my feet. We studied each other in acute silence for a few seconds. He picked my feet up and placed them back on the ottoman, then removed my hiking shoes and my socks as I stared, speechless and enthralled. He curved his hands around the foot of my injured leg and pressed gently with his fingers, massaging. “I’ve got no plan other than a foot massage,” he told me. “I want to help, if you’ll let me, because you keep shifting your leg as if it’s aching.”

  Scattered warnings moved through my thoughts, but they couldn’t overcome the power of temptation. His hands felt so good. “The muscles twitch sometimes. The surgeon told me to expect it. He says it’s the nerves test-firing while they get their act back together. Growing pains.” Hurting and healing. We couldn’t have one without the other.

  Roan molded his fingers around my scarred ankle. The sunset-streaked sky felt closer outside the enormous frame of a large new window in one wall; the warmth spreading through my breasts and belly became full, rich, and urgent. I closed my eyes to block him out, but that only magnified the stroking pressure of his hands.

  I was letting him have his way with me, so to speak, poised on the chair with no willpower to stop him. He not only knew what he was doing, he was caught in the same spell. “I don’t know what to do about you,” I whispered. “I’m just so glad you’re alive.”

  He went still; a chasm opened, mocking the charade of his restraint. He bowed his head slowly to my foot cradled in his hands, then rested his cheek against the pink line of scar tissue. “I almost lost you forever. I don’t want to let you out of my sight again. I don’t give a damn whether anyone understands how we can be this way with each other so fast. I want you.”

  I was shaking. I feathered my hand over his hair, traced the outline of his features with quiet devotion as he raised his face to my touch. It was incredibly intimate, the rush, the energy we shared. Tender, shattering, the acceleration of emotion, a stark, sexual prowling unleashed by invisible signals. He got up, bent over me, and we kissed in long, smooth sequences of exploration. “Let’s be simple tonight,” he whispered as he reached for my hands. And I had my arms halfway up, to slip them around his shoulders, when I remembered how many years he’d let me agonize over him.

  I pushed back from him. “Don’t do this to me. This isn’t fair and you know it.”

  Roan gazed down at me with bitter amusement on his face. “Has our situation ever been fair?”

  “I love you,” I yelled. “I know I do, whether it makes sense to love a man I haven’t seen in two decades or not. I love you. And if you’re using me to prove you can own me, I’ll still love you, but I’ll never touch you again.” I was pulling at him violently. “If you can’t tell me why you disappeared for twenty years, then what we are to each other is a lie.”

  He straightened slowly. There was a stillness between us filled with challenge and expectation. Then he turned and walked into the bedroom. I moved to the edge of my chair and grabbed my cane, planning to follow him, but he returned carrying a deep metal file box, dented and rusty at the corners. He set it on the ottoman in front of me, then dropped to his heels beside it and spun the dial on a small combination lock dangling from the lid clasp.

  He looked at me for a moment without speaking. His jaw worked. “You may not want to touch me after you read these. There are more boxes. This one is just the letters from the early years.”

  He opened the box and riffled through bulging file folders until he pulled out several wrinkled sheets of paper marked with a red tab. “This is a letter you need to read first,” he explained, laying it on my knees.

  My hands shook. I looked down at yellowed sheets of old business stationery with RACAVAN, INC. printed across the top. Slanted, passionately haphazard handwriting filled the pages as if Roan had put his thoughts down in a flood of emotion.

  He nearly died this week, and now I understand what I’ve got to do, Claire.

  It’s been extra cold and wet this winter, like the ocean is moving in one cloud at a time, and I got a lot of work to do on a couple of rundown split-level ranches I bought last fall at a government auction. I always bring him with me to work every day after he gets out of school and I give him some tools to learn with. I been teaching him to saw angles on moldings with a miter box. He’s real good and he works hard, but he’ll never go into my line of work. He’s not interested in property. He’s crazy about animals. I guess he was born to be a farmer or something like a farmer. Born to be. He’s great with all kinds of animals. We got a dog. He takes the dog everywhere we go. It’s almost funny, if his natural ways didn’t remind me so much …

  Anyhow. He got sick to his stomach the other afternoon while he was working with me, and that night he started running a bad fever and I took him to the emergency room. It was his appendix. They had to take it out, and I walked the floor like a wild man while he was in surgery. I was so scared he might die. I couldn’t stand to be that alone in the world again.

  When he woke up after surgery, he grabbed my hand and held on like he did when he was just a baby. He said he wasn’t scared because I was there. I got him up in my arms and rocked him and promised him I’d always be there.

  That’s when I knew how much I loved him and he loved me. I can’t risk somebody taking him away from me. Give him what they think is a good home. Not with me. Hell, I know what I look like. Trash with big dreams. And not even old enough to raise a kid.

  I can’t put him in the middle and let strangers fight over him. I can’t take the chance that nobody wants him because I know how that feels and what could happen to him. If I never do anything else good with my life I have to raise him—make sure he’s happy, and educated, and solid. I can be the kind of daddy I never had, and maybe that can make up for what my old man did to you. And I can do for my kid what you tried to do for me, Claire. Never let him down.

  But see, I know now that I can’t tell you where I am. I meant to do that. Been thinking and planning ever since I left. But if I get in touch with you the family would find out sooner or later. I can’t have that happen, at least not until he’s old enough to take care of himself. And so I’m missing you worse than usual tonight. I’m broken up inside. I don’t know if you’ll ever want me; I have to believe we were meant to be together someday, and that it will be so fine—special—when we are. Some people have crazy hopes. That’s mine. My hope. I’m going to raise this boy because I love him and he makes me think of you, because he’s like a bridge to you.

  You’d want me to do this, I think. Because if you knew what I know about him you’d understand why your family’s not ever going to want to know.

  And you might wish I’d never come back.

  I couldn’t breathe. I lifted my gaze to Roan’s stark scrutiny. “You have a son?” He hesitated, then nodded. My heart twisted. “You could have told me.”

  His eyes held my fixed gaze. “I adopted him.”

  “All right. Then you knew his mother? You must have loved her. Who was she?”

  “I didn’t love her,” he said flatly. “I lived with her and the boy for a few years. The years right after I ran away. Then she died. The boy was only about seven then.”

  “Why couldn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t you risk hav
ing the family find out where you were and that you were raising a child? Did you really think I’d reject you because you—”

  “Claire, listen to me.” Roan’s face was brutal in the shadows sliding into the old cabin. “His name’s Matthew.”

  I blinked. “Matthew?”

  Roan put a hand over mine and gripped hard. “Sally McClendon was his mother.”

  I sat back, stunned. The truth sifted through me. “Matthew,” I whispered. My cousin. My Uncle Pete’s son.

  Roan had raised Matthew Delaney.

  The moon was a high, white coin in the night sky, its light cast down as shimmering silver on the lake’s black mirror. Frogs sang their high-pitched chant in celebration of the new season, fresh, urgent life seeking company in the darkness. A soft, sweet-scented breeze moved through the water oaks. Deceptive serenity.

  I sat on the edge of the new porch of the cabin. Roan stood on the thick carpet of sod in the yard, his hands shoved in his trouser pockets and his shoulders hunched. We’d hammered facts into meaningless strings of words; it was time to be still, be quiet, sort through the labyrinth of emotion.

  There are brands of jealousy too primitive for reason; I remembered Sally so well, the big-breasted, hard-eyed teenager from the shacks of Steckem Road. She and I had recognized everything that was special about Roan when we were growing up. She deserved sympathy, but I sat there scalding myself with images of her wrapped around Big Roan and then Roan. Did you? With her?

  As a boy he’d listened to Sally talk about her daydreams; when she left he had ideas about where she’d gone. He found her living in a small apartment and working at a strip club in some town he didn’t name.

  And she took him in, hid him, and he stayed with her for the next few years.

  “I’m glad Sally helped you. Thank God for that,” I said.

  Roan came over and sat down on the porch steps beside me. “I’m no saint,” he muttered. “But I didn’t sleep with her. Room and board. That’s all it was. She knew I was always remembering her and my old man.”

  “I was thinking you were only human. And you owed her.”

  Roan turned and eyed me quietly. “I didn’t owe her that kind of debt. My old man had already made a few payments.”

  “I’m only saying—”

  “I know.” He scrubbed a hand over his face wearily. “But she didn’t need anybody else pawing her. She got plenty of that at her job. She needed me to be her friend and baby-sitter.”

  I nodded, relieved. Sally got him a job, the only job where no one asked questions. He worked in a back-alley garage, a chop shop, dismantling stolen cars. He was good at that, very good, the boy who had a way with mechanical things, and could make a lot of money at it.

  “I went out with the Jacksonville cops one night,” I offered, “when they busted a chop shop.” It was a lame effort to convey empathy. I hesitated. Then, “I don’t give a damn if you cut up stolen cars. It doesn’t matter now.”

  “I’ve reformed,” he answered with a certain bleak humor.

  I felt feverish. “What happened to Sally?”

  “She was killed.”

  “How?”

  “Drugs, booze. She got stoned and picked up the wrong guy at a bar one night, and he beat her to death in a motel room.”

  “How old were you then? How long had you been living with her?”

  “I was about nineteen, so I’d been with her and Matthew for maybe four years. Matthew had counted on me for as long as he could remember. Hell, Claire, I’d changed his diapers, fed him, taught him games, read bedtime stories to him. Sally loved him, she really did, and she was as good to him as she knew how to be, but she’d disappear sometimes. I took care of him. I always did.”

  “You could have asked me for help after I was old enough to make my own decisions. And the family—”

  “Don’t tell me that. I’ll never believe it about the family. Your folks wouldn’t publicly admit Matthew was their own blood kin, much less take him in to raise. They’d have turned him over to foster care just like they did to me. They wouldn’t have let me raise him either.”

  “You’re wrong. They’d have loved him. They’d have welcomed you and him back. They wouldn’t have made the mistake they made before, when they hurt you.”

  “I’m not going to argue a useless point. It’s done. I pretty much stole him after Sally died. Got him a fake birth certificate, changed his last name to Sullivan, and we headed west as far as we could go.”

  “Oh, Roan.” A man accustomed to extremes of loyalty and rejection doesn’t deserve a glib assurance that there’s nothing left to fear or a promise of simple solutions. He hadn’t stolen Matthew, he’d saved him. When the family learned what he’d done, he’d be showered with more love and admiration than he could imagine. And so would Matthew. “We have to tell them,” I said desperately.

  “They don’t want him. And believe me, he doesn’t want them. He knows all about his history. He’s not bitter, he just understands that there’s nothing for him to come back to.”

  “Oh, Roan. There’s so much, and so much has changed. Uncle Pete was killed years ago in a hunting accident. Harold was killed on the stock-car track. Arlan’s pretty much deserted the family. He’s in Louisiana and he’s not coming back. You don’t have to deal with any of them.”

  “I know all about Pete and his boys,” Roan said darkly. “I made it my business to find out about them over the years. About the whole family. There’s not much I don’t know.”

  “I see.” Silence. “I can’t promise that the whole Maloney-Delaney clan will throw open their arms to Matthew, but I know my folks will—”

  Roan laughed harshly. “You’re wrong. I’ll take any shit anybody can dish out, but I don’t want him treated like shit, Claire. And I don’t want you put in the middle of a mess either.”

  I moved around in front of him on the steps, pushing his thighs apart and balancing on the knee of my good leg, leaning into his chest with my hands curved around his face. “You’ll feel better when we’ve talked all this over a few times. We can resolve this. It will be all right.”

  He covered my hands gently. “I’ve wanted to see you every day for twenty years. I didn’t know how in the hell we could deal with what I had to tell you, and I still don’t know. But I do love you. Don’t ever doubt that.”

  I put my arms around him. For twenty years he’d hidden the truth from everyone, even me, when I could have been trusted, I would have helped him. But no one had given him many choices. He had offered an incredible act of devotion and sacrifice to protect a child’s innocence in return for the innocence he and I had lost. And we had lost each other for twenty years because so much trust and hope had been hammered out of him.

  “I’ve never cared what other people said about us,” I whispered. “All that matters is that I know who you are again. Hello. Hello, boy.”

  His eyes glittered. He laughed hoarsely and then kissed me, and we were frantic with relief, clinging to each other. He stroked my hair and face, the years fading and shifting, sugar between our tongues, children’s memories burned away in a flash.

  “You want simplicity?” I asked. “Then stop talking and do something.”

  He carried me inside and put me on that deep green new bed in the old cabin. Slowly, while I watched him, he removed his clothes and then, slowly, he helped me undress. “Well, here we are,” he said quietly, looking at me in ways that brought goosebumps to my skin.

  I touched him between the thighs with my fingertips. “This is about the only part of you I never got to see when we were kids.”

  “Explore all you like,” he answered, and carefully cupped his hand over me. “As long as I get the same opportunity.”

  Breathless, I placed kisses down his body and he did the same to mine. We lay together, naked, our hands moving over each other. We were trembling, both of us, caught up helplessly in the sensations and newness of each other’s sexuality; it was awkward at moments, intense, blindly comp
elling to share, signaling with touch and breath, small sounds and movements, lost in a place as hot and emotional as a summer night filled with lightning. His eyes darkened to the color of old pewter, endlessly searching my face for clues. “We would have been like this years ago—the first time—if we’d had the chance,” he said softly. “Not a whole lot of grace to it, but plenty of love.”

  “A little grace and a lot of love is all I need right now,” I told him. “This is our first time. This is our time tonight.”

  He eased a pillow under my injured leg; it didn’t hurt, I told him, and he swore he’d be careful, and I knew he would be. He made my body bend like a flower. When he was poised between my thighs, I curled my fingers around him, my other arm draped around his neck. I urged him gently forward. He put his arms under my shoulders, cradling my head, his mouth just above mine. “Help me go where I belong,” he whispered.

  And I did.

  There was room for hope and reconciliation. I would coax Matthew McClendon Delaney Sullivan back home. I would bring him back—Uncle Pete’s abandoned boy, my grown cousin, Roan’s adopted son, a testament to our faith in each other and to Roan’s own large heart. All of Roan’s mysteries would be explained, and anyone who had ever doubted him would be ashamed of themselves. I felt more serene and hopeful than I had in months. In years.

  I took so much for granted.

  My parents had formed a protective wall around their children when we were small, and Mama always told me that someday I would be big enough to see over her and Daddy and then I’d climb out and move beyond them. But the thing about parents, she said, is that their wall would always be there, backing me up, no matter how old and ignorant and small I might think they had become from my view outside their boundaries.

  “Thank you for calling last night to let us know you’d be home by morning,” Mama said briskly when Roan and I returned to the farm at dawn. “We appreciate the courtesy.”