He opened his eyes and gazed out at the valley. Forget it. She’s not your problem.
He lifted his coffee cup to his lips—and sloshed it down his bare chest when the ring of the telephone jarred him. Cursing under his breath and wiping away the spill, he walked inside, picked up his phone and looked at the display.
Terri. His ex-wife. Sam put the phone down and walked away from it. The last time she’d called, she’d been looking for money. He’d told her not to call him again. He couldn’t bear the idea of her piercing the armor he’d erected around his heart and his memories again.
The phone stopped ringing, and a moment later, it started again. Terri again.
Sam turned off his ringer. He felt a swell of bitterness rise up in him, the sort he used to tamp down with drink. Four years ago, he would have opened a bottle. Today, he would take a shower and hope to God it erased the tension he felt.
He’d met Terri in a college government class all those years ago. She’d been the girl with straight red hair and dancing blue eyes. She was full of purpose and the desire to make a difference in the world. Sam had been caught up in the swirl of her energy, had fallen madly in love with her. Let’s join the peace corps, she’d said. Let’s go help people.
He had never wanted to help people so much in his life.
But even then, as young and idealistic as they were, there had been warning signs. Terri loved to party, for one, and Sam had been easy to pull along. She also had a volatile temper that was made worse with a couple of drinks.
Whether Sam had been too na?ve to understand what was happening to her and to him, or too blinded by love, he didn’t know. But he’d ignored those signs, every last one.
Sam and Terri married in a little church in Taos, New Mexico, the summer after he graduated. Terri, a year behind him, dropped out of school. They’re part of the establishment. They don’t get it, she’d said. That was the reason, she claimed, that her grades were falling. Them, they, the unseen faces of injustice that seemed to shadow her everywhere she went.
Sam and Terri moved around for a couple of years. They lived in Santa Monica in a rent house with a bunch of hippies who talked a lot about bringing peace to the world but did little more than surf. They made their way to Portland when Terri had the idea to own a coffee shop. We’ll have poetry readings, she’d said brightly. They’d lasted three months.
Eventually, the need for money had driven them to Colorado Springs. Terri had big plans to take a job with the Forest Department, but took a job working for an insurance agent—still helping people, as she saw it. Sam joined the police force. After a couple of years, the opportunity to work for the Pinero County Sheriff’s Office had cropped up. It had been a good couple of years for Sam—he’d done well, rising quickly through the ranks. The sheriff had liked him, and had taken Sam under his wing. Sam was the guy everyone assumed would run for office when the sheriff retired.
Many times, Sam had tried to pinpoint when it had all begun to get out of hand. When it was, exactly, that Terri had gone from a vivacious college girl to a woman who got into verbal altercations with people around town about ridiculous things and drank straight from a vodka bottle. When it was that everything had unraveled into frayed ends, when the shadows had begun to close in around Terri, when he found the answer to all his troubles in the same vodka bottle Terri favored. When had they become this couple?
It bothered Sam when he saw shadows around Libby, too. Libby’s shadows were vastly different than Terri’s had been, but still. He didn’t think Libby was crazy, like he heard Mrs. Miller say at the Grizzly Café one morning. Or that she had some heretofore undiagnosed mental health issue that had suddenly manifested itself. He thought it was probably true what she’d said—she’d had a breakdown. He didn’t believe she was gripped by anything more than a need to belong—to someone, to something. And in rapid succession, she had lost all her places to belong, and all the people who had mattered to her. That was enough to send anyone down the path Libby had traveled.
He knew what that felt like, that wanting to belong to someone. Sometimes, Sam could feel it slipping around in his marrow, tugging at his conscious thoughts. He could feel the ache of wanting children settling into the crevasses of his heart.
As for Libby . . .
He couldn’t even define what it was that he felt about her. Frustration. Sympathy. More. Whatever more was, he didn’t want to look too close. No good could come of his worry or his growing infatuation for her. The last thing he needed was to complicate his life with a woman like her. It was best for him stay up on the mountain with his birdhouses and devote himself to helping those who were in a spot he’d once been in. Like Tony D’Angelo. If he could keep Tony from falling off the wagon, if that was the only thing Sam did with his life, he’d be happy.
That’s what he told himself.