"Deep down he's probably grateful to you for being there last night, forcing him to do something he really wanted to do—come home.
You provided a way for him to do it and still save face. We owe you a real debt of gratitude and so does Chase."
Marcie gave them a tremulous smile, then gathered up her coat and purse. "Since you're here to take over, I'll say goodbye."
"I'll walk you to your car."
"There's no need to, Lucky," she said, hastily turning to open the door for herself. She didn't want them to see her tears. "I'll call later to check on him. Goodbye."
What had been falling as sleet a hundred miles west was a cold, miserable, wind-driven rain in East Texas. Marcie drove carefully, her vision impaired by the falling precipitation on her windshield… and her own tears.
Chase released a string of curses when someone knocked on his door late that evening.
After having been dusted, mopped, scoured, vacuumed, and disinfected, his apartment was finally clean, empty, and silent. With only himself and the nagging pain in his ribs for company, he was finishing his dinner in blessed peace.
He thought of ignoring the knock. Whoever it was might think he was asleep and go away.
However, on the outside chance it was Lucky sneaking him a bottle of something stronger than tea or coffee, he left his seat at the bar and padded to the door.
Marcie was standing on the threshold, holding a bouquet of flowers. He had never seen her in a pair of jeans that he could recall.
They made her legs look long and slim—thighs that seemed to go on forever.
Beneath her short, quilted denim jacket, she was wearing a sweatshirt. It was decorated with splatters of metallic paint, but it was still a sweatshirt and a far cry from the business suits she was usually dressed in.
She'd left her hair down too. Instead of the tailored bun she had worn that morning, the flame-colored curls were lying loose on her shoulders. They were beaded with raindrops that glistened like diamond chips in the glow of the porch light. He didn't particularly like red hair, but he noticed that Marcie's looked soft and pretty tonight.
About the only thing that was familiar were her eyeglasses. All through school, Goosey Johns had worn glasses. It occurred to him now that she must have been wearing contacts, even two years ago when they had been reacquainted in his office just before she and Tanya left to look at a house together—the afternoon Tanya died.
"It's a cold night out," she said.
"Oh, sorry." He shuffled out of her path and she slipped past him to come inside.
"Are you alone?"
"Thankfully."
He closed the door and turned to her. Her eyes moved over him in a nervous manner that made him want to smile. To please his
mother, he had bathed and shaved and shampooed.
But he hadn't dressed and was still wearing only his bathrobe.
An old maid like Marcie probably wasn't used to talking to a barefooted, barelegged, bare-chested man, although she had demonstrated aplomb when he had come out of his hospital bed wearing nothing more than his bandage.
A hospital room was a safe, uncompromising environment compared to a man's apartment, however.
Chase sensed her uneasiness and decided that it served her right for butting in where she wasn't wanted.
"These are for you." She extended him the colorful bouquet.
"Flowers?"
"Is it unmacho for a man to accept flowers?" she asked testily.
"It's not that. They remind me of funerals."
He laid the bouquet on the coffee table, which
Devon had polished to a high gloss earlier that afternoon. "Thanks for thinking of flowers, but I'd rather have a bottle of whiskey.
I'm not particular about brand names."
She shook her head. "Not as long as you're taking painkillers."
"Those pills don't kill the pain."
"If your ribs are hurting that badly, maybe you should go to the emergency room here and check in."
"I wasn't talking about that pain," he mumbled, swinging away and moving to the bar where he had left his dinner. "Want some?"
"Chili?" With distaste she stared down into the bowl of greasy Texas red. "What happened to the chicken soup your mother made for you?"
"I ate it for lunch but couldn't stomach it for two meals in a row."
"I bought the canned chili today thinking it would make a convenient meal in a day or two. Spicy food like that probably isn't the best thing for you right now."
"Don't nag me about my food."
He plopped down on the stool and spooned a few more bites into his mouth. Raising his head, he signaled her toward another of the barstools. She slipped off her jacket and sat down.
After scraping the bowl clean, he pushed it away. Marcie got up and carried it to the sink. She conscientiously rinsed it and placed it in the dishwasher, along with the pan he'd heated it up in. Then she moved to the coffee table, got the flowers, placed them in a large iced-tea glass, and set them down on the bar in front of him.
"No sense in letting them die prematurely just because you're a jerk," she said as she returned to her stool.
He snorted a wiseass laugh. "You're going to waste, Marcie. You'd make some man a good little wife.
You're so—" He broke off and peered at her more closely. "What's the matter with your eyes?"
"What do you mean?"
"They're red. Have you been crying?"
"Crying? Of course not. My contacts were bothering me. I had to take them out."
"Contacts. I didn't realize until I saw you in your glasses that you usually wear contacts now. Your looks have improved since high school."
"That's a backhanded compliment, but thanks."
He looked down at her chest. "You're not flat-chested anymore."
"It's still nothing spectacular. Nothing like your ladylove."
The muscles in his face pulled taut. "Ladylove?"
"The woman last night."
He relaxed. "Oh. She had big boobs, huh?"
Marcie cupped her hands in front of her chest. "Out to here. Don't you remember?"
"No. I can't recall a single feature."
"You don't remember the silver hair and magenta fingernails?"
"Nope." Looking her straight in the eye, he added, "She was just an easy lay."
Marcie calmly folded her arms on the bar.
Her eyes remained steady as she leaned toward him. "Look, Chase, let me spare you the trouble of trying to insult me. There isn't a single insult I haven't heard from being called Four Eyes and Bird Legs and Carrot-top and
Goosey. So you can act like a bastard when I
bring you flowers and it's not going to faze me.
"As for off-color comments, I've worked with and around men since I graduated from col lege. I could match every dirty joke you can think of with one even dirtier. I know all the locker-room phrases. Nothing you say can offend or shock me.
"I realize that your virility didn't die with your wife, though you might have wanted it to. You have physical needs, which you appease with whatever woman is available at the time. I neither commend nor criticize you for that. Sexuality is a human condition. Each of us deals with it in his own way. No, it's not your behavior that confounds me, but the women who let you use them.
"You have people who care about you, yet you continue to scorn and abuse their concern.
Well, I won't allow you to do that to me any longer. I've got better, eminently more satisfying ways to spend my time."
She stood and reached for her jacket, pulled it on. "You're probably too stupid to realize that the best thing that ever happened to you was that damned bull named El Dorado. It's only unfortunate that he didn't give you a good, swift kick in the head. It might have knocked some sense into it."
She headed for the door, but got no farther than his arm's reach. He caught the hem of her jacket and drew her up short. "I'm sorry."
For reasons he couldn't understand, he heard himself say, "Please stay awhile."
Turning around, she glared down at him.
"So you can make more snide remarks about my single status? So you can try to shock me with vulgarities?"
"No. So I won't be so damn lonely."
Chase didn't know why he was being so baldly honest with her. Perhaps because she was so honest about herself. In everyone else's eyes, she was a successful, attractive woman.
When she looked in the mirror, however, she saw the tall, skinny, carrot-headed bookworm in glasses and braces.
"Please, Marcie."
She put up token resistance when he gave her arm a tug, but eventually she relented and returned to her stool. Her chin was held high, but after their exchanged stare had stretched out for several moments, her lower lip began to quiver.
"You do blame me for Tanya's death, don't nil you?
He took both her hands, pressing them between his. "No," he said with quiet insistence.
"No. I never wanted to give you that impression. I'm sorry if I have."
"When you came to my hospital room the morning after the accident, I asked you if you blamed me.
Remember?"
"No. I was saturated with grief. I don't remember much about those first few weeks after it happened.
Lucky told me later that I
acted like a nut case.
"But I do remember that I didn't harbor a grudge against you, Marcie. I blame the boy who ran the stop sign. I blame God. Not you.
You were a victim, too. I saw that today when you were driving us home."
He stared at their clasped hands, but he
didn't really see them. Nor did he feel them as he rubbed the pad of his thumb over the ridge of her knuckles.
"I loved Tanya so much, Marcie."
"I know that."
"But you can't understand… nobody can understand how much I loved her. She was kind and caring.
She never wanted to make waves, couldn't abide anyone's being upset.
She knew how to tease enough to make it fun but not enough to hurt. Never to hurt. We had terrific sex.
She made bad days better and good days great."
He pulled in a deep breath and expelled it slowly. "Then she was gone. So suddenly. So irretrievably.
There was just this empty place, vapor, where she had been."
He felt an unmanly lump forming in his throat and swallowed it with difficulty. "I told her good-bye. Gave her a hug and a kiss.
Waved to her as she left with you. The next time I saw her, she was stretched out on a slab in the morgue. It was cold. Her lips were blue."
"Chase."
"And the baby. My baby. It died inside her."
Scalding tears filled his eyes. He withdrew his hands from Marcie's and crammed his fists into his eye sockets. "Christ."
"It's okay to cry."
He felt her hand on his shoulder, kneading gently. "If only I had gone with you like she wanted me to, maybe it wouldn't have happened."
"You don't know that."
"Why didn't I go? What was so damned important that I couldn't get away? If I had, maybe I would have been sitting where she was. Maybe she would have been spared to have our baby, and I would have died. I wish
I had. I wanted to."
"No, you didn't." Marcie's harsh tone of voice brought his head up. He lowered his hands from his eyes.
"If you say anything like that again, I'll slap you again."
"It's the truth, Marcie."
"It is not," she declared, shaking her head adamantly. "If you really wanted to die, why aren't you buried beside Tanya now? Why haven't you pulled the trigger or driven off the bridge or picked up the razor or swallowed a handful of pills?" She came to her feet, quaking with outrage as she bore down on him.
"There are dozens of ways one can do away with himself, Chase. Booze and easy women and bull riding are among them. But they sure as hell aren't the fastest means of self-destruction.
So either you're lying about seriously desiring death or you're grossly inefficient.
All you've done effectively is fall apart at the seams and make life miserable for everyone around you."
He came to his feet, too. Grief wasn't paining his injured chest now so much as anger.
"Just where the hell do you get off talking to me like this? When you've lost the person you love, when you've lost a child, then you'll be
at liberty to talk to me about falling apart.
Until that time, get out of my life and leave me alone."
"Fine. But not before leaving you with one final thought. You're not honoring Tanya with this kind of bereavement. It's unintelligent and unhealthy. For the brief time I knew her, she impressed me as one of the most life-loving people I'd ever met. She positively idolized you, Chase. In her eyes you could do no wrong. I wonder if she would have the least bit of respect for you if she could see the mess you've made of your life since she's been gone.
Would she be pleased to know that you've crumpled? I seriously doubt it."
He ground his teeth so hard it made his jaws ache. "I said to get out."
"I'm going." Hastily she fished in her purse and produced a folded sheet of pink paper.
She spread it open on the bar. "That's the itemized receipt from the hospital bill that I paid for you. I'll collect it in full tomorrow."
"You already know I don't have any money."
"Then I suggest you get some. Good night."
She didn't even wait for him to go to the door with her, but crossed his living room, flung open the door, and marched out, seemingly impervious to the rain. She soundly pulled the door closed behind her.
"Bitch," he muttered, sweeping the receipt off the bar with one swipe of his hand. It fluttered to his feet.
He gave it a vicious kick that sent a sharp pain through his ribs. Wincing, he hobbled toward the bedroom and the bottle of pills on his nightstand.
He uncapped the prescription bottle and shook out a capsule, then tossed it to the back of his throat and swallowed it without bothering to get a glass of water.
As he was returning the bottle of pills to the nightstand, he paused. Turning the amber plastic bottle end over end, he considered taking all the capsules at one time.
He couldn't even conceive of it.
He lowered himself to the edge of his bed.
Was Marcie right then? If he had seriously wanted to end his life when Tanya's ended, why hadn't he?
There had been many opportunities when he'd been away from home, on the road, in the company of temporary friends, lonely, broke, drunk, and depressed. Yet he had never even thought of actual suicide.
Somewhere deep inside, he must have felt that life was still worth living. But for what?
He lifted his gaze to the framed photograph of Tanya and him taken on their wedding day. God, she had been lovely. Her smile had come through her eyes straight from her heart.
He had known unequivocally that she loved him. He believed to this day that she had died knowing that he loved her. How could she not know? He had dedicated his life to never letting her doubt it.
Marcie was right in another respect—he wasn't honoring Tanya's memory by living the way he presently was. Odd, that an outsider, and not one of his own family, had read him so right and had known just what strings to pull to make him sit up and take notice of his life.
Tanya had been proud of his ambition. Since her death he hadn't had any ambition beyond drinking enough to dull his senses and cloud his memory. At first he had put in token appearances at the office of Tyler Drilling, but one morning when he'd shown up drunk while
Lucky was cultivating a potential client, his brother had blown up and told him he'd just as soon not have him around if he was going to jeopardize what little business they had.
That's when he'd gone on the road, following the rodeo circuit, riding bulls in as many rodeos as he could afford to enter. He won just enough prize money to keep him in gasoline and whiskey, and that was all that mattered.
One kept him away from home and the other made him temporarily forget the heartache he had left there.
His life had become a nonproductive cycle of whoring, drinking, gambling, fighting, riding bulls-Winning money, spending it. Moving from place to place, roaming aimlessly, never stopping long enough to deal with what he was running from.
The smiling groom in the photograph on the nightstand didn't even resemble him now.
In fact it mocked him. How naive he'd been then, to think that life came with a guarantee of unending happiness. He studied Tanya's blond prettiness, touched the corner of her smile, and felt remorse for the shame he'd brought to her memory.
According to his mother's speech, his family's patience with him was finally expended.
He had alienated all his friends. He was flat broke. He was bedding women he couldn't even remember in the morning. Like the prodigal in the New Testament, he'd reached rock bottom.
It was time he pulled himself together. Life wasn't going to be fun no matter what he did, but it sure as hell couldn't get any worse than it had been.
Tomorrow he'd talk to Lucky and find out what was going on with their business or even if they still had a business. Tomorrow he'd go see his mother and thank her for the chicken soup. Tomorrow he'd scrape up enough money to repay Marcie. That would be a start.
He would take it one day at a time.
But first, he thought, as he raised the picture to his lips and kissed her image, he would cry for Tanya one more time.
"Damn, Sage!" Chase shouted at his younger sister as she drove straight over a chuckhole. "My ride on that bull was nothing compared to your driving." He tentatively touched his aching ribs.
"Sorry," she said cheekily, smiling at him across the console of her car. "That hole wasn't there the last time I was in town. Nor were you for that matter. The last we had heard, you were in Montana or someplace."
Chase had been glad to see her. She had knocked loudly on his door while he was brew ing a pot of coffee after a surprisingly restful night.
"Chase!" she had cried, exuberantly throwing herself against him and hugging him hard before he yelped and set her away.
"Watch the ribs."
She had swiftly apologized and joined him for coffee and toast. Since he was still without transportation, he had asked her to drive him to the company headquarters as soon as he was showered and dressed.
"How often do you come home?" he asked her now.
"Hmm, every other month maybe. But when