A Girl, A Guy And A Lullaby. Debrah Morris
“It’d be better if your dog died. Or you maybe drove an eighteen-wheeler.”
“I’ll work on it.”
He turned to her after a few minutes. “Feeling better?”
“Yeah. I’d forgotten how good it feels to have someone to talk to.”
Yeah, right. If she wanted a sympathetic ear, she was barking up the wrong cowboy. According to Mariclare’s exit speech, he was incapable of listening. Too wrapped up in himself to care about others. What was it she’d called him?
Oh, yeah. An emotionally unavailable, self-centered SOB.
The accusations had cut deep. He’d had a lot of time to think about them. He knew she had her reasons, but he could never quite reconcile the heartless man she’d described with the one whose face he shaved every morning.
Tom stuffed those feelings down and concentrated on maneuvering the curves. Ryanne was humming now. Like she was testing out an elusive melody heard only in her head. She’d been through a lot for someone so young. He didn’t want to add to her pain.
And he did not want to share it.
“I don’t know what happened to me back there,” she said. “It was either a fleeting episode of temporary insanity or a really bad case of bus lag.”
“I reckon you just needed to let off steam.”
“You reckon?” She laid her head back on the seat. “Just don’t think I’m a high-strung, world-class hysteric. I’m not. Normally I’m pathologically stoic.”
She made it sound like she cared about his opinion. He wasn’t sure how he felt about that. “You’ll be home soon.”
“Home. You don’t know what that means to me.”
But he did. He’d come home to lick his wounds, too. To find comfort in the familiar world of his childhood. To slip back into the skin of the nice guy he’d once been. The man he’d been when he left Brushy Creek. The one his hometown thought he was. “Home is the place you can’t appreciate until you leave.”
“That’s pretty poetic for a cowboy.” For once she sounded sincere.
At least she’d calmed down. He wasn’t up to handling raw emotional upheaval in any form. With his own future so uncertain, he sure as hell didn’t want to get involved in anyone else’s life right now.
Especially not the overwrought, messed-up life of an abandoned fiddle-playing wannabe country singer who looked like she could give birth and/or have a nervous breakdown at any moment.
In his heart, that hollow place he’d boarded over when Mariclare walked out, Tom knew Ryanne needed reassurance that things would be all right. But understanding the problem and taking responsibility for it were two different things.
No way would he volunteer for any comforting jobs. He had enough problems, without letting some little gal get under his skin.
Ryanne let out a sudden squeaky yelp.
He resigned himself to another outburst. “Now what?”
She grinned and patted her belly. “Tom Hunnicutt, meet the future clogdancing champion of the world.”
Chapter Three
Birdie Hedgepath’s house on Persimmon Hill crouched among tall post oaks and pines at the end of a long gravel drive. A pole light between the house and barn illuminated a weedy yard where leggy petunias spilled from old tires.
Everything was just as Ryanne remembered. Peeling white paint on the clapboards. Plaster hen and chicks under the crape myrtle bush. Pink plastic flamingos clustered around the propane tank.
The old porch swing stirred in the breeze and the creak of its rusty chains brought a rush of memories. Hot summer days. Cold Pepsi. Shelling beans. Birdie and meaning-of-life discussions.
Nothing had changed. Insects filled the night with their noisy chorus. Down at Annie’s Pond the bullfrogs belted out the amphibian top ten. Even Froggy, Birdie’s rheumy-eyed old hound, was in his spot by the door. He barely looked up at the midnight intruders.
Ryanne took a deep breath. She’d missed the smell of this beautiful green place. She’d been so self-absorbed that for five years she hadn’t thought once about barn owls or little sulfur butterflies. She’d forgotten the feel of dew-damp grass on bare feet. The sound of bobolinks.
In her single-minded pursuit of fame and recognition, she’d discounted the treasures left behind. She’d worried that coming home meant moving backward instead of forward. That embracing the past meant giving up on the future.
She was wrong. Persimmon Hill wasn’t the end of the road. It was a place to rest while she repaired the damage of her own foolish choices. Her life might be going to hell in a handbasket, but here she would be safe.
Home was the most sentimental song of all.
Tom set the last of the bags on the porch. “No one answered?”
“I haven’t knocked,” she admitted. “I’m just taking it all in.”
“Let’s surprise her.” He didn’t know what had gone wrong in Ryanne’s life, but when he saw the look in her eyes, he knew she’d been right to come here. He motioned her back into the shadows behind him. He rapped, and in a moment a sleepy-eyed woman in her midsixties pushed open the screen door.
Birdie Hedgepath’s quarter Cherokee blood showed in her round face, high cheekbones and dark eyes. She and her late husband Swimmer had no children of their own. If she hadn’t taken in ten-year-old Ryanne when her mother died, the child would have become a ward of the court, and sent to live among strangers.
Birdie did not possess the frailty her name implied. She had substance. Shoulders that were wide for a woman. A waist and hips to match. Stout legs, flat feet. Her black hair was cut short and streaked with gray. Though strong physically, her real strength was her wisdom and humor. Everyone who met Birdie, loved her.
“Landsakes, Tom,” she said with a yawn. “What’re you doin’ out here this time of night?”
“I brought you a little something I picked up in town.” He stepped aside with a dramatic flourish.
“Oh, oh, oh! You brung my baby home.” She pressed her hands to her mouth then threw her arms wide. “Baby girl, come here to me and let me hug your neck.”
“I missed you, Auntie Birdie.” Ryanne’s eyes filled with damp happiness. “I don’t know why I stayed away so long. I’m glad to be home.”
“Not half as glad as me. Let me look at you. Ohwee, girl, have you gone and swallowed a watermelon seed?”
“Something like that.” Ryanne gave her foster mother another hug. “You smell exactly as I remember. Like lilacs and bacon.”
Birdie’s dark-eyed gaze raked Ryanne from her cockeyed ponytail down to her bare feet. “What did you do, Tom? Drag her backward through the brush all the way?”
Ryanne laughed and hugged her again. “It’s a long story.”
“And one I aim to hear. Tom, you get those bags in the house and I’ll put on some coffee. Probably got a pie around here somewheres.”
He carried the luggage inside, but declined the offer. Like a messenger delivering a prize, he had no right to hang around and enjoy it.
“Thank you, ma’am, but I need to get home. I know you two have a lot of catching up to do.”
“You go on then. But stop by the Perch and I’ll wrap up one of them blackberry cobblers you and Junior favor so.”
“Thanks. I’ll do that. Birdie. Ryanne.” He tipped his hat and stepped out into the night.
Ryanne