The Top Gun's Return. Kathleen Creighton
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eyes away. His light, ironic laugh came to her as they moved side by side toward the door that opened onto a patio where guests could sit at outdoor tables when the weather was fine. Beyond that was a wooded area, and a paved bicycle and pedestrian path.
“So, I guess we’re still married, then?”
He didn’t know what made him ask it, like probing a sore tooth with his tongue. We’re still married, then? He didn’t feel like her husband. He felt like a barbarian invader, bringing pain, ugliness and horror into her soft and lovely, civilized life. Everything about her—her hair, her sweater, her skin—was so beautiful, so soft. She smelled so clean. He didn’t feel clean, and sometimes wondered if he ever would again. Until he did, he knew he’d never be able to touch her without thinking that he was soiling her, somehow.
We’re still married, then? What he really wanted to know was, Do you still love me? But that was something he couldn’t bring himself to ask.
Bleakly, he drew a breath and forced a smile. “Your momma seems just the same,” he said as he crossed the brick-paved patio, using the cane in what he hoped was a dashing sort of way rather than leaning on it like an invalid. He considered the pain in his knee only an annoyance—he’d grown accustomed to much worse—but the doctors had told him to keep his weight off of the knee as much as possible. And since his dreams of ever flying again lay pretty much in their hands, he was willing to do what they told him.
Jess gave a light laugh as she came beside him, fitting her stride to his uneven gait. “Did she cry?”
“I…think she might have, yeah, but you know how she is. She’d about die before she’d let you see her shed a tear.”
She did a quick scan for reporters, then moved across the strip of grass that separated the guest house from the path. “Yeah, Momma doesn’t change much,” she said, lifting her face to the sweet spring breeze.
The breeze lifted the hair from her shoulders gently, like the fanning of a butterfly’s wings, and the slanting sunlight shone golden through the fine strands. It seemed to Tristan the loveliest sight he’d ever seen.
“Things around her keep changing, but she stays the same. She’s like, I don’t know…our family’s anchor, or something. Our compass. You know—true north?”
He did know. He wanted to tell her how she and Sammi June had been that for him, all that and more—his anchor, his compass, the beacon light on the shore, his sword, his shield, his armor. But that seemed too big a burden of expectation to lay on one person.
“I guess there’ve been a lot of changes, though,” he said.
She threw him a smile. “Yeah, there have. Mostly good ones. Lots of babies. There’s a whole new crop of nieces and nephews for you to meet. Jimmy Joe and Mirabella—you remember Mirabella’s little girl, Amy Jo? Jimmy Joe delivered her in the cab of his rig on a snowbound interstate in Texas on Christmas Day? Anyway, they have a little boy, now, too, and by the way, J.J.’s a senior in high school, if you can believe that. Then my brother Troy and his wife Charly, they have two little girls. And…let’s see. Oh—oh my God, you’ll never guess. You know my little brother, C.J.?”
“You mean, Calvin? The one that dropped out of high school, and everybody’d pretty much given up on?” How good it felt to talk like this, of ordinary, everyday things. Home…family.
“Excepting Momma, of course—Momma never gives up on any of her kids.” Laughter bubbled up, and he drank the happiness in that sound like water from a healing fountain. “Yup, that’s the one. Well, would you believe he’s a lawyer now?”
“A lawyer? Good Lord.”
“I know, isn’t it wild? He just passed the bar this last March. And guess what else? He’s married. No babies yet, but he and his wife—her name’s Caitlyn, she’s from Iowa, and he met her when she hijacked his rig, and then she got shot and was blind for a while—oh, God, it’s a long story—but anyway, they’ve adopted a little girl. Her name is Emma—she’s a doll. And…let’s see, who else?”
“What about your other brother—what was his name—Roy?” Tris prompted. “Did he ever get married?”
Jessie sighed. “Not yet. That makes him the last holdout in the marriage department. He’s down in Florida, someplace. On the gulf. Captains a charter fishing boat.”
“Sounds like a tough life,” Tristan said dryly.
“Doesn’t it, though. Okay, so who does that leave? Oh, yeah, my oldest sister, Tracy, of course—she’s still married to Al, the cop, and they still live in Augusta and still have four kids. And then there’s Joy Lynn—”
She broke off while he took her arm and guided her out of the path of a pair of joggers who were overtaking them on the pedestrian side of the pathway. And he thought how easily such a thing came back to him. Sometimes, in fact, it was hard for him to get his mind around how some things, small, everyday things that had been absent from his life for so long, slipped back into it almost as naturally as—well, smiles and laughter, which were two more things he’d been without for a long, long time. If only, he thought, everything could be that easy.
“Joy—how is she? She and her second husband—what was his name?—ever have any kids?”
Jess threw him a look, too quickly. He became conscious once again of the soft fabric of her sweater, warming beneath his fingers, and the tensed muscle of her arm under that. He let go of it and felt her body relax.
“Fred.” She bit off the word. “She divorced him—with good reason, by the way. And she swears she’s never getting married again. Given her lousy taste in men, it’s probably just as well. Anyway, she lives in New York, now. She’s working on a novel, but she has a job at a magazine publisher’s to pay the bills.” She gave Tristan another side-long look. “I was up there visiting her when I got the call. That’s why I wasn’t home—”
“I know,” he said softly. “Your mom told me.” After a long moment he added, “She said you’re a nurse now.”
“Yeah,” she said, watching her feet, “I got my degree four years ago. I work in the NICU—the Neonatal Intensive Care—”
“I remember. You always wanted to do that, after Sammi June. That’s great.”
They walked on in silence, moving slowly, overcome all at once by the enormity of what had happened to their lives, the catastrophic changes of the past few days. The sun went down, and the air turned cooler. Tristan, who had sometimes doubted he’d ever be completely warm again, couldn’t repress a shiver.
Jessie glanced at him but didn’t ask if he wanted to turn back. Probably trying not to smother him, he thought, hating how weak he felt. He wondered if he’d ever have any stamina again.
After a while she said, “Granny Calhoun passed away.”
He nodded his acceptance of that inevitability; the old lady, his mother-in-law’s mother, had been at least ninety and frail as a twig last time he’d seen her, though still sharp as a tack mentally.
They paced another dozen quiet steps, and he was thinking he was going to have to turn around pretty soon, unless he wanted to humiliate himself by having to call somebody to come and get him and carry him back. Then he looked over and saw that she was crying. Soundlessly, with tears making glistening trails down her cheeks. Only when she felt his gaze did she lift her hand and try to stanch their flow with the sleeve of her sweater.
“Jess,” he said, his voice raspy with emotions long and deeply buried.
When she didn’t reply he uncertainly touched her elbow. That was all it took to bring her to him, sobbing.
He stood and held her as close as he dared, staring over her head with eyes dry and face aching, hard little muscles clenching and unclenching in his jaws. Joggers and bicyclists hurried past, uncurious, their whirring wheels and labored pants making breathing rhythms in the dusk. A plump woman