Child of Their Vows

She called again, exasperated. “Max!”

“If you would quit working or cut back your hours,” he yelled over his shoulder, “we might not have kinks in our relationship.”

Throwing a blatant red herring in her path was a dirty trick, but he hadn’t yet figured out what he was going to do about Randall, and until he did, he didn’t want to talk about sons, real or hypothetical.

“That is so unfair!” She kicked her booted foot at a rotting stump beside the path, scattering crumbling bits of decaying wood.

He shrugged and kept on walking. “You wanted to know what I thought.”

“You’re avoiding the real issue,” she insisted. “You want another child and I…I’m not ready.”

He snapped a dry twig off a branch in passing and flung it down the hillside, where it snagged on a bush. “You keep saying ‘maybe’ and ‘later,’ but later never comes and maybe means nothing. Face it, you have no intention of having another baby.”

“I never said that!”

“You didn’t have to.” Fed up, he increased his pace.

Max felt her angry silence bombard his back as they descended toward the valley floor around hairpin turns in the narrow path. Gradually his temper cooled. He could put their spat from his mind, if not the cause of it, but he knew Kelly would continue to dwell on the problem until they made up.

With a sigh, he stopped again, took her in his arms and rubbed her nose with his. “I forgive you.”

She snorted, half amused, half annoyed, but wholly unrelenting. “Max, you know we should talk more.”

“Aw, Kel, it’s too nice a day to hash things over. Come on, we’re almost at the river.”

Reluctantly she gave up the fight. “Oh, all right.”

Another hundred feet and the trail led them out of the woods to the edge of the tumbling river. Silenced by the roar of water and awed by the grandeur of the falls, they turned to each other. His hands lightly touching her waist, he kissed her, putting all the tenderness he could into the soft pressure on her lips, and he felt her irritation dissolve in the misty air.

High overhead, treetops were moving in the wind, which blew clouds across the sun, but there on the river all was still and warm. They walked along the gorge until they came to a large flat rock where they could sit side by side, looking toward the falls.

From her day pack Kelly removed the lunch the hotel had prepared for them. “Want a sandwich?” she asked, speaking over the sound of water. He nodded and she handed him one. “Remember when we came here on our honeymoon? We smuggled our own food into the hotel because we didn’t have the money to buy meals.”

“How did you get stuck with such a cheap bastard?”

“I guess I got lucky,” Kelly said, munching happily.

“Do you still think you’re lucky?” Max tossed a breadcrumb to a junco that had fluttered down onto the next rock. The small gray bird snapped up the crumb in its beak and turned its black head to regard him with one beady eye. Kelly still hadn’t answered. “Never mind,” Max said. “Dumb question.”

“We were so young when we married,” she said at last. “I was straight out of high school and you were only a year older.” Kelly placed a hand on his jaw, forcing him to look at her. “I can’t imagine life without you.” She shook her head with a wry grin. “Sometimes I can’t imagine life with you, either.”

He nudged her off balance, then caught her before she toppled. She fell into his arms, laughing. He said, “I’ll never understand why your grandmother allowed you to marry so young. If you’d been my daughter…”

“She let Geena go to New York on a modeling contract when she was sixteen. How could she stop me from marrying at eighteen? Gran always told us we had good heads on our shoulders and that we should trust our own judgment.”

“Bulldust. You and your sisters were as headstrong as wild ponies. You always got your way. Erin was the most sensible, but your Gran was as weak as water where you girls were concerned.”

“Don’t you criticize Gran,” she said, wagging a finger at him. “At least she considered my feelings. Your parents did everything they could to stop us from getting engaged. The moment they heard we wanted to get married after graduation they shipped you off to that job on the dude ranch, hoping you’d forget me over the summer.”

The bite of sandwich in his mouth suddenly turned dry and lumpy. Why the hell had he brought up the past? “But I didn’t, did I?” he demanded, feeling an urgent need to reconnect with Kelly. He did not want to lose the woman he’d spent more than a decade building a life with.

She tilted her head, clearly puzzled by his tone. “No,” she said slowly. “You came home even more loving than when you left…if that’s possible.”

He kissed her, almost desperately, deepening the kiss until she melted against him, as he’d hoped she would, and slid her arms around his neck.

Finally she drew back, eyes grave. “All right, Max. You’d better tell me all about it.”

Despite the warm sun, a chill raised bumps on Max’s forearms. How could she know? He’d hidden the letter from Randall deep in the bottom drawer of his office filing cabinet. “What do you mean?”

“You’re hiding something,” Kelly stated. “You’ve been acting really weird all weekend, guilty and secretive—when you weren’t giving me a tumble, that is.” She crossed her arms. “Spill it.”

At first Kelly thought he would evade this demand for explanations, too. Then before her eyes, Max seemed to shrink from her and turn inward. Her heart sank. Whatever he was hiding must be really bad. He was having an affair. He wanted a divorce. He—

“I have a son.”

She stared. She’d heard him speak, but his words had no meaning. “What did you say?”

“I have a son,” he repeated.

“That’s impossible. Unless,” she added with a short humorless laugh, “one of the twins had a sex change.”

“Kelly.”

“But it’s impossible, Max,” she repeated. “We were married right out of high school. How could you have a child I don’t know about?”

“I got a letter from him yesterday.” Max crumpled the plastic wrap his sandwich had come in and compressed it into a tiny ball. “His name is Randall Tipton. He’s thirteen years old and he lives in Wyoming.”

The bottom fell out of Kelly’s world. One moment the sun was shining on her and Max, a unit despite their problems, as solid as the rock on which they were sitting. The next instant she was in free fall, with no hope of safe landing.

Questions crowded her tongue, clamoring for expression. “But how…? When…? Who is the mother?”

“Her name is Lanni. She worked at the dude ranch.”

Spinning, sinking, Kelly spiraled down through a swirling gray void. “You had an affair with another woman while you were engaged to me?”

“You’d broken off the engagement before I left for the ranch, remember?”

“Your parents broke it off. I had every intention of marrying you as soon as we had the opportunity. I thought you felt the same.”

He stared at her as if she were speaking a foreign language. “You said we should go along with their wishes. I left for Wyoming thinking you weren’t going to marry me.”

“I thought you’d come sweeping back one moonlit night and carry me away, that we would elope or something equally romantic. Instead…” Tears swam in her eyes as she gazed at him, stricken, “You were with this Lanni person.”

He tried to take her hand. “Forget Lanni. She’s not important.”

“How can you say she’s not important?” Kelly shrilled, tugging away. “She’s the mother of your child.”

Kelly wrapped her arms around her shivering body and buried her face in her knees. Max, her anchor, her rock, the husband she thought she knew inside out, had suddenly, nightmarishly, become a stranger.