Welcome Home, Cowboy

“I don’t know,” Emma said as a dryer buzzer sounded from the closed-in porch behind them. “At least, not for sure. Um … do you mind? I’ve got at least four more loads, and if I lose my momentum I’ll be doing laundry at midnight.”

Bile rising in his throat, Cash watched her disappear into the add-on his father had built before everything went haywire. The splintered plank floor probably bore the imprints of Cash’s knees from when he’d been made to kneel for hours, reflecting on his sins. He drew a deep breath and followed her, standing in the doorway.

The warm, cluttered room smelled clean. Sweet. Dozens of Ball canning jars lined the pantry shelves, lined up by their contents’ color like a child’s crayon box—yellow to red to orange to green—glistening against the bright, white walls … and white tiled floor.

“What do you mean, you don’t know for sure?” he asked at last.

The dryer open, Emma pulled out a peach-colored towel, efficiently folding it into fourths. “Like I said, I thought Lee had told you. Although I know your father didn’t want you to know about his illness.”

“Why not? After all, it gave him the perfect out.” At her sharp glance, he sighed. “You may as well know, I’m not a nice person. Not saying I go around kicking puppies or taking people’s heads off because I’m having a bad day or anything. I’m not a total SOB. But my milk of human kindness has always run several quarts low. Finding out about my father. it doesn’t change anything. Certainly it doesn’t make me feel, I don’t know … whatever you think I should be feeling.”

Another towel clutched to her chest, Emma considered how little the man in front of her lined up with the image she’d carried of him all these years. Of course, nearly twenty years was bound to change a person. She wasn’t the same she’d been at sixteen—why would Cash be?

But whereas marriage and motherhood had softened her, made her more malleable, clearly Cash’s experiences had produced the opposite effect. She could practically see the accumulated layers of caution hardened around his soul, like emotional polyurethane. And yet, as impenetrable as he thought they were, their translucence still allowed a glimpse of the aching heart beating inside.

“I don’t think anything, Mr. Cochran.” At his snort, she dumped the folded towel into a nearby plastic basket, then shooed away The Black One before he settled in for a snooze. “Who am I to say what you should be feeling? I didn’t go through what you did. Anyway …”

She hauled out the rest of the towels, heaping them on top of the washer. “As I was saying, your father didn’t want you to know. According to Lee, once he was in his right mind again and started piecing together what he’d done to you and your mom and your brothers, he was horrified. Ashamed. Didn’t matter to him, either, that he hadn’t been responsible for his actions back then. I guess he figured what was done, was done. That some things, you couldn’t fix.”

The towels folded and in the basket, she clanged up the washer lid, transferred the wet clothes to the dryer, slammed the dryer closed, then dumped the next load in the washer. When she went to pick up the heavy basket, however, Cash grabbed it from her.

“Oh! You don’t have to do that—”

“Where’s it go?”

“Our—my—bedroom.”

A shadow flickered across his eyes before he carted the basket to the master bedroom, the soft pastels and thick comforter on the king-size bed a far cry from the cold white walls, brown spread and worn hooked rug from when Dwight still lived here.

“Looks nothing like I remember.”

“That was the idea.”

Several beats passed before he said, “Lee still should’ve told me. No matter what my father wanted.”

“I agree. But …” Separating the towels and bathroom rugs into three piles on the bed, she spared Cash a quick glance, then returned to her task. “Lee and I, we had similar childhoods in many ways. Loving parents, stable home life, all of that. But we were both also teased a lot when we were kids. For being fat—”

“You’re not—”

“Oh, for pity’s sake,” she said on a light laugh, “I’m big as a house. Especially right now. No sense in pretending otherwise. And as a kid I was downright roly-poly. Just like Lee.” She looked up, swiping a hunk of hair out of her face. “But he said you were the only kid who never made fun of him. How you stuck up for him when the other kids did.” She carted clean towels and rugs into the phone-booth-size master bath, then returned. “That you gave him the confidence to get his first girlfriend. In other words, Lee felt he owed you.”

Cash’s brows pushed together. “You think Lee saw taking care of the old man as a way to pay me back for being friends with him? That’s nuts. Especially since it kinda worked both ways. Lee stuck by me, even though I was the kid other kids’ parents told them to stay away from. Like what my father had was contagious.”

“Okay, then maybe Lee figured there wasn’t any point in telling you. Because he didn’t think the damage could be undone, either. To ask you to come back, when the wounds were still so fresh …” She paused. “Would you have? If you’d known?”

Not surprisingly, he didn’t answer right away. Instead he hefted The Big Fat Gray One, who’d been twining around his ankles, into his arms, scratching her under the chin until her purring seemed to swallow the room. Emma took pity on him. “It’s okay, you don’t have to answer that—”

“I don’t know. I mean, I don’t much like that somebody else got burdened with looking after him. But back then …” He blew out a breath. “By the time I left, I doubt I would’ve been much good to anybody. Let alone the man who’d left me in that condition. Which still doesn’t answer why Lee didn’t tell me the truth after my father died.”

“I know,” Emma said, sighing. “Especially since he knew how much it would’ve ticked me off to find out he hadn’t.”

Cash almost smiled. “I take it you’re not one for keeping secrets.”

“No, I’m not. Although I suppose I understand Lee’s loyalty conflicts. The Christian duty he felt he had to take care of your father versus his high esteem of you. For overcoming everything you did, for making a name for yourself … if you’d been blood kin, he couldn’t have been any prouder of you.” Other words bunched at the back of her throat; if she’d been as good as her husband, she’d swallow them. But she wasn’t, and if she didn’t let them out she’d choke. “Although frankly it got a little tiresome, hearing him talk about you all the time like you were some kind of god.”

Only the merest flicker of Cash’s eyelids indicated her words had hit home. But her husband’s constant adulation of his old friend had irritated Emma far more than she’d let on in the name of matrimonial harmony. Yes, Cash had suffered as a kid—what it must’ve been like for him growing up, she couldn’t imagine. But he wasn’t a god, he was just a man—a man who’d made, from everything she could tell, some really poor choices along the way.

At some point a person has to stop using the past as an excuse for his bad behavior. Whether Cash had done that by now, she could hardly tell from a single conversation. But he sure as heck hadn’t during all those years of her listening to Lee’s ballyhooing about how great he was—

The baby walloped her a good one, a little foot trying to poke right through her belly button. Grabbing the bedpost, Emma stilled, slowly breathing through the Braxton-Hicks contractions that inevitably followed.

“You okay?”

“I’m fine,” she said when it ended, straightening. “Getting crowded in there, is all.”

She gathered the rest of the towels to stuff in the tiny linen closet in the hall; Cash stepped aside, but the space was too cramped for them not to invade each other’s personal spaces. Especially as between them they took up enough space for at least four average-size people. Cash was all hard and lean where Lee had been more on the marshmallow side, but still, there was a lot of man there.

A lot.

The towels crammed into the closet, Emma started back toward the living room. Silently, Cash followed her, ducking into the kitchen to retrieve his jacket, his face creased into a scowl when he came back out.

“I didn’t ask Lee to put me up on some kind of pedestal, Emma. God knows I didn’t deserve to be on one. But if listening to him talk about me got up your nose, then maybe you should’ve said something instead of staying silent for so long. Or does your thing about the truth only work one way?”

As Emma stood with her mouth open, Cash hunched into his jacket and said his goodbyes to Annie, whose only reply was a waved paintbrush over her shoulder. Then he faced Emma again, his eyes all sharp. “That it?”

“I think so, yes. No, wait,” she said the second he got through the door. “There’s one more thing.”

“And what’s that?” he said, still scowling.

“After Dwight went into the home, Lee took him a copy of your first CD.”

Cash actually flinched. “Now why on earth would he have done that? Considering Dwight destroyed my first guitar.”

Emma laid a hand on her belly as old memories, old hurts, darkened his eyes. “I know, Lee told me—”

“Millie Scott gave it to me,” he said to no one in particular, palming the porch post. “I was eleven, twelve, something like that. It’d been her son’s before he moved away. Gave me all his how-to-play books, too. Took the better part of the summer to get the hang of it.”

With a short, dry laugh, he looked back at Emma. “I was so bad when I started, I’d play in the barn so nobody’d hear me. Except one day Dad did.” The glimpse of humor vanished. “God knows I’d seen him mad plenty by then, but that was nothing compared with that time. You’d thought he found me …” His face reddened. “Well, I suppose you can fill in the blanks on that one.

“Anyway, he grabbed the guitar, told me to git. Later I found it smashed to pieces in one of the garbage cans. Took another two years before I could buy another one—Mama’d slip me a couple of dollars every week from the grocery money. Bought it one of the rare times she and I went to Santa Fe by ourselves.” His mouth stretched. “My first Fender.”

“That the one you hid at Lee’s?”

“Yep. I think the old man knew. Or at least suspected. Because whenever he felt the need to get in a dig? He brought up how bad I was. That who’d ever want to listen to me, anyway? Cows and horses, maybe, but that was it.” His gaze narrowed. “So why on earth would Lee give him my album?”

“Because that wasn’t the same man who destroyed your first guitar! Or got off on belittling you. Mr. Cochran,” she said when he turned away, shaking his head, “you’re not listening—the drugs, the treatment … they banished the monster who’d lived inside your father all those years! Or at least subdued it. And the man left behind, the real man who’d been there along … he listened to the whole album straight through, tears running down his face.”

Her arms crossed against the chill, Emma stepped closer, half tempted to smooth a hand across those hard, tense shoulders, half tempted to cuff the back of Cash’s head. “Believe me or not, it’s no skin off my nose … but your father died a humbled man. And as proud of you as he could have possibly been. I heard him say it myself more times than I can count. He never expected you to love him again, but at the end of his life he loved you more than he could say.”