Texas Trouble

But what exactly would he say? I’m not interested in a long-term relationship with a woman like you, but as you know I’m wildly turned on by you anyhow. I’m afraid that if we spend too much time together, I might seduce you, and I might end up breaking your heart….

Yeah, right.

Not in this lifetime.

Besides, the attraction was only part of the problem.

The rest of it was that he just didn’t want to get involved in the Archer family tragedy. Call him a selfish bastard, but he didn’t want to feel their pain. He didn’t want to dig around in the muck of their grief and see if he could help them drain the swamp. He didn’t want to lend his ear, offer his shoulder or hold the Kleenex while they cried.

He couldn’t help them anyhow. Bereavement wasn’t like some club you joined. There wasn’t a secret handshake he could show them, no guided tour he could lead to help them feel at home.

It was a private hell, and everyone was locked up in their own solitary fire.

“I’m sorry, Nora,” he said. He picked up the tool box to show that he was out of time. “I’m afraid there’s nothing I can do.”

CHAPTER THREE

“JEEPERS, NORA. I ASKED you to come because I wanted to talk about Sean. But now I think we’d better talk about you, instead.” Jolie Harper, the music teacher at Eastcreek Elementary School, leaned forward, elbows on her desk. “You look awful. Aren’t you sleeping?”

“Not much.” Nora plopped into the visitor’s seat, relieved to be able to drop the brave face for once. She had volunteered in Jolie’s classroom several times a week for the past three years, and had come to trust her completely.

“I try to sleep, but my mind won’t shut off. I keep second-guessing every decision I make. I’ve told Sean he’ll have to work off the damage to the Cathcart place. But am I being too hard on him? Too soft? Does he need more freedom? Less? Evelyn thinks—”

“Ugh. Spare me what Evelyn thinks.”

Jolie stood and went to the window. Using her thumb and forefinger, she wedged a crack in the blinds so that she could peek into the rehearsal room, where her assistant was helping Sean and three other students learn “The Star Spangled Banner” on the guitar, flute, clarinet and bells.

She grimaced. “They sound terrible. Any chance they’d let us have our spring show in August this year?”

Nora smiled, although the joke, obviously meant to lighten the tension, paradoxically set off a new pang of guilt. The guitar was another former love that Sean no longer enjoyed. Getting him to practice was like pulling teeth, and half the time Nora just didn’t think it was worth the struggle.

They couldn’t fight all day, every day, could they? What kind of life would that be for a nine-year-old boy?

Or was she taking the easy way out, craving peace, even at her son’s expense?

She reached up and rubbed her aching forehead. This was the kind of emotional tail-chasing that kept her up all night. For Evelyn, life was so straightforward. In her opinion, Nora was a naive woman who had no idea how to steer her sons through this dangerous storm and should rely on Evelyn for guidance. End of debate.

In those sleepless hours before dawn, Nora sometimes wondered if she might be right.

“So why did you ask me to come in, Jolie?” She braced herself. She might as well know the worst. “Has something else happened?”

Jolie cast one more glance into the rehearsal room. Apparently satisfied that Sean was safely occupied, she leaned against the edge of her desk, close enough to speak softly and still be heard.

“Not really. Nothing dramatic. It’s just that…he seems very remote. He doesn’t volunteer for anything extra, doesn’t go for the chair challenges. He doesn’t hang out with his friends much, either. He sits by himself whenever he has a choice. He doesn’t cause trouble. He just doesn’t…” She sighed. “Doesn’t engage.”

Nora laced her fingers in her lap and squeezed tightly. Out of nowhere, she felt the urge to talk to Harrison. She would like his advice, of course, but she’d also like to be able to tell him that she understood so much better what he’d been through with Paul.

Intellectually, any human being could grasp that it was terrible to watch your son suffer and die. Anyone with a heart could sympathize with a tragedy like that.

But when you actually went through it, when the fear that your child might be hurting, might be in danger, ran through your veins like a fiery poison, threatening to blow your heart up right in your chest…that was a whole new level of understanding.

“I see that apathy at home, too,” she said. “At first I thought it might be an improvement, a sign that he was calming down. But it’s not natural. It’s too bottled up.”

“Right.” Jolie’s shiny blond ponytail bounced jauntily as she nodded, but her face was very serious. “Like a fire behind a tightly closed door.” She glanced toward the window again. “Is he still seeing the counselor?”

“Yes, but he’s down to once a week. It was the psychiatrist’s suggestion. He said it was time to move toward normalcy. I thought it might be too soon, but he said we should try.”

Evelyn had pooh-poohed Nora’s doubts, eager to accept the psychiatrist’s recommendation. The older woman didn’t set much store by talk therapy, which she believed encouraged brooding on your troubles, instead of moving past them. She called it “wallowing.”

“I’ll phone him tomorrow.” Just making the decision loosened the knot in Nora’s chest slightly. She leaned back in the chair and took a deep breath. The varied scents of the classroom were soothing to her. The sharp, alcohol sting of whiteboard markers, the crisp sweetness of new textbooks, the warm musk of children.

And best of all, the muted laughter of students in the next room struggling to make music.

She’d always planned to be a music teacher, like Jolie. She loved working with kids, watching them light up as their clumsy efforts suddenly bloomed into beautiful sounds.

When she first went to visit Harrison at the Bull’s Eye Ranch that summer ten years ago, she’d been only twenty-one, just out of college, still interviewing for teaching positions in South Carolina. By the time she landed a job, she knew she might be pregnant. And by the time classes started in South Carolina that September, she was living in Texas, married to a very rich man twice her age.

Harrison quickly quieted her talk of teaching. Motherhood, he insisted, was a full-time job.

Understanding why he was a bit overprotective, she’d indulged him. He’d bought her a beautiful piano, so that she could keep up with her own music, and she’d appreciated the gesture.

Someday, she’d always promised herself, she’d start over. When the boys were older. When Harrison felt more secure—about her, and about them. She’d earn her Texas certification, and she’d finally stand in her very own classroom.

Guess someday was on permanent hold now.

And she didn’t mind. There was only one goal that mattered anymore. Shepherding what was left of her family through this crisis.

But she didn’t want her worries to monopolize this whole visit. Jolie had problems, too.

“So did the PTA finally agree that you need new sheet music?” Nora knew that the recent budget cutbacks had slashed the school arts programs. Jolie would have had to cancel the Independence Day concert if Nora hadn’t written a personal check for new instruments. She’d write another, if the PTA didn’t come through with funds. She might write one, anyhow. One of the nicer aspects of having money was being able to give it away.

“It’s still under advisement.” Jolie rolled her eyes. “Which means they’re waiting to see what the Phys Ed teacher needs. If it’s a choice between music and sports, we all know who—”

Suddenly, midsentence, she lurched forward, though she must have been reacting to some sixth sense. Nora hadn’t noticed anything amiss.

“Oh, dear Lord,” Jolie murmured under her breath. She flung open the door to the rehearsal room. “Madeline, grab Sean.”

Nora was only a foot behind her, so she had just entered the room when Sean’s guitar hit the floor. Obviously the instrument had been flung with force. Contact with the linoleum made a hideous sound, part splintering wood, part ghastly harmonies from reverberating strings.

“Oh, Sean, no,” she said softly.

Her son didn’t hear her. He stood on the other side of the room, rigid as a pole, his eyes sparking with fury. His face shone palely, which made his freckles stand out like copper pennies on his cheeks. His hair was mussed, his collar lifted where Madeline, the assistant music instructor, held it in her fist.

Jolie had one hand lightly but authoritatively placed on the shoulder of a second boy. Nora knew him—Tad Rutherford. He and Sean had played together since the kiddie band in nursery school. Tad was Sean’s age, but twice his size, and something of a bully. Right now, his broad face burned red, his breath coming hard and noisy.

Nora’s heart beat high in her chest. But Jolie, as always, looked completely calm, in spite of the chaos, the wild-eyed boys and the smashed guitar, which was now two splintered halves held together only by the strings.

She owned the situation. She had frozen the potential for trouble right in its tracks with just the force of her silent authority. That was her gift. It made her a wonderful teacher.