Love - From His Point Of View!: Meeting at Midnight

I knew the houses along here, the changes that had been made in and around them over the years, the names, stories and people who belonged to those houses. Some people don’t like seeing the same faces and places all the time. Take my brother Charlie. He drove a truck for years because he liked staying on the move, always seeing something new. And I’m not sure Annie’s husband, Jack, will ever settle permanently in one place.

That’s hard for a rooted man like me to understand. Did the world’s wanderers have any idea what they were missing? Or were they so busy chasing the horizon they never realized what they’d given up?

I pulled into my driveway, cut the engine and glanced at the woman beside me…one of the wanderers. I shook my head. “If you’re keeping quiet in the hope that I’ll be too tactful to ask why Mrs. Randall Burns hates your guts, you’re out of luck.”

She snorted. “I’m not such a blind optimist. Anyway, you’re due an explanation.” She looked down, plucking at a snag near the hem of her sweater. “Helen Burns hates me for being born. Bad blood, you see. She’s my grandmother.”

I closed my mouth before any more stupid comments could escape. “Inside. We’ll talk about it inside.”

She didn’t quite slam the door when she got out. “There’s nothing to talk about.”

That remark was obviously the product of wishful thinking. “I take it she’s your father’s mother. The father you don’t know anything about.”

“When I told you that I was trying to preserve a little privacy. Not a concept you have a lot of respect for…oh, do slow down, Ben. You’re obviously hurting.”

“I’m okay. So does he live here, too? Here in Highpoint?”

“Yes.” She didn’t wait for me to obey—or not—but moved up beside me and slid her arm around my waist, forcing me to move slower. “And yes, that’s why I came to Highpoint—sheer, bloody-minded curiosity.”

A quick jolt of heat distracted me…and a quieter warmth seeped inside, unknotting muscles I hadn’t realized were clenched. The pain in my shoulder eased to a dull ache.

I frowned at the top of her head. She was looking down, as if the stairs to the porch required a lot of attention. “You wanted to meet him?”

“No. There may be a touch of masochist in me, but I don’t let it take over. I wanted to see him, find out about him, that’s all.”

We’d reached the door. I let her use her key while I tried to sort out the difference between one kind of heat and another. “Wanting to know your father isn’t masochistic.”

“No? And yet you’ve met his mother.” She swung the door open.

I limped inside. “How did she recognize you, if you haven’t had any contact all these years?”

“My mother sent my father school pictures and little notes every year. I suppose he might have shown them to Granny Dearest. Or maybe she recognized me from the last time we met, twenty-four years ago.” She slapped her purse down on the hall table. “Does it matter?”

Twenty-four years ago…“When you were eight? That was the last time you saw your father, you said. That was when you last saw your grandmother, too?”

“Daisy hit a hard patch financially that summer. Things were always tight, but then she had her purse snatched and there went the rent money. My father…” Her voice faltered. “He’d been gone three years by then, but hadn’t yet dropped out of my life completely. She called him, asked for help.”

“Did you go stay with him?”

“Not exactly. He was working toward his master’s and didn’t have a penny to spare. So he said, anyway. I wound up being shipped up here to stay with the judge and my grandmother. My father drove up on weekends, or sometimes we drove into Denver to see him.”

“You didn’t get along with your grandparents.”

“That’s putting it mildly.” She shrugged out of her jacket and opened the hall closet. “Can we drop the subject now?”

“In a minute. Your grandmother knew you were in town. She claimed you’d told her you were leaving.”

“She and the judge ate at the lodge one night. I waited on their table.” She grimaced. “Not a happy encounter for any of us.”

“Why didn’t you—”

“Ben! Stop interrogating me. You need to sit down, get off your knee.”

I didn’t want to sit. I couldn’t pace very well, dammit, but I sure didn’t want to sit. “If I don’t ask questions, you won’t tell me anything.”

“Why should I?”

“Why shouldn’t you? Lord, I never knew a woman so good at turning away questions! If I ask a single personal question, I end up talking about my own father. Or the best color for the hall bath, or how to repair damaged plaster.”

Anger waved flags in her cheeks. “You’re exaggerating.” She spun and headed for the living room.

“Am I?” I hobbled after her. “You led me to think you didn’t know anything about your father’s side of the family. If we hadn’t run into your old witch of a grandmother—”

Her laugh was short, sharp and ugly. “Oh, but she’s not the witch. That’s the problem. My other grandmother is. Literally.”

God help me. I leaned my stick carefully against the wall. “Your mother’s mother is, uh…”

“A witch.” Mockery gleamed in her eyes.

“Okay.” I nodded slowly. “I got that part. You mean like Wicca and all that?”

“That’s what people call it nowadays. Granny doesn’t, and really, I’m not sure how much a New Age witch would have in common with Granny’s brand of the Craft.”

She believed this. She honestly thought her grandmother was a witch. “And do you think…uh, are you one, too?”

“The word is witch, Ben. And no, I’m not. But I’m the granddaughter of one, which makes me Satan’s get in the eyes of Mrs. Randall Burns. Didn’t you hear the part about me being a devil child?”

“Somehow that didn’t immediately bring witchcraft to mind.” Muddy floors, yes. Witchcraft, no.

“I suppose not. Will you get off that damned knee?”

“I don’t think I’ve heard you curse before,” I observed.

“You could make a saint curse!”

“I’ll sit down if you’ll tell me about your grandmother. Your other grandmother, not the one I just met.”

She muttered something unflattering about my antecedents, then flung up her hands. “Okay. Her name is Alma Jones. She’s eighty-four and the top of her head barely reaches my shoulder. She lives…sit, Ben!”

“I’m sitting.” I lowered myself onto the couch.

“She lives in a tiny cottage in the Appalachians and makes the world’s best chicken and dumplings. Fresh chicken, mind, from her henhouse. She also makes simples, little charms and cures to sell to her neighbors, and she has the Sight.”

“Ah…the Sight. That’s a Celtic thing, isn’t it? Irish or Scottish?”

“Her maiden name was Sullivan.” The laid-back woman I’d known for a week fairly bristled with feeling. Even her hair seemed agitated. She began pacing. “She’s a darling. She’s helped people all her life. She didn’t ask to have the Sight. Who would? But it runs in our family. Like the curse.”

The curse?