looked at her a long moment. “I will.”
She forced a smile and walked away. A group of soldiers walked ahead of her, laughing, talking and harassing each other the way soldiers always seemed to do. Will Baron wasn’t among them. It annoyed Arley a great deal that Grace thought Arley might be using Will to get back at Scott. She wasn’t. She just welcomed a little diversion. She was so tired of being worried and scared.
And lonely.
Scottie was nearly asleep when she picked him up at the great-aunts’ house. He managed to walk to the car under his own power, but he was too sleepy to buckle himself into his safety seat.
“Mommy?” he murmured as she secured the belt and slipped his favorite pillow next to his head—a beagle dog pillow he’d named Dot, his threadbare sleeping, waking, stress and anxiety companion. She stood for a moment, then caressed his cheek before she closed the car door. There was nothing she wouldn’t do for her son.
Nothing.
It began to rain when she was halfway home. She drove carefully along the back roads leading to Fayetteville. Traffic was heavier than she expected. The countryside was illuminated by lightning from time to time, but there were no strong winds or heavy downpours. Scottie was afraid of thunder; she was glad he was sleeping. He had too many things to be afraid of these days, most of all that his father didn’t love him. He was so eager whenever Scott deigned to come around, trying to impress him with his rock collection, his drawings and papers from school, or how fast he could run and how high he could jump—anything that might elicit some indication that he had his father’s undivided attention, just for a moment. That was sad enough, and what was even sadder was that, for a time, Arley had been just like him.
She was better now, though. Surprisingly better. Even before the wedding reception, she had felt more comfortable about things than she had in a long time. All in all, her life was going…reasonably well. She hadn’t caused any embarrassing moments for Kate—thanks to Will Baron—and it was much more apparent to her now that she was no longer afraid that she couldn’t live without Scott McGowan. Regardless of her sisters’ misgivings, she was actually managing—except with money. She needed a better and permanent job instead of being sent pillar to post by the temp agency, and she was going to keep taking courses at the community college and filling out applications until she got one.
She smiled to herself. Scottie liked that; as soon as school started, both of them would have to do homework at the kitchen table.
Her mind suddenly wandered to the summer afternoon when she’d met Will Baron. She had hardly been at her best that day. She had been frantic to find Kate because of something Scott had or hadn’t done, and because Scottie had misbehaved at the private kindergarten Scott was still paying for him to attend. She had felt totally overwhelmed by it all. She went looking for Kate at home and then at Mrs. Bee’s house next door, and she found Will Baron in the sweltering upstairs hallway on an errand of his own. He may or may not have recognized the degree of her distress, but he had definitely recognized Scottie’s. As they were leaving, he had taken a blue-green stone out of his pocket—a piece of turquoise—and had given it to Scottie for his collection.
He was kind to her son.
And that was the reason she remembered him. Yes, he was nice-looking. Yes, his eyes smiled long before his face did, and he smelled good. But it was because of Scottie that she’d asked Kate later about the paratrooper in Mrs. Bee’s upstairs hallway. There was something intriguing about him, something that made her willing to brave Grace’s criticism and the embarrassment Scott had caused her at the reception in order to talk to him again.
But that’s all it was. A little conversation. She had told her sisters the truth when she said that Will Baron was an interesting person. He was, and it had been a long time since Arley had had any social interaction with anyone beyond her immediate family. There was no harm in it. None. The fact that Kate had invited him to the wedding in the first place should be recommendation enough for Gwen and the ever-suspicious Grace.
But Arley had no expectations that she would see Will Baron again. She rarely went on post—except for futile job interviews, and those were few and far between. She rarely went anywhere, for that matter, except to work at whatever paying position the temp agency found for her, and to the grocery store and to Scottie’s school—and a fast-food restaurant as a treat for him as often as she could afford it. She had met Kate for lunch once or twice, taken Scottie to the post hospital, to the ward where Kate worked when the “get well” dogs were coming to visit, and she hadn’t seen Will Baron any of those times. It wasn’t likely that she’d run into him—unless she did something to make it happen. Which she wouldn’t. She didn’t need Grace’s input to be concerned about Scott and his possible long-range plans where his son was concerned. It was just that Scottie had never been his priority—he thought nothing of skipping a visitation if it conflicted with his social plans—and she knew Scott McGowan well enough to know that actually wanting to be a real father might have nothing to do with his trying to get custody.
She reached to turn on the car radio for company. After a while, she drove out of a rain shower and then right back into another one—the story of her life, thus far. She didn’t regret staying for the wedding reception, in spite of Grace’s lecture and her skirmish with Scott. But if she wasn’t careful, the reason she didn’t regret it could become a full-blown family issue. The Meehan sisters tended to each other’s business. She herself had been an all-too-willing participant in the Grace-led sister alliance to keep Kate from making what they had all thought was a huge mistake in becoming involved with a disabled paratrooper—a man younger than she was, no less. And Kate was considered the “sensible” one. Heaven only knew what would happen if it even looked like Arley the Handful might follow Kate’s example with another member of the military, especially if it might cause problems with Scott.
But she was too tired to worry about it.
It was late when she finally arrived at her apartment, and it was still raining. As she carried the sleeping Scottie to the door, a white car she didn’t recognize crept slowly past and turned around.
Maybe we’ll run into each other again.
It wasn’t an invitation. Will wasn’t quite sure what it was—except another reason for his disharmony, which had more to do with his current state of mind than with the postwedding raucousness of the barracks tonight. Everybody was wound tight. Music seemed to be coming from behind every closed door, all of it different and all of it meant to effect the same end. He and his fellow soldiers were expecting to travel—sooner instead of later—and they were all looking for the right mind-set, the pumped-up killer high that would get them through it. He understood the dynamics perfectly. He’d never made a jump without doing the warrior chant all the way to the ground, in spite of his recent cynicism about following the Beauty Way.
He lay on his bed in the dark and tried to disengage himself from the thoughts swirling in his mind. Harmony was essential for anyone who intended to follow Navajo teachings. If he were still a hataalii….
If.
He wasn’t certain if the family knew that he’d all but lost the vocation he’d fought so hard for the privilege of learning. He had dedicated years of his life to becoming a Navajo healer, to learning the complexities of the mindset and the chants and rituals to achieve a kinship with Mother Earth and Father Sky. But what little “serenity” Arley had accused him of having completely eluded him now and had for a long time. He had had such big plans—once—assuming that he managed not to suffer any unfortunate consequences from being posted in harm’s way and that his enlistment ended as scheduled. He was going to return to the reservation in triumph, where he would meld all the knowledge he had gleaned from both
