of her mother’s skirt.
Heather had a great pair of legs. But then, she always did have. He remembered watching her practice cheerleading moves on the field while he and his friends were supposedly listening to the coach give orders. He allowed himself a moment to appreciate the view. For old-time’s sake.
“Is there anything else while you’re here?” Shayne asked her.
Heather shook her head, a little emphatically in Shayne’s estimation. “No. Thank you.” She felt behind her for the doorknob. Finding it, she held on as if it represented her ticket to freedom. “I can pay you around the middle—”
Shayne waved away her words. “Follow-up care. See you girls later.”
“Um, yes. Thank you,” Heather stammered. With a quick nod at Ben, she turned on her heel and left the premises. She had to almost drag Hayley in her wake. The latter, her gaze intent on Ben, waved madly as she disappeared down the front steps of the porch.
Shayne waved back even though he knew that the attention was centered exclusively on Ben. The door closed and he turned to face his brother.
“Looks like you’re a hit with the under-three-foot set,” he commented. Glancing at the day’s appointments, he saw that the next one wasn’t scheduled for another half hour—provided there were no emergency phone calls.
He knew better than to count on that. But he did need a caffeine hit.
Since Ben had neglected to take his blatant hint about making coffee, Shayne made his way to the back room and the barren coffeepot. Of late, at a very minimum, he found himself averaging a cup an hour. It was an unabashed intent on his part to stave off exhaustion. The feeling seemed to haunt him more and more these days, though he kept that to himself. Given Sydney’s penchant for reading him like a book, he knew it was only a matter of time before his “secret” was out. Hopefully, by then his energy would make a reappearance of its own volition.
“Not entirely,” Ben replied, following him into the back. He leaned against the doorjamb, watching Shayne move about the cramped area. With a discarded dinette table in the middle, surrounded with four chairs, the room wasn’t big enough for both of them to move around, and he didn’t want to crowd Shayne. “Her older girl looks as if she’s afraid of me.”
“Hannah,” Shayne said. “Hannah’s shy. She’s always been the quiet one in her family. She was born without making a sound.” He smiled. “Heather used to bring her in, concerned because Hannah didn’t cry. I told her to be grateful. Once Hayley was born, she realized she’d had a good thing with her firstborn.”
Ben nodded, only half listening. Another question had occurred to him. Try as he might, he couldn’t see the petite, delicate Heather married to Kendall, a big, burly man who looked far more at home handling steel beams than holding something as fragile as Heather in his arms. “How’s Joe Kendall doing? Is he still a miner?”
“Not these days,” Shayne told him dryly. Putting the filter in its proper place, he measured out several heaping tablespoons of coffee and then added very little water. The pot began making noises as it heated the water. “He’s dead.”
“What do you mean, ‘dead’?”
“The usual definition,” Shayne responded mildly. He replaced the plastic lid on the can of coffee and put it back into the tiny refrigerator Sydney had given him. “Not breathing. Body decomposing, or in Joe’s case, already decomposed.” He turned from the coffeemaker and glanced at his brother. “Did you sleep through the basic course in medical school?”
“I mean dead how?” Ben pressed. “How did her husband die?”
“Cave-in at the mines.”
The words were recited without feeling, but Ben knew better. No one cared more than Shayne about these people. Whenever there was a cave-in, Shayne was the first there to help with the wounded. To go into the bowels of the earth if need be. Shayne coped by keeping a tight rein on his feelings. Just the way he had when their parents were killed.
Ben thought back to the special he’d watched last month. The one that had triggered his decision to return home. Maybe the footage he’d seen on the Alaskan cave-in had even been of the one that had claimed Heather’s husband.
Small world.
He realized that Shayne was holding a cup out to him. Taking it, he looked down at the pitch-black, almost-solid contents. “You know, you should offer to coat the walls at the mines with this stuff, Shay. They’d never cave in again.”
“Starbucks is approximately a hundred miles due east,” Shayne told him, pointing in that general direction. Just as he took a sip of the dark brew, they heard a bell ring in the front. It was swiftly followed by a low, resonant greeting.
“’Morning!”
“That would be Jimmy.” Rather than leave the cup behind, Shayne topped it off then headed out of the small room. “C’mon. Time to make introductions.”
The coffee jolted through Ben’s system. He’d forgotten just how strong Shayne’s coffee could really be. He smiled to himself as he followed behind his brother. It felt good to be home.
Heather had no recollection of the short drive home from the clinic. She didn’t remember getting into the car, didn’t remember strapping the girls in, didn’t remember starting the car or turning on the radio. As she paused to glance into the back, she was surprised to see the girls were each in their car seats where they were supposed to be. She vaguely became aware the radio was on only when she heard the deejay, Preston Foster, launch into his stale routine. It hadn’t changed very much since he’d cut his teeth on the radio station in high school.
Staring ahead again, she gripped the steering wheel so tightly that had it been frozen, she would have succeeded in snapping it in two. Not to mention she was moving slightly faster than a snail suffering from a bout of the flu.
It was a preventative action because she didn’t want to hit anything. The fact that Hades had no traffic seemed to have escaped her. At given times of the day, there would be only one, possibly two vehicles on any of the three streets that led in and out of the town. A traffic jam was declared whenever three vehicles all headed in the same direction.
“Faster, Mama, faster,” Hayley urged. The girl waved her feet back and forth quickly, as if that would help propel the vehicle a little faster. “I’m gonna miss Celia Seal.”
Trying not to think about the man in the clinic, Heather pressed down on the accelerator. The speedometer on the dash rose to a racing twenty-five miles an hour.
“We’ll get there,” Heather assured her younger daughter.
Hayley was unconvinced. “Shoulda let the doctor drive,” she said, pouting.
Should have never come in today, Heather thought. “Maybe next time.”
Glancing in the rearview mirror, she saw that Hayley’s face had lit up as she strained against her restraints. Lack of enthusiasm had never been Hayley’s problem. “Really?” she asked eagerly.
“No, not really,” Heather told her quietly, struggling to tuck away the frayed ends of her nerves. “He has other things to do.”
For
