a field that paid better. Having a career that meant something to her and the world at large was more important to her happiness in the long run, but in the short run, her old car was ready to plunk its last ker-plunkety plunk.
Sophie’s head throbbed. Maybe her dad could work on the engine again, keep it going a little longer with another bubblegum-and-rubber-band miracle.
She pushed the door open with a creak and stepped out, tired to her bones. Aside from the wicked headache, it wasn’t a physical exhaustion as much as a mental one. The psychological trauma of Maverick’s return had done her in.
Facing her father and son was what she dreaded next. If Archie “Buzzsaw” Ryan had made his rounds to the Thunderhead and the liquor store instead of moldering in his trailer out back, he’d have heard the news. Word wouldn’t have reached Joey as fast. Even if it had, he wouldn’t really care about an adult he’d never met. Unless some busybody had started up with the old rumor about Luke Salinger being Joe Ryan’s father…
Rolling her head to ease the tight muscles in her neck and shoulders, Sophie clumped up the porch steps of her two-bedroom wood frame cottage. Coming home usually gave her a boost. The small house wasn’t much, but it was hers—at least the mortgage was—and she’d worked hard to make it into the kind of safe, cozy home she’d never known, growing up. Today it just looked like a money pit—a conglomeration of loose shingles, dripping faucets, crumbling plaster and buckling linoleum. If she hadn’t splashed bright jewel-toned coats of paint on every surface to distract the eye, there’d be no disguising that the place was coming down around their ears.
“Hey, Joe?” she called from the pumpkin-colored front hall, even though the silence told her that her son wasn’t home. She checked the clock. Time for a bath before she had to start dinner. If ever there was a day when she needed to be cleansed of her cares and woes, it was today.
Luke already knows about Joey.
The thought had pulsed at the back of her mind all day, a red-for-danger strobe that had given her the vicious headache. As the tub filled, she popped a couple of aspirin, staring at her face in the mirror over the sink.
“He doesn’t know everything,” she told her bleak reflection.
But he soon will—someone’s bound to repeat the rumor, argued the voice that had taken control of her pounding skull. What will you do when he shows up, asking if it’s true?
How badly did she want Joey to have a father?
“I can’t think about it now.” Sophie stripped off her uniform and dropped it in the hamper. She’d have to remember to bring the ruined shirt to the dry cleaner’s tomorrow morning—another expense she could do without.
As if it mattered in the larger scheme of things. After this morning, she had worse problems than coffee stains to think about. Confronting them made her headache intensify. She could have sworn it was gnawing away her brain.
Luke suspects.
She winced in pain.
Heath Salinger knows.
The townspeople think they know.
Gad, her head was going to explode.
But everyone’s wrong—including me.
CHAPTER THREE
TYPICALLY, JOE RYAN came home with a clatter and crash—backpack flung to the floor, high-top sneakers kicked off against the wall, a brief stop to power up the TV at top volume, a noisy forage through the kitchen, gabbing loudly all the while whether or not there was a response from Sophie. Only his garrulousness had abated recently as he took more and more to locking himself in his attic bedroom, rap music pounding the slanted walls, immune to his mother’s entreaties for either a little bit of peace and quiet or a return of their old rapport. While Sophie figured Joe’s moods were the usual teenage funk, she missed the boy he used to be: sweet, funny, affectionate—a chatterbox.
“Hey, Mom, what’s for supper?” Joe hollered from the kitchen, sounding as though his head was buried in the refrigerator.
Sophie had left the bathroom door open a wide crack. “Casserole,” she yelled, which was what she always said when she hadn’t planned a menu or shopped for ingredients. There was usually something on hand that could be made into a casserole.
Joe groaned. “Not again.”
“Unless you want to fire up the barbecue?”
He groaned louder to be sure that she’d heard.
She muttered. “Then don’t complain about the casserole.”
A creaking sound followed by the shushing slide of stocking-clad feet in the short hallway told her that Joey was trying to creep upstairs without her hearing. “Joe,” she called. “Stop and say hello before you go up to your room.”
“’Lo,” he mumbled from outside the bathroom door.
A few years back—more like four, Sophie realized with a pang—Joe used to sit with her while she soaked in the bathtub. He’d chatter about his day at school and why the pond changed color and how come Grandpa only had one arm and what he’d dreamed about last night, which at the time was usually spaceships or vampires. Now she was lucky if she could get a “’lo” out of him.
Today she needed more. “Can you talk to me, please, Joey? Tell me that you got an A on your first biology quiz and that you and Grandpa cleaned out the garden shed like you were supposed to all summer.”
“I got a B+, and Grandpa wasn’t here when I got home from school so I went over to Fletcher’s and played basketball. Okay?”
“You’ll do the shed this weekend.”
“Yeah.” Agitated, Joe rattled a bag of tortilla chips in time with his jiggling leg. He was all twitches and fidgets these days, a perpetual motion machine. “Can I go now?”
The silhouette he made hovering in the dim hallway was disturbing to Sophie’s tenuous peace of mind. Anyone looking for it would see her son’s familiarity to the Salinger brothers—the lanky frame, the handsomely carved profile, the height. Luckily Joe’s eyes were brown like hers and not Luke’s steel blue. That would have been a dead giveaway.
Joe raked one hand through the scruff of dark hair that flopped over his forehead. “Huh, Mom? Can I pleeeze go to my room now?”
Sophie squirmed in the bathtub, rubbing at the goose flesh that had sprung up on her arms despite the steamy water. “Then nothing interesting happened today?”
“Mo-o-om…”
“Okay, you can leave,” she said, relieved. “Way to go on that B+.” But Joe was already gone, galloping up the twisting steps like a gangly runaway colt. His door slammed. Two seconds later, music blared. Sophie listened for a few minutes to be sure he hadn’t sneaked in a banned CD—she knew more about gangsta rap than she wanted—before tuning out.
Reprieve. She closed her eyes and slid lower in the tub. She had time to think of what—if anything—she should tell her son about his father.
Gradually the hot bath eased her tight muscles. Total relaxation
