prison.”
“Not from a disease. You don’t have to worry about that,” he assured her, coming up to a one-way bridge. He waited for the approaching car to go first. “He was murdered.”
Stepping lightly on the gas, Matt guided the Blazer over the bridge.
“And your mother?”
“She ran off with her boyfriend.”
“And abandoned you and your brother and sister?”
“Just me. My brother was…gone by then. And she took my sister. Lori was older than me, out of high school, and she and my mom were pals.”
“They just…left you?”
More turns. Matt negotiated them. “I was glad they did,” he told Phyllis. “I wasn’t living with them anymore, hadn’t been since I turned sixteen and got a job at the grocery store. I rented a one-bedroom apartment with my first paycheck.”
“At sixteen?” Her voice had lost its calm.
The warmth was still there. Matt didn’t get it.
“Who’d rent to a sixteen-year-old kid?”
“An old lady who’d taught him in the fourth grade and had a room over her garage.”
“Are you still in touch with her?”
He shook his head, slowing as he came to the second bridge. The way was free. He could go. “She died ten years ago.”
A happy woman. Her star pupil had still been shining.
It had been another year before he would’ve killed her with disappointment.
“And in all this time, you’ve never heard from either your mother or your sister?”
“Not a word.” They hadn’t actually been on speaking terms. Not after that last big fight when he was sixteen and he’d told them what he thought of them and the life they were living. When he’d denounced everything they stood for, refusing to have anything more to do with them.
He’d not only been incredibly young, he’d been foolish. He’d thought that if he distanced himself from his family, he’d lose the stigma of being related to them. He’d thought he’d stop paying for their choices, their actions.
But he’d been judged by his association with them just the same.
He understood that now. He was a Sheffield and he couldn’t escape his past.
But that wasn’t going to happen to his child. No child of his was going to be judged by his father’s sins. Or made to suffer for them.
If he was certain of nothing else in life, he was certain of that. He’d die before he’d allow another generation to be hurt by the stigma of criminal convictions and jail time. Of coming from losers. And going nowhere because of it.
“Did you have any other family? Aunts, uncles, ousins?”
Oh, yeah. “My dad’s younger brother.”
“He couldn’t take you in?”
“At the time he was serving ten years for auto theft….”
THE RESTAURANT WAS amazing. That was the only word Phyllis could think of—amazing. She stared, her eyes darting all over the room. It was a rustic old place, and she could easily believe it had been there for more than a hundred years. A good part of the building hadn’t been, Matt had told her, as it had burned in a fire in 1987. But some of the original structure still stood.
There was nothing fancy about the wooden tables and chairs crammed too close together, the cheap tablecloths. Yet it was perfect. They were seated immediately, which Matt said was fortunate since the restaurant didn’t take reservations.
At the moment, her stomach was cooperating. She didn’t feel even a twinge of the morning sickness that had been causing her such misery over the past few weeks.
“I’ve never seen so many dollar bills in my life,” she said for the third time. Since arriving at Tortilla Flat, all their conversation had centered on the restaurant. Every available inch of the inside walls were covered with bills, mostly American one-dollar bills, but other paper currency, as well. Some foreign. Even some checks.
Though she sensed that their conversation—their real conversation—was far from over, Phyllis was glad for the respite.
Matt had one hell of a lot of pain bottled up inside him. Phyllis hadn’t felt anything that potent in more than a year. Probably not since she’d first met Tory Sanders, struggling with grief for her sister and fear of her ex-husband. She knew that if the situation with Matt was different, if she’d met him at another time, in another way, if she hadn’t slept with him, she could probably have helped him.
She would’ve liked to try. Underneath all the keep-off signs, Matt Sheffield was an intelligent, gentle man. A kind man. At least judging how he’d been with her. And with his students during her symposium.
“People come here from all over the world and leave the money,” Matt said after their waiter had taken their drink order, imparted a bit of Tortilla Flat history and left. Matt indicated the newspapers the man had set in front of them.
“The rest of the history is right there, and the article on the second page is the menu.”
The place was crowded, with every one of the fifteen or so tables taken and people milling around in the gift shop just beyond.
“The bills all have names on them,” Phyllis said.
“Or business cards tacked to them.”
“How many of them do you think there are?”
“I wonder every time I come here, but I have no idea.”
“A million maybe?”
“I doubt it. But I know it was a lot more than anyone wanted to lose when the place burned in ’87.”
“The walls were covered like this back then, too?”
“More so, from what I’m told. I guess the bills were four and five thick in some places.”
He looked so comfortable sitting there, sipping from the iced tea the waiter had brought. The perfect host.
Phyllis could hardly believe this was the same man she’d known in Shelter Valley. Or the one she’d driven up with.
He’d shed his jacket, revealing his broad shoulders in the denim shirt he was wearing. It was tucked into another pair of the snug-fitting jeans that had driven Phyllis to insanity that fateful Saturday afternoon.
His black hair and eyes were just as captivating. And those hands, resting so easily on the table…
She guessed it was time they returned to the business at hand. Before she forgot that all it could ever be was business.
“So,”
