Danny, returning as a corporate executive with the power to put everyone out on the street.” She paused. “When we heard the news, your dad looked like he was going to have a stroke.”
Maybe he will, Cate thought, hunching over on her stool. He’s never stopped hating Danny or condemning me for loving him. If he has to be polite, take orders from the man he believes led his daughter astray, it might actually kill him. The explosion that would occur if Danny fired him was almost beyond imagining.
She knew that, whatever form her father’s outrage took, he’d make her pay. So would her mother. They always did. Meanwhile Brian and her in-laws stood to get hurt.
Her forehead lined with sympathy, Brenda put her arms around Cate. “Sorry I had to be the one to tell you,” she apologized. “But you were bound to hear about it from somebody. You need to prepare yourself for the possibility of meeting him. At least with me you don’t have to pretend…put on an act about your feelings.”
Cate nodded in agreement. “Where’s he staying?” she asked. “In one of the motels out on Route 32?”
Brenda shook her head. “According to his old boss, Zeb Miller, who pumped gas for him this evening, he plans to stay at his grandmother’s place. One of the part-time checkers at Clingers’ Market said she saw his fancy car in the driveway out there on her way in to work. Apparently, he phoned ahead and had the electricity turned on, because there were lights in some of the windows. Funny, isn’t it, considering he’s been gone so long and the way he always felt about that wreck of a place, that he’d go straight home to roost?”
Cate had to admit it was. Meanwhile, it seemed that the news about Danny’s return was getting around. Imagining him at his grandmother’s farmhouse, thinking about the past and listening to the crickets, made her want to weep. He was so achingly close. Part of her wanted to run to him, let him absorb the pain his absence in her life had produced.
She wouldn’t do it, of course. They were strangers now, as foreign to each other as if they’d grown up on opposite sides of the planet. Her knowledge of him was seventeen years out of date.
“Do you think he’s come back to punish Beckwith for the way it treated him and his family?” she asked. “That he’ll close the plant without listening to a word anyone might say in its defense?”
Brenda shrugged. “I don’t know. I overheard people asking each other that question. And you have to admit Danny’s got plenty of reason to be less than charitable to the folks around here. Yet somehow I can’t picture…”
Cate knew what she meant. The Danny she’d known and loved would have based his decision on concern for the ordinary people whose lives would be affected, not just his employer’s bottom line, though naturally that would be an important factor. He wouldn’t have been inclined to seek retribution for retribution’s sake. Still, a lot of water had passed under Brush Creek Bridge since they’d been close. She couldn’t be sure how he’d react.
He might be very changed, hardened by the circumstances of his departure and the rigors of climbing the corporate ladder. It struck her that maybe she hadn’t really known him. She would have bet her life, the night they’d run away to Clermont County to get married, that he would never have walked out on her. Yet, in the days following her forced return home with her parents, no letter had come. He hadn’t phoned. The man she’d loved and trusted so deeply had vanished without a trace.
A painful question surfaced. “Have you heard…whether or not Danny’s married?” she asked in a small voice, forcing herself to face the likelihood that he had a wife and children. “I realize his personal life is none of my affair. I’d, um, just like to know the lay of the land before we run into each other.”
Brenda’s sympathy was clear. “If he is no one’s said anything to me about it,” she avowed.
A widowed, working mom who supported herself and her son on a modest teacher’s salary, Cate realized she couldn’t hold a candle to Danny’s achievements, at least insofar as the world would value them. If he was happily married, the father of several children who just happened to be Brian’s half-sisters and brothers in addition to his corporate success, the disparity between their lives would break her heart.
She felt as if it had been broken already. Aching to see Danny, yet dreading it, she struggled to pull herself together. And succeeded to a point. It was only then that she noticed the bruise on Brenda’s cheek, shadowy beneath her makeup.
“Dean did that…didn’t he?” she exclaimed, demanding a closer look.
Brenda’s take-charge expression crumpled. “He didn’t just go, the other night,” she confessed. “He hit me first.”
By now, dusk was falling, causing the exterior windows at the far end of the office to blacken and reflect the room. Putting aside her own tangle of emotions, Cate focused on her friend’s safety and well-being.
“If he threatens you again, I want you to call me,” she insisted. “I’ll come over, even if it’s two o’clock in the morning. If necessary, call the police. I’m not afraid of Dean and his threats. And I’m not intimidated by the fact that he’s a sheriff’s deputy. In my opinion, he’s the kind of coward who’ll back off if there’s a witness present.”
At the same time as Cate was locking up the school office and walking Brenda to her car, Danny was seated on the front porch of his grandmother’s house, stirring its dilapidated wooden swing with one desultory foot. He hadn’t been “home,” if he could call it that, for almost seventeen years. Ignoring the emblem of his most recent promotion, a shiny black Infiniti he’d parked in the weed-choked drive, he sipped at a beer, turned his gaze inward and tried to deal with his ghosts.
The only one who still mattered to him was Cate. In truth, he’d volunteered for the Beckwith Tool and Die assignment out of a gnawing wish to see her again. As he’d driven down from Chicago via Interstates 65 and 74, exiting onto Ohio Route 32 at Mount Carmel, just east of Cincinnati, he’d let memories he’d tried to bury for years resurface and catch him by the throat.
Accepting the pain they’d brought, he’d allowed himself to remember the sound of her laughter. Her inherent kindness. The delicious warmth of her as she’d nestled close. She’d been the best thing in his life. In point of fact, the only thing. Losing her as they’d stood poised on the brink of having a life together had scooped the heart right out of him.
Why’d she leave the Clermont County Jail that night without even glancing in my direction, he asked himself for perhaps the thousandth time as the swing creaked softly with his movements. Sure…her parents had her by the scruff of the neck. She was their prisoner, in effect. And we were in a very humiliating situation. Yet she could have looked at me. Let me know without saying a word that the setback to our plans was only temporary.
The way things had turned out, it hadn’t been, of course. They hadn’t set eyes on each other again.
As the moon rose, gilding the saplings and weeds that choked the overgrown property he’d inherited, he found himself asking the same old questions. First and foremost, he wanted to know why Cate hadn’t answered his letters. Clearly, she’d gotten them. Signed in her familiar handwriting, the annulment papers had reached him at his new address.
Painful as her silence had been, neither it nor the arrival of the annulment notice had overthrown his hopes. She was underage and her parents were calling the shots. He would simply wait them out—return to Beckwith for her on her eighteenth birthday.
A
