2
The farmer’s wife invited them into the house for coffee and cake, and Clara, though he half-expected her to be snobby about it, accepted immediately.
“Clara loves my coffee cake,” Mabel informed him as she cut into it, and added modestly, “It’s my mother’s recipe.”
“I’m so glad you asked us in,” Clara said cheerfully. “Jesse must be starving. We came straight from the airport.”
So he sat in the knickknack-cluttered living room and worked his methodical way through an enormous square of cinnamon swirl cake while the women discussed Nina’s winter formal. He didn’t know who Nina was and he didn’t care. He was so tired that he felt buzzed, and Clara was right: he was really, really hungry.
Clara was the spoiled princess all grown up. Her entire family from her grandparents to her little brothers had indulged and pampered her to a degree Jesse had never before seen, and the proof was in the pudding. Long, pearlescent-white fingernails studded with rhinestones, a big bow in her shiny, dark hair, casually driving a truck that probably cost a hundred grand, parking in fire lanes and getting free cake wherever she went—she was exactly the kind of woman he’d always imagined she would be: high-maintenance. Entitled. Expensive.
But she also had that unshakable confidence all the Wilders had that made a man wary of underestimating them.
And she was beautiful.
And funny.
And she kept smiling at him.
Jesse kept his eyes on the coffee cake and told himself that he needed sleep.
Twenty minutes later they were on their way again. As soon as he climbed back into the truck his eyelids drifted shut, though he did glance once or twice at Clara’s expression of concentration as she steered the truck and trailer out of the farmyard and through the gate. Only then did she turn on her music, and immediately began to sing along; not at all well, really, but alternating freely and without warning between earnest note-hitting and a ludicrous falsetto.
It was the way a normal person would sing while sitting alone in traffic or taking a shower, and Jesse considered it just more evidence of that Wilder overconfidence. Her mother, who disclaimed all musical ability, sang much the same way and didn’t care who heard her.
Her mother. Just thinking about Dr. Wilder was like a kick in the gut.
Clara’s voice wasn’t too bad and it was nice to have another person nearby as he settled into a doze. He liked napping in the doctor’s lounge at the hospital where he worked for that reason.
He wasn’t sure how much time passed—it felt like none at all, but at some point the noise and jolting of the gravel road had been replaced by smooth highway sounds—before he heard the truck’s female computer voice say pleasantly, “Incoming call from Uncle Jim.”
Clara hit a button on the steering wheel. “Hello?”
“That you flying down my road?” her uncle asked sternly.
“I’m going sixty!” she defended herself.
“With four thousand pounds of hay?”
“It’s a straight shot!”
“You swear you’re going sixty?”
“All right, all right,” she grumbled, slackening her speed. “You’re a nosey neighbor, you know that? Guess it comes from being a narc.”
“Ha!” he retorted, and hung up on her.
“There he is,” she said to Jesse, and he looked where she pointed and saw a pickup in a distant field.
“Was he a narc?” he wondered.
“He was FBI in the ’90s. ‘Back when it was cool,’ he says.”
“Just thought he was a rancher. And kind of a gun nut.”
“Well, he’s all of the above. They’re coming for dinner tonight. To see you.”
It surprised him that Jim and his wife Liesl would go out of their way to see him. After so many years, Jesse had expected to be an outsider again. He had even gone so far as to think of this as a business trip, and had looked forward to meeting Dr. Wilder as a colleague.
That would be too easy. He had too much history in this town.
He glanced at Clara and she met his eyes and smiled easily. “Don’t be freaked out when you see my mom using a walker, okay? It’s temporary.”
She had a great smile, warm and genuine. She’d probably never gotten a ticket in her life. “I know it’s temporary.”
“I know you know. I’m just reminding you. It was, like, a shock, like I hadn’t realized she was an old person before.”
He knew what she meant, but his sympathy did not extend to Dr. Wilder. “Don’t expect me to feel sorry for her. She started running marathons knowing full well she’d destroy her knees.”
Clara laughed at that, and told him, “She said the same thing herself.”
“Well, good.”
“She’s going to love having you around,” she assured him. “Y’all have, like, identical bedside manners.”
He wanted to argue with her, but found himself speechless. There was nothing so horrifying and humbling as being casually likened to someone who’d ripped your heart out.
“Anyway, there it is,” she announced. “Probably looks about the same. Been awhile, huh?”
“Been awhile,” he echoed absently, looking up at the big, old house as they came up the driveway.
He didn’t know if it had ever been a plantation, but it looked like it could have been. Col. Wilder and his wife had moved there from the D.C. area not too long before Jesse came to live with them, and back then it had been in rough shape after years of neglect.
Like Jesse himself.
Enough with the introspection. “Place looks good,” he said aloud.
“Well, it’s a never-ending project.”
“Tell me about it,” he muttered, and climbed out of the truck. “Hey, Colonel. How are ya?”
Clara’s father had emerged from the barn and now raised a hand in greeting. Asa Wilder was a handsome man, tall, swarthy, and fit for his years, and Jesse knew him to be half Navajo Indian and half Danish. The occasional thousand-yard stare from his dark eyes suggested that he had Seen Things during his military tours, but he was a devoted husband and his kids idolized him.
“Jesse,” he said, and they shook hands.
A few seconds’ eye contact with the Colonel was a ten-minute conversation with anyone else.
“Help me get this unloaded.”
“Sure,” Jesse said, having anticipated this turn of events. Good thing he’d taken that nap, because he’d spent the night on his feet in the OR.
Clara must have read his mind. “You slept for thirty minutes, and in case you were worried about it, you didn’t snore,” she said as she slid carefully down from the truck with a purse slung over her shoulder and her hands full of coffee mugs, keys and her phone. “Want me to help, too, Dad?”
“Wouldn’t want you to chip your polish,” the Colonel replied as he started unfastening tie-down straps.
“A chip I could handle. A break would be disastrous,” she said as she tossed him the keys. Then she turned her brilliant brown eyes back to Jesse. “Want me to take your bag in?”
“Nah, I’ll get it,” he said, and directed his attention to the massive alfalfa bales. The last thing he needed was for the Colonel to catch him looking at Clara.
The second-to-last thing he needed was to be thinking about her at all.