Chapter 28 Red
Red stuck out his thumb for a ride when he saw the Buick coupe racing his way. The brakes squealed and the car swerved to the shoulder.
“Where you headed?” The driver was a businessman type in a sharp suit and a perfectly creased fedora. His eyes were red rimmed and he had a coffee cup balanced on the seat beside him with a liquid in it that sure wasn’t coffee.
“Home,” Red said, climbing in.
“Name’s Chester,” the driver jerked back on the road. “Heading to Butte.”
“That’ll do,” Red said. He’d be home by tonight. His insides churned at the thought of facing Claire.
We don’t need you. Claire’s words the morning he left had cut him to the bone.
She hadn’t kissed him goodbye, hadn’t even waved when he got on the bus. He’d almost chucked the whole plan right then. Then he’d remembered the empty bank account. All the places he’d gone to looking for jobs. Bridget’s accusations.
And Lem Garrison looking for him.
He’d been a fool to run. He’d get home and tell Claire everything. Hope she would take him back.
The boozy businessman took a swig from the coffee cup and the car drifted over the center line. He glanced at Red. “You a family man?”
The man was just making conversation, but the question was like a punch in Red’s gut. A family man. At the orphanage the word family was spoken with the same reverence reserved for words like heaven.
Yes, he was a family man. But he hadn’t done right by his family.
The kids at the orphanage called him dummy and blockhead, and he was.
He felt the burn of shame in his chest as if he were still that boy, standing in front of the class with the words of his primer blurring in front of his eyes.
As a kid, he spent most of his days in the corner, and the rest of the time looking out the window, wishing he was outside.
After he ran away from the orphanage, he got good at a few things—fighting, stealing cars, and getting thrown in juvenile detention.
A month short of his sixteenth birthday, a sympathetic judge gave him some advice: get out of Chicago before he ended up in a prison.
He jumped a train west. When he found Montana and horses, he thought he had put the shame of the orphanage classroom behind him.
Wasn’t the joke on him when he fell in love with a schoolteacher?
“Got a picture?” Chester said, taking another swig from his cup.
Sure, Red had a picture. His hand went to his jacket pocket but he didn’t retrieve the black-and-white photo he’d taken of Claire on their first real date—the one without Bucky and Millie tagging along.
They had gone to the Lower Falls, his favorite spot in the park.
It was late in the afternoon, when the sun was just at the angle that made everything look like burnished gold.
They stepped out on the viewing platform and Red got up the courage to take Claire’s hand.
She let him, and his chest swelled with something like pride as they gazed together at the bright column of water thundering over the falls and down three hundred feet to the river below.
Mist rose from the churning base, throwing up rainbows and making the canyon walls sparkle like diamonds.
She glanced at him, then back at the falls. “It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”
It sure did. Red wondered how a beautiful woman like Claire Reilly was standing beside him. “What do you wonder about?” He wanted to know more than anything what she was thinking.
She didn’t answer right away, but stared at the marvel of the Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. “Do you go to church, Red?”
He wasn’t sure how to answer. “Is that important?” If it was, he’d be at church in West Yellowstone on Sunday.
She turned her gaze back to the rainbow mist. “It seems important to know what you believe.”
He suddenly wanted to be honest about what he’d felt since he met her, even if it sounded sappy.
“If you’d asked me three days ago if I thought God knew my name or cared a whit about me, I might have said no.
But now,” he met her eyes and his heart thudded with the truth of what he was saying. “Now, I might think different.”
She looked down at their clasped hands and a smile tugged at her beautiful mouth. “Nobody ever told me that I made them think God might love them.”
He swallowed the lump in his throat and looked back out at the falls, everything in him melting. “What do you believe, Claire?”
She looked reflective, like she was putting some thought into her words and he was glad. He wanted to know her heart—like he had shared his.
“I believe,” she said slowly, “that God created this—the falls and Old Faithful and the sunrise and the mountains—to show us how much he loves us. When I look at something like this, I feel like God is here, and he loves us. He loves Claire Reilly. And he loves Red Wilder.” She raised her brows at him as if challenging him to disagree.
He wasn’t about to argue. “He sounds like somebody I might like to get to know.”
She smiled at him then in that bright, sure way she had. “Maybe you should.”
She’d asked him to take her picture then, with the falls behind her and that luminous smile. She’d had the photo developed and given it to him, writing Claire Reilly on the back. Not Claire. Claire Reilly. As if he’d ever forget who she was.
The picture was in his pocket, along with the letter from Claire that had come on Friday in care of the Zonolite Mining Company. The letter he hadn’t read.
It could be Claire telling him to come home.
Or it could be her goodbye to him. Either way, there was no reason for him to stay in Libby, mining Zonolite and dying a little each day from heartache.
It wasn’t something he could talk to her about on the telephone.
He had to see her, and beg her to forgive him.
For leaving. For Dell. For keeping secrets.