CHAPTER EIGHTEEN #2
Through the windshield she could see the memory as clearly as if it were playing on glass.
Her father on the porch, broad and hard as a gatepost, Connor younger and angrier and too proud to back down when older men told him to.
She had spent a week refusing to speak to Connor after that fight, furious with both of them and too young to understand that pride had already begun sinking its claws into every part of their marriage.
A little smile touched her mouth despite herself. “You wouldn’t have stood a chance back then. Dad was made from granite.”
Connor leaned back in the seat. “Well, it kind of worked out in the long run. We’re pretty close now.”
That surprised her enough to show. He’d told her he’d been visiting her dad, but “pretty close”? She had a hard time seeing it.
“Yeah, that just seems weird to me,” she told him. “How the hell did that happen?”
He looked out through the windshield as he answered. “Your dad had a fall a couple years back. Diane called the sheriff’s station because an ambulance was going to take too long. I went over and helped him up.”
Selena turned slightly toward him. “Diane called you?”
“She called the station. I was the one closest.”
“And that was it?”
“No.” Connor’s fingers tapped once against the steering wheel.
“I ended up staying a few hours. He’d bruised his hip, pride worse than anything else.
Diane was running around trying to get ice and blankets and call the doctor.
Your dad told her to stop fussing at him or he’d hurt the other hip. Same old Robert Raven charm.”
A breath that might have been a laugh left Selena.
Connor went on. “Later, once he felt better, he asked if I wanted a drink.”
“I always thought you and my dad were more likely to throw your drinks at each other than actually drink them.”
“Things change, Selena. It was a bottle of Scotch. The good stuff, too. Maybe he figured near-death experiences called for quality. Maybe he just wanted to say sorry in his own way for all the aggravation he’d given me over the years.”
“And you just… talked?”
“We did.”
“About what?”
Connor’s mouth shifted. “Weather. Crops. Why he thought modern country music was an insult to God. Eventually old grievances.”
Selena looked back out at the bus.
That was harder to picture than the fall itself. Her father and Connor in the same room after all those years, not circling each other, not separated by the wreckage she had left behind.
“When we got married,” she said quietly, “I’d never have predicted that.”
“Your dad’s mellowed,” Connor said. “And I’ve probably hardened a bit. Started seeing things a little more in line with him. I guess age does that. Somewhere we met in the middle.”
A pause followed.
“Besides,” he added, “we had one thing in common we could bond over.”
Selena knew before she asked that she would not like the answer.
“What was that?”
Connor kept his eyes ahead. “We were both estranged from you.”
For a moment she only stared at him.
Anger came up late but hard, rolling through her chest with enough force that she set the coffee in the cup holder before she spilled it.
“You know it wasn’t all my fault.”
Connor gave one of those maddening small shrugs, barely more than a lift of the shoulder.
That made it worse.
“You and my dad might have hated me for leaving,” Selena said, voice kept low only by effort, “but I had to leave. Our marriage was over after the accident. It couldn’t be repaired.”
Connor turned his head then. “The hit-and-run wasn’t what killed our marriage. We didn’t try hard enough.”
“I did.”
“No,” he said, just as quietly. “You decided to leave because it was too hard.”
Her fingers curled against her knee. “I decided? You could never tell me why you were in contact with that woman.”
Connor’s face changed, not much, but enough. The humor was gone. So was the softness that had crept in while he talked about her father.
“It didn’t matter what I said. You never believed me.”
Frustration flashed white-hot. “Because you never gave me a reason to.”
“I gave you one. You just didn’t like it.”
Selena looked away before the expression on his face could settle too deeply. Beyond the windshield the bus remained where it had been all night, mute and smug.
This was what happened. A small opening, one inch of old familiarity, and then the floor dropped out from under it. No matter how carefully she stepped, the same ground kept giving way.
“Let’s just do our job,” she said.
“Fine.”
The answer came clipped.
After that, silence returned and this time it had weight.
Connor sat with both hands loose on the wheel, eyes on the fairgrounds.
Selena kept hers on the bus and tried to ignore everything else in the car.
The warmth of his presence. The memory of his voice when he said her father’s name.
The old anger now freshened and awake beside her like something that had never really slept.
Out beyond the trees, Leon stepped down from the bus and lit another cigarette. Smoke drifted pale in the floodlight. Nothing else moved.
Selena took another sip of coffee gone lukewarm and wished she had stayed in the woods.
Worse than that, she wished she had never gotten into that car.