9
I may not believe in myself, but I believe in what I'm doing.—Jimmy Page
As Rhett prepared to turn the car into the driveway, her hand rose to press the remote that would raise the garage door.
Only there wasn't a remote, and an embarrassed little laugh escaped her as her fingers encountered nothing but the soft gray felt-like material on the visor.
Even though she hadn't been to the house in Claiborne in two months, her eighteen-year habit of reaching for the remote was still there.
The garage door opener and all the house keys were turned over to Les Joslin when she hired him to sell the house, and this afternoon he would hand them over to the new owners after the papers were signed.
If he'd been surprised when Rhett showed up at his office two hours early, he didn't let on.
In fact, he acted as if her request for a key so she could see the house one last time was something every homeowner did.
Maybe it was. Maybe she wasn't being a sentimental fool now that the time had come to relinquish her claim to the house.
She parked in the driveway and cast a critical eye across the front of the place she called home for so long.
Someone had shaped the boxwood that grew in an orderly row under the windows, and she frowned at the squared-off look of them.
Perhaps that was the way they were supposed to look, but she always preferred them to be a bit rounded on top, more informal.
Another small laugh, this one rueful, shook her shoulders.
It wasn't her house anymore, not really, nor was it her boxwood.
So why should she care what it looked like?
Well, time to get it over with. She turned off the car, slipped the keys into her purse, and stepped out into the baking heat of a Texas summer afternoon. Sweat sprang up immediately along her hairline, and she waved her hand in an ineffectual gesture to cool her face.
"'S'cuse me. Can I help you?"
At the sound of the voice, she turned toward the neat white picket fence that separated the front yard from that of the house next door.
Sam Harris squinted at her with distrust from under the bill of his Rangers baseball cap, his hands still clutching the handles of the wheelbarrow filled with red pine mulch.
"Hey, Sam," Rhett called out. "It's just me."
"Rhett." His seamed face broke into a pleased smile, and he lowered the wheelbarrow.
"Didn't rec'anize the car." He stripped off his yellow leather work gloves as he hurried—well, as much as Sam could hurry, anyway—to the end of the fence.
Rhett met him near the street where the white pickets stopped and grasped his thin old hands in hers.
"It's good to see you, Sam." She gave his gnarled fingers a careful squeeze. "I just came back to say goodbye to the house."
"Yeah, I seen that real estate feller puttin' that SOLD sticker on the sign a couple of weeks back. Guess y'all are really gone, then."
"'Fraid so. But, hey! My realtor said the new owners are a really nice young couple. The husband's just out of the Air Force after eight years, and the wife's a kindergarten teacher. Oh, and they have a four-year-old daughter."
Sam's eyes lit up, and Rhett smiled, remembering how he and his late wife always doted on Lilith.
"You don't say. It'll be good to have another youngster in the house. I may not be able to bake cookies like Nelda did for little Lil, but I can sure lay in a supply of lollipops."
"I'll bet that little girl will love it." Rhett slipped an arm around the old man's shoulders and gave him a quick hug. "Sam, I've got to get a move on. I'm supposed to be back at the real estate office pretty quick, so if I'm going to go through the house one more time I'd better get after it."
"All right, then." Sam returned her hug. "You take care, Rhett."
"You, too."
As Sam headed back to his wheelbarrow, Rhett hurried up the driveway, eager to get out of the heat.
The humidity was so thick it was like trying to breathe through a hot wet bath towel slung across her face.
She stepped onto the small covered front porch and dug the key Les gave her from the front pocket of her white linen slacks.
It felt odd to be entering the house through the front door.
When she lived there, she always used the door off the kitchen that gave on the garage.
The odd feeling escalated as she stepped inside.
Goosebumps rose on her bare arms, and she couldn't attribute all of it to the air-conditioning.
The once familiar living room was now a foreign landscape with its gleaming hardwood floors and freshly painted walls.
It seemed large and bright and airy without the worn, stained carpet and the collection of tired furniture that occupied the space for so long.
Her footsteps echoed back at her as she walked toward the hall, and she had to resist the urge to tiptoe, as if she was intruding on a place of worship.
The bedrooms and baths were just as alien as the living room, and after a quick glance into each of them she moved on.
When she entered the kitchen she came to a dead halt, disoriented.
Every surface of the room was changed, and the sight of this new and modern room just cemented the feeling she had since she opened the front door.
This was no longer her house, and she wondered why she thought it so important to see it one more time.
There was nothing left to indicate the Davis family ever lived there.
Even the balky sliding glass doors that led to the back yard were gone, replaced by French doors that broke the sunlight shining through them into orderly squares that glowed on the new tile floor.
Rhett stepped over to them and looked out at the eight-foot-high wooden privacy fence that had gone silver-gray with age. That, at least, hadn't changed, and a wistful smile drew up one corner of her mouth as she remembered how Todd had taken a whole week off work to put up that fence.
The back yard was enclosed by chain-link when they bought the house and changing it out had been the furthest thing from their minds.
Until the Saturday morning vicious growls and ferocious barking sent Rhett rushing through the house from the living room where she was folding clothes.
Their German Shepherd mix, Landry, had always been more of a doof than a menace, and in the two years since they brought him home from the local animal shelter Rhett never heard a full-throated bark come from the dog.
But the sounds he made that Saturday morning sent painful pricks of fear over Rhett's skin as she ran through the kitchen and out on the patio.
Lilith had been standing in the middle of the backyard, a blue plastic jump rope dangling from one hand as she stared at Landry, her big brown eyes full of confusion and the beginning of fear.
The dog was planted in front of the little girl, body low and ears pinned back, the hair at the back of his neck bristled.
He faced away from Lilith, his fury directed toward the street where a man stood at the chain-link fence beckoning Lilith forward with one hand.
Rhett never remembered moving, but the next thing she knew she was standing at the fence, the shovel Todd had left leaning against the house next to the door clutched in her hands as she watched the man flee down the street.
At the brush of fur against her leg, she looked down to see Landry at her side, his body still tight with tension and a low growl emanating from his throat, topaz eyes fixed in the direction the man had run.
That was eighteen years ago, but Rhett's knees still went weak at how close they had come to...
well, she couldn't even think of what might have been if it hadn't been for Landry.
Rhett shook off the memory of her terror that day, stepped out into the heat again, and walked across the lawn to the far back corner of the yard where a small mesquite tree grew.
She knelt down, breathing in the strong honey fragrance of its white flowers, and put her hand on the grass in front of it.
"Good Landry," she murmured. "Good dog." It had been seven years since Landry passed peacefully in his sleep, but Rhett was suddenly as desolate as if the dog had died that very morning.
Hot tears burned her eyes, and she stroked the grass over where Landry was buried, the same way she once stroked his fur.
How could she just go off and leave such a loyal friend behind?
The new owners would have no idea he was buried here.
If she signed those papers, Landry's grave would be forgotten and abandoned, almost as if the faithful dog never existed.
With a sob, Rhett lowered herself full-length on the grass, unmindful of the heat, the thorns on the mesquite, or anything else.
Rhett erected a brick wall of protection around her heart the day Todd died.
It had been the only way for her to remain strong in the days and weeks that followed, the only way she could keep it together enough to deal with the aftermath.
As the months went by, the wall had been fortified with extra mortar and even coils of razor wire across the top to keep the pesky feelings of confusion at bay, and to repel thoughts that maybe she didn't have any idea what she was doing.
The earth-shattering news about Todd and Elaine created a substantial crack in the wall, but the move to Dallas slapped a layer of Quikrete over it, and it had held. Until now.