Lori Armstrong - Merciless

My cell buzzed while I waited in line. I debated ignoring it, except I wouldn’t want to miss sexting with Dawson because I was avoiding Turnbull. The text wasn’t from either man, but from Hope, asking me to pick up diapers. One step ahead of ya, sis.

Since I had no place to be, I stopped at Wendy’s for lunch. Afterward, on a whim, I pulled into Runnings, a ranch supply store. Seeing the display of hunting gear, I realized I didn’t have the mandatory neon orange article of clothing required for all hunters. It went against everything ingrained in me to wear something so blatantly obvious. I picked the least offensive item I could find: a knit hat. I tossed one in the cart for Dawson, too. Checking the prices of various calibers of bullets, I was surprised they were a buck less a box than at Walmart, so I scooped up a box of.308 for my rifle, a box of.270 for Dawson’s Remington bolt action, a box of.223 for my AR, and a box of.22 for target practice.

Since I’m a sucker for western clothes, I detoured through the women’s clothing department and found two rhinestone shirts a little on the tacky side that I couldn’t live without.

My last stop was the candy aisle. I don’t have much of a sweet tooth, but I’m the only one in my family. Sophie loved old-fashioned horehound candy. Jake had a thing for lemon drops. Dawson could eat black licorice by the truckload, and Hope preferred maple nut goodies. I bought two packages of each and wondered what kind of candy Lex liked.

I flashed back to Levi as a kid and how crazy he’d been for circus peanuts-those disgusting molded blobs of orange fluff. But I hesitated to throw in a package. Sometimes the simplest thing would start Hope on a crying jag. She’d gotten better in the last few months. At least now she and I could talk about Levi without either of us breaking down every time.

I loaded everything into the truck and finally started for home. I’d managed to shove aside the morning’s events during my shopping foray, but as soon as Rapid City reflected in my taillights, those suppressed thoughts surfaced unbidden and unwanted. Dammit. I’d been in such a happy-albeit girly-place with the lunch and the shopping. Needing to stay out of my head, I cranked the country music and belted out tunes about cheating, drinking, and more drinking.

Hope’s car was parked next to Sophie’s. I unloaded everything myself. After I dragged the last bag into the kitchen, I heard Sophie and Hope talking in the office. Or were they arguing?

“She says she’s fine, but I know she ain’t telling me all of what the doctor said.”

Another conversation about the perils of Penny Pretty Horses.

“Well, it’s stupid that she doesn’t let you go to the doctor’s office with her,” Hope retorted. “You never should’ve let her get away with it the first time. Demand to go with her.”

Sophie shook her finger. “Don’t be pretending you know what it’s like to have this kind of confrontation. You always back down from conflict. Always. And you’re tellin’ me to make demands of my daughter… who is dying?” She snorted. “You have no idea-”

“I’ve lost a child, too,” Hope snapped.

This discussion was headed into dangerous territory, so I cut in. “Hey, ladies, what’s going on?”

Hope’s angry gaze flicked to me from behind our father’s desk. “Hey, Mercy. Sophie is leaving early to spend time with Penny.”

Sophie gave Hope her back. Her eyes were hard, and her jaw was tight.

“I know this is hard on you. Is there anything I can do, Sophie?”

A beat passed. She shook her head, but a sly smile appeared. “Just don’t leave no more of your clothes in the kitchen, hey.”

I would not blush.

Sophie patted my arm as she walked past me, and I wanted to hug her. Normally, I squashed such impulses, but today, I gave in to it. Her familiar scent, a scent that hadn’t changed in thirty years-Jovan musk perfume, a faint whiff of cooking grease, laundry soap, and Lemon Pledge-enveloped me, and I sighed. Maybe I’d needed the hug more than she had. “Tell Penny hi from me.”

“Will do.” She stepped back and straightened her coat. “I stripped the bedding in Hope’s old room, so it’s ready for the boy.” Her dark eyes pinned me. “You’d better be washing them sheets before you put ’em on the bed, ’cause who knows what kinda chemicals and junk they got on ’em in China.”

I was happy to see the flash of the old bossy Sophie. “Yes, ma’am.”

After Sophie left, without saying good-bye to Hope, my sister said, “Since Sophie feels entitled to interrupt me whenever the hell she wants because I have nothing important to do”-she sneered the last part-“I have about an hour and a half left of bookwork. Are you gonna be around to listen for Joy?”

And despite the tension in the room, my day just got a whole lot brighter. “Sure. Do your thing.”

I shoved the bedding in the washer. Then I snuck upstairs to peek at my niece, indisputably the cutest baby on the planet. Tempting, to pick her up and snuzzle her chubby cheeks just to hear that darling giggle. But Mama would whup my ass if I woke her. Plus, the kid was so sound asleep, she snored.

I ditched my FBI duds for my favorite pair of Aura jeans and slipped on my new red-and-black thermal “burnout” western shirt dotted with what looked like bloody roses. In the living room, I opened my laptop and logged on.

Feet propped on the coffee table, pen jammed in my mouth, I didn’t move beyond getting up to toss the bedding in the dryer when the cycle beeped. I hadn’t found much information, and I suspected that was because the two local Indian papers had only recently started uploading content to the Internet.

Hope passed by the living room with a blithe, “Joy’s up.”

“What? I’ve been listening, and I haven’t heard her.”

“She turned over in her crib, which is a signal naptime is over.”

Whoa. Hope had heard that all the way in Dad’s office? Talk about batlike senses. I shut down my computer and grabbed the clean bedding. I met Hope halfway up the staircase.

“False alarm. Joy is still sacked out.” She pointed to the bundle in my arms. “Need help?”

“Sure.”

In the bedroom, I stretched the fitted sheet across the top corner of the mattress.

Hope tucked her end of the sheet around the opposite corner on the bottom of the bed. “So… Dawson’s son is coming to stay for a while.”

We each automatically moved to the other end of the bed, the motions familiar from doing this a hundred times. “I guess.”

“Have you ever talked to Lex?”

I shook my head. “Dawson talks to him in the afternoon when Lex gets home from school. It worries him that Lex is a latchkey kid.”

Hope snapped out and smoothed the top sheet. “Will that be different when he’s living here?”

“A lot of that is up in the air until Lex is enrolled in school.”

“Middle school. God, Levi hated middle school. Kids were so mean. It was probably the only time I thought about pulling him out and homeschooling him, but Daddy wouldn’t let me. Said I wasn’t gonna coddle the boy and Levi had to learn to deal with adversity.”

“That sounds like something Dad would say.”

“He also told me that since I’d barely graduated high school, I had no business teaching.”

I hugged the pillow to my chest instead of punching it. “Hope, did Dad say mean shit like that to you all the time?”

She shrugged. “When I look back on it, usually he only said that stuff when I was being a brat about something. It made him crazy because he always wished I’d be more like you. He’d hoped for that up until the day he died.”

My sister knew so many more facets of my father than I did. In the time I’d been home, I’d discovered not all of those facets put Dad in a good light.