J Jance - Queen of the Night

Dan kept asking where his mother was and when she would come to get him. He noticed that when the woman bothered to answer him at all, she said that she didn’t know, but that someone else, someone who wasn’t Dan’s mother, would come for him soon. His father had told lies all the time. Dan noticed that the woman never looked at him when she said those things, and Dan suspected that she was lying, too.

Dan was only four years old at the time. He wasn’t able to put all his feelings into words, but he finally figured it out, even though no one said so in so many words. He finally came to understand that something terrible had happened to his mother. Maybe she was hurt. Maybe she was sick. He tried not to think about the sounds of his parents quarreling on the far side of his bedroom door. He tried not to think about all those noisy firecrackers exploding out in the living room, but as the long lonely days passed one after another, he finally realized those noisy pops he had heard hadn’t been from firecrackers, not at all.

Dan had seen his father’s gun. Adam Pardee kept it on a high shelf in the closet. He often told Danny that he’d take his belt to him if he ever so much as touched it. Dan knew he could have reached the shelf if he had tried, if he had climbed up on a chair, but he never did. Daniel maybe didn’t believe what the nice woman told him about someone coming to get him, but harsh experience had made him believe in Adam Pardee’s belt.

Then, one morning-several days later, although in Danny’s mind it seemed much longer-the woman had rushed Dan through his cold cereal at breakfast and then had herded him into the bathtub.

“Your grandfather’s coming to get you,” she announced with a cheerful smile. “Isn’t that wonderful!”

It wasn’t wonderful for Dan. He didn’t know his grandfather, had never met him, didn’t know he had one.

“What grandfather?” he asked.

“Why, your mother’s father,” she replied, sounding surprised. “He’s coming all the way from Safford, Arizona, to pick you up and take you home.”

Dan knew that wasn’t right. Home was here in California with his parents, not in Arizona with some stranger. He didn’t even know where Arizona was. It sounded like it was far away.

An hour or so later Dan found himself sitting on the sagging couch in the living room waiting for the doorbell to ring. He was dressed in faded jeans and an equally faded Star Wars T-shirt. The clothing was several sizes too large for him. The remainder of his meager possessions-a toothbrush, a comb, a small tube of toothpaste, and a freshly laundered and neatly folded Spider-Man bedsheet-had been packed into the paper bag that sat on the couch beside him.

When the doorbell rang, he raced to answer it. As soon as he flung the door open and saw who was outside, Dan knew there had to be some mistake.

The wizened, wiry old man standing on the front porch might have been a cowboy straight out of the Old West. He came complete with boots, belt, and a pearl-button Western shirt. That wasn’t so bad. The real problem was that he was an Indian. Dan had seen Indians before-in the movies and on TV. The man’s coal-black straight hair was slicked down and combed back flat on his head. His face was both broad and angular. His skin was brown, much browner than Daniel’s. His eyes were almost black. Dan’s were light brown-almost hazel.

“Daniel?” the old man asked.

All Dan could do was stare and nod wordlessly.

The stranger held out his hand, but Dan backed away from him.

“My name is Micah,” the old man said. “Micah Duarte. Rebecca, your mother, was my daughter. I’ve come to take you home.”

Was. Dan heard the word and understood at once what he had just been told, what the smiling woman hadn’t been willing to tell him. This was like in the movie when Bambi’s father comes to Bambi after hunting season and says, “Your mother can’t be with you anymore.”

Leaving the stranger on the porch, Dan walked away from the door, climbed back up on the couch, and clutched his paper bag to his chest. He did his best not to cry.

His father hated it when he cried. “Don’t be a sissy,” Adam Pardee always said. “Only sissies cry.” Dan had cried in the movie when Bambi lost his mother, but he didn’t cry for his own mother, not then, not with that strange Indian man watching him.

The woman bustled in from the kitchen, smiling and wiping her hands on a towel as she approached the man who still waited outside on the porch. He wasn’t smiling. Neither was Dan.

“You must be Mr. Duarte,” she said. “Please do come in. I’m Hilda Romero. I see you two have already met.” She turned to Dan. “Are you ready to go?”

“I don’t want to go,” he said, shaking his head. “I want to stay here. I want to live here.”

Mrs. Romero smiled again. It seemed to him that she was always smiling, but he didn’t believe that, either.

“But Mr. Duarte is family,” she said. “Your real family. He’s going to take you home with him. He’s going to look after you.”

“I don’t want him to,” Dan insisted stubbornly. “I want my mother to look after me.”

Micah Duarte said nothing. He gave only the smallest shake of his head, a gesture that meant exactly what Bambi’s father had meant. Dan’s mother was gone-gone forever. She wasn’t coming back for him, but still Dan didn’t move. He stayed where he was, on the couch.

“We have to go,” Micah Duarte said softly. “Safford is a long way away. My boss would only let me have today off. I drove all night to get here, and I told Maxine we’d be back home tonight.”

Dan didn’t know who Maxine was and he didn’t want to.

“But I don’t know you,” Dan objected, practically shouting.

Micah Duarte nodded. “I know,” he said. “Your mother didn’t like being an Indian. She hated it. That’s why she ran away and came here. She was very beautiful. She thought she’d be able to be a movie star.”

He shrugged as if to underscore the futility of his daughter’s empty dream.

Dan, who had never heard anything at all about his mother’s people, was thunderstruck. “My mother isn’t an Indian,” he declared. “She can’t be.”

“She was,” Micah insisted, using that terrible word again, “was” spoken softly and sadly. “She was Apache, and you are, too, Daniel. Come now. We need to go. We can talk along the way.”

He held out his hand. Once again Dan shook his head.

For a moment longer Dan sat there, resisting, but the force behind Micah Duarte’s command was like a physical presence. Finally, as if his feet had minds of their own, they hopped down from the couch and carried him across the room. He stepped out through the door and onto the porch. Then, almost against his will, Dan reached up and took his grandfather’s hand.

Even though Adam Pardee was a stunt man doing pretend tricks for the movies, his hands had always been smooth and soft. That was one of the reasons he always used the belt-on his son and on his wife. He didn’t want anything to damage the looks of his hands; he couldn’t afford to bark or scrape his knuckles.

Micah Duarte’s hands were large and anything but smooth. They were cracked and rough and covered with bumps Dan would later learn were calluses-calluses that came from working long hours with tools and doing hard physical labor. Micah made real stuff happen, and he didn’t care how his hands looked or felt.

Together Daniel and Micah walked across the porch, down the steep steps, and along the short walkway. Outside the yard, a very old pickup was parked next to the sidewalk. Micah walked up to the passenger door, opened it, and gestured for Daniel to get inside.

He didn’t. He stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. “I want my mother,” he said. “Where is she?”