Carolyne Aarsen - Unexpected Father

“They died in a plane crash when I was nineteen.”

A shadow crossed his face and Evangeline saw that the memory still caused him pain. In that moment Evangeline felt a bond between them. A bond between children whose parents had left a family too soon.

At least she still had her father.

“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, sympathy softening her voice. “That must have been so difficult.”

“We got through it. I’m sure you know how that works. You lost your mother, too.”

Then he gave her a rueful smile, which, combined, with his acknowledgment of her own pain and history, made her heart flutter. Just a bit.

She returned his smile and as their eyes held, awareness bloomed.

Evangeline caught herself and looked away. This was not the man for her.

“Besides the house, is there anything else you need to know about the place?” Evangeline asked, feeling a sudden need to get this tour over and done with. From the first moment she’d met Denny, she’d felt as if her emotions were a tangle that she couldn’t sort out.

She’d thought Tyler was the right man, and look how that had turned out. Andy Arsenau had broken Evangeline’s heart enough times that she would be crazy to feel anything for someone exactly like him. She didn’t trust her judgment in men anymore. “I’m sure my father filled you in,” she continued.

“I think I’ve seen what I need to see,” he said, giving her another crooked grin.

“Okay, then,” she said, then turned and walked toward her car, signaling the end of the tour.

They arrived at the vehicles but Evangeline stopped there, drumming her fingers on the hood of her car. “How did you meet my father? How did you know about the ranch?” she blurted, unable to contain her curiosity about Denny and Andy.

Denny scratched his forehead with a fingertip as if wondering himself.

“We met at a truck stop. We were on the same gravel haul. I’d seen him a couple of times before, and we ended up sitting together. Talking. That was about a year ago. We clicked. We started arranging to meet when our schedules worked. One day he told me he had this place that wasn’t getting used to its potential. I told him I was looking for a place for a few years and he offered to lease me this ranch. He talked about you a lot and said he missed you—”

“So what kind of truck do you drive?” she cut in, her disappointment with her father too fresh to hear false platitudes.

Denny’s frown made her regret her sharp tone, but at the same time she wasn’t in the mood to hear secondhand about her father’s affection for her.

“I have three gravel trucks,” he said. “They keep me busy.”

Of course they did. The more she talked to Denny, the more she understood how her father would have connected with this guy. They had so much in common.

“Then if you’ve seen what you need, I guess we’re done here,” she said, pulling her keys out of her purse. If she stood here long enough she would get angry with her father again and that was an exercise in futility. She had to move on from the past.

But as she drove away, she glanced in her rearview mirror at the man who stood by his truck looking over the ranch with the same expression she had caught on his face as they’d walked the yard.

As though it was home. A place he belonged.

Evangeline tore her attention away, memories, long buried, assaulting her.

She and her mother working in the garden....

Riding in the hills with her father and mother to check the cattle on the upper pasture....

Coming home from the bookstore after spending Saturdays there with her mother, carrying crinkly bags filled with new books and heading directly to her favorite spot in the shade of a large fir tree where she could see both the ranch yard and the mountains guarding it....

It had been the best time in her life. A time when she’d felt safe. Protected. Loved. Life was perfect.

Then her mother had died.

She and her father had stayed on the ranch for a month before she’d moved in with Auntie Josie at age eight.

From that time until she was nineteen, Evangeline had spent her spare time in the store helping her aunt manage it for her father. When her aunt decided she wanted to live closer to her sister, she’d moved away, leaving Evangeline in charge for the past nine years.

Her father had promised she would get the store when she turned twenty-one. She was twenty-eight now and still no closer to full ownership.

Her throat thickened as she turned onto the road. Why did her father’s broken promises still bother her?

I’m not going to cry, she told herself, reminding herself of other disappointments as she clamped her hands on the steering wheel. I’m a big girl. I shouldn’t care about another broken promise.

I’m not going to cry.

And then she did precisely that.

* * *

Was that crying he heard?

Denny wove his shirt onto the metal hanger, dropped it onto the bar in the cupboard, then paused, listening.

But whatever he’d heard had stopped.

Must have imagined it, he thought, picking up another shirt. After touring the ranch with Evangeline Sunday, he had spent yesterday moving the few things he owned into the apartment. He had to finish today. Tomorrow he had to arrange to get the trucks moved and Friday he’d start work.

His yearlings were coming to the ranch in a couple of weeks. Which gave him time to do the work necessary to get the ranch ready.

He hooked the hanger on the bar in the closet, trying not to let his thoughts crowd in on him. Too much to do and too little time.

He paused.

There was that baby crying again. This was followed by the murmur of a woman’s voice. The crying grew louder, then stopped.

Then he heard someone pounding on his door.

He stepped around the last couple of boxes he had to unpack and opened the wooden door of his apartment.

A tall, thin woman with lanky brown hair stood in the hallway with her back to him. She wore blue jeans and a discolored purple hoodie. A black bag was hooked over one arm; a suitcase lay at her feet.

She was holding a little girl, who looked to be a year and a half old, wearing a stained, white sleeper. The toddler had sandy, curly hair, brown eyes shimmering with tears and a mustache of orange juice. She stared at him over the woman’s shoulder, her lip quivering.

“Can I help you?” Denny asked.

The woman turned and Denny’s heart fell like a stone as he recognized Deb.

His sister-in-law. Ex-sister-in-law, he corrected.

“Hey, Denny. Long time no see,” she said in her raspy, smoker’s voice. She jiggled the baby a moment, then held her up, handing her to Denny.

“Hang on to her a minute, wouldja?”

Not sure what else to do, Denny took the little girl, catching a whiff of cigarette smoke and old milk.

“What is going on?” he asked just as the toddler pushed at him with sticky hands, whimpering again.

Deb handed him the black diaper bag, then pushed the suitcase toward him with her sneakered foot. “You may as well know, and I don’t know how to tell you better than this, but Lila’s dead.”

Denny stared at her, his grip loosening on the baby in his shocked surprise.

The little girl whimpered and he quickly pulled her close again, trying to wrap his head around what Deb had so causally thrown at him.

Lila? Dead? Why hadn’t anyone told him?

“What? When?” The questions tumbled out of his shocked confusion. “How did it happen?”

“She got sick about three months ago,” Deb said, crossing her thin arms over her chest, looking down at the floor as if still remembering. “Got some infection from a cut. Never got better. She died in the hospital a month ago.”