Mary Sullivan - No Ordinary Sheriff

She sped to the hospital. By the time she got there, Tom had slipped into a coma.

There was nothing they could do for him but keep him on life support and wait for a change, the doctors said. What did that mean? Were they waiting for his death?

She stood by his bedside. The terrifying image of him with tubes running everywhere was burned onto her retinas.

Slipping the photo under his limp hand, she gave instructions for it to stay near him, either on his body or on the bedside table.

She brushed too-long hair from his sweaty forehead and willed her tears away. Better to be angry. Furious.

“I’ll get whoever did this to you,” she whispered with an intensity she hadn’t felt since Janey’s rape. “I’ll crush them.”

“Shannon?”

She turned around. Dad. Who had called him? Dave? Good. He’d done something right.

“Tom’s bad.” Her voice cracked and she moved into her father’s arms. As usual, though, she ended up comforting him more than receiving comfort. Dad had fallen apart after Mom’s death, too, but that time it had been Janey who’d held the family together. These days, with Janey living in Ordinary raising her own family, the job had fallen to Shannon.

She called the twins to tell them what had happened and then held her father while he cried. She’d deal with her own grief later.

* * *

“FRANK?” SHERIFF CASH KAVENAGH stood behind his desk in the Sheriff’s office in Ordinary, Montana, and stared at the man who was technically his father. “What the hell are you doing here?”

Francis Kavenagh might have shared his DNA with Cash, but he hadn’t given much else of himself to his son.

Autumn sunlight streaming through the office’s open door limned Frank’s once-broad shoulders. He was shorter than Cash remembered.

Behind him, cars drove by on Main Street. A junker Cash didn’t recognize sat at the curb. Frank’s?

One of Main Street’s shop owners walked along the sidewalk, but didn’t glance at the stranger. Thank God. A brisk November wind blew in. Another ordinary day in Ordinary. Or not. Cash’s father was here.

Cash’s eyes weren’t deceiving him, though. Nor was his nose. It was Frank, all right. He still wore the same old lady-killer cologne—Kanøn—applied with a heavy hand. It had been popular thirty or more years ago.

“Why are you here?” Cash asked again, the belligerence in his tone unintentional. He came by his attitude toward Frank honestly. Life had taught him to distrust the man.

“I wanted to see you.” Frank’s voice had weakened, didn’t have the authority it used to.

Pushing sixty, he looked closer to seventy. He’d been vain about his thick head of hair, but most of it was gone, the remaining yellow-gray like an old bedsheet. Sort of matched the tone of his skin.

“I told you to never come to Ordinary,” Cash said.

“I know.”

“Get in here and close the door before someone sees you.”

Frank did.

Broken veins dotted his cheeks and the creases of his nostrils.

“You look like hell. I guess the hard living finally caught up.”

Frank winced. “Yeah.” He stepped toward the desk. “Can I sit?”

Cash nodded. He didn’t want the man here, should boot him out, but— He seemed unwell. Cash didn’t care, but couldn’t turn him away.

“I tried to talk to your mother.” Frank fell into the chair with a sigh that started in the soles of his shoes. “She wouldn’t see me.”

“She’s happy now.” Cash sat down on the business side of the desk. “She got herself a good husband the second time around. Leave her alone.”

“I figured that out.” In a gesture so familiar it hurt to watch, Frank ran his hand over his head as if fixing his non-existent hair. “I need to tie up certain things. Make them right.”

“‘Tie up things?’ What is this, some kind of deathbed confession scenario?” Despite the joke, unease circled in Cash’s gut.

A cynical smile spread across Dad’s face, colored with sadness. “Yes.”

Cash froze. “Seriously?”

“Yeah. Cirrhosis of the liver. End-stage. I wanted to see you before I…go. To apologize for the way I treated you and your mom.”

“It’s been twenty years.”

“I know.”

“You couldn’t have apologized before now?”

“I should have.”

“I thought you didn’t care.”

Frank stared at him. “For a long time I thought I didn’t, about either you or your mother.”

“Yeah, I got that.”

Frank met Cash’s bitter smile with a grim one of his own.

“I know I don’t deserve a thing from you—”

“You got that right.”

“—but I want you to know that you and your mom were the best thing that ever happened to me.”

“It sure didn’t feel that way.”

Frank glanced away and nodded. “It took losing you two for me to realize it.”

“So, what do you want from me? Money?” Man, that bitterness was giving everything Cash said a real hard edge.

“No, son. Nothing. I came for you, not for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I was a rotten role model. You never got married and had kids.”

“That has nothing to do with you.” So what if Frank’s concerns echoed his own? He’d tried to find someone to settle down with—honest to God he had—but that was nobody’s business but Cash’s. Particularly not Frank’s.

Frank had never appreciated Cash and his mom, yet Frank thought he had to right to criticize Cash for not having married yet?

You’ve been worried about that yourself a lot lately.

So what? That’s my right. Not Frank’s.

Besides, Cash was only thirty-six. Who knew what could happen in the next few years?

Frank raised a placating hand. “Okay. I’m sorry. For everything.”

Frank’s dry-eyed apology moved Cash more than tears would have. What he wouldn’t have given for this sincere, humbled man to have been his father twenty years ago. Cash resisted the apology.

“You’re a dollar short and a day late. I don’t need anything from you.”

“I can see that, Cash. You’ve done well for yourself. I asked around.”

“Who did you talk to?” Someone here in town? Cash felt a moment’s panic.

“Don’t worry. I did it long distance. You have a good reputation in the area.” Frank stood. “You’re a better man than I was. I’m proud of you.”

“Am I supposed to go all gooey and soft now? After you neglected me and mom during the marriage and since the divorce?”

“I know. It’s not much, is it? But it’s true.”

He didn’t know what to say. The man looked bad enough to elicit sympathy, but all of those years of anger backed up in Cash’s throat. Choked him. Strangled every decent word he might have said.

Frank gripped the door handle and Cash’s heart rate kicked up despite his anger, the child in him preparing to watch his father walk out of his life again.

“I just hope you find a good woman to love,” Frank said. “And don’t waste the opportunity like I did with your mother.”

“Don’t you worry about me,” Cash countered. “There are plenty of women in town who’d be happy to take up that position.”

Cash wasn’t boasting. He knew it from experience.

“Good.” Frank opened the door to leave.

Cash held his tongue. They’d said enough.

“I know you won’t believe me, Cash, but I love you.”

With that Frank was gone.

In the weighty silence left behind, Cash breathed heavily, trying not to succumb to regret and maudlin sympathy. Frank had forged his own way.

Cash’s hands formed into fists and he leaned on them on the desk, hard, so he wouldn’t run after Frank.

Even so, when the doorknob turned, his heart lifted.