Cait London - Last Dance

—From the journal of Anna Bennett, descendant of Magda Claas and the mother of Tanner Bennett.

Tanner Bennett expertly knelt on his mother’s roof and tore away the damaged shingles. Familiar to his hand, his father’s hammer was worn, a contrast to the new shingles he’d just patched into the old.

He inhaled Montana’s midmorning April air, and knew that his ex-wife would soon come calling to warn him off. He’d known Gwyneth all her life, and he sensed from the dark look she burned at him in the café that she wanted to set down her rules.

Too bad. He had rules of his own now, and he wasn’t feeling friendly.

From the top of the two-story home, he scanned the small rural town he’d left eighteen years ago. Nestled in Freedom Valley, a lush valley blanketed with fields and cattle and cradled by soaring, snowcapped mountains, Freedom—the town—was quiet. Down the country road that led to town, babies were napping, housewives were cleaning, store clerks were waiting on customers, and the café crowd was gossiping over morning coffee. Freedom Valley hadn’t changed. Birthed by single women united for their protection in the 1880s, their traditions remained in their descendants. Lives and families blended through the years, the descendants’ colorful names proudly stamped with immigrant heritage, biblical reference and popular contemporary ones. The town’s square was lined by two-story buildings, little changed since Montana’s cattle-drive days.

In the distance, just past pickup trucks lined around the feed store, and up the street from the florist, his mother rested in a tiny, well-tended cemetery. An auto accident had taken her life too soon—on a fog-draped country highway, Anna never saw the semitruck at the highway intersection. Beside her grave lay Paul Bennett’s, her husband, victim of a heart attack when Tanner was only twelve.

At thirty-six now, Tanner felt old memories rustle to life, the slight breeze stirring the leaves of an oak tree nearby, while sunlight danced upon Anna Bennett’s beloved home. Not far from town, the twenty-acre farm was neat from the chicken house to the pasture to the vegetable garden. In Anna’s sunporch, the impatiens and tomato plants she’d started from seed waited to be put into her gardens. Tiny feed-store sacks of lettuce, green beans and cucumber seed lay in a neat row as if she couldn’t wait to plant them.

Tanner scrubbed his hand across the aching tightness within his bare chest. In the six weeks since her death, he’d cleared away his business commitments on the Northwest Pacific coast—building handcrafted, custom-order, wooden fishing boats had suited him. In his absence, a good friend would handle his business there.

Tanner scanned the small farm and wondered how his widowed mother had managed her young brood, to see them safely into their lives. He’d come back to visit his mother through the years, but what held her here, in this tiny place? Anna Bennett never complained through her hardships. What was the source of her strength? What gave her such peace?

Peace. Would he ever find peace?

The church’s white spire shot into the clear blue Montana sky. Twelve years ago, he’d been married there, a young man with his blushing, sweet bride tucked against his side, heading off into a bright new future away from Freedom.

But that first night, Gwyneth Smith Bennett had been terrified, running from him, and despite his determination and patience, the marriage ended—without consummation.

A white panel van soared into Anna’s driveway. Scrawled along the side, a purple and pink Gwen’s Pots announced his ex-wife—information mischievously tossed at him by Willa, owner of Willa’s Wagon Wheel Café, and incumbent mayor of Freedom. According to Leonard at the gas station, Gwen’s van got good mileage, needed a tuneup and so did she.

One week in Freedom’s close-knit community provided more information than he’d wanted about his ex-wife—not that he’d asked. In a small town, lives weren’t that private.

His hand stilled over his heart, the one she’d torn to shreds years ago. He’d rebuilt his life without her, and he regretted the momentary sharp clench of pain that just looking at her could bring.

When a man’s pride was badly stomped by a woman, he wasn’t likely to forget.

Tanner inhaled sharply as she stepped briskly out of the van, her short blond hair gleaming in the sun. She looked like a boy, not a thirty-two-year-old woman, until he took in that compact, curved body. Gwyneth Smith Bennett, dressed in a T-shirt and cutoff bib overalls that showed off the tanned length of her legs above her practical work boots, wasn’t happy. Her scowl shot around Anna’s untended herbal and vegetable gardens, the sheds and the chicken house to the small field bordering the Smith ranch. She swung open the gate of the white picket fence and glanced at a large branch, broken free by the storm, on the freshly cut lawn. Then she marched up the stone walkway, usually bordered by summer flowers, past the new green starts of the yellow and red Dutch tulip bed, past the concrete birdbath filled with leaves and up onto the front porch, out of Tanner’s sight. The old brass door knocker sounded briskly and then Gwyneth appeared, marching around the side of the two-story house.

“Oh, Gwynnie…” he called lightly from the rooftop, unable to resist the tease of long ago.

She stopped in midstep and her face jerked upward. Stark in the bright sunlight, Gwyneth’s expression tightened into a scowl. The woman’s face had been honed from the girl’s that he had loved and married—had he really loved her? Or had he wanted to protect her from her overbearing and possessive father?

No, it was more than that, and he’d paid a heavy price.

Gwyneth’s mouth tightened—he remembered instantly how sweet that little cupid bow tasted all those years ago—perfect and virginal. Now, her hazel eyes weren’t happily filled with him, and beneath those dark arching eyebrows, brilliant anger lashed at him. The peach-gold skin across her cheekbones gleamed, her expression darkening. In her dark mood, her jaw had the locked set of old Leather’s, her father. Without missing a beat, she moved to the wooden ladder he’d braced against the house, walked it backward and let it drop to the grass.

“When are you leaving? It isn’t soon enough,” she shot up to him, her hands braced on her waist.

Tanner settled back on his haunches; the furious woman on the ground below. While visiting Anna, he’d met her accidentally several times; they hadn’t spoken, an icy mountain of pain and anger standing between them. He didn’t like the ugly fury within him at first, and later a cold distance seemed safer. This lean and shapely woman little resembled the frightened twenty-year-old girl who had run from their first night as husband and wife. He’d never forget the sight of her as he walked to their bed in that hotel—wide-eyed fear that had eventually ended a marriage never begun. They were both older now, and he wasn’t letting her push him. At one time, he’d been very careful of her; but that time was gone. “I’ll leave when I’m ready.”

“I hear down at Livingston’s Hardware that you’re fixing up Anna’s place to sell. I suppose you’ll be leaving, going back to your big Northwest Pacific coast custom-made fishing boat business, right?”

Apparently, the gossips had been working Gwyneth, too. Her eyes flashed with an impatience and anger that was new to Tanner. “I’m flattered that you’re interested in my life, Gwynnie.”

“Do not call me ‘Gwynnie.’ I’m not six anymore and I don’t have a crush on you any longer. I’m not interested in anything about you. I just want you out of town. You came back a week ago, and the gossip is already flying. I can’t walk down the street without someone mentioning that you’re back in town and looking at me as if they expect—well, never mind. This is my town. I’ve stayed. I haven’t been heading off for college, or teaching in Kansas City, or traveling around the world in the merchant marine. I’ve stayed right here and took care of Pop and now that he’s gone, I’m running the ranch. It won’t work with the both of us here, not with what everybody knows about—”