A Promise of Forever (28 page)

“It was no big deal.” His family had needed him. Of course they’d come first.

Brianne scowled at him. “It was a very big deal. You settled, Ben—on your school, your residency, your practice, your life. I know other clinics and hospitals have tried to lure you away with offers doubling what you’re making here. But you’ve always settled for what was best for us instead of what you wanted.”

So
that
was where she was going with it: She was weaving a little trail to Augusta. To Avi.

He hid his smile. “Yeah, I was a little disappointed that I couldn’t live in Stillwater.”

“Or go to Baylor for medical school.”

Or apply for a residency at Massachusetts General or the Cleveland Clinic. “I’m happy with the education and training I got. After all, my reputation is good enough to get those job offers that would double my income.” He didn’t spend what he already made, and his roots had been planted deep in Tulsa.

But he’d realized in all those painful moments alone that a healthy tree’s roots had to spread far beyond the tree itself. If they didn’t grow deep and wide, the tree would never survive the first drought or strong wind. They could spread halfway across the country—halfway across the world, if needed.

“Well, you know what, Ben? Sara and me—we’re all grown up. We have jobs and homes and pay our bills and everything. Truth is, we don’t
need
you the way we used to.”

Overhearing, Sara left the table and came to sit on the coffee table in front of them. “Way to be tactful, Bree.”

Brianne’s frown matched Sara’s. “You try tactfully telling someone you don’t need him, O master of subtlety.”

Ben couldn’t help smiling at her taunt. Sara and subtlety didn’t belong in the same sentence. It was a fact: Their younger sister was blunt. She didn’t coax or wheedle; she demanded. There was never a question of what she wanted. She made it crystal clear from the start.

“You’ll always be the head of our family, Ben,” Brianne went on. “The one we go to when we need help, the one we depend on to
be
there. You’ll always be in charge.” Then she very softly added, “But we’re grown enough now that you can be in charge from a distance.”

Ben angled toward her. “Just a week or two ago, you were in my office wanting me to promise that I wouldn’t move away. Why the change of heart?”

“Because now I see how much you miss Avi. Besides, haven’t you heard that home is where the heart is? And your heart is
not
here. If I loved Nigel—really loved him—I’d move to Chicago with him in a heartbeat. And look at Mom. She moved new places every few years, and it was okay because she was with George, and she would have lived on Mars to be with him. Besides—” Her voice quieted to what Ben thought of as her tattling voice. “Sara said I made the biggest fuss, so I had to be the one to undo it.”

“Bree!” Sara pinched Brianne’s knee, making her jump and squeal.

“Ben!” Brianne shrieked, and he automatically responded, “
Sara
.”

Sara reached out to pat his knee, and he automatically moved away to avoid a pinch. She graced him with a frown, then stuck out her tongue at him. “Listen, bubba—”

Bubba.
She hadn’t called him that since she was still little enough to need tucking into bed at night.

“I’ve got to get my tribe to the game so they can get their picture taken with Hornsby. You can come, too, but I don’t think even posing with a blue bull will cheer you up. Personally, I’d prefer you stay here and pack some bags because you know what? You’re not gonna be happy in Tulsa without Avi, so you just gotta go where she is. And we want you to be happy. Really. You’ve earned it.”

With a squeeze of his knee that was a little harder than strictly necessary, Sara stood, but before she could gather the others, he caught her hand, pulling her down again. He also took Brianne’s hand in his. Theirs were smaller, softer, more delicate, but every bit as capable as they needed to be. Brianne was right: They
were
all grown up. Imagine that.

“You know what?” he began, his voice unsteady. “My job is just a job. I can always get another one. And the loft…it’s nothing special. But the three of us—we’re always going to be together no matter how far apart we are. So I’m taking your advice. I’m going to Augusta today, and I’m going to ask Avi to marry me, and wherever the Army sends her, I’m going, too.”

Their shrieks hurt his ears as they both grabbed him in a fierce hug. He held on just as tightly for a long moment before gently disentangling himself. “I’ll have to come back to settle things here, and you and the kids will have to teach me how to Skype. But right now, you’d better head over to the field. You never know how much fun you might have with a blue bull.”

Once Sara and Brianne had herded everyone out, he went to his bedroom, pulling a suitcase from the back of the closet, tossing clothes into it. With his cell braced between his shoulder and ear, he called Patricia. Her
hello
, cheerful and happy and light, took him back twenty-five years and made him smile, really smile, for the first time in a week.

“Remember last Friday when you said ‘Drink the wine. If someone needs you tonight, they’ll just have to settle for second best’?”

She chuckled. “It sounds like something I’d say.”

“You know what? In my career—my
job
—second best is good enough. I might have been named the best, but there’s nothing I can do that the second-best surgeon in town can’t also do. And I’ll always be Bree and Sara’s big brother, but I can do that long distance. I can be your son long distance.” His voice got a little unsteady, and he swallowed hard to steady it. “But I’m the only man who can love Avi the way she deserves to be loved, and I can’t do that long distance, not and do it justice.”

His mother could get weepy faster than anyone he knew. “Oh, sweetie…I’m going to miss you so much, but it’ll be the best kind of missing there is. When are you leaving?”

“My flight leaves in two hours.”

“Are you surprising her?”

“Yeah. It’s a kind of thing that should be done in person, don’t you think?”

“I do. Call me.”

“I will. So often that you’ll wish I was back here so I’d leave you alone.”

She choked up again. “Never, Ben.”

He tossed in his toothbrush, toothpaste, and razor, then zipped his bag and started toward the door. “I love you, Mom.”

With that, as he’d known she would, she burst into tears.

Saturday afternoon in a new town, familiar though it was, was a lonely place to be. Avi stretched out on the couch with Sadie near her feet, flipping through an insane number of channels on the television to find one that she could bear to watch for more than five minutes.

Her workdays hadn’t been awful. She’d kept busy from the time she reported to the office until she drove out the main gate of Fort Gordon every afternoon. She’d become friendly with some of her fellow instructors. She’d gotten familiar with her neighborhood and spent a lot of quality time with Sadie.

Today, though, with nowhere to go and nothing to do, had been brutal.

It was okay. Tomorrow would be better. Next Saturday she would make plans to go shopping, to a movie, or out clubbing with her new friends. Next Sunday she and Sadie would go for a long drive, maybe to Clarks Hill Lake. She, Jolie, Kerry, Rosemary, and Paulette had had a lot of good times there back when they were going through Signal school.

Realizing she’d gone through all however many hundred channels, she turned off the TV, tossed the remote onto the cushions, and scanned the apartment for something to do. Sadie had fresh water. The dishes were done. She’d vacuumed and dusted that morning, scrubbed the toilet, and done a load of laundry. She’d bought groceries at the commissary last night and had enough leftovers from lunch’s takeout for dinner.

Then her gaze wandered to her phone. She could call her parents, but she’d talked to them three times already this week. She could call Patricia, but it would just make her blue. She could try to catch Jolie or Rosemary or Kerry, but surely Jolie was busy with the kids on a Saturday afternoon, and she wasn’t up to figuring time differences for Germany or Korea.

Truth was, there was only one person she wanted to talk to, and she shouldn’t call him. Shouldn’t, wouldn’t, couldn’t.

Sadie lowered her front feet to the floor, stretched long and hard, then hopped off the couch and trotted to the door, where she sat politely and waited.

Despite her melancholy, Avi checked her watch, then laughed. If this was a typical weekday, she would have been climbing the stairs about now, then opening the door to find her sweet girl waiting for her. Since she was already here, she decided Sadie’s behavior was a quiet request for a walk. That was the first thing she did after work every day: change out of her uniform and take Sadie out.

She stood up, stuck her cell in her pocket, and got the leash. The sun was shining, the pines that lined the trail were sweet-smelling, and schedules were good for dogs, right? After tucking the last two of the cookies Lucy had made for Sadie into her pocket, Avi hooked on the leash and walked out the door.

Her second-floor apartment opened onto a small stoop shared with the apartment across from hers, then directly onto stairs that made a straight shot to the sidewalk. She was holding the leash loosely in one hand while locking the door with the other when the dog plunged forward, jerking free and racing down the stairs, the leash a bouncing lime-green blur behind her.

“Sadie!” Gripping the handrail, Avi ran after her. The dog was so well behaved that she didn’t even so much as tug on the leash when they walked. Avi couldn’t have been more surprised by her behavior until she raced around the corner at the foot of the steps and skidded to a faltering stop.

Sadie was sitting in the grass ten feet ahead, not just her tail but her entire body quivering. Bent over her, giving her ears a good scratch, was Ben.

Slowly he raised his gaze from the dog to her, and a look came into his eyes that was so intense, it made
her
entire body quiver. “Hey, gorgeous.”

“Hey, Doc,” she said, and her voice trembled on those two small syllables. “What are you doing so far from home?”

“I’m not far at all.” Straightening, he closed the distance between them, standing very, very close to her, so that all she would have to do to touch him was lift her fingers a bit. “Haven’t you heard that home is where the heart is?”

Her eyes grew watery with no breeze to blame it on. “What about your career?”

“It’s portable. I’m guessing people injure or wear out hips, knees, and ankles here just as much as they do in Tulsa.”

Her voice got softer, wobblier. “What about your loft?”

He shrugged. “I’ll probably sell it. It really won’t suit us once we move back to Oklahoma. We’ll need a second bedroom, and a third and probably a fourth.”

Marriage. Babies. Happily-ever-after. They were going to get it, after all. Every bit of it. Just the thought made her heart do a little happy dance in her chest. “What about your sisters?”

He grinned sheepishly. “They informed me today that they’re all grown up and that I can boss them as well from here as there. What they didn’t mention was that they can ignore me all the more easily from here than from there.”

Everything inside Avi softened and melted and turned all girly and gooey. They would be all right, she’d told herself the night before leaving Tallgrass, and she’d believed it, in a long-time-comin’ sort of way. In a year or two or eight.

But he’d proven her wrong. He had left everything he loved because he loved her more. They
would
be all right, starting from this very moment, forever and ever.

She lifted her fingers those few inches and touched him for the first time in more than a week. It felt sweet and wonderful, like being made whole again after losing a part of herself. Raising her other hand to cup his cheek, she grinned a million-watt grin. “I love you, Doc.”

He kissed her, the kind of kiss that made her weak-kneed and easy, that stole her breath and made her nerves tingle. Then he took Sadie’s leash in one hand, Avi’s hand in the other, and said, “Let’s walk the baby.”

His smile turned wicked. “And then you can show me just how much.”

Y
ou can’t go home again,
someone had famously said.

Someone else had added,
But that’s okay, because you can’t ever really leave home in the first place.

Calvin Sweet was home. If he tried real hard, he could close his eyes and recall every building lining the blocks, the sound of the afternoon train, the smells coming from the restaurants. He could recognize the feel of the sun on his face, the breeze blowing across his skin, the very scent of the air he breathed. It smelled of prairie and woodland and livestock and sandstone and oil and history and home.

There were times he’d wanted to be here so badly that he’d hurt with it. Times he’d thought he would never see it again. Times he’d wanted to never see it—or anything else—again. Ironically enough, it was trying to ensure that he would never come back except in a box that had brought him alive and unwell.

He didn’t close his eyes. Didn’t need a moment to take it all in. Didn’t want to see reminders of the streets where he’d grown up, where he’d laughed and played and lived and learned with an innocence that was difficult to remember. He just stared out the windows, letting nothing register but disquiet. Shame. Bone-deep weariness. It wasn’t that he didn’t want to be in Tallgrass. He didn’t want to be anywhere.

“You have family in the area,” the driver said, glancing his way.

It was the first time the corporal had spoken in twenty miles. He’d tried to start a couple of conversations at the airport in Tulsa and in the first half of the trip, but Calvin hadn’t had anything to say. He still didn’t, but he dredged up a response. “Yeah. Right here in town.”

When the Army sent troops to the Warrior Transition Units, they tried to send them to the one closest to home so the family could be part of the soldier’s recovery. Calvin’s mama, his daddy, his grandma and aunties and uncles and cousins—they were all dedicated to being there for him. Whether he wanted them or not.

“How long you been away?”

“Eleven years.” Sometimes it seemed impossible that it could have been so long. He remembered being ten and fourteen and eighteen like it was just weeks ago. Riding his bike with J’Myel and Bennie. Going fishing. Dressing up in white shirt and trousers every Sunday for church—black in winter, khaki in summer. Playing baseball and basketball. Going to the drive-in movie, graduating from grade school to middle school to high school with J’Myel and Bennie. The Three Musketeers. The Three Stooges.

The best memories of his life. He’d never thought it possible that
All for one and one for all!
could become
two against one
, then
one and one
. J’Myel had turned against him. Had married Bennie. Had gotten his damn self killed. He hadn’t spoken to Calvin three years before he died, and Bennie, forced to choose, had cut him off, too. He hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Hadn’t been welcome at the funeral.

With a grimace, he rubbed the ache in his forehead. Remembering hurt. If the docs could give him a magic pill that wiped his memory clean, he’d take it. All the good memories in his head weren’t worth even one of the bad ones.

At the last stoplight on the way out of town, the corporal shifted into the left lane, then turned onto the road that led to the main gates of Fort Murphy. Sandstone arches stood on each side, as impressive now as they’d been when he was a little kid outside looking in. Just past the guard shack stood a statue of the post’s namesake, Audie Murphy, the embodiment of two things Oklahomans valued greatly: cowboys and war heroes. Despite being scrawny black kids and not knowing a damn thing about horses, he and J’Myel had wanted to be Audie when they grew up.

At least they’d managed the war hero part, if the medals they’d been given could be believed. They’d both earned a chestful of them on their tours in Iraq and Afghanistan.

With a deep breath, he fixed his gaze outside the windows, forcing himself to concentrate on nothing that wasn’t right there in front of him. They were passing a housing area now, the houses cookie cutter in size and floor plan, the lawns neatly mowed and yellowed now. October, and already Oklahoma had had two snows, with another predicted in the next few days. Most of the trees still bore their autumn leaves, though, in vivid reds and yellows and rusts and golds, and yellow and purple pansies bloomed in the beds marking the entrances to each neighborhood.

They passed signs for the gym, the commissary, the exchange, barracks and offices and the Warrior Transition Unit. Their destination was the hospital, where he would be checked in and checked out to make sure nothing had changed since he’d left the hospital at Joint Base Lewis-McChord in Washington that morning. He tried to figure out how he felt about leaving there, about coming here—psychiatrists were big on feelings—but the truth was, he didn’t care one way or the other.

His career was pretty much over. No matter how good a soldier he’d been, the Army didn’t have a lot of use for a captain who’d tried to kill himself. They’d diagnosed him with posttraumatic stress disorder, the most common injury suffered by military personnel in the war on terror, and they’d started him in counseling while arranging a transfer to Fort Murphy. Soon he would be separated from the Army, but they would make a stab at putting him back together before they let him go.

But when some things were broken, they stayed broken. Nothing could change that.

Within an hour, Calvin was settled in his room. He hated the way people had looked at his medical record, hated the way they’d looked at him.
He’s a nut job, a weak one. Killed the enemy in the war but couldn’t even manage to kill himself. What a loser.

More likely, those were his thoughts, not the staff’s.

He sat on the bed, then slowly lay back. He could function on virtually no sleep—he’d done it too many times to count—but sometimes his body craved it. Not in the normal way, not eight or nine hours a night, but twenty-hour stretches of near unconsciousness. It was his brain’s way of shutting down, he guessed, of keeping away things he couldn’t deal with. He could go to sleep right now, but it wouldn’t last long, because his parents were coming to see him soon, and Elizabeth Sweet wouldn’t let a little thing like sleep deter her from hugging and kissing her only son.

Slowly he sat up again. His hands shook at the thought of facing his parents, and his gut tightened. Elizabeth and Justice hadn’t raised a coward. They’d taught him to honor God, country, and family, to stand up for himself and others, to be strong and capable, and he’d failed. He’d tried to kill himself. He knew that sentence was repeating endlessly, disbelievingly, not just in his head but also in theirs.

He was ashamed of himself.

But he’d do it again given the chance. The only difference would be the next time he would succeed. No public park, even if he’d never once seen anyone there in all the times he’d been, and no misguided teenage punks to intervene. Diez was the name of his particular punk. After “saving” Calvin’s life, he’d stolen his wallet and car and disappeared. Some people got the Good Samaritan. He got the thieving one.

Announcements sounded over the intercom, calling staff here or there, and footsteps moved quickly up and down the hall, answering call buttons, checking patients. Calvin sat in the bed and listened, hearing everything and nothing, screening out all the extraneous noises until he heard the one he was listening for: the slow, heavy tread of his father’s work-booted feet. Justice had a limp—arthritis in knees punished by years laying floor tile—and the resulting imbalance in his steps was as familiar to Calvin as his father’s voice.

The steps stopped outside his door. Calvin took a deep breath and imagined his parents doing the same. He slid to his feet as the door slowly swung open and his mom and dad just as slowly came inside. For a moment, they stared at him, and he stared back, until Elizabeth gave a cry and rushed across the room to wrap her arms around him.

She was shorter, rounder, and he had to duck his head to rest his cheek against her head, but he felt just as small and vulnerable as he ever had. There’d never been a thing in his life that Mom couldn’t make better with a hug—until now—and that just about broke his heart.

It seemed forever before she lifted her head, released him enough to get a good look at him. Tears glistened in her eyes, and her smile wobbled as she cupped her hand to his jaw. “Oh, son, it’s good to see you.” Her gaze met his, darted away, then came back with a feeble attempt at humor. “Or would you prefer that I call you sweet baby boy of mine?”

He managed to phony up a smile, or at least a loosening of his facial muscles, at the memory of her response when he’d complained about being called
son
in front of his friends. “Son is fine.” His voice was gravelly, his throat tight.

“You know, I can come up with something even worse.” But there was no promise behind her words, none of that smart mouth that she lived up to quite nicely most of the time. She was shooting for normal, but he and she could both see there was nothing normal about this situation.

Justice stepped forward. “Move on over a bit, Lizzie. Let a man give his only boy a welcome-home hug.” His voice was gravelly, too, but it always had been, rough-edged and perfect for booming out
amen
s in church or controlling small boys with no more than a sharp-edged word.

Elizabeth stepped aside, and Justice took his turn. His hug was strong and enveloping and smelled of fabric softener and the musky aftershave he’d worn longer than Calvin had been alive. It was so familiar, one of those memories that never faded, and it reminded Calvin of the person he used to be. The one he’d liked. The one who could do anything, be anything, survive anything, and prosper.

The one he would never be again.

After his dad released him, they all stared at each other again. Calvin had never seen them looking so uncomfortable, shifting their weight, wanting to smile but not sure they should or could. His fault.

The psychiatrist in Washington had tried to prepare him for this initial meeting, for the embarrassment and awkwardness and guilt and disappointment. For no one knowing what to say or how to say it. For the need to be honest and open and accepting and forgiving.

Calvin had been too lost in his misery—and too angry at Diez—to pay attention.

Should he point out the elephant sitting in the middle of the room? Just set his parents down and blurt it out?
Sorry, Mom and Dad, I tried to kill myself, but it wasn’t you, it was me, all my fault. Sorry for any distress I caused. Now that we’ve talked about it, we don’t ever need to
do it again. So…how’s that high school football coach working out?

And, as an aside:
Oh, yeah, that suicide thing…I’m getting help and I haven’t tried anything since. We’re cool, right?

At least, until he did try again.

His throat worked hard on a swallow, his jaw muscles clenched, and his gut was tossing about like a leaf in a storm, but he managed to force air into his lungs, to force words out of his mouth. “So…it was cold outside when I got here.”

“Dropped to about thirty-eight degrees,” Justice answered. “Wind chill’s down in the twenties. The weather guys are saying an early winter and a hard one.”

“What’s Gran say?”

Elizabeth’s smile was shaky. “She says every winter’s hard when you’re seventy-six and have the arthritis in your joints.”

“She wanted to come with us, but…” Justice finished with a wave of his hands. “You know Emmeline.”

That Calvin did. Emmeline would have cried. Would have knelt on the cold tile and said a prayer of homecoming. Would have demanded he bend so she could give him a proper hug, and then she would have grabbed his ear in her tightest grip and asked him what in tarnation he’d been thinking. She would have reminded him of all the switchings she’d given him and would have promised to snatch his hair right out of his scalp if he even thought about such a wasteful thing again.

He loved her. He wanted to see her. But gratitude washed over him that it didn’t have to be tonight.

“Your auntie Sarah was asking after you,” Elizabeth said. “She and her boys are coming up from Oklahoma City for Thanksgiving. Hannah and her family’s coming from Norman, and Auntie Mae said all three of her kids would be here, plus her nine grandbabies. They’re all just so anxious to see you.”

Calvin hoped he was keeping his face in a sort of pleasantly blank way, but a glimpse of his reflection in the window proved otherwise. He looked like his eyes might just pop out of his head. He’d known he would see family—more than he wanted and more quickly than he wanted—but Thanksgiving was less than a month away. Way too soon for a family reunion.

His mother went on, still naming names, adding the special potluck dishes various relatives were known for, throwing in a few tidbits about marriages and divorces and new babies, talking faster and cheerier until Justice laid his hand over hers just as her voice ran out of steam. “I don’t think he needs to hear about all that right now. You know, it took me a long time to build up the courage”—his gaze flashed to Calvin’s, then away—“to get used to your family. All those people, all that noise. Calvin’s been away awhile. He might need some time to adjust to being back before you spring that three-ring circus on him.”

Elizabeth’s face darkened with discomfort. “Of course. I mean, it’s a month away. And it’ll be at Auntie Mae’s house so there will be plenty of places to get away for a while. Whatever you want, son, that’s what we’ll do.”

They chattered a few more minutes, then took their leave, hugging Calvin again, telling him they missed him and loved him, Justice thanking God he was home. Her hand on the door frame, Elizabeth turned back. “I don’t suppose…church tomorrow, family dinner after…It would just be you and me and your daddy and Gran…”

Calvin swallowed hard, looking away from the hopefulness on her face. “I, uh, don’t think I can leave here yet. Being a weekend, they’re a little slow getting things settled.”