Follow A Wild Heart (romance,) (27 page)

Her tears began slowly, and in minutes they were raining down on the ungainly sandwiches she was slapping together. A grubby hand came to rest tentatively on her shoulder, and Danny's subdued voice said, "Don't cry, Mom." He patted her clumsily, and when the tears kept right on, he took charge. "Here's a roll of tissue, go sit down and I'll finish these, the soup's boiling over already."

She'd read somewhere that in old age, the parent becomes the child, and obviously it was happening sooner in her case. She collapsed in a chair and gave way to several moments of blissful sobbing before she made a real effort to control herself and smile shakily at her son, now slopping soup into bowls and putting the thick sandwiches on the table.

He shot uneasy glances at her. How long had it been since he'd seen her in tears? She'd always made sure he wasn't around if she absolutely had to cry. That brought another realization, and she sniffed and said, "Did you hear your grampa and I having a fight just then?"

He nodded, and then considered. "Well, I sure heard you telling him off. And what you said was right, Mom. I was really proud of you. Grampa's tough to get along with, all right. I think he needed a talking-to, like you give me sometimes." He frowned and cast her another wary glance.

"But, Mom, you said that about Logan to Grampa, and it sounded like— Will Logan be coming up next weekend, Mom? He'll be here, won't he?"

Her son's hopeful, clear gaze was almost more than she could bear. She drew a shuddering breath and shook her head.

"No, Danny, he won't be. The field sessions are over and he's back in St. Paul, you know that."

How much else should she tell him? It wasn't fair to let him keep hoping that sooner or later Logan would reappear in their lives. It wasn't going to happen; she'd made certain of that. Danny would have to be told.

"Logan and I aren't seeing each other anymore, Danny." He stopped eating and stared at her in consternation. "You had a fight with him, too? Same as you and Grampa? Gee, Mom, just go tell him you're sorry. Logan's a neat guy; he'll say it's okay."

His reaction illustrated more than anything how much he idolized Logan. Her son automatically put all the blame for the breakup on her.

But then, so had Abigail.

Karena felt too miserable even to cry this time.

"It's not that easy, Danny." How to explain relationships and their intricacies to him, when she barely understood them herself?

"Look, we'll talk on the drive to the hospital. Is the stove going in the washhouse? I haven't even showered yet."

"But you didn't eat, and I made the soup special," he said plaintively. "Gee, Mom, I always have to eat what you cook."

He ate what she cooked, and he lived with the decisions she made about their lives, right or wrong, whether he agreed with them or not, because he was a child. Her child.

He was totally dependent on her, at least until he was older, and she knew it would be impossible to make him understand why Logan could no longer be a part of their lives.

He'd resent her for it, the way she resented her own father for his stubborn attitude toward Gabe, his narrowmindedness, his attempt to control her life.

Well, there was no comparison between the two situations.

Her father was totally unwilling to compromise, that was his problem.

She forced as much of the soup down as she could without choking, using the remnants of her will to keep herself from formulating the question that logically followed that conclusion about Otis. It sneaked into her brain anyway, and she got up from the table and hurried out to the bathhouse, running from it.

Inside the door, the warmth and silence of the cedar smelling room engulfed her, but the question was there waiting for her.

How about you, Karena? How willing are you to compromise? Aren
'
t you reacting exactly like your father?

Chapter Eleven

Logan was in a meeting. The large private company that had sponsored his department's latest research grant had sent a committee to assess the advisability of renewing the sizable fund for another year. Logan read the fifth and sixth pages of the pamphlet he and his colleagues had put together as a sample of what they were doing.

It was a study titled, "Economical Methods of Decreasing Moisture Content of Green Wood Chips: Resultant Energy Benefits."

Not one single word in the whole thing made sense to him, and he'd supervised the study and written the paper himself.

Before Karena. Everything he did now seemed divided into Before and After Karena.

"Our goal is to develop a system that will effectively increase the amount of energy from a given amount of forest residue..."

He pretended to listen as one of his colleagues, Dr. Edgar Mason, effectively sewed up the grant for another year.

He should feel elated: the project was his baby. Instead, Logan came to the conclusion that he simply didn't give a damn.

He tossed the papers down on the boardroom table and closed his eyes wearily, then opened them again, because every time he shut them Karena's face was vividly etched on a screen in his mind.

It had been a month now since he'd seen her. He'd made forty different plans for salvaging their relationship, and not one was any good.

What good were plans, when he wanted Karena so much he was willing to make any concessions whatever with his job, his home, his life, in order to have her?

A dozen times, he'd decided to simply turn his back on everything, his apartment, his life-style, his career, and drive to her cabin and stay there for the rest of his natural life.

"If you did that, you'd resent me for the emptiness in your life," he could hear her saying, and much as he hated to admit it, Karena was right. He knew he needed his job, friends, a life-style he was comfortable with.

Those weeks at Itasca, the weekends at her place, had taught Logan a great deal about himself that he hadn't really wanted to know. For instance, he admitted now he wasn't the rough-and-ready cavalier he'd always fancied himself to be, and the admission didn't do a whole lot for his ego.

He was no wimp, but he hated to live without indoor plumbing. He hated fiddling with that diesel generator every night and morning, the stink, the noise, when simply living where electricity was available made it unnecessary. Heating with wood that had to be found, dragged home, stacked and chopped wasn't at all romantic to him. He saw it as hard, unnecessary work, and he hadn't even tried it in the wintertime.

He liked theaters and restaurants and telephones and saunas.

Those were minor points, however. He'd cheerfully accommodate himself to her cabin, if the other problems were solvable.

There was this career of his. He could apply for a different sort of job, one that would take him out of the college and into rural forestry somewhere near Northome. He'd always thought of that as a possibility at some future time, when research began to pall.

Except that now, perversely enough, he wanted to teach. Itasca had backfired on him. It had shown him what he wanted to spend his life doing. Not research, not sitting in stuffy meetings like this one to justify what he was producing. Not even working in rural forestry, or going out into private industry.

"Professor Baxter, we learned a lot from you," one of the kids from Itasca had told him earnestly that final day. "To begin with, we just thought you were the worst. But you kind of tricked us into doing our best. You taught us how to learn, y'know?"

For the first time in his academic career, Logan had felt like a hero.

And now, he wanted to challenge more young minds, make them see what forestry was really all about. He'd felt a response to those young people up at Itasca, he'd felt stimulated. He'd felt a deep sense of human involvement and self-fulfillment that had been lacking in his career.

It took him several weeks after he got back to admit it, but he missed every last one of those maddening students. He missed Itasca, he even missed the damned soil pits.

Worst of all, worse than anything he'd ever experienced before, was the way he missed Karena. And Danny. And, God help him, Mortimer Moose. They'd become his family, his center, his purpose for living, and he was desolate without them.

There had to be a solution, a compromise to this dilemma, that would suit everyone. He had to formulate a workable plan for living with Karena, because he sure as hell couldn't stand living without her.

The first step seemed to be to get his life in order here. He was going to his department head the instant this meeting was over to ask if he could assume teaching duties on any level whatsoever.

Then, he had to mail a version of the letter to Karena he'd spent four weeks writing and tearing up. It had started as a ten page testimonial of his feelings for her, but what was the point of that?

She knew how he felt about her. That wasn't the issue.

The letter was now a one page sterile note, stuck in with the detailed information Brian Sutton had sent him about the Michigan Wildlife Society's re-entry project.

The project was an exciting and ambitious attempt by concerned naturalists to help wild animals like Mort who had become reliant on man for their survival to learn to adapt to their natural environment. Brian and several students from Itasca who had helped him investigate the project felt that it was the ideal solution for Mort, and the response from the people in Michigan had been enthusiastic. Logan had phoned several times and discussed Mort with the supervisor.

"The only stipulation we have is that the moose be brought here as soon as possible," he'd insisted. "Our most successful efforts have involved younger animals, and this moose is still under a year, not yet in rut. He's still young enough to pattern to other moose. We have funds available for transporting costs, and I'm mailing other information."

There were details and names, and Logan had already contacted the naturalists who would help with all the arrangements. Now all that was required was a go-ahead from Karena.

September had brought a long, warm spell of Indian summer, and there still wasn't any snow in the woods this second week of October. The sky stayed its faded denim blue, but for the past several days an icy wind blew that managed to cut through Karena's layers of thermal underwear and woolen stocking cap, chilling her to the bone.

Maybe she felt the cold more intensely because of the icy chill in the region of her heart, she thought tiredly as she climbed into the truck for the long drive home.

Where had the contentment gone, the pleasure she used to feel at the end of a day at the prospect of going home to her snug cabin and her son? Everything had seemed to go sour on her lately, and even Danny was quieter than she'd known him to be as the weekends came and went and he realized Logan wasn't going to come back.

Gabe, too, was gone, at least temporarily. His sister Ida had come and taken him back to Portland to convalesce.

"I figger it'll give the old girl a purpose in life, having me around to take care of," he'd told Karena and Danny. "And derned if I don't need somebody to fetch and carry for a while. This overhaul's left me weak as a lamb."

"We'll take care of you, Gabe," Danny had offered wistfully.

Gabe reached out and tousled his hair. "I know you would, son, but you're in school and your mammy has to work, and that sister of mine has nothin' at all to do. This is good for her. I'll be back soon, don't you fret."

Karena's heart ached for Danny. He'd lost Gabe and Logan at the same time, but when she tried to talk with him about it, he clammed up on her. She often heard his angry voice outside, though, going on and on to Mort.

Mort was becoming a major pain in the neck. One day Karena had arrived home before Danny to find a terrified young woman hiding behind the cabin, while Mort stood like a sentinel by her small car, playfully butting at her when she tried to get in her vehicle and leave.

Karena bawled Mort out soundly and took the shaken young lady into the cabin for coffee.

"I'm Shannon Marshall, I'm with Evergreen Realty," she explained when she'd calmed down. "I have a client who wants a hideaway by a lake, and I've been driving around exploring the area. I drove in here and knocked on your door. I would have left since no one was home, but that— that animal came out of the woods and right over to me, and I panicked."

She left Karena her card, assuring her that she could sell the "property" immediately if Karena ever wanted to.

"It's rustic and charming, and as long as the moose doesn't come with the house—" She left with a weak grin and a joke, but the situation could have been far more serious, Karena realized. Mort was a wild animal, even though she and Danny never thought of him that way. And he was becoming more unpredictable the older he got.

Even her job had lost its appeal. The long, solitary hours outdoors gave her far too much time to think, to remember, and besides, she missed Abigail. The training program had ended the previous week.

"Max and I are enjoying a meaningful relationsip," Abigail had assured Karena with a wink the day she left, and Max brought homemade oatmeal chocolate chip cookies these days for the birds.