Sage Creek (2 page)

“Well, now, that happens. You have a lot on your mind.” Her mother’s arms went around her, hugging very gently as if she were afraid Sophie would crack in pieces. But her voice was brisk and bracing as she touched her daughter’s toffee-colored hair, tumbling in soft curls around a beautiful face with wide cheekbones a model would covet, a generous mouth, and dimples when she smiled. But Sophie was definitely not smiling now.

“You’re here, Sophie, that’s all that matters.” Her voice was overly cheerful. “Leave your bags, we’ll get them later. Let’s go inside. I’ve fixed your favorite—meatloaf and biscuits, garlic mashed potatoes, and a big salad—oh, Sophie . . . honey, what’s the matter?”

Sophie’s feet had frozen on the threshold of the ranch house. Behind her flowed the night, full of stars and a crescent of moon, the buzz of insects, the lone cry of a hawk. The cool night wind rustled delicately through the ponderosa pines. And ahead of her loomed her past, the house of her childhood and teen years, warm and faded yet so familiar it was startling.

She felt herself teetering between two worlds.

She couldn’t move, could only stare past the entry into the rectangular living room, with its big chintz-covered sofa and matching love seat, warm maple end tables, and the black walnut TV stand centered along the far blue wall. She took in the massive stone fireplace, the bookshelves, and her father’s favorite tan leather chair in the corner beside the reading lamp.

How many times had she torn through this door, or downstairs from her room, to see his long legs stretched across that chair, his feet propped on the footrest, his hooded eyes intent as he watched a football game or devoured the newest Tom Clancy novel—or slanted a stern glance at her as she hovered uncertainly in the doorway, just as she was doing now?

Her father’s granite voice seemed to scratch the air around her, blasting his opinion of all the ways she fell short of his expectations.

Worst of all, that F in Geometry during her junior year.

She’d never been able to please Hoot McPhee. But then, no one had. Not even her mother, though, somehow, for most of the years they’d been married, she’d put up with him—Sophie didn’t know how. And finally, when he stepped way over the line, even her mother couldn’t look the other way anymore.

Hoot had perhaps been hardest on her brother, Wes, who’d responded to the never-ending reprimands by leaving for Missoula and the University of Montana at the age of eighteen, and never looking back.

Wes had gone on to law school at the University of Texas, taking out student loans and working two jobs all the while so that he never had to ask his father for a dime above basic tuition. And he hadn’t called home or come home more than three or four times in the years after his high school graduation. He hadn’t returned to Lonesome Way for Hoot’s funeral either.

Hoot McPhee had been gone five years. But for a dizzying instant as Sophie stared into the living room, she could have sworn she sensed her tall, formidable father in that chair.

“It’s the first time I’ve been back . . . since the funeral,” she murmured as her mother came up behind her. “For an instant, I could almost see him sitting there—”

Sophie drew a breath and told herself to stop acting crazy. She walked into the living room, her flats clicking across the hardwood floor, and touched her hand to the back of the tan chair.

“Sorry, Mom. I know if he were here, you wouldn’t be.” After her mother had divorced him, Sophie’s father had spent the last few years of his life living alone—or with one or another of a succession of women—in a cabin on Bear Claw Road. “I probably wouldn’t be here either,” she added with a rueful smile. “I’m just being stupid. Emotional, as he would say.”

“No, you’re not, not in the least. I don’t wonder it seems strange to you to come in here and not see him. But a lot of things are different on the ranch now, Sophie. I’ve sold all the livestock and leased most of the grazing land. It’s not the same as when your father was here, running cattle, running everything.” Her mother’s gaze held hers. “All the years you lived at home, he was here—we both were, together. So you’ve barely been in this house without him here—of course it feels odd to walk in and not see him.”

Sophie studied her mother. She didn’t look the least bit upset. Which was a wonder. Sophie couldn’t imagine how her mother could talk about Hoot so calmly, almost dispassionately, as if he hadn’t been discovered having an affair with the mayor’s wife, Lorelei Hardin, during Sophie’s junior year of college—and who knew how many other women he’d cheated with before that?

Sophie was still reeling from finding out about her own husband’s infidelity. When would it stop, that icepick-to-the-heart pain? After a year—or two—a decade?

It’s only been a few months,
she told herself.
You won’t always feel this rage, this pain. This blinding sense of betrayal. Mom survived. She’s a normal, rational human being. You’ll become one again too.

But she knew she’d never trust any man again. Sophie couldn’t ever see that happening. No way.

And she would be careful not to share her heart again, much less give it away. To anyone. The pain was too intense. The risk too great. She understood that now.

“You know, Mom,” she said quietly. “It’s because of Hoot that I tried so hard to make things work with Ned. I always dreaded the possibility of a second generation of divorce in the family. I needed someone different from Hoot, someone who’d hold to his vows. Who’d encourage me and laugh with me and not tear down the people he was supposed to love. I thought I found him. So I kept trying for so long even after . . .”

Even after Ned became so distant, burying himself in his work. Putting Sophie and their life together on the back burner.

Somewhere along the line, Ned had let go of her and their marriage, and committed himself instead to his drug of choice—his own ambition.

In the end he’d had much more in common with Hoot McPhee than Sophie could have dreamed the day she walked down the aisle in swirls of white silk, seed pearls, and taffeta, making promises to love, honor, and cherish.

But she didn’t know that—not until the day she found out about Cassandra Reynard.

“I really thought we’d last. Forever.” She turned away from her father’s chair. “Which just goes to show how much
I
know.”

“There’s no sense in blaming yourself. None at all.” Taking her hand, her mother determinedly led her into the kitchen, lips pursed and concern sharpening her gaze. “Not one bit of this is your fault. I know Ned told you it is, but he’s full of it. Don’t let him screw with you any more than he already has. Divorce isn’t a family curse, passed on from one generation to another. It just happens. And
he
cheated, not you. You gave him countless chances to keep your marriage together. A damn sight too many, if you ask me.”

Sophie had to grin as she carried the wooden salad bowl brimming with greens and tomatoes and peppers to the square table. Her even-keeled mom rarely got so worked up. Obviously, Ned was high up on her shit list.

“Good to know you have my back, Mom.”

“Family sticks together.” Diana brought over the platter of sauce-laden meatloaf surrounded by garlic mashed potatoes and set it down. “That man better never show his face around here or he’ll
really
get a piece of my mind.”

The table was set with a robin’s egg blue tablecloth and her mother’s prettiest blue and yellow dishes. Matching napkins were folded atop each plate. Sophie’s gaze was drawn to the bouquet of wildflowers filling an oval white vase in the center.

It all looked so festive and inviting.

But nothing was easy these days.

Sophie needed to lift her own mood, or else fake it, for her mother’s sake. Which meant not thinking about Ned or about how she had to find a job, or wondering how she was going to restart her life.

“Everything looks great. You made too much food, though, Mom.”
Especially since these days I have the appetite of a flea.
She slid into a chair, reached for the salad bowl. “How’s Gran?”

“Same as always.” Diana gave a tiny smile at the mention of her mother. “She still has more energy than a windstorm and still thinks good always wins out in the end. Not such a bad philosophy, I guess. She’s coming to dinner tomorrow night. Be prepared, she’s planning to tell you how to fix your love life.”

“What love life? I’m done with a love life.”

“Not if your grandmother has anything to say about it. I give her a week at most before she seriously gets on your case.”

“Maybe coming home wasn’t such a great idea.” Seeing her mother’s alarmed expression, Sophie regretted her flip words. She felt a rush of warmth for her mother, for this house, for the Montana night that seemed to enfold them, at least at this moment, in a cocoon of safety.

“I’m just joking.” She hugged her mom. “I’d rather be here than anywhere else in the world right now.”

And she meant it.

After putting away her clothes and storing her suitcase in the back of her walk-in closet, Sophie gazed around her small, high-ceilinged room brimming with knickknacks and memories. The familiar lemon scent of Pledge, freshly washed cotton sheets, and fresh air wafting through the open window stirred her senses.

With the soft white lace curtains rustling in the breeze, she realized how little these four walls had changed since she’d left the ranch for college. She was twenty-nine now, single again, and staring at the remnants of innocence and childhood.

From the photographs and posters hung on the walls to the peach and yellow quilt folded neatly over her double bed, the room whisked her back through time, to days when she and her best friends Lissie Tanner and Mia Quinn spent almost every minute together, and if not together, gabbing on the phone.

All of her old stuffed animals from kindergarten through senior year in high school, including the huge stuffed lizard Wes had won her at the state fair, still slouched on the top shelf of her oak bookcase, which took up half a wall, and her creaky old six-drawer dresser occupied the other half.

Her mother had told her at dinner that Lissie—now Lissie Norris—was pregnant. And that Mia was throwing her a baby shower a week from Saturday.

She was thrilled for Lissie and Tommy—they’d been together since high school and had been trying to have a baby for over a year.

But suddenly, the hollowness inside Sophie became a hard, tangible ache in her chest. So many of her friends were pregnant or had babies now. She’d gone to all of their baby showers. Watched them hug and feed and bathe their infants, bundling them into tiny coats and hats, strapping them into strollers and car seats, caring for them with a joy and total intensity that Sophie could only yearn for.

Soon, Ned had told her, over and over. Be patient. We’ll start trying soon. In six months. Then it was another six.

Then a year.

The timing needed to be perfect, according to him. And that meant after his career was firmly on track, rolling along in the ideal groove. After he landed a cable or network job and could cut his ties with the local affiliate crap Ned felt was so beneath him.

Her ex-husband had been a local news producer on WBBK in San Francisco, and he was good at his job. Damned good. Under his direction, the nightly news ratings had climbed from third place to number one in just under a year. But Ned had wanted more, a whole lot more. He wanted to become executive producer of a cable or network news show, one that was big and important and would get national attention—and that would thrust him into the big time.

With the big budgets,
he’d told Sophie, pacing across the bamboo floor of their Potrero Hill condo, wound up the way he used to get before a final exam in college.
Not to mention big players, big media attention—and big money.

Sophie wasn’t sure exactly when the cute, brown-haired guy with the serious eyes and a cleft in his chin, with the perfect manners and a double major in journalism and business, the guy she’d studied with in the library, gobbled pizza with at Dewey’s, lived with in a tiny studio apartment off campus their senior year, and married ten months later, had morphed into a man with tunnel vision—burrowing straight ahead toward his career goals and forgetting the life and family and home he’d promised to build together with her.