Chapter 9

Of all the places in the Texas Hill Country that Jake did not wish to stop, Charlie had to stall him at this one.

It was bad enough driving past the burned-out husk of the Nash mansion almost every day on some odd job or other. He usually turned the radio up loud long before he approached and made a point of looking for deer in the trees across the road, or checking the lake for signs of a top-water bite. He kept his head turned away.

Jake still woke up some nights to those licking, devouring walls of fire, that skin-melting heat. It was indescribable, impossible to convey the horror of it. He’d felt like a human marshmallow, crisping and blackening on the outside, his blood boiling and his organs bubbling inside. For precious, hideous seconds, he’d stood gaping and steaming in his own sick fear. Then, impelled by some stronger emotion, he’d hurtled back into the house to find Grandma Babe.

The back wall of the house was in flames. The fire had knocked out the electricity, so the only light seemed to come from hell, and it was precious little because of the thick, suffocating, nightmarish smoke. It wasn’t just smoke, either . . . it was a hot blanket that had dropped him to his knees. But on his knees he’d gone forward, crawling like a blind, crazed baby, searching for Charlie’s grandmother, feeling his way along.

He got to the bottom of the stairs, where he heard a high-pitched whining, a bark, then a disembodied canine scream and the skittering of paws. A rattling of chain, then a thump, thump-thump and a howl as Mr. Coffee came hurtling down the stairs and hit Jake head-on. Grandma Babe had clearly pushed him, trying to save him. So she was still okay . . .

The dog was tangled in a sopping-wet towel, and Jake dragged the animal, towel and all, backward, in the direction of the front door. Jake tugged and scrambled, heaved and gasped, until he got the squirming, whining bundle through the door. He pitched them both forward, rolling them down the porch steps.

The dog was hysterical, and the once-cold wet towel was steaming. Charlie rushed, white-faced and panting, to take Mr. Coffee. Jake himself was banged-up, bruised, gasping. But Grandma Babe was still in there, upstairs. Without thinking, Jake ignored the screams from the front lawn, pushed past a wild-eyed Kingston Nash, hurled himself up the porch steps, and crawled back into the inferno.

The walls pulsed with horrific heat. It was a toxic, burning malevolence that tore the oxygen from his lungs. He was hopping with adrenaline and a weird fury at the fire. He couldn’t beat it—no way—but he wasn’t going to let it take anyone he loved. Jake crawled once more to the stairs.

He didn’t remember making it up them. All he could recall was feeling the texture of the carpet at the top of them, and then something soft—Babe Nash’s thigh. She lay there quiet amid all the terrible cracks and pops and thunderous whooshing. He shouted her name. No response. Oh God.

Jake knew he couldn’t stand up—the smoke was too thick and too scalding. The only breathable air was close to the floor. The only way to get Babe out was—he didn’t think about it. He simply positioned himself at the head of the stairs, facing down and facing the floor. Then he pulled her up onto his back, holding on to her arms as best he could with one hand, and slid down the stairs on his belly, balancing somehow with the other hand. It hurt. It wasn’t dignified. But it worked.

He had little memory of getting from the stairs back out the front door. All he remembered was clumsy weight and awkwardness, and a sheer terror that drove him like some primal motor. Then they were on the front lawn, with people screaming. Charlie’s mom rushed to do CPR on Babe, while tears streamed down Charlie’s dad’s face as he embraced Brandon.

Jake collapsed onto his back in the grass, desperate to drink in all the night air available, with the moon and the stars as chasers. Instead, he coughed and hacked out smoke. Rolling onto his stomach, he gasped in dirt and bits of grass along with the clean air he craved. Then he coughed those out, too.

He became aware of a hand slapping him on the back. Jake? Jake! Are you all right?

It was Charlie. She was crying.

You got her out! she said, over and over. You got Grandma out.

Except he hadn’t gotten her out in time.

Jake shook off the memory of the Charlie of the past and focused on the one standing comically before him in the present.

Yep. The best of times, the worst of times. That was Charlie in a nutshell. The idea of her rebuilding the mansion . . . the idea that maybe she was rebuilding to stay, well, that was the kind of nightmare scenario that used to keep him awake at all hours once he’d stopped being haunted by the opposite: that she was never coming back. And yet another part of him (well, a couple of different parts of him, truth be told) had the notion that after all this time, Charlie Nash keeping him up all night wasn’t the worst thing he could think of anymore.

God, Charlie, the truth is, it feels good to see you. I never thought I’d be able to say that. But it feels good to see you, looking so alive.

And I still hurt so badly inside.

He surveyed the bright-eyed natural disaster standing in front of him and alternately wanted to yell at her and take her in his arms. Jake had never wanted to kiss a swamp creature before. But here he was, wanting to back Charlie Nash up against the nearest tree, lick the mud from her mouth, and have his wicked way with her. There was something very wrong with him.

But even covered from head to toe with sludge, with a piece of grass stuck to her cheek and her zombie eye makeup, he wanted her. Even growling like a small bear from mortification, Charlie was gorgeous, which entertained him and aggravated him at the same time.

“Yeah,” she said after a pause. “I could use a tow.”

He nodded and headed for his Durango before he said or did something stupid, and repositioned the trunk so that his bumper faced the front of Progress. Then he got out, and unlocked and opened one of the big toolboxes that rode directly behind the cab. Out of it, he pulled a long length of chain with a hook on either end. This wasn’t the first time he’d had to give someone in Silverlake a tow, and it wouldn’t be the last. He and the guys sometimes towed cars for the Larsens’ garage.

He walked back to poor old Progress, which was sorely in need of a paint job. A memory surfaced: he and Charlie’s brother as teenagers, washing and waxing this very truck for extra money.

Charlie had squelched back over to it in her disgusting socks. He caught her taking an aghast look into the side mirror and couldn’t contain his laughter any longer as she put a hand up to her mud-encrusted hair.

“Sweetheart, don’t bother. You look like you’ve been dragged through a hogpen backwards and then trampled by a mule.”

Startled, she jumped and almost fell on her face again, but she braced herself on the running board. “I, uh . . . I wasn’t checking my appearance. There’s, um . . . something under my contact lens,” she said, clearly attempting to recover half a shred of dignity.

He shot her a knowing glance, which she did not seem to appreciate. He crouched down and hooked one end of the chain under Progress. Then, accompanied by its metallic rattle, he walked the other end to his trailer hitch and secured it. When he turned around, she was staring wistfully at the burned-out foundation of the house.

Bile rose in his throat as he gazed at it, too. His stomach clenched. He tried to ignore both sensations. They’d go away if he simply didn’t acknowledge them. So would the emotions roiling inside.

He’d sat at the Nash kitchen table, right there in the middle of the foundation, eating meatloaf and baked potatoes and peas. He’d sat at their Thanksgiving table, in the dining room sixteen feet to the right, eating turkey and stuffing. He’d played backgammon and chess in the family room at the far left, with Brandon and Dave, their dad. He’d watched sports and played poker with them and Kingston back there, too—a game which they’d always pretended was Go Fish or Uno if Babe walked in. She hadn’t approved of gambling.

Jake swallowed, then inhaled raggedly and looked up, finding the now-invisible bedroom that the Nashes had once told him to call his own. They’d taken him in, a stray, and practically adopted him. He’d been so happy in that bedroom next to Brandon’s. The denim comforter on the twin bed and the blue plaid flannel sheets had always smelled clean and fresh, thanks to Babe, like spring in the country. The bottom of the lamp had been red ceramic; the bureau, simple blond wood. An oval woven rag rug had warmed the hardwood floor, and on the wall had hung a turn-of-the-century oil painting of boys playing in a schoolyard. That room had been Jake’s idea of heaven.

Charlie squelched over to him. She put a hand on his arm, which sent an unwelcome and inappropriate jolt of electricity through him and brought him back to the present. “Remember the time when Mr. Coffee snatched the Butterball turkey right out of the sink and ran under the house with it?” she asked.

“Yeah.” One corner of his mouth lifted.

“And you and Brandon had to slide under there and pry it away from him?”

He nodded. “Mr. Coffee. The chocolate Lab from hell. I still miss that dog.”

“Me too. He lived a good long life, though.”

Jake nodded. “How is Brandon?” he asked carefully. Brandon, his best friend—until he wasn’t. Until the tragedy, after which the whole Nash family had moved away and cut him cleanly out of their lives. Ostensibly for Brandon’s sake, because he was distraught, emotionally unstable.

She shrugged, an expression of grief and frustration settling over her features. “Depends on the season. He’s, uh, struggled, but he seems to be doing better now.”

Jake examined a smudge on his work boot. It was rust-colored and shaped like a fist. He’d never noticed it before, but now it was fascinating. He took a deep breath as his stomach roiled along with a rush of dark feelings. “If it’s ever appropriate, if it ever feels right, or if he ever asks about me—tell him I said hey.”

Charlie swallowed. “I will.” Her blue eyes held grief, wistfulness, guilt . . . and something else that he couldn’t name but wanted to.

Without being conscious of it, Jake reached out a hand and cupped her cheek, rubbed gently at the mud there with his thumb, at the smudged mascara.

Charlie’s breath hitched, and she closed her eyes.

And then somehow his other hand was cupping her other cheek, and he was stepping into her space, all the dark feelings, all the dark memories of their broken lives fading away. Jake felt like he was in a beautiful dream, with this girl he’d loved like no other in his hands where she belonged. If I could go back in time . . .

Guiding her mouth to his, he bent to kiss her very gently.

He smiled against her lips; she tasted like earth from her face-plant. She smiled, too. He raised his head, lifted his T-shirt, and wiped her mouth with it. She let him, her gaze fixed on his bare abdomen. She flattened her palms on it, and he sucked in a breath. Then she slipped her hands around his waist and sighed as he kissed her again, more urgently this time. The touch of her hands on his skin was almost too much to bear. He wanted to devour her.

He backed her against the side of Progress and pressed every inch of himself against every available inch of her, not caring that it was wet or cold or that she was mud-encrusted. If he thought anything at all, he thought, Mmm and Mine.

Then a tremor, a shudder, racked her entire body, and he belatedly realized what he was doing: kissing the Goodbye Girl, Charlie Nash. The girl who’d cared so little for him that she’d left without a word, and wouldn’t take his calls or letters once he had managed to track down her new address. The girl who’d shut the door in his face when he’d hitchhiked into the city to find her.

What the hell was he thinking? He wasn’t. Jake backed away, wiping his mouth on his flannel sleeve. Feeling that he needed to spit out the taste of her, because it made him want more. A lot more. “That,” he said evenly, “was a mistake.”

Charlie sagged against her grandfather’s truck, her expression shell-shocked, staring down at the useless Italian boots still stuck in the mud.

Jake strode over to the Durango and flung open the driver’s-side door. “I’d move those, if I were you. And you’ll need to get into Progress so you can steer once we’ve gotten your back wheels free.” He got in and slammed the door—on the brief flare of attraction between them, and on any possibility of it escalating further.

Charlie bent forward, pulled the boots from the muck, and tossed them into the bed of the pickup with about as much ceremony as she’d given their breakup all those years ago. A boy’s feelings? His love for her? Thunk, chunk. The old metal reverberated as the boots hit it.

Jake started his truck and drummed his fingers on the wheel impatiently as Charlie clambered awkwardly into her grandfather’s truck. Was she really going to try to drive in those muddy, slippery socks? He rolled down the window and tooted the horn.

She manually rolled down her own window, raising her eyebrows.

“You might want to take off your socks,” he drawled. “It’s awful dangerous for a city girl to—”

Something came whizzing at him through the window. Jake dodged just in time and caught the projectile in his hand. Banana bread? What the . . . ?

“I’m not a moron, Jake. But thanks,” Charlie said, looking pleased with herself. She bent down, peeled off her socks, and tossed them onto the passenger-side floor mat.

Jake stared down at the banana bread in his hands. It looked really similar to the kind Charlie used to ask her mom to make for him. “You hate bananas.”

“Yeah. So throwing it at your head was a win for both of us.”

The ridiculous feeling of well-being that shot through Jake as he stared down at his “present” was almost enough to make him forget what a mistake that sweet, sweet kiss was.

Almost. A wave of anger swept through him as he remembered how easily Charlie had once switched from hot to cold.

“Jake,” she said haltingly. “What was that, just now?”

A mistake. Mistake. Mistake. “Banana bread,” he said, knowing quite well that wasn’t what she was asking about.

He slipped on the aviator sunglasses that sat in his console. Then he put the Durango into drive. “Ready?”

She shrugged.

“Start her up and put her into first gear,” he told her, though this time it was without the attitude.

And Jake got on with rescuing her, though what he really wanted to do was drive away at a very high speed, leaving her and his memories mired in the past, where they belonged.

---

Charlie’s mouth burned from the kiss, and she could still taste Jake on her lips. Her stomach quivered, and she gripped the wheel tightly, as if it might slip from her grasp, as he had. The man who’d been kissing her moments ago had gone up in smoke, his essence untouchable and faceless behind the twin mirrors of his shades.

She wasn’t allowed to keep him back then. What made her think she could have him now?

The Durango did its job with a roar. Charlie sensed a similar aggression below Jake’s too-cool surface as he manned the operation. With a mighty lurch, Progress pulled free and then shuddered forward, the chain clanking and rattling to the ground.

Jake got out and unhooked the two vehicles.

“Thank you,” she called.

“No problem.” He slung the chain and hooks back into his toolbox and slammed the lid.

She tried not to enjoy her view of his backside in the snug, faded denim, tried not to notice the small hole in the shoulder of his flannel shirt that was somehow endearing instead of sloppy. She definitely didn’t pay any attention to the way the slightly curling dark hair at his nape met the muscular back of his neck, or the cocky way he held his head as if he knew she was checking him out.

“Jake . . .”

He turned, his face so neutral and professionally pleasant that it made her ache deep inside. “That was a mistake. Let’s not do that again,” he said matter-of-factly. He checked his watch, a plastic digital number. Nothing flashy or designer for Jake. Just pure pragmatism, right down to the Timberland work boots he always wore. “I’m late for a . . . thing.”

She nodded, even though she knew there was no “thing,” and he knew she knew there was no “thing.” The layers of awkwardness were surreal. Charlie stepped on the gas with her bare foot and lurched forward, then made the most inelegant shift into second gear and finally third. Then she fled, heading in no particular direction, just away from Jake. Away from her own guilt about the past and the role she’d played in making it even worse for him. For Brandon’s sake.

“Stop beating yourself up, Charlie,” she said aloud. “The past is the past.” A clean break, everyone had said, was best for her brother.

But had it been best for him? Really? And what about poor Jake? What about her? Everyone had made such a fuss about Brandon and his struggle in the fire’s aftermath. Her parents had been all-consumed by their worry and their grief. Charlie herself had just stayed out of everyone’s way. She’d seen a therapist for a while, but had filled only one scrip for an antianxiety medication, only to have Brandon swipe the pills. She never refilled it.

Grandma Babe used to say there was no better cure than a homemade apple pie. Maybe Charlie ought to do some baking tomorrow. Maybe she’d make, oh, say, twenty-five pies. Maybe that would do the trick.

The potted tulips on the passenger seat nearly tipped over as Charlie hit a pothole. Charlie smiled. You don’t approve of my attitude, Grandma? She sighed. You’re probably right.

Without further incident, Progress led her to the gates of the Silverlake Community Cemetery and then down the curving tree-lined drive to where the huge stone Montmorency Mausoleum kicked things off, so to speak. One of the founding families of Silverlake back in 1839, the Montmorencys had seen to it that they anchored the cemetery and were remembered in style, with a Gothic arched entrance to their eternal resting place. A very large stone angel guarded it, wings outspread. Brandon, the soul of irreverence, used to say that it looked tired, that maybe it needed a break.

After the Montmorency clan, who’d erected the town library and the first city hall, came the slightly smaller tribute to the bootlegging Brockhursts, who’d opened the first tavern (and, it was rumored, the first brothel). No angel outside their mausoleum, just a very large urn. Then there were massive looming blocks of dark granite for the three brothers Stockdale, who’d owned the first bank, livery stables, and dry-goods store. After that, Charlie lost count. They’d been forced to learn about Silverlake’s founding families in school, but the local history lesson had needed to stop somewhere.

Charlie stared out at the sea of gravestones, looking for the corner plot shaded by a large oak that was Babe’s. There it was, over there. Progress took her right over, and she made sure to park in a paved area—no more mud today.

She grimaced as she gazed down at herself. Really? She’d come to visit her grandmother looking like this? Charlie opened the door, grabbed the tulips and a spade from the foot well, and hopped out. Yes, her toes were grime-encrusted. Her pants would need to be burned. Her sweater, once a fashion statement, now looked as if it had been dug out of some long-deceased person’s casket. And then there was Granddad’s nasty old barn jacket to top it off.

“I feel pretty,” Charlie sang, under her breath. “Oh so pretty . . .”

Grandma would laugh.

Charlie walked slowly toward the oak, appreciating the softness of the green grass under her feet, even though it was wet. She was still shivering, still humiliated and confused by her feelings for Jake and the utter wrongness of them. But she tried to ignore all of that.

Babe’s headstone was a light gray granite, and oddly enough, there were fresh white lilies in a container in front of it. BARBARA NASH, the marker read. 1934–2004. BELOVED WIFE, MOTHER, GRANDMOTHER. Charlie jammed her hands into Granddad’s coat pockets, wiggled her bare toes in the grass, and stood there in all her vagabond glory, just staring at the stone block. Four words, to sum up a woman’s whole life and all of the love she’d given to everyone she’d ever encountered.

So inadequate. There was so much that the headstone did not say:

Had wanted to be a nightclub singer in her youth. Got married and sang in the church choir instead. Secretly retained her affinity for slutty shoes and too-bright lipstick, to counteract that rooster apron. Held her entire family together. Made everyone mind their manners. Chased after anyone who didn’t behave with a wooden cooking spoon.

Couldn’t bear to kill any living creature, even if it had six legs and jumped out at her from behind the flour jar. Always looked at her glass as half-full (even when it was upside down, transporting a cricket back outside on a piece of paper).

Babe Nash, tiny lady with the heart of a lion. The kind of woman who’d have a tug-of-war with a terrified chocolate Lab during a house fire, crawling on her arthritic knees under a monstrous antique four-poster bed to pull Mr. Coffee out, throw a wet towel over his head, and push him toward the staircase and freedom.

Charlie used the spade to make a hole in the ground and quickly transplanted the tulips from the pot to the natural soil guarding Babe’s name.

She wiped her hands on her dirty clothes and then sat down next to the headstone. “Sorry I look so terrible, Grandma. But I promise you that my underpants don’t have holes in them, and you would have really liked my Italian boots if you’d seen them yesterday.

“I won’t stop anywhere else on my way to the shower, I swear. I won’t embarrass you. And I’m going to rebuild your house if it’s the last thing I do in my lifetime. Okay?”

Babe Nash herself didn’t respond, but a squirrel in the branches overhead beaned her headstone with a seedpod of some kind. Charlie didn’t find that respectful, but she decided to take it as an “amen.”

She got to her feet and grabbed the empty pot, not bothering to brush off her backside, and stared again at the white lilies. They had to have been placed there recently—no later than yesterday. But by whom? Certainly not by Granddad, who couldn’t walk on his own down the hospital hallway, much less outside in the cemetery. She couldn’t see him paying someone to do it—that was just out of character. Charlie puzzled over it for a moment longer, then turned to walk away. That’s when she noticed it: a very large fresh bootprint in the damp earth.

As she fired up Progress and headed back to town, she thought about it some more. The print was definitely a man’s. No woman had a foot so large. That print had been made by a man’s work boot. But whose?

Back at Granddad’s complex, she deliberately ducked down in Progress and hid until old Mrs. Dwyer had finished walking her schnauzer. Grandma Babe would haunt her forever if she let Mrs. D, a former archrival in the garden club, see her granddaughter like this.

Then she hopped out and scurried into Granddad’s sparse little apartment. She was so dirty that she left tracks on the walkway and inside on the hallway floor. She grabbed a clean garbage bag and stripped in the bathroom, tossing each discarded item of clothing into the bag. She’d just pray that they didn’t destroy the apartment’s laundry facilities.

It wasn’t until icky brown water was streaming off her in a blessedly hot shower that she realized something. Jake’s red Dodge Durango hadn’t been coming from town when he’d stopped to help her. It had been coming from the direction of the Social Security office and the cemetery. Jake wasn’t over sixty-five, so that ruled out a visit to Social Security. And he’d been wearing work boots on his very large feet.

It broke Charlie’s heart. Twelve years after the tragedy, Jake was still putting flowers on Babe Nash’s grave.