Black Sheep Son

Nothing about going home to Gordon Falls is easy for fireman Clark Bradens. His role as local bad boy is firmly established, though he’s determined to use his newfound faith to change people’s minds. But Clark isn’t the only one coming home to hard times. When Melba Wingate came home from Chicago to help her ailing father, she wasn’t expecting to unravel a family secret. As Melba wades through the past to find the truth about her father, Clark becomes an unlikely ally. And while neither can change the past, the future is theirs to shape.

“I never pegged you for the kind to come back home.”

It had to come up sooner or later. Clark sighed. He still hadn’t come up with a graceful way to answer comments like that. “It’s not a new story. Bad boy goes off to the big city to find new ways to be bad, hits bottom, comes home a changed man.” Clark pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking that sounded arrogant. “Or hopes he comes home a changed man. I’m still ironing out the kinks, as you already know.”

“I think I remember hearing something about an accident. Was that the bottom you hit?” Melba asked.

Calling that night an accident was like calling an earthquake a bump in the road. It wasn’t the kind of thing Clark could share with just anyone, despite the warm look in Melba’s eyes. She was dealing with her life tilting in a different direction, and he knew what that felt like. Maybe that was why he felt so drawn to her.

ALLIE PLEITER

Enthusiastic but slightly untidy mother of two, RITA® Award finalist Allie Pleiter writes both fiction and nonfiction. An avid knitter and unreformed chocoholic, she spends her days writing books, drinking coffee and finding new ways to avoid housework.Allie grew up in Connecticut, holds a B.S. in speech from Northwestern University and spent fifteen years in the field of professional fund-raising. She lives with her husband, children and a Havanese dog named Bella in the suburbs of Chicago, Illinois.

The Fireman’s Homecoming

Allie Pleiter

www.millsandboon.co.uk

And the God of all grace, who called you to his eternal glory in Christ, after you have suffered a little while, will himself restore you and

make you strong, firm and steadfast.

—1 Peter 5:10

For the tireless, compassionate caregivers

serving their loved ones every day—

you are God’s finest heroes of the heart.

Contents

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Dear Reader

Questions for Discussion

Chapter One

Melba Wingate pushed the button on the hospital cafeteria vending machine again. Please, Lord, I know this is Gordon Falls, but would it be too much to ask You to somehow send a grilled smoked gouda sandwich? She peered without hope into the little mechanized windows rotating toward her. Sad, sanitary wedges of breaded ham and tuna salad stuttered into view. Those, and something labeled as—but barely resembling—turkey. It had been a long day, and her last meal had been two packages of cheese crackers from this machine six hours ago. She sighed and let her head fall against the cold hum of the machine window.

“No use looking for actual food in there.”

Melba turned to see a man leaning against the hallway wall, one of the offending wedges in his hand with a single bite taken out of it. “I don’t recommend the tuna. I’m not even sure I’d recommend the bread.”

In dark pants and an official-looking white shirt, the man looked vaguely familiar. She felt as if she ought to know him by his red hair, but couldn’t place the face. Just as she made out the name on his shirt badge, he extended a hand and said, “Clark Bradens.” After a moment, he cocked his head to one side and said, “Aren’t you...?” just as Melba said her name.

“Right.” He nodded. “Mort’s your dad. I heard you’d come back to town.”

The familiar face and red hair made instant sense. She offered what she hoped was a grin and pointed to his name badge. “You were two years ahead of me in high school. George is your dad.”

He took a final begrudging look at the sandwich and tossed it into a nearby garbage can. “I heard they brought Mort in here the other day. Everything okay?”

“Some bug hit him hard, but he’ll be fine.” She clutched her stomach, embarrassed at the loud growl it gave off. “I was trying to scare up some dinner, but I don’t think I have too many edible options beside a Snickers bar here.”

“You remember Dellio’s just down the street? Not too many problems in this world can’t be improved with their good cheeseburgers, and it’d be a quick trip.”

Dellio’s had been a favorite of hers in high school, and while she didn’t do cheeseburgers anymore, their fries could still taunt her from half a mile away. Melba salivated. “I don’t eat meat. Anymore, I mean. And I can’t really leave Dad.”

He paused for a moment, then checked his watch. “I’ve got twenty minutes. They make a mean grilled portobello for you veggie types. I could have it and fries back here in fifteen for you if you want.”

Melba blinked. The Clark Bradens she remembered was not the kind of guy who played fetch out of sympathy. Then again, the Clark Bradens she remembered would have been the last man she’d have expected to put on a uniform for the Gordon Falls Volunteer Fire Department—especially with his dad as chief. The margins of far too many high school notebooks were filled with odes to Clark’s wavy red hair and dreamy green eyes, but attributes like “responsible” or “civic-minded” never seemed to come up. He’d been the kind of bad-boy motorcycle rebel that mothers warned daughters about, known for luring cheerleaders to their doom.

The man before her didn’t look anything like that. Oh, the handsome hadn’t left, but the dark edge was long gone. Or maybe she was just tired. His smile was almost sweet, bearing a touch of the weariness she felt down to her bones this evening. Who cared about moral fiber when the man was offering Dellio’s fries? Life had handed her too many reasons to crave them today. “I’m in.” She dug into her wallet.

Clark pushed her wallet back down toward the handbag. “I’ll spring. They give us a firefighter’s discount anyway. Give me your dad’s room number and I’ll bring it up.”

“Really?”

“Think of me as the Gordon Falls Welcome Wagon.” He nodded to the machine of questionable sustenance behind her. “Or just a guy who’s eaten too many of those.”

Melba was too hungry to refuse. “Room 614. You just became my hero.”

“Shh...” Clark gave her the wink he was known for back in the day. “Don’t let that kind of thing get out.”

* * *

Melba heard her father’s agitated voice as she got off the sixth floor elevator.

“Calm down, Mr. Wingate, she’ll be back in a moment.”

“Where is she? Where’d she go?” The angry, confused panic in her father’s voice was a knife to her chest. She clutched her handbag to her side and took the hallway at a jog, only barely catching the resigned look from the station nurse as she turned the corner.

“We need to tell Melba.”

Dad had been doing so well this afternoon. She tossed her bag onto the vinyl chair and grabbed her father’s hand. “Hey, I’m right here, Dad.”

“Don’t leave like that, Maria. Don’t do that.” The knife buried in her ribs twisted harder when he called her by her mother’s name.

“He was fine until a minute ago, really,” the nurse said.

Melba nodded, shifting to place herself in her dad’s line of vision. “I’m here. I just left for a second but I’m back now.”

Her father’s eyes found her, the trembling grip on her hand tightening. “Maria.”

Melba swallowed. It seemed so cruel to correct him when he got like this. “It’s okay,” Melba whispered to the nurse. “I think he’ll settle down now.”

She felt the nurse’s hand on her back. “He is better than he was yesterday, remember that.” They’d done this more than a few times since Mort had been admitted with fevers two days ago. “I’ll come back with the evening sedative in about an hour.”

The nurse left and Melba sank onto the bed’s edge, weary. She stroked her father’s right hand, hating the blue-black bruises. They’d moved the IV needle to his left hand yesterday when he’d pulled it out of his right hand.

“I’m sick.” His voice took on a frail, childish quality that opened a black hole in Melba’s stomach.

“Well, yes, you caught some kind of bug, but the fever’s almost gone so you’ll go home soon.”

“It’s wrong, Maria.”

“Nothing’s wrong, Dad. You should go to the hospital when you’re sick. It’ll be fine by tomorrow, you’ll see.”

“Maria, I’m telling you, it’s wrong. She needs to know.”

She dismissed the useless reply of “But I’m Melba, Dad,” and kept stroking his hand instead. “Tell her what?”

Dad grew agitated, his mouth working for the words. He seemed to lose words so much more now, and that seemed so cruel—he was still two years shy of sixty. “I hate that she’s not mine.” He moaned it, as if the words broke his heart in half. Melba froze, the strength of his regret grabbing at her, forcing her attention as much as the clutching grip he had on her hand. “She ought to know she’s not mine. It’s wrong. It has to be fixed. We need to tell her, Maria.” Anger narrowed his eyes and he shook Melba’s arm with every word.

Melba’s blood ran as cold as her father’s hand. Not mine? What did that mean? He couldn’t possibly be saying what she thought, could he? The knot of worry in her stomach hardened to a dark ball of suspicion, but she tried to push it away. Such a thing wasn’t possible. Dad wasn’t himself. She shook it off, just as she’d shaken off the irrational fear that he’d somehow not survive a simple bout of the stomach flu. The man in front of her was Dad. Weak, confused, but Dad all the same.

“Keeping it from her was a mistake.” The bark of command came back to his voice, iron-strong out of a man who had looked yesterday as though he were made of paper. “Why can’t you see that?” He rattled her hand for emphasis. “Where’s Melba? Find her. I’ll tell her myself if you won’t.”

The dark suspicious knot began to pull tighter. This was not one of Dad’s “wanderings,” the wishful conversations Mort invented with Melba’s mom, gone two years now. He’d gotten angry before, but it was always a generalized, frustrated anger, never clear and pointed like this. This had another tone altogether. It seemed almost like he was remembering a real problem he and her mother had struggled with—an argument they had actually had. But the things he was saying didn’t make any sense. She had no idea what to do with his strange actions or his words.

“I’m here, Dad, I’m right here.” Melba peeled the clenched gray hand off hers and stroked it until the fist softened. She needed this strange tormented man to go away, needed Dad to come back and tell her that nothing was amiss. “I’m your daughter. I’m Melba. I’m right here.”

Her voice saying her own name seemed to pull him from the fog. Dad’s narrowed eyes softened in affection and recognition. His whole countenance changed as if the last thirty seconds had happened to someone else. As relieved as she was to see the change, it disturbed her, too. She’d done loads of research, trusted Dad’s doctors, and had three friends whose parents were living with the same disease. She’d thought she was prepared. Still, the split-second change of his emotions always pummeled her. Alzheimer’s was like an invitation into a house of mirrors, never knowing which face belonged to the Dad who loved her and which belonged to the fast-aging man who didn’t recognize her. There had been days lately where it seemed he lost his bearings midsentence.

“Where’s your mother, Melba?” His kindness and clarity startled her—where had it been a moment ago? Why now and not the dozen other times she’d told him who she was? “I need to talk to your mother.”

He’d become reconnected and yet still not quite back to reality. The emotional whiplash rattled her again, compounded by what she’d just heard. Or thought she heard. Or shouldn’t hear. She wanted to throw her hands up in panicked frustration, but kept still. Who knew what she’d just heard or if it meant anything at all? “Mom’s been gone two years, Dad, remember?” She tried to keep her voice soft and reassuring, despite her thundering pulse. She made herself ask, “What did you need to tell her?”

Dad’s brows furrowed in sad confusion. “I forget. I forget she’s gone, you know?” He seemed like a wayward child seeking forgiveness, aware he’d done something wrong but unable to say what. Somehow the disease had taken a giant leap forward during these three days, scaring him as much as it scared her.

Dad’s attention wandered off. She watched his thumb absentmindedly rub the ring finger on his left hand, searching for the wedding band the hospital had asked her to remove along with his watch when he was admitted. The ring had still been warm from his hand when she’d slipped it on her thumb for safekeeping and she’d kept it on since. Did he even recognize it was missing? Did he even notice its odd home on her right hand as she touched him? “I know, Dad.” Melba fought back the lump in her throat—and the roiling in her stomach—to force brightness into her voice. “Hey, it’s just us pals now, remember?”

The phrase never failed to bring a broad smile. “Just us pals now.” He looked around the room as if he’d just entered instead of been here three days. “Let’s go home. I don’t need all this junk.”

“All this junk” was Dad’s catch-all term for everything medical, and he had lots of “junk” these days. Too much. She’d spent nearly a year ignoring the red flags of warning that began a while after Mom died; the missed date here or the lost word there. A few months ago those flags refused to be ignored as it became clear Dad wasn’t just pushing sixty, he was sick. Getting sicker. Packing up her Chicago life to move back home felt like diving into a bottomless black pit, but she’d known it was the right thing to do. More than just “honor thy father,” she loved him, shared his loneliness now that Mom was home in Heaven. Sure, it was difficult—and so painfully early for a man as vibrant as her father—but Melba never doubted the choice. She was exactly where she was supposed to be. From now on, it was going to get harder. Somewhere in the back of her mind she knew she’d think of this day as “the day it started getting worse.” Her stomach rolled and she felt ill instead of hungry.

“Doc Nichols says you do need all this junk. At least for a bit. That flu hit you pretty hard, and he wants you stronger before he lets you go home.”

“I’m fine.”

Melba raised her eyebrows and pointed to the IV line. “Oh, really?”

“I’ll be fine once they unplug me from this getup.”

Melba fiddled with the plastic pitcher of ice water on the bedside tray. Her anxious curiosity about his outburst was like an undertow, pulling her off her feet no matter how she scrambled for shore. Against every instinct, knowing it would be fruitless, she still couldn’t stop from asking, “So, what did you want to talk to Mom about?”

“Did I ask for... Hey, why are you wearing my ring? On your thumb? Give that back, it looks ridiculous on you like that.” He reached for her hand only to wince when the tension on the IV line tugged at the needle in his hand. He scowled, a seven-year-old’s tantrum brewing under the wrinkles of his fifty-eight years.

Melba poked her thumb into the air. “I kind of like it. All the cool kids are wearing rings on their thumbs now.”

“You’re twenty-six, not a cool kid, and I want that back.”

How could he do that? Remember her age with stunning clarity and then forget his wife of nearly thirty years had died? He’d phoned Melba a month ago—at work no less—and asked her calmly what she wanted for her sixteenth birthday. The day-to-day randomness of his disease hurt almost more than the ultimate decline it heralded. “You eat all that delightful turkey dinner on that plate so Doc Nichols signs off on your release, and I’ll hand it to you personally.”

Dad picked up a fork and poked at the beige slab in questionable gravy. “Do they think I’ve already forgotten what real food tastes like?”

Melba hated when he made those kind of comments—the ones that hinted he knew how far he’d slipped and how fast. Alzheimer’s at this age was bad enough, but to be aware of your own decline seemed too cruel for anyone. She wanted to run into the bathroom and sob but she plastered a smile on her face. “Think of it as incentive. Choke down the bad food so you can go home to Barney’s good cooking.”

Dad smiled at the mention of the hefty woman who came every afternoon to tend house and fix him dinner. Barbara Barnes, or “Barney,” as everyone called her, had insisted on coming by daily even after Melba moved in. “Barney’s meatloaf,” he sighed, resigning himself to the penance of hospital turkey.

She gestured like a game-show hostess. “And it could be yours if you just behave for one more day.”

“I’ll share.” He hoisted the fork in her direction.

Melba held up a hand. “No, thanks. I’ve got someone bringing me Dellio’s in a few minutes. I may even let you have a fry if you polish off your turkey.” It sounded so horridly parental, the unnatural role reversal of eldercare lamented by every book and friend.

“Well, isn’t that dandy, you getting one of those cheeseburgers you like so much and leaving me with these mushy peas.”

Melba sighed. She’d been a vegetarian for six years.

* * *

Clark checked his watch and winced. “You know, Plug, I need to ban the phrase ‘I’ll be right back’ from my vocabulary.”

The firehouse dog offered a sympathetic woof that sounded far too much like “I told you so” before wandering off to the kitchen.

Clark followed. “Hey, Pop? Do you know when visiting hours are over at the hospital?”

“Eight,” came his father’s voice over the usual meal-time chatter from the firehouse dining room.

It was seven-fifteen. An hour after he’d promised Melba Wingate he’d be “back in fifteen” with a meal from Dellio’s. Clark glowered at the pager fixed to his belt. “What? Do you have some kind of radar to know when it’s the worst time to go off?” Some days that little black device felt more like a ball and chain than lifesaving technology—especially when it signaled a false alarm like it had this evening. If he ever got his hands on the kid who pulled that fire alarm over at the high school, it wouldn’t be pretty. “Do you know if you can hear the siren over at the hospital?” It was a slim chance Melba heard the siren and realized he’d been called into duty, but it was better than her thinking him a jerk.

Pop poked his head up from the pot he was stirring. He rarely went out on calls anymore, so he was in a red apron and holding a bowl of chili—it had become his role to ensure everyone got fed once they came in off a call. “I expect not. Folks need to get their sleep over there, you know. You want cheese on yours?”

Clark grabbed his keys off a hook in the hallway. “I’ll pass. I was supposed to be somewhere an hour ago.”

“You need to eat and they’ll understand.”

Clark shrugged his shoulders. “I’m not so sure.”

Pop sat back on one hip. “Who’s not going to understand a volunteer firefighter going out on call?” It was more of an accusation than a question. Chief George Bradens brooked no disrespect whatsoever where the Gordon Falls Volunteer Fire Department was concerned. Besides, Clark had made plans to have dinner with his dad even before the call. Before Melba.

“I met Melba Wingate over at the hospital. Mort’s daughter. She looked in a bad way, so I told her I’d run and get her something from Dellio’s and bring it back to her so she wouldn’t have to leave her dad.”

Some kind of weird shadow passed over Pop’s face. “She’ll get over it. She just hasn’t lived here long enough to remember what it is we all do around here.”

“Maybe, but I feel bad.”

“Well, you ought to.”

“Even if I stop by Dellio’s first, there would still be a half an hour of visiting hours by the time I could get to the hospital. I’ll try a last-ditch effort in case she’s still there. You’ll still be here when I get back, right?” he called as he ducked out the door. After two seconds he circled back to add “Mort’s doing fine,” but not before he realized Pop hadn’t asked after Mort.

Which was odd because Pop asked after everyone. Pop was like Gordon Falls’s universal grandfather, poking his nose into everyone’s welfare. He’d always thought there was something odd about the chill between those two, but then again he’d just stood Pop up for dinner. Again. So much for trying to prove to his father that he’d put his old, irresponsible ways behind him. Why was it he had such a gift for disappointing people? He put it from his mind as he thumbed through his cell phone to the listing for Dellio’s “call ahead and pick up” line.

Chapter Two

Clark knocked on the hospital room door even though it was partway open. “Better late than never, I hope.”

The pile of snack wrappers on the side table by Melba made him wince. She looked worse than earlier, looking over her shoulder at him with weary eyes. Her father seemed to be dozing, his head turned toward the window and a blanket tucked up over his thin shoulders. He didn’t know Mort all that well, but it didn’t take a lot of familiarity to see the man was in bad shape. His thin, wiry body slumped without energy against the hospital bed.

“That was a long fifteen minutes.” Her words were lifeless, as if she were too tired to be angry.

Clark palmed the pager at his side. “Got a call. Normally I take cell numbers because this kind of thing happens all the time, but I didn’t have yours. Sorry I kept you waiting.”

She pushed a strand of hair out of her face. She wore exotic, artsy jewelry on several fingers—the handmade kind with lots of colored stones—and a bulky gold band on one thumb. “It’s okay.” He looked past the dark brown curls to see red-rimmed eyes. She’d been crying.

“No, it’s not.” He kept his voice soft as he walked farther into the room. “Hey, look, are you going to be okay? No offense, but you look like you need a lot more help than just a decent meal.”

She took a deep breath and swept up the pile of wrappers into the trash can. “It’s been...a bit rough today, that’s all. Harder than I thought.”

Even though his training as a first responder injected him into people’s moments of pain all the time, he felt this intrusion keenly. “What isn’t?” He placed the bag on the table, uncomfortable but still unwilling to leave. “Is he in pain?”

“Just really confused. He wakes up not remembering where he is or why he’s here.”

“Sounds understandable.” Her watched her pull herself wearily out of the chair. “You think he’ll be better once he gets back home?”

It was the wrong question. “I’m sure he will.” Disbelief pushed a false brightness into her words even as fear leapt up in her eyes. “Thanks, I’m starved.”

“I’m glad I made it under the wire. Another ten minutes and they wouldn’t have let me in. I’d have been forced to eat that giant fungus for you.”

She managed a small smile that broadened when she opened the bag of French fries and the savory aroma filled the room. The half-eaten contents of the bag sitting on the seat of Clark’s car held testament to the truth that nothing in the world grew an appetite faster than the scent of Dellio’s fries.

The aroma even roused Mort, who groaned and rolled his head on the pillow to face them. His ashen face startled Clark. It seemed impossible that the man in that bed was nearly the same age as his own robust father—they looked decades apart.

Mort’s brows furrowed in confusion, staring at Clark as if he were a misplaced object. Melba walked over to touch her father’s arm, her whole body reacting to his wakefulness. Something dark and hard flashed in Mort’s eyes, and he began to pull himself up off the bed. “What’s he doing here?” he snapped.

“That’s Clark Bradens, Dad. He brought...”

“How dare he come here?” Mort jabbed an accusatory finger in Clark’s direction. “You swore to me, Maria, you said you’d never...”

“Dad, it’s Melba. Calm down, okay?” With a flash of a look in Clark’s direction, Melba pushed her father back onto the bed and hit the nurse call button.

“Get him out of my home!” Mort yelled, and Clark backed up toward the door.

“I’m sorry, he’s not himself.” Melba struggled to keep Mort from rising.

Clark felt awful for not being able to help, but it seemed clear that moving any closer to Mort would just escalate things. “I’ll just go.” The nurse came in behind him as he ducked out of the room.

“Go away and don’t come back!” Mort’s brittle voice called behind him.

* * *

Her father’s angry words still echoed in Melba’s head as she stared into her tea the next morning. The chill of them made her pull the afghan Mom had knitted for her first apartment tighter around her shoulders. Its blue-and-green design didn’t fit this house’s color scheme, but then again nothing from her Chicago apartment looked at home in this country bungalow. She was at home and out of place at the same time.

The color clash was a mirror of her mood. Events felt confusing since last night, facts wouldn’t fit together in neat patterns, and life itself felt disjointed and tangled.

“I’m...” she searched for the right verb as she stroked Pinocchio, the fat tabby who’d been their pet since Melba was sixteen “...tumbling into a new life today, hm?” Tumbling seemed like the best word. Tumbling was something set in motion not by her, but by things beyond her ability to control. Tumbling didn’t imply control or direction—and she felt like none of those were in her grasp today. Pinocchio merely purred and pushed against her hand, the universal cat gesture for “more, please.”

“Dad’s coming home today. You’ll get plenty of petting soon.” Pinocchio was one of the few things guaranteed to calm Dad down when he got confused. Pinocchio and music. Melba had loaded Dad’s favorite record album—a collection of old hymns played on the piano—onto her digital music player so she could play them for him in the hospital. She had it playing now. It was nice to have the music cue the long-remembered lyrics in her head—“Great is Thy Faithfulness” was a good message for someone thrashing their way through a huge life shift.

When she heard the cuckoo clock downstairs in the living room announce 8:00 a.m., Melba shook off the afghan and hoisted Pinocchio from her lap. Resolutely, she walked downstairs. Face the day head-on, Melba girl. Bright April sunshine filled the kitchen from the window over the sink. Melba let the light soak in, a welcome counterbalance to the cloudy way her soul felt today. Cued by the music, Melba sang the hymn’s reassuring words as she loaded her breakfast dishes into the twenty-year-old dishwasher and spun the funky little dial to hear it gurgle to life.

Am I gurgling to life? Or about to drown?

Barney was sitting at the kitchen table making a shopping list when Melba came back downstairs dressed and showered. With a lopsided grin, she nodded toward the dishwasher. “You paid for that, didn’t you?”

Melba had to laugh. “I’m used to living in an apartment building where you can run the dishwasher and the shower at the same time.” She mimed a shiver. “Brrr, but at least I’m wide awake now. I don’t suppose they have decent chai tea at the supermarket here, do they? I need better caffeine these days.”

Barney laughed. She was a hefty, jolly woman, the kind whose eyes sparkled and whole body jiggled when she laughed. “Lipton’s about as exotic as they get down at Morgan’s Finer Foods, darlin’.”

Melba added Stop at Karl’s Koffee and get some decent tea to her mental list of “Dad Coming Home Tasks.”

“Coming-home day,” Barney said as she opened the door and surveyed the empty fridge. “Glad of it, too. I don’t like to think of your dad holed up in one of those cold, harsh hospital rooms. He needs his things around him, you know?”

“He does, I know.” Half of her was glad Dad was going to be discharged today, but the other half of her was anxious, even with Barney’s offer of extra help. “Dr. Nichols just called the fever ‘a bump in the road,’ but I’m worried. He seemed to...” she searched again for the right verb “...unravel in a way he hasn’t before.” It seemed a better way to put it than “I think he blurted out a deep dark secret about me,” which was what the back of her mind had been yelling at her all morning despite every effort to ignore it.

“Hey,” she called over her shoulder as she stuffed papers into a purple batik tote bag, “did Dad ever blurt stuff out at you...say things you’re not sure he meant?” It didn’t come off as casually as she tried to make it sound.

She felt Barney’s hand on her shoulder and almost resisted turning, afraid she’d be unable to stop herself from crumpling into a tearful heap on the big woman’s shoulders. “It’s not him talking, child, it’s the disease. Don’t you dare take it personal when he gets mean like that.”

Melba swallowed, unsure whether to be glad Barney half mistook her real question. “I know.”

Barney pointed at her. “Do you know how glad—how well and truly glad—he was to know you were coming home to him? How much that meant to him? Means to him?”

“It means as much to me. He acts like it was this big sacrifice on my part, as if he has to make it up to me every waking moment, but I chose to come back. I would never have chosen not to come.” She blinked back the tears that threatened. Over the last two days it felt like she’d spent more time swallowing back a sob than she spent breathing. She tugged what proved to be the last tissue from the box on the kitchen table.

Barney smirked and grabbed the grocery list from the table to add “tissues x 3” to her list. “There’s too many youngsters would have chosen not to come, you know. Kids who bolt when life gets hard or messy. Life is hard and messy, I tell my Jake all the time.” She cupped Melba’s cheek like a doting grandmother. “The wise among us know you live into the hard, live into the mess, because running from it never works. It always comes and finds you.” Barney waved her hands as if shooing her words like flies. “As if you need any such sermon on a day like today. How about I make sure there’s a chocolate cake waiting for you and Mort when you get home? Jake’ll tell you there’s no healing power like that of a wise mama’s chocolate cake.”

Melba started to decline, and then decided a wise mama bearing chocolate cake was no gift horse to look in the mouth. Not today. “Just get some skim milk to go with it?”

Barney scowled a bit, obviously thinking anything “reduced fat” was an abomination of nature. The woman put whipping cream in her coffee, and was probably the reason Dad managed to keep most of his weight on when so many other of Dr. Nichols’s patients dropped pounds. “And yogurt, if you don’t mind,” Melba added, remembering the full bag of fries she’d put away with glee last night. “Anything with ‘light’ on the label will do.” She needed to get running again or her waistline would soon succumb to the ravages of the Barney Meal Plan.

“Call my cell when you know what time you’ll be coming home. I’ll make sure Jake swings by in case we need some of my son’s manpower to get your dad up the steps.”

Dad unable to get himself up his own front steps. The thought struck a cold note under her ribs. She grabbed the keys to her Prius and applied a smile to her face. “It’ll be okay, Barney, I’m sure it will.”

“Well, you know what they say.”

Melba stopped with the door half-open. “What do they say?”

“It’ll all be okay in the end. And if it ain’t okay yet, well, then it ain’t the end yet either.”

Oh, no, Melba thought, it’s just the beginning.

* * *

Clark caught sight of Melba as she walked down Tyler Avenue, Gordon Falls’s main street, toward the corner that housed Karl’s Koffee. He was glad she looked a bit stronger. He rushed across the street to tap her shoulder. “Hey, Melba, hi. Look, I’m really sorry about last night.”

“You shouldn’t apologize—you didn’t do anything other than bring me dinner. I’m sorry Dad hauled off at you like that. I think maybe he thought you were someone else.”

“I knew it wasn’t about me. But being an hour late with your food? That was all me.”

“Yeah, but you already apologized for that.”

There was still so much weariness in her eyes. “That’s some tough going with your dad. Is he coming home anytime soon?”

“I’m heading over there in a bit. Yesterday afternoon Dr. Nichols said he would probably come home today, but...” She shrugged while he pulled open the door to Karl’s for her. “It’s so up-and-down, you know?”

No, he didn’t know. Pop was still as sharp as a tack and going strong at fifty-four, and while Mom’s diabetes had taken her life too soon, it had never been the sort of drawn-out trauma Melba had ahead of her. “That memory-loss stuff seems so hard to handle.”

“Most times it’s not so bad but you...well...” She blinked, and took a deep breath. “You caught him at his worst.”

Clark felt an unwanted tug toward Melba and the huge burden she carried. He was always a softie for a damsel in distress, only now was absolutely not the time. Now was supposed to be all about his new job at the department, about making things right with Pop. Still, every lecture he’d given himself about professional focus couldn’t stop the invitation from coming out of his mouth. “Buy you a cup of coffee?”

She looked up at him as if the thought of someone doing something nice for her were a foreign custom. “You don’t owe me.”

“I know.” Now it was he who shrugged. “But if you were heading for Karl’s I’m guessing you could use one.”

She gave him a slip of a smile, just enough of a hint to let him know her full-blown grin would have distracted him for hours. Cut that out, Bradens. You promised no female distractions. You get sidetracked and stupid when a woman enters the picture, and too much is on the line here. She ordered a scone and some odd chai thing—soy milk and other strange ingredients—and surprised him by asking for a china mug instead of a to-go cup which made him feel obligated to do the same. It felt like cheating on his “no female distractions” policy when he slipped into the booth by the window—she obviously thought he’d meant a visit when he offered to buy her a drink, not just the purchase of a beverage. And it’d be rude to refuse, right? Sitting down for coffee. A friendly cup of coffee. Between friends. When was the last time he’d done that? He didn’t even know Karl’s would serve in actual mugs, and he lived here.

And now, so did she. Distractions...

“Extra time.” She sighed, looking around the folksy little coffeehouse. “I’d forgotten it existed. I’d also forgotten it only takes two seconds to get anywhere in Gordon Falls. I’m so used to leaving time for traffic.”

“We don’t really get Chicago-brand traffic in Gordon Falls. You can count the streetlights on one hand. Ah, but come some of the holiday weekends, just watch how the locals grumble that you can’t park within a block of Tyler Avenue.”

She gave a small laugh as she wrapped her hands around the large blue stoneware mug. She wore a dark purple nail polish and all those rings he’d noticed the other night. He couldn’t tell if the exotic spicy scent that wafted toward him was from her hair or the tea, but its uniqueness intrigued him. And that hair, that mass of dark curls tumbling around her shoulders—how had he not remembered Melba Wingate and that hair? “You were a freshman when I was a junior, weren’t you?” Clark had absolutely no remembrance of the teenage Melba. Sure, he knew her name—Wingate’s Log Cabin Resort had been a Gordon Falls staple for years before they’d finally closed up shop after Mrs. Wingate died—but nothing else about her. “What did you do after school?”

Melba sipped her tea. “I went to design school in Chicago, and then got a job at a textile import house. I figured import-export was the perfect way to see the world. I got to do a few trips and was getting ready to go on a large-scale overseas buying expedition when things got...” Her eyes flashed up at him, then back into the mug. “...complicated. Work’s been really nice about the whole thing, shifting me to handle their online catalogue while I’m here dealing with...Dad.” She used a knife to cut her scone in half. A perfect, thoughtful cut. Artistic. “You?”

Clark thumbed the name badge on his shirt pocket. “Two years of criminal justice at the local community college, but I was never the kind of guy to finish things, so I went into firefighting pretty much after that. I worked in Detroit for seven years until I came back here.”

“The big-city fireman.”

“Well, Detroit. Maybe not as big as Chicago, but it makes up for it in intensity.”

She sized him up as she ate a bite of her scone. “I never pegged you for the kind to come back home.”

It had to come up sooner or later. Clark sighed. He still hadn’t come up with a graceful way to answer comments like that. “It’s not a new story. Bad boy goes off to the big city to find new ways to be bad, hits bottom, comes home a changed man.” Clark pinched the bridge of his nose, thinking that sounded arrogant. “Or hopes he comes home a changed man. I’m still ironing out the kinks, as you already know.”

She leaned back in the booth, finger running around the rim of her mug. “I think I remember hearing something about an accident. Was that the bottom you hit?”

Calling that night an accident was like calling an earthquake a bump in the road. Talking about that point in his life was a four-hour conversation, not something for a quick morning coffee. It wasn’t the kind of thing Clark could share with just anyone, despite the warm look in Melba’s eyes. She was dealing with her life tilting in a different direction, and he knew what that felt like. Maybe that was why he felt so drawn to her. But she had enough trouble on her plate. Digging into his own mess with Melba Wingate was not on today’s menu—on this year’s menu—of good ideas. He drank down the last of his coffee and made a show of checking his watch—the only way he could think of to slip out of the oncoming conversation. “Yeah, well, that’s a story needing way more time than you or I have.”

She peered at her half-empty mug and scone with only a bite taken out of it. “I should probably head on over to the hospital.” Her words lacked any sense of hurry whatsoever.

Clark’s gut grew a black hole, and it wasn’t from gulping his coffee. He was leaving her hanging—again—and he knew it, but he also knew that the potency of that topic with this woman was a bad combination. He could not get so personal with her and keep it “friendly.” The goal here was to keep his focus on becoming the department’s new chief, and Clark’s terrible track record bore witness that any romantic entanglements would mess up the chance he had here in Gordon Falls. “No, stay, enjoy the sunshine. I just have to go... Appointment... Firehouse stuff.” He wanted to whack his forehead for how lame that excuse sounded. “Hope things go well for your dad.”

Her smile was polite but hollow. “Me, too. It’s been a rough couple of days.”

Clark made himself sit still a moment longer. “This is a good town, you know. People know your dad. They’ll want to help, so don’t be afraid to ask for it when you need it, okay? Barney knows everyone and Pastor Allen can have twelve casseroles at your house in under an hour—our deacons’ board is like a SWAT team.”

He was glad that got a laugh from her. He wanted her to get connected—it was just better if it wasn’t to him. “I’ve been meaning to get settled in a church here.”

With her words, a memory of high school Melba invaded his brain. A gawky, frizzy-haired teen girl heading up to the youth Bible study he used to make such fun of with his wild friends. How the world had changed for them both.

Chapter Three

“Okay, now, you’re settled.” Melba tucked the knitted afghan over Dad’s knees. He looked so old, the recliner’s worn cushions nearly swallowing his thin body.

“What a lot of work getting up those front steps.” She couldn’t tell if Dad’s remark was in annoyance or admission. Did he have any sense of how frail he’d become? “When did we paint them that awful green?” He glared out the window at them, eyes narrowed in the expression of a man gloating over a vanquished foe.

She could almost laugh. Maybe it was better if Dad blamed the steps. “Two years ago. And the green’s not so bad.”

“It’s all wrong. I liked them better when they were brown.”

The most amazing details from way back would pop into his mind like that. The steps hadn’t been brown for almost ten years—they’d been beige before they were green. Melba took her father’s coat and hung it on the bentwood coatrack by the door. “Maybe we’ll paint them this summer.”

“I’d like that.” The smile seemed to transform her father’s face, to roll back the years as it lit up his eyes. “I’m hungry. The food in there was lousy.”

“Nutrition is boring,” Barney declared, waltzing into the room with two sizable slices of chocolate cake. “So I’m banning healthy meals for the rest of the day.” She winked at Dad as she put the fork into his right hand. For a while they’d thought he’d lost his appetite, getting surly at meals, until one supper he let it slip that he couldn’t remember which hand to use. Now Barney slid the fork into his hand as if it were the most natural thing in the world. Barney was amazing at helping Dad without making him feel “helped.” Melba had run out of ways to thank her.

“Where’s your slice?”

Barney rubbed her hefty stomach. “Already gone. Someone had to make sure it was up to snuff.”

“You’re a doll,” Dad said behind a mouthful of cake. “Delicious as always.”

Picking up her handbag, Barney tapped Melba’s shoulder. “I’ll be at church for the women’s committee till four. I’ll be back to check on you and put the casserole into the oven at five so you all can eat at six. You all call me if you need anything. Anything at all.”

“We’ve got cake, we’ll be fine as can be,” Dad said.

Barney smiled, but caught Melba’s eyes with a silent “You going to be all right on your own?” raise of one eyebrow.

“Fine as can be,” Melba echoed, banning all sounds of worry from her voice. In truth, she was more than a little nervous, wondering if Dad’s fits of anger or anxiety would soon loom larger than she could handle. Looking back at him now, she saw just a happy old man eating cake in his favorite chair.

* * *

They passed the afternoon without incident, Dad napping while Melba formatted half a dozen digital catalogue pages for work and plowed through the pile of emails left unattended during the hospital stay. “I’ll need to learn to give myself wider margins on deadlines,” she wrote her boss, Betsy, in the email that submitted the catalogue pages, thankful that she’d had the cable company install wireless internet a week ago. “Life can get upended on a moment’s notice over here.” It annoyed her that the pages were a day behind schedule—usually Melba managed to get things in early. “On time is late for Melba,” Betsy used to joke. She doubted anyone would say that anymore.

“Melba?” Dad’s voice startled her, it was so clear and strong.

“Right here, Dad.”

“It’s four-thirty, isn’t it?”

She glanced at the clock above the kitchen table where she’d been working. “Four twenty-eight, to be exact.”

“Aren’t I supposed to take one of those enormous pills now?”

Melba pulled the huge, multi-compartmented pill sorter toward her—recently refilled with some new additions—and consulted the list. “Wow, Dad, you’re good. Yep, it’s one of those big yellow ones.” She filled a glass with water and brought him the pill with two others in the “Afternoon” compartment.

Dad made a face. “These are monsters. They used to be small and white.”

They did. His memory was still there, peeking out, holding on. “Well, Doc says you need a double dose for the next few weeks.”

“Let him choke ’em down, then.” He slid the collection into his mouth, grimaced, then swallowed. “I might need more cake to ease the way.” Dad grinned up at her like a mischievous child.

“You’ll spoil your supper.”

“Fine by me.”

He seemed so here, so alert and happy. “How about a cup of tea instead?” Some huge part of her wanted to sit with him right now and make him tell her all of whatever he’d begun to say back there in the hospital. Another part of her wanted to run, to put her fingers in her ears like a disobedient child, and pretend she’d never heard a thing. Mostly, she craved the connected gaze of his eyes, the true conversation he seemed capable of right now. The urge to hoard his salient moments, to stockpile his wisdom and affection, surged up until she bent over the recliner and gathered him in a fierce hug.

“What’s this fuss?” His words spoke surprise but his eyes told her he knew what was behind her embrace.

“I’m just glad you’re home,” she managed, blinking too fast.

“You and me both, Melbadoll.”

She laughed. “I think it’s been fifteen years since you’ve called me that.”

“You told me you hated it back in high school.”

“What did I know back in high school?”

He laughed. It sputtered into a small cough, but it was a laugh just the same. Melba jumped on the tiny boost of courage it gave her. “Hey, Dad, guess who I ran into this morning from my high school days?” It felt safer not to start with Clark’s visit to the hospital room.

“Who?”

“Clark Bradens. It took me a minute or so to recognize him, he’s changed so much. I never thought he’d clean up his act. He’s going to be fire chief when George retires next month, right?”

The mention wiped the smile from Dad’s face. “So they say.” He reached for the television remote.

She couldn’t help herself. She wanted to know what had caused the strong reaction to Clark’s visit at the hospital. “What’s he like?”

“How would I know? I don’t see that boy.” He turned on the news and turned up the volume. The conversation had been declared over. She wasn’t really surprised that Dad had said “that boy” with the same tone people had used to refer to Clark in high school. Usually around the phrase “stay away from that boy.” Clark was no hero back then.

Melba was opening her mouth to try again when Barney pushed open the back door. “Lord, save me from church committees!” she declared as she shucked off her coat and set her handbag on the table. “A lot of good may get done, but a whole lot of not-good creeps in around the edges. Some town gossips ought to just hush up and stay home.”

Melba left her dad to his television news and leaned against the kitchen doorway. “Tough day at the office?”

“Talk, whisper, talk. And then they wonder why the young people leave this town.” Barney shook her head. “We’ve known for two weeks since the town council meeting, but the yammering hasn’t stopped yet. You’d think there’s never been a second chance given in the whole wide world the way some of them went on about Clark Bradens this afternoon. Ain’t too many of us could stand up to judgment by who we was in high school.” She gave out a trio of disapproving tsk-tsks as she moved the casserole dish from the fridge to the oven.

“Clark Bradens? Why’d he come up?”

“Some folks want to throw him a nice party when George retires and he takes up as fire chief. I say it’s a fine thing to celebrate a son coming home like that. Others, well...they don’t see it that way. All they can see is a young high school punk coasting on his papa’s coattails. Honestly.” Melba wiped her hands on a dishtowel. “How many years has it been, and since when isn’t a man allowed to grow up and get it right?”

“Who says he’s grown up and gotten it right?” Melba could hardly believe Dad was standing behind her. He’d gotten up out of the recliner all on his own?

“He seemed nice enough to me.”

“When’d you meet him?”

Dad was fine, Dad wasn’t so fine. It was like living on an emotional Ping-Pong table. “I just told you I ran into him this morning.” Her frustration ran away with her better sense, because she heard herself add, “You yelled at him last night when he brought me food in your hospital room.”

“I couldn’t have yelled at him. He’d have no business visiting me.”

“I just said he was bringing me food. I met him in the hospital cafeteria and he offered to get Dellio’s for me but a fire alarm made him late.”

Dad shuffled into the kitchen and plopped himself down on the nearest chair. “He’s going to be fire chief.” He did not say it like a person pleased with the idea. In fact, his words had a “there goes the neighborhood” tone.

Melba started to say “We just talked about that,” but shut her mouth in resignation. Instead, she caught Barney’s eye over her father’s head, and they shared a split second of silent concern.

“Did you really holler at that boy? Or rather, since he is older than your daughter, did you really holler at that man?” Barney asked.

“I just said I didn’t yell at that Bradens boy,” Dad snapped.

“Have the world your way, then.” Barney huffed. It was what she said whenever Dad’s version of the world didn’t line up with reality. Melba hoped she’d someday acquire the ability to let it roll off her the way Barney did. “Get on out of this kitchen, you grumpy old man. Dinner won’t be ready for another fifty minutes.”

Melba reached out to help her father out of his chair, but he brushed her off. With considerable effort, Dad pushed himself up and shuffled, grumbling, back to the recliner. She stared after him and shook her head. “Should I be glad he’s moving around, or annoyed at his mood?”

Barney laughed and pulled a package of brown-and-serve rolls out of the freezer. “Both.”

Melba got a cookie sheet out of the cabinet and took the package from Barney. “He really did haul off at Clark in the hospital room,” she said quietly as she broke apart the rolls and arranged them on the cookie sheet. “It was scary, actually. Came out of nowhere. He yelled at Clark like they knew each other.”

Barney leaned back against the counter. “You know George Bradens and your father have never gotten along—not for a long time, anyway. Too easy to get a flood of bad water under the bridge in a small town like this. I heard they were close when they were younger.”

A thought struck Melba. “Clark looks a lot like his dad, doesn’t he?”

“With all that Bradens red hair, I expect he does. I ain’t ever seen a photo of young George but I can picture it easy enough.”

Melba moved closer. “Dad kept thinking I was Mom last night. Do you suppose he thought Clark was George, thought it was back then?”

“Could be.”

“The question is, then, what could have happened in the past that made Dad so angry at George?”

“Who knows?” Barney nodded in the direction of the living room. “But take care, hon. Sometimes it don’t pay to dig up past hurts like that.”

Too late, Melba thought. The digging’s been started for me. Only I don’t know if Dad realizes he’s the one who picked up the shovel.

* * *

Melba pulled on her robe and padded downstairs like a woman about to face the noose. She’d been up half the night, her mind a storm of questions about what her father had said at the hospital when they’d been alone. She’d tried to put it out of her mind, knowing Dad didn’t want to talk about it. Help me let it go, she’d prayed nearly hourly since Dad had come home, but to no avail. With the thin pale rays of dawn came the realization that it could no longer be avoided.

She knew as she smelled coffee that there would never be a better time. He was up, sitting with coffee in his recliner. She was still up, having barely slept. And Barney wasn’t due for another hour. Give me the right words, Father. This is going to need so much grace and I’m running on empty.

“Morning, Dad.”

He turned toward her, and she marveled at the health in his features. He looked like Dad again, not that ghost of Dad who’d thrashed around his hospital bed. “Mornin’ Melbadoll.” He smiled, and she fought the urge to just let the day slide into peaceful normalcy.

It won’t. It can’t until you talk about this, she argued with herself while she fixed a cup of tea and dragged herself into the living room to perch on the ottoman by Dad’s chair. “I need to ask you something, Dad.”

He raised an eyebrow and sipped his coffee. “Shoot.”

She’d rehearsed twelve ways to ask this, but couldn’t think of one. “I know people say stuff when they’re sick, and you had a high fever, but you said something to me in the hospital.”

“Okay, maybe I could be nicer about that Bradens boy, but...”

“No, Dad, it doesn’t have anything to do with that.” She couldn’t resist adding, “But yes, you could be nicer.” She stirred her tea, trying to come up with the right words. “This is...something you said to me. Actually—” this hurt to say “—I think you thought you were talking to Mom, the way you said it.” When his eyes grew anxious, she added, “You were pretty sick and on a lot of medication.”

“You look so much like her.” He said it with such tenderness, then shifted his gaze away from her to out the window.

“I like that, you know? It used to bug me in school when everyone would say, ‘Oh, you must be Maria’s daughter,’ but I like it now.” Melba squinted her eyes shut, pulling up a thread of courage from the place deep inside her chest that hadn’t settled since the hospital. “Dad, you looked at me, called me Maria, and said ‘She ought to know she’s not mine.’”

Melba watched her father’s body take in the words. Even with his face away from her, it was like a shock wave, hitting his shoulders, flinching his fingers, pushing on his chest. Part of her wanted him to not remember, to dismiss it as another of his “gone away” moments, but the telltale movements left no doubt. She was almost afraid for him to turn toward her.

When he did, his face was so full of pain and heartbreak it pummeled the breath from her lungs. “I didn’t say that.” It was a last-ditch denial.

“Yes, Dad, you did. And I think we should talk about it, don’t you?”

He turned away from her again. The fingers around his coffee cup began to twitch. “I didn’t say...” The coffee cup tumbled out of his grasp before she could catch it, spilling coffee on his lap. He yelped at the heat, the flash of anger she’d grown to fear surging up in him. “Don’t give me hot coffee like that!” he snapped at her, forgetting it was he who’d served himself this morning. To think she’d been pleased at his self-sufficiency.

By the time Melba had gotten Dad cleaned up and calmed down, they were both exhausted and irritable. When she arrived, Barney’s frown told Melba they looked as bad as they felt. Melba looked up from her third cup of tea as she clung to her last nerve while Dad shouted things at the news broadcasters from a too-loud television in the living room.

“Last night not go so well?” Barney said, nodding toward the blasting news headlines on the other side of the kitchen door.

“No, the night went fine. This morning, not so much.”

“Did he fall?”

“No. It’s my fault. I tried to get him to explain something he said to me in the hospital and it...” Melba pushed out a breath that felt like concrete in her lungs. “It didn’t go well.” She hated that she felt tears twist up her throat. “He’s so...here sometimes, and then the next second he’s...” She swallowed, unable to come up with a suitable alternative to “gone.”

Barney sat down. “I know,” she said, putting a hand over Melba’s. “This is hard. For you most of all. You gotta have faith God’s going to walk you through this, and I know you do, but that don’t mean it isn’t tough to see some mornings.” She frowned at Melba’s face, asking, “How much sleep did you get last night?”

I must look a sight, Melba thought. She was still in her pajamas and hadn’t put her contacts in or brushed her hair. “Not a whole lot.”

Barney patted Melba’s hand. “Why don’t you go upstairs and nap a bit. I’ll take care of Mr. Personality in there and see if I can’t lighten the mood.”

“Actually—” Melba stifled a yawn “—I think the best thing for me would be a run. A little sunshine and fresh air ought to do me a world of good.”

“Never could see the point in that, but if that’s your ticket, then by all means. Go burn off stress.”

“Burn off chocolate cake, actually.” Melba was surprised to find a smile creep onto her lips. Nothing was going to solve itself anytime soon, so she was going to have to learn to cope while knee-deep in uncertainty. Uncertainty over what to think, what to do, where to find the answers she sought. And most of all, uncertainty over how to deal with the revelation that she was now certain was true—that Dad wasn’t her father after all. She needed time to think, to pray, to start pulling at all those knots in front of her, and she did that best while running.

Chapter Four

Chad Owens kept jogging. “Forget about it. What do a bunch of old ladies know?”

Clark held out a hand to halt Chad’s steps as they jogged together on the river bank path. He wanted Chad to take more offense at what he’d just heard. “Those old ladies know how to make a fuss, how to complain to other people, and probably how to write letters to the editor of the town newspaper. I’m going to pay for the fact that they aren’t happy about the idea of me as fire chief.”

Chad shook his head and kept running. “The town council’s already voted. You’re already hired. You’re in uniform. You formally take over in a month. It’s just noise.”

“I go to that church.” Clark dashed to catch up. “I spent three hours mopping out the basement from the last flood. Why do they still think of me as some kind of hooligan?”

Now it was Chad who stopped. “You can’t tell me you didn’t see this coming.” He wiped his forehead with one sleeve. “You didn’t exactly leave here Prince Charming. Did you think everyone would come around in the first month?”

Clark didn’t really have an answer. “I suppose I figured once the hiring became official, that’d be the end of it.”

Chad put one leg up on the park bench beside him and stretched a calf muscle. “Come on, Clark, I didn’t even grow up here and I could have told you this was going to happen.” He looked straight at Clark. “You have some pretty big fire boots to fill.”

“Tell me about it.”

Chad cuffed Clark’s shoulder. “He’s been fire chief around here for ages. You’d constitute a big change even if you were identical to him.”

It wasn’t much of a help.

“And you’re completely different from him,” Chad continued as he stretched the other leg.

Clark started running again. “Thanks for the vote of confidence there.”

“Hang on.” Chad caught up. “What I’m trying to say is this is an uphill battle no matter who steps in as chief, so don’t worry about a little bit of friction.”

“Oh, so I suppose that’s why you didn’t step up to take over as chief? Didn’t want to take the hit but happy to watch me go down in flames?” Clark didn’t really feel that way, but life didn’t offer up too many chances to rib Chad Owens, so he had to find his targets when he could. It had gotten a bit easier since he’d married just before Clark came back to town.

“I’m too busy to be chief.”

“Too busy playing the happy newlywed. You’ve put on a few pounds being married to the candy store lady.”

Chad smirked. He smirked a lot more since his wife, Jeannie, and stepson, Nick, had come into his life, and Clark was truly happy for the guy. “I can handle it. And what about you?”

“Oh, that’s the last thing I need right now. I’ve got to play the straight-and-narrow for a while. One hundred percent work and no social entanglements for the first six months, that’s my plan.”

“Funny thing about plans...” Chad said.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ve heard it before, but this is Gordon Falls. I’m safe. I’ve been here three weeks and so far the only single woman I’ve met is Melba Wingate.” He tried to put disinterest in his voice, but the truth was Melba’s chocolate-brown eyes and cascades of hair entered his memory far too easily.

Chad turned and jogged backwards in front of him, raising a teasing eyebrow. “Melba Wingate, huh?”

Clark reached out and nearly pushed him over. “Her dad’s sick—she’s got enough on her plate. And besides, you know I don’t go for the artsy, esoteric types.”

Chad stumbled but caught his footing. “I seem to remember athletic blondes being your specialty. In alarming numbers.”

“Before,” Clark corrected a bit too sharply, but it was a sore spot and Chad knew it.

“Before you cleaned up your act.” Chad stopped and caught Clark’s shoulder. “And you have. Look, you’ve pulled the biggest U-turn of anyone I know, Clark. I respect that. Everyone else will, too, you just have to give them time to see the change I’ve seen. Come on, even your dad came around. You’re supposed to be here. Some old stories from who you were ten years ago aren’t going to change that.”

It was as much of a speech as Clark had ever heard from Chad. He clasped Chad’s hand on his shoulder, thankful for their friendship. “Thanks.” Before things got too gooey, he ducked under Clark’s arm and started running at a faster pace. “But you’re still fat and married.”

“Yeah, well, you’re still skinny and obsessive.”

“Lean and focused,” he called as he turned a corner of the riverside path, “lean and focused.” He turned back to see Chad was not following him. “What?”

“I’m done for the morning. You take that final mile on your own.”

Clark pumped his fists in the air victoriously. “Because I can.”

“Because you need to. See you at the station at two for the meeting with P.A. Crimson.” They had a meeting with a safety equipment company that afternoon—Chad was seeing to it that Clark met all the vendors and suppliers.

Clark began thinking of all the ways he could kid Chad for “going soft” as he kept running. It wasn’t hard; Chad was an easy target these days. Once a somber, serious loner, Chad had fallen hard—and completely against his will—for Jeannie Nelworth and her young son. Now the three of them were the poster family for happy endings, all sugary happiness and love-struck smiles. It was nice, in a make-your-teeth-hurt kind of way. Chad had known a lot of pain in his life, had lost a fiancée to a fire and shut down for too many years. It was fun to rib him for his newfound light-heartedness.

The perfect taunt had just come to Clark, and he was actually laughing out loud as he turned a corner on the jogging path and nearly tripped over Melba Wingate. She was sitting on the path clutching one ankle and he almost tumbled over top of her but managed to catch himself to stumble alongside.

“Whoa....you okay?”

Melba looked up at him with the same eyes he’d seen that first night at the hospital. Strained, weary, hanging on by a thread. And now, physical pain laced her expression as well. “That depends on your definition,” she winced.

* * *

“Well, then, let’s see.” Melba watched Clark kick into first-responder mode, tugging at the sweatshirt now tied around his waist to wipe the sweat from his forehead. He crouched down beside her, lifted her ankle and gently removed her shoe, then tucked the bunched-up sweatshirt under her leg to cushion her foot as he set it back down. She tried not to wince, but ended up sucking in her breath sharply when he ran an assessing hand over her throbbing ankle.

“Ouch.” She hated how weak and wobbly her voice sounded. She hated that she was on the verge of tears. Not because her leg hurt that much—although it was painful—but because it was a last straw of sorts. She’d thought the run would clear her head of her problems, but all it did was add another one on top. One more ding in an already battered-feeling life.

“No break, but you’re swelling a bit. I’d say ‘ouch’ is justified.”

Somehow, it was the exact wrong thing to say. Melba’s fragile emotions took it as permission to overflow. She tried to hold it back, but a small sob escaped from her tight throat. This is a really bad place to lose it, she told herself, but the admonition only made things worse. She looked away, pointlessly trying to hide the tears that stole disobediently down her face.

“Hey.” Clark’s voice dropped its clinical tone completely. The warmth of it only made things worse. That kind of tone always got to her these days. The best nurses in Dad’s hospital—the ones for whom crisis caring was a true gift, not just a job—could bring on tears just with a hand on her shoulder. “Whoa there, you just turned an ankle, you’ll be...” He stopped and sat down beside her. “Well, I was gonna say ‘fine’ but I think maybe that’s the wrong word here.” He paused for a moment before asking, “Running from, huh?”

“What?” His odd question made her turn and look at him. It broke the tension of trying to keep her emotions in check—there was no hiding the tears once she turned. There had been no hiding them earlier, really, but the trick served to loosen the knot in her throat. Clark’s eyes were full of compassion, without a hint of judgment. Why must Clark Bradens always find her at the end of her rope?

He sighed and rested his elbows on his knees, as if ready to stay a while. “My fire chief in Detroit said that when you run, it’s best to know if you’re running to or running from. He had a theory that you never got hurt running to something, you got hurt running from something.” It was an odd thing to notice at the moment, but Melba could see that rescuing was deep in Clark’s nature. The urge to help—either here or at the hospital vending machine or on the street corner yesterday—seemed to leap from him without effort. This Clark was a bit of a shock—it felt so much at odds with the careless trouble-seeker the high school Clark had been.

“From.” She pointed to her ankle, surprised to find a damp little laugh bubbling up from the tide of tears. “The theory holds.”

“That’s been my experience.” He offered a half-hearted shrug. “Done my share of ‘running from,’ too.”

Melba waited for Clark to ask her what she was running from, but he didn’t. They sat there for a moment, quiet amid the pale green of the Gordon River’s waking spring. She hadn’t even noticed before now that it was a pretty morning; her thoughts had been inwardly focused. The chief’s theory made plain and painful sense. She sighed and flexed her foot, feeling foolish. It startled her that some part of her wanted Clark to pry, to give her an excuse to blurt out the storm of questions brewing inside her. They wouldn’t surface on their own—raw and deep as the pain and uncertainty were—but they wanted to be pulled out of her. Running from. It seemed almost inevitable now that she tripped and turned her ankle.

Clark picked up a twig and began spinning it in his fingers. “You’ve got a lot chasing you.”

It was a perfectly phrased comment, opening the door for her to say more but not requiring it. The urge to tell him everything—to open up about leaving Chicago and the torture of her fading father, about disappointment and postponed travel plans and the bone-deep suspicion that she wasn’t who she thought she was—pushed at her like a sudden squall. The tears burned behind her eyes again. “Yeah.” It was a gulped whisper, a last-ditch effort to hold it all in. She nodded—twice—rather than attempt any more words.

“This whole parent thing, the coming back when you’re not a kid anymore, it’s rough. The roles get all tangled. Add your dad’s...condition...and, well, it’d be easy to see how ankles get turned.” Clark shifted himself down toward her foot again. “Flex it and see how it feels.”

She did. “It hurts less now.”

He looked back up at her with something close to the charming wink she remembered from high school. “See, better already.” He’d been bad-boy hunky as a teen; a flame of too-long red hair that tumbled behind him as he tore through town helmetless on a loud motorcycle. Now, his short hair and stunning features were strong rather than wild. He was as handsome as ever, but in a completely different manner. And far too appealing for someone already struggling with more than she could handle.

He stilled for a moment, as if deciding whether or not to say something. The same hesitation she’d seen at the coffee shop when she asked him about his accident. “Not too many people our age here to talk to. Not who get what it’s like to come back. It’s kind of a tight fit to squeeze back into Gordon Falls, don’t you think?”

Melba merely nodded again, the squall pushing harder. Clark felt so easy to talk to. He was an outsider newly forced in, just like she was. It’d be so simple to let it all spill out of her on the quiet of the riverbank. How much she wanted one other soul on earth to know she hadn’t imagined what her father blurted out in his delusion. Clark had no stake in the secret. He’d been a dangerous young man; he probably had a closetful of past secrets himself. Melba ventured a long look at him, noting that his green eyes had a singed quality around the edges. He had secrets and scars. Melba’s forefinger found Dad’s wedding band still on her thumb and tried on the thought of betraying the secret to just one other person.

“It’s hard,” she managed. How many times had she said that phrase lately? “He’s...” She couldn’t think of a way to start, and wasn’t even sure she should start at all. There was an odd, tenuous space between them—too close and yet too far apart at the same time.

“Everybody loves your dad,” Clark said after a moment, his eyes returning to a professional assessment of her ankle as his warm fingers tested muscle and joint. “They were praying for him in church while he was in the hospital and Barney told me people have been by to help.”

“Sure, now. What about weeks from now when he’s still sick? Sicker.”

“The help will still be there. Honestly, you’ll probably get more help than you need, the way folks like to poke their noses in around here.” He looked up at her again as he reached for her running shoe. “It’s going to be okay.”

His eyes were intense, focused, compelling. She had a vision of him reaching a victim in a cloud of smoke, extending a hand, saying those words with the same lure of confidence he exuded now. Trouble was, Clark only saw part of the fire burning around her—the disease, the logistical challenge. He had no idea of the full-blown firestorm licking at her heels. How she wasn’t the least bit sure it was going to be okay ever again.

It wasn’t his problem. It wasn’t fair to make it his problem, either.

Melba took the shoe, stuffing the urge to tell all back down with the same effort she forced her swollen ankle back into its shoe.

Both hurt far too much.

Chapter Five

Charlotte Taylor was a sight for sore eyes. Melba hugged the stuffing out of her coworker and best friend as she got off the train in Gordon Falls. “I’m so glad to see you!”

Charlotte, who was an urban girl to the core, spun around on her black leather boots to squint at the little train station with her mouth open. “Wow, girl, you live in a postcard. I feel like I’m on a movie set.” She nudged Melba. “You grew up in this place? Really?”

It was a funny thing, living in a place like Gordon Falls. People thought of it as peaceful and perfect, not at all ready to think of it as having bumps and warts like any other community. “Mom used to say Gordon Falls was like a duck swimming upstream. Peaceful and charming on the surface, furiously paddling with big clumsy feet underneath.”

Her words must have had more of an edge than she realized, for Charlotte dropped her overnight bag and took Melba by both shoulders. “That bad already?” she said quietly. Charlotte had lost her grandfather to Alzheimer’s two years ago, and as such she’d become Melba’s go-to shoulder to cry on. Just the look in Charlotte’s eyes returned the lump to Melba’s throat.

She shook it off, picking up Charlotte’s bag and putting an arm around her friend instead. “Yes and no. I’ve got an hour before we have to be home, so let’s go introduce you to some excellent apple pie.”

“Pie. This really is a movie set. We’re riding in an actual car, aren’t we? Not a horse and buggy?”

Charlotte was the kind of friend who could make Melba laugh even in the worst of circumstances, which was exactly why she’d called her to come out for an overnight visit. Besides, she knew the daily life of Alzheimer’s, so Melba felt comfortable bringing her to the house where she still wasn’t comfortable with lots of company yet. Dad could be so unpredictable, and not everyone could handle that. “My car is right there. We’re quaint, but not that quaint.”

Charlotte tucked herself into the passenger seat. “I half worried I’d find you in a bonnet and apron or something.”

Melba rolled her eyes. “I went ninety miles down the interstate, Charlotte, not back in time.”

Turning to look at her for a long assessment, Charlotte sighed. “You look tired. How are you holding up?”

“Some parts are okay, others have been...” Melba didn’t know how or where to begin. “...startling.” She put the car in gear. “You know what it’s like.”

“Still, it hits everyone different. It hits every day different.” Charlotte reached out a fingerless-gloved hand to give Melba’s shoulder a squeeze. “I’m glad you called. You need backup to do this. It’s just too nuts to handle alone. I have Mom, but for you...well, it’s just you.”

“I have Barney. And a month’s worth of church casseroles.” Melba seized the chance to talk about something happy. “How—and where—is Mima?”

“Oh, you know Mima.” Charlotte exhaled. Her grandmother had taken life by the horns after her husband’s long decline, and become a world traveler. “Where’s Mima?” had become a grown-up version of the children’s search book Where’s Waldo? at Melba’s office. Half of Melba’s yearning to travel the world had been nurtured by Mima’s tales of adventure. “Indonesia at the moment, then home for the holidays, then I think it’s Greenland.”

Melba laughed. “Greenland? Why?”

Charlotte shrugged her shoulders, setting her long blond hair swinging. “Why not?”

“Your grandmother never did need a reason.”

Charlotte whipped out her ever-present smartphone, fingers flying. “I’m sending her a message right now, asking her to flood you with postcards. What’s your address here in Charmingland?”

“Mima texts?”

“Mima is a thoroughly modern woman. I bought her a smartphone for her birthday.”

Melba gave the address as she pulled into Cafe Homestead, informing her friend that it was the purveyor of the state’s most delicious apple pie as well as an impressive selection of tea. Life felt a bit more in place now—good tea and a good friend made a world of difference.

* * *

An hour later, pie consumed, introductions made, and Dad happily dozing in front of the television set, Melba and Charlotte sat across from each other on the bed in Melba’s room. Melba leaned back against the headboard and fingered the eyelet lace on a yellow throw pillow left over from her teenage years. “I feel like I’m fifteen and having a sleepover,” she said, staring around at her once-beloved butter-colored walls and cream curtains.

Charlotte ran her hands through the fringe on one of the fabrics Melba had draped over those cream curtains. “It’s like you just spread the Melba I know overtop a lemon meringue pie or something.” She laughed when Melba moaned. “No, it’s sort of fun. I bet you thought this was fab-u-lous when you were that age.”

“It’s a bit weird to me now. It’s home, but then again it’s foreign territory. Like the layers won’t fit together right anymore.” She caught a photograph of her and her mother—a sunny, smiling scene from a visit home just after she’d moved to Chicago—and felt her throat tighten.

Charlotte rolled over to perch on her elbows. “Okay, we’ve done all the preliminary niceties, so why don’t you tell me what’s up?”

Melba swallowed hard. “I thought this would be easier, you know? Like a list of tasks or coordinating medications or just being around.” It was the tip of the iceberg—the big, dangerous emotional iceberg waiting to sink her Titanic—but she couldn’t think of another place to start.

Charlotte’s smile held the edge of remembered pain—her grandparents had lived with her right up until the end. “It’s hard stuff. Taking care of Grandpa was like going to war some days. With an enemy you can’t see or predict or even fight. You can only duck out of the way and hope you survive.”

The metaphor seemed to offer a way to say the unthinkable out loud. “I didn’t duck, and I’ve already been hit.” The tears came out of nowhere, like they seemed to too often these days. “A big bomb dropped on me, Charlotte, and I don’t know what to do about it.”

Charlotte scrambled across the bedspread to pull Melba into a fierce hug. “Yeah, you did know what to do. You called me. We saved the Colorado Alpaca Fleece account, girl, and that means we can tackle just about anything.”

Somehow pacifying an irate alpaca fleece supplier whose product had been mislabeled—twice—didn’t seem a match for what Dad had dumped on her, but Melba let the feisty energy of Charlotte’s hug soothe her soul. She cried on her friend’s go-to shoulder for a minute or so, then pushed her hair out of her eyes. “That was a monster of a problem, wasn’t it? This problem is a bit harder to solve, though. This bomb has...real damage potential.”

Charlotte sat up. “Okay, start at the beginning.”

Pulling her knees up to hug them, Melba let the words crawl out, small and vulnerable. “Well, you know Dad got pretty sick last week, and his mind sort of...short-circuited.”

“Good way to put it,” Charlotte sighed. “I always thought ‘dementia’ sounded so gruesome.”

“He said some things. One thing, actually, that was a big shocker.” Melba steeled herself with a deep breath, sure it would make the thing more awful to hear it spoken out loud. “He said...he said I wasn’t his.” There. She’d said it and not melted into the carpeting.

It took Charlotte a few excruciating moments to grasp what Melba was saying. “You mean, not his daughter? Biologically?”

Melba could only nod. It was so much more complicated than biology.

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