Where There's Smoke

“I’ll sit down, but I don’t feel like eating.”

He’d been in a rotten mood since Lara Mallory had asked him to help her retrieve the remains of a little girl, who was probably his own flesh and blood, from Montesangre. Could Clark’s guilty conscience have driven him to take his own life? Key had previously denied the rumors of suicide. They no longer seemed so farfetched.

He brought the liquor decanter to the table with him. Defying Jody’s critical glare, he poured himself another drink. “How was your day, Jody? Feeling better?”

“There’s nothing wrong with me. Never was. I got short-winded and everybody made a big deal of it.”

He declined to argue with her at the risk of raising her blood pressure. Since her stroke, he’d walked on eggshells around her, doing whatever was necessary to placate rather than provoke her.

He still thought having a live-in nurse was a good idea, but he hadn’t broached the subject again. He’d dodged every verbal missile she’d fired at him, knowing that her rotten disposition stemmed largely from fear. Hell, if he’d had a seizure like the one she’d suffered, he’d be on edge, too.

“How about you, Janellen? Anything exciting happen to you today?”

“No. Business as usual. What did you do today?”

He told them about the rancher from Arkansas. “Anderson paid me well. It was easy work. Boring as hell, though.”

“And to you that’s the most important thing, isn’t it?” Jody said. “God forbid you ever get bored.”

Raising his glass of whiskey, Key saluted her accuracy.

“Just like your father.” Jody sniffed contemptuously. “You’re always looking for adventure.”

“What’s wrong with that?”

“We’ve got tapioca pudding for dessert, Key. Would you like some?”

“I’ll tell you what’s wrong with that.” Jody ignored Janellen’s desperate attempt to avoid a quarrel. “You’re a big baby, living in a dream world. Isn’t it time you grew up and committed yourself to something worthwhile?”

“He’s flying for one of the timber companies, Mama. They’re using him to spray the trees for pine beetles. Saving forests is worthwhile.”

Jody didn’t hear her daughter. She was focused on Key. “Life isn’t made up of adventures. It’s working at something day in and day out, rain or shine, good times or bad, whether you feel like it or not.”

“That doesn’t sound like ‘life’ to me,” he said. “That’s my definition of drudgery.”

“Life isn’t always fun.”

“Exactly. That’s why you have to look for it. Or make it.”

“Like your father did?”

“Yes. Because he couldn’t find it at home.” By now his temper was at the breaking point. “He searched for it in other places, with other women, in other beds.”

Jody came out of her chair like a shot. “I won’t have you talking that filth at my dinner table.”

Key stood, too, squaring off across from her. “And I won’t have you bad-mouthing my father.”

“Father?” she said scornfully. “He was no father. He left you for months at a time.”

It hurt, that reminder of the countless times he’d watched his father’s car disappear around the bend in the road, knowing in his breaking young heart that it would be endless days before he would see him again.

He wanted to hurt her back. “He left to escape you, not us kids.”

“Key!” Janellen cut in.

Again, she went unheeded. Now that the well of his resentment had been tapped, he couldn’t control the gush of angry words. “You never offered me a kind word or a soft touch. Did you treat Daddy any differently? Did you ever talk to him without making it a goddamn lecture on his faults? Did you ever stop thinking about crude oil long enough to laugh with him, to tease and act silly just for the hell of it? When he was depressed, did you draw him to your breast and comfort him? Not that your bosom would have been comforting, or even yielding. It’s as hard as a drill bit.”

“Key!” Janellen cried. “Mama, sit down. You look—”