“Now, I also know Cole worries about my heart. So after he got over being boiling mad over the bargain I stuck him with, he decided it would be better, for my sake, if the two of you pretended you actually give a damn about each other. Are you with me?”
She nodded warily.
“Good, because now we’re coming to the part that scares the hell out of me.”
“What’s that?”
“Yesterday he was up at the house driving everybody crazy about every little detail so it would be as nice for you as it could be. He was giving a damned good imitation of a man who thought a whole lot of his wife. I got real excited to meet you. Last night, he couldn’t keep his eyes off you. But I’ve gotta tell you straight out, Diana, I didn’t get the idea you shared his feelings. Yet, this morning, he’s wearing his heart on his sleeve, so I figure you had something to do with that last night.”
He paused for emphasis, his voice turning insistent as he reached the real issue: “Don’t go playing around with his heart, girl. Either take all of it or leave it alone. Don’t go taking little bits and pieces, when it suits you—and if it suits you. I don’t think it’s in you to be mean or cruel, but sometimes, if a woman doesn’t know how a man feels, that could happen.”
Diana collapsed back against the sofa, laughing softly, hugging Cole’s picture to her chest. She turned her face to the elderly man who loved her husband, too, and said, without shame or pretense, “Cole isn’t wearing his heart on his sleeve. That is my heart.”
He looked fifteen years younger . . . and belatedly embarrassed. Looking around for some way out of the situation he’d brought on himself, he got up and went over to the fireplace. “That picture you have is Cole when he was sixteen. Here’s two others.”
He presented them to her with great care, and Diana held them that way, but her smile began to fade and her heart began to ache. She’d looked at enough photographs at the magazine to notice things quickly, and the dark-haired little boy with his fingers shoved into the heavy coat of a mixed-breed collie at his side was looking at the camera with a very solemn expression. Much too solemnly for a six- or seven-year-old. She took the other picture.
“He was nine there,” Cal said. The collie was on one side of him, and another mixed-breed dog was on his left. Diana scarcely noticed the dogs; she noticed that although he was trying to smile, he didn’t look happy. And his pants were several inches above his ankles in both pictures. He was standing beside an old tire swing in one shot and in front of a shack of some sort in the other.
She forgot about all that when she suddenly realized that Cal could give her tidbits of information about Cole. “Even when I knew him before,” she confided with a smile, “he was frustratingly secretive about his past.” She patted the seat beside her. “Tell me everything. Tell me what he was like when he was little and what his mother was like and—everything.”
“What’s he told you?” Cal asked warily.
“Nothing! I know he had a brother who was two years older than he and another brother who was three years older, and they both died in an accident right after Cole went to college. I know his mother died of cancer when he was in his first year of college. He never told me when his father died. He’s had so much tragedy,” she added quietly.
She waited for Cal to talk after he sat down, but he seemed deeply troubled and genuinely at a loss. He kept looking over at the piles of reading material. “I like psychology,” he said, seemingly apropos of nothing. “Do you believe in it?”
“Of course.”
“Do you believe it’s good for a person to keep bad things bottled up inside of him, and to hide those things from the woman who loves him—And go on doing so for as long as he lives?”
Diana knew with absolute certainty and grave foreboding they were talking about Cole. She wanted to help, but she didn’t want to pry.
“I—I wouldn’t want him to feel I pried into anything.”
“I’d call it lancing a wound, not prying.”
“I don’t like wounds that don’t heal,” Diana said. “The question is, can I help them heal?”
“You couldn’t hurt.”
She looked at the picture she was holding and thought about lying in Cole’s arms last night. He had so much love to give, and she wanted it all. She didn’t want to risk losing any of it. “If what you’re going to tell me is really bad, then how will Cole feel if he knows I know it?”
“He won’t have to worry that you’d change if you found out. He won’t have to wonder how you really feel. Dr. Richenblau calls it ‘cathartic.’ It won’t take long to tell. What you do about it is up to you.”
Diana drew a deep breath and nodded. “Tell me.”
“Well, you said he’s had a lot of tragedy in his life. The biggest tragedy was that he was born with the name Harrison.”
That was the last thing Diana expected him to say. “Why?”
“Because in Kingdom City, where Cole grew up, that name is a curse. For as long as anyone can remember, the Harrisons have been wild and worthless. They’re drunkards and cheats and hell-raisers, the whole worthless lot of ’em, and Cole grew up with that stigma. When Cole’s mama eloped with Tom Harrison, my brother cried. He couldn’t believe his baby girl had done it. Turned out Tom had gotten her pregnant, and in that day and age, in these parts, girls who got pregnant had to get married. No two ways about it.”
Diana watched him bend down and straighten magazines and generally stall; then he straightened and said, “Cole’s two brothers got killed the year after Cole went away to college. They were in Amarillo, and they were drunk, and they wanted to get even drunker, but they didn’t have any money. So they beat an old lady half to death for her purse; then they jumped in their car and took off. They ran a red light, and the cops went after them. They were going over a hundred miles an hour when their car hit a lamppost. Good riddance to ’em, I said then and I say it now, too.
“Cole’s daddy liked those two boys of his, though. They were chips off the old block.”
When he paused, Diana said flatly, “But Cole wasn’t.”
“Never was. Never could be. He was smarter than all three of them put together, and they knew it. They hated him for it. About the only friends Cole had in those days were his dogs. Dogs and horses and cats—Animals just loved that boy and he loved them right back. They understood each other. Guess maybe it was because they all knew how it felt to be helpless with no one to turn to.”
“So Cole was the only one who went to college,” Diana said aloud.
Cal gave a mirthless laugh. “He was the only one to make it past the tenth grade.” Tipping his head back, he said, “You know the collie that was with Cole in the picture?”
“Yes.”
“About a week before Cole left for college, his brothers gave him a little going-away present.”
Diana knew it wasn’t going to be good, but she wasn’t prepared for what she heard.
“They hung the dog in the barn.”
Diana moaned and clamped her hand over her mouth, half rising from her seat; then she made herself sit back down.
“They disappeared afterward and didn’t come back until after Cole left. If they had, I think he’d have killed them.”
“Wasn’t there somewhere else he could live?”
“He could have lived here, but his pa wanted him right there, doing a man’s work. He said a thousand times that if Cole moved away from home, Cole’s mama would pay for it. And Cole’s mama—poor, weak soul that she was—wouldn’t leave that bastard. By the time Cole left for college, she was so sick she didn’t know where she was half the time, and she wasn’t worth abusing for Tom.”
Diana was still a little sick from the thought of the collie. “And what about Cole’s father. How long ago did he die?”
“Last week.”
Diana slowly made the connection between the conversation at breakfast and this piece of information.
“I told Cole he has to go back to the old pla
ce in case there’s something of his mama’s there for him. Truth is, I wanted him to see it as a man. In one of my books, it said that when adults confront the ‘evils of their childhood,’ they often feel better. I think, whether he’s there or not, it would be a good idea if he knew you’d seen the place and it didn’t matter. Personally, I think he’ll go there.”
“Will you draw me a map?” she said, pressing a kiss on his cheek and startling him. “I’ll run up to the house and get the keys to the truck.”
Cal started to offer her Letty’s car since Cole had his, but Letty had left to do the grocery shopping.
Chapter 50
COLL STOOD NEAR THE FRONT yard of the place of his birth, a four-room shack with rotting boards for a floor—an ugly scab on a piece of barren earth.
His birthplace. His heritage.