The Cowboy's Unexpected Family

When was that? he wondered. How do I keep missing these things?

Ben lay in the pool of light from the lamp clipped onto his bedframe. He was reading and very studiously ignoring Jeremiah.

“It’s pretty late, buddy.”

Ben turned a page.

“You’re going to Lucy’s tomorrow after school, remember?”

Silence.

Jeremiah took a breath and turned to stare at the bare walls. A window dormer had been cut out and the night sky was full of stars. All of them as far away as the boy in the bed.

“You can talk to me,” he whispered, his throat burning. “I know...maybe it doesn’t feel that way all the time, but...you can talk to me about how you feel.”

He heard the quiet rustle of another page turning and then, not that he expected much different, more silence.

“Turn of your light in five minutes,” he said, stepping out of the room without looking at Ben.

Please Lucy Alatore, please be the help we need.

There was a fire in Walter’s room. No, he thought, sweaty and disoriented, his stomach rolling with every breath. The fire was under his skin. He looked down at his body, naked and glowing on the bed. Christ. Was this hell?

Had to be. He’d plumbed the breadth and depth of awful on Earth, there’d been no horrible stone unturned in his life, but this—the burning body—was new.

He’d died. Thank God. Thank God the torture of trying to stop drinking was over. He took a breath, another. Too shallow. Not enough air.

“Walter.” He turned, trying to find that voice. Searching the shadows for the devil come to escort him to his just reward.

There. By the window. Tall and thin, grim and unforgiving.

His ex-wife.

“You,” he breathed.

“I told you that you would burn,” she sang. “This is what you get for coveting another man’s wife.”

“And what do you get?” he panted. “For what you did to that family. To our son.”

“You. You were my punishment.”

“Good.” He laughed at the thought. They’d deserved each other for a time there, he and his ex-wife. They were each other’s just rewards. He just felt so damn awful his son, Sandra and the girls had gotten wrapped up in their war.

“You think you will win her like this?” Vicki hissed. “You think your son will forgive you for the way you turned your back? You think those girls are going to think better of you because you lie in your bed shaking and vomiting and sweating like some pig?”

“Go away,” he breathed.

“Never.” He could smell her perfume. The rose scent she wore. “You aren’t half the man A.J. was.”

He sighed, the knowledge a stone in his gut, a weight in his heart. “I know.”

“You’ll never have more than me. You’ll never get anything better than the mess you made—”

Anger fed the fire under his skin and he pulsed with fury. “Shut up. I’m done with you.”

She laughed and he screamed, opened his mouth and spilled fire over her, until his lips cracked and his skin crackled. With a strength that surprised him, a speed he would never believed he possessed, he lunged up and toward her, grabbing her wrist. Real in the fever. Odd.

“Walter,” she said, her hand cool against his bare chest. The fire under his skin hissed at the contact. Like rain on a campfire. “You’re hurting me.”

“Good,” he said, holding onto that wrist. “You won’t win.”

“I won’t.”

“No. I can fight. I will fight.”

A cool hand touched his forehead. And the fire fled the area. He pressed the hand in his grip to his chest, over his heart, and the fire darted away, scared of the power.

Suddenly exhausted, he lay down. His eyes closing. He tried to hold on to that hand, to keep his grip on her, on everything, but it was impossible. He was being sucked down, down, down.

And just before sleep claimed him, he smelled roses again. And cumin.

Sandra.

Thursday afternoon Lucy had it all planned out. She waited for Ben in the back garden. Her mom would answer the door, calm him down because he’d probably be nervous. Give him something to eat because he’d probably be hungry. And then she would lead him out to the garden where Lucy would put him to work staking the vegetable plants.

Over the last few days she’d developed this theory, and the more time she spent with it, the more she believed in it. She would just ask him about his mother. She would talk to him, open him up. And like popping a blister, all that grief would pour out and then...he could heal.

He was clearly dying for someone to just listen. She could be that person. Hell, she’d be great at being that person.

So caught up in her daydream and potential plans of going to school to become a child psychologist, she didn’t hear her mother coming down the rickety steps to the garden until she cleared her throat right behind her.