The Road to Reunion

“I won’t,” Molly promised with a smile that felt slightly tremulous. “Thank you so much for all you’ve done for me.”

Jewel looked a little sad, herself, then. “It was nice to have young people in the house again.”

With a hard swallow, Molly turned then to Mack. “Thank you, too, for opening your home to me.”

He patted her shoulder with a rather awkward warmth. “You make Kyle drive carefully. And make him treat you nice.”

She smiled. “I will. And I’ll send him safely home to you.”

“Do that, too,” he said gruffly, patting her shoulder again. “And come back yourself, sometime. Jewel and I will give you a tour of the area, maybe take you out to Dollywood for the day, if you like amusement parks.”

“I love amusement parks.” But she made no promise to return, since she couldn’t foresee any reason to do so.

Kyle seemed to have had enough of the touching farewells. He opened the passenger door of Molly’s car and motioned her in. “We’d better get underway,” he said to the McDooleys. “See you in a couple of days.”

Molly’s eyes met Jewel’s for a moment as they shared wry smiles, and then Molly maneuvered her way into the passenger seat, lifting her right leg in very carefully. Kyle made sure she was safely inside before closing the door with a decisive snap. She had her seat belt fastened and had wriggled into a reasonably comfortable position by the time he slid into the driver’s seat.

There was an oddly hollow feeling in the pit of her stomach as she watched the McDooleys’ motel disappear behind them.

“You’re a very lucky guy,” she said after a while, breaking the silence within the small car.

“Lucky?” Kyle seemed surprised by the word, as if he wasn’t in the habit of applying it to himself.

“Oh, yes. Not only do you have a great house in a beautiful setting, you’ve found a family here who love you very much.”

One might almost have thought Kyle was stunned by her comments. He couldn’t seem to decide which part to focus on first. “You still think I have a great house?”

“Of course. It’s small, but very well arranged to make the maximum use of the floor space. It needs a little work, obviously—” she motioned almost absently toward her leg “—but that’s all minor stuff. Maybe I

would decorate it a little more, but no amount of decorating could compete with the view from your deck.”

“I would have thought you’d consider it too isolated.” “I grew up on the ranch, remember? Sure, there were always people around, but it’s no closer to a town than your place is. As you pointed out, when you have the urge to be with people, you aren’t that far away from them.”

“Hmm.”

She wasn’t quite sure what to make of that sound, but she didn’t press him to say more. If he wasn’t in the mood for conversation, she certainly wasn’t going to talk his ears off all the way back to Texas. She was perfectly content to ride in silence, if that was what he preferred.

Her resolve lasted all of fifteen quiet minutes. Squirming a little in her seat, she asked, “What kind of music do you like?”

“There’s only one kind of music. Country.”

You could take the boy out of Texas…

Hiding a smile, she asked, “Do you mind if I put in a CD? How about George Strait?”

Without taking his eyes off the road, Kyle shrugged. “I can listen to Strait.”

She reached behind her seat and brought out her bulging CD case. She stored her CDs alphabetically by artist, so it took only a moment to locate a “best of…” collection by George Strait. Shortly afterward, his smooth voice filled the car with the opening verse of “You Look So Good in Love.”

She could relax a little more now that it wasn’t so quiet. She didn’t have to babble to fill the silence. And it was hard to be tense when George was crooning a cowboy love song.

She made it through two songs before the compulsion

to speak grew too strong to resist. “Did you know that Jewel was a nurse in Vietnam?”

“I knew.”

“Mack was over there, too. In the army.”