While Abby stared at him, Patrick bent down and peered under the kitchen table.
“I left them here yesterday when I-aha!” Patrick hurried over to her refrigerator, reached into the space between it and a counter, and pulled out his sunglasses. He stood up, put them on, turned to face her, and grinned. “How the hell did they get down there? I think your damned birds must have done it. They hid them on purpose, Abby. I told you, those birds hate me.”
She stared at his teasing grin.
“Abby? What’s the matter? You know I’m only kidding, right? I don’t really think your birds hid my shades.” When he grinned at her again, but she just kept staring at him, he said, “Are you okay?”
“My birds,” she whispered, and sank onto the floor, and burst into tears.
Patrick pushed his sunglasses up into his hair and hurried to comfort her. “What happened?”
“Lovey’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“In the storm. And J.D. flew away and hasn’t come back. And Gracie is traumatized. And I thought you did it, Patrick! I was positive…I was sure you left those glasses on the table this morning. I just knew you did. And they were there when I got home the first time this evening, but then they were gone the next time, and I thought that meant you’d come out here, and you hated my birds, and you took the opportunity to…”
“Hurt them?” He sounded horrified. “I may hate them, but I wouldn’t hurt them.”
“My sister and Cerule and Randie and Susan were here. I must have seen some sunglasses belonging to one of them and I thought they were yours. I was upset about…something else. I guess I wasn’t seeing things correctly.”
“What were you upset about?”
“Never mind,” she said, and began to sob again.
He let her cry in his arms, waiting a bit before he said, “Hey, you know who’s back in town? Your old boyfriend, Mitch Newquist. Have you seen him?”
Abby buried her face in his shoulder for a moment before whispering, “No.”
He tensed, but hid it by gently tightening his embrace of her. “You’d better marry me, Abs.”
She pulled away enough to look into his face. “Why?”
He nodded toward the devastation outside her house. “Because this is a lot for one person to handle. I know you can do it, but why should you have to? When things happen, don’t you want somebody here to help you? And you wouldn’t just be getting me, you’d get my whole family that already loves you.” One side of his mouth crooked up in a half grin. “Better than they like me.”
Patrick gently kissed her damp face. “You can’t stay single forever.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Because you’re not built for it, Abby.”
“I always thought you were.”
“That was before I fell for you.” He kissed her again, and as he did he smelled fresh soap on her, felt how damp she was from the shower, a shower taken sometime between four and five in the morning. “Poor Abs,” Patrick said as he stroked her hair. “I know you loved those birds.”
After Patrick left, Abby got into her truck and drove aimlessly around for a while, looking for a flash of red in the skies. She made posters with J.D.’s photo on them and tacked them up all over town. She begged Rex to tell his deputies to keep a watch out for the parrot, and she went door-to-door downtown to ask everybody she saw to do the same for her. On an impulse, she even stopped by the cemetery to touch the Virgin’s grave and ask her help in finding him, or at least to keep him safe from harm.
Finally, feeling stunned by loss and by the enormity of what she had done a few hours before, she drove back out to her property to join her employees as they began the work of cleaning up after the storm.
Chapter Thirty
Mitch spent the day distracting himself in every way he could think of to take his mind off Abby. He finished cleaning the ranch house and drove to another town to do more shopping that would make it possible to stay awhile. He spent the hours planning what he was going to do next, and considering the consequences of those plans. He drove into Small Plains only once, toward the close of the business day, to conduct some business of his own, parking on backstreets, wearing his baseball cap, lying low, avoiding eye contact on the streets.
Everywhere he went, people were sweeping up after the storm.
Storm…
He heard the word in his brain, and felt a wry, unhappy laugh rising inside of him at the sound of it. He’d been inside of a storm, all right. He’d been swept up in a tornado of sex and memory, naked regret and short-lived ecstasy. Now he felt tossed out of it onto the hard, prickly ground. He felt bruised and used. It was, he decided, as the rueful, bitter feelings rose higher, an altogether appropriate way to feel as he worked up to the moment when he would walk back into his parents’ home for the first time in seventeen years.
And then he thought, as he had many times over the preceding years, “Nobody loves a martyr. You lost. Get over it.” And then he thought, with a certain hard, delicious energy that wiped out everything else, “Get even.”
It felt like history repeating itself.
Early that evening, as twilight turned the prairie lavender, Mitch used his old keys to let himself into the big house at the top of the long driveway. He stepped inside, without knocking or ringing the bell, because…the hell with it, I’m his son, I won’t fucking knock first. Then, just like the last time, he closed the front door behind him and before he could take another step, there was the judge emerging from his office.
“Hello, Dad.”
“My God! Mitch!”
His father looked him up and down, while Mitch stared back. He had expected to feel shocked at how his father had shrunk over time, but now he found it had not happened. The old man was still taller than he was. The hair was thinner, but not much, and still more brown than gray. His father had the same ramrod-straight posture that had always intimidated some defense attorneys in his courtroom. Reading glasses were perched halfway down his nose, as he stared over the tops of them. Mitch realized he had been picturing his father as aged, as if he were ninety-three, instead of merely sixty-seven, which was relatively young as such things went these days.
It wasn’t true that Mitch had never seen his parents since he left. They had come to his college graduation. But they had not attended his wedding, because Mitch had not invited them. They had not seen his son, their only grandchild, though Mitch’s former wife had softened and sneaked some photos to them. He’d been furious at her for doing that, but then she had never really understood the depth of his feelings of betrayal and abandonment. Mitch had always had the feeling that she’d secretly believed he must have done something to deserve it, that there must be another side to the story, because he wasn’t always easy for her to live with, and because surely no parents would ever treat their son like that. But then, as Mitch had reminded her more than once, she had never met his parents. If she had, she might have understood how rigid and unforgiving they could be. Although-what was there for them to forgive? That was the question that Mitch always came back to, the point he kept trying to make to his wife-that he hadn’t done anything wrong and yet they had behaved as if he had committed some kind of awful crime, as if they were ashamed of him, as if they were doing him a favor by spiriting him away from everything he knew and loved. They had never visited any of the places he had lived in Kansas City. He wasn’t sure his father knew what he did for a living. There had come a point at which they had all stopped trying.
After his wife sent the photos of their grandchild, there was no response.