Almost Perfect Read online

  “You know where to find me.”

  “Where’re we going?” Shawna demanded, a quaver in her young voice.

  “To ask your Pete if he’ll come stay on the ranch,” Carolyn said grimly, but about a mile down the road she felt a small smile tugging at her lips.

  Chapter 2

  By the imperfect light of a waning moon and dying firelight, Pete Jackson slipped a rose quartz arrow point into a small felt pouch. He pulled the bag’s drawstring and rubbed the chamois cloth over the facets of the arrowhead inside with slow, careful precision. The perfect arrowhead reminded him of the woman who’d held a gun on him not an hour before.

  She’d been right to refuse his offer of assistance. She didn’t know anything about him. He was a complete stranger. And if she had known about his past, the things he’d done in the questionable name of right, she’d have kept that gun trained on him instead of trustingly setting it aside.

  Pete sighed as he set the small pouch on the top rung of his opened tackle box, alongside some twenty-five similar bags he’d ordered from a jewelry discount house in Philadelphia. That was the last of them, the arrowheads the girls had taken from their pouches to show their mother earlier.

  He didn’t stop to analyze why packing them away seemed oddly final, as if he’d ended yet another chapter in his life. There had been too many endings, too few beginnings.

  He gave a wry smile, thinking he’d rather enjoyed the novel experience of caring for two little girls all afternoon and evening, though anyone listening to his biting remarks wouldn’t have begun to guess as much. The girls had, however. They’d seen through his determination not to give them a single inch and had promptly taken a couple of miles.

  He closed the tackle box lid with its many compartments and lifted the mug Carolyn Leary had thrust into his hand when she left the camp. He’d already tossed the cold coffee out into the night, but he studied the mug now as if it held her imprint on it. No lipstick in a semicircle on the rim, no visible fingerprints showed on the glossy enamel surface. And yet, something of Carolyn’s presence seemed to linger there, tantalizing him.

  In his imagination, he thought sourly.

  He lifted the boiling cleaning tin from the grill and poured some steaming water over the cup. He dried it then carefully stowed the mug in his supply chest before sealing the cabinet against the West Texas dust. He surveyed his camp, straightened a few items the girls had knocked out of place, set another twisted log of mesquite on the fire and sat back down on his bed.

  And he stared into the flames, thinking he’d never felt so damned lonely in his entire long life. Until Carolyn Leary—and her two overtly wayward daughters—had waltzed in and out of his camp, he been so focused on reveling in his solitude he hadn’t given a thought to the narrow difference between alone and lonely. Now he was forced to acknowledge that slim distinction. And he decided too much knowledge and too short an acquaintance was unmitigated hell.

  In the pure desert air, the flash of headlights caught his attention long before he heard the hum of a vehicle engine. As methodically as he would have performed any campsite task, he pulled his .45 from beneath the pillow and tucked it into his belt. By the time he was both hearing and seeing the approaching vehicle, he’d reached inside his vest and pulled out a cigarette. He flicked open his lighter and cupped his hand against a nonexistent breeze. He drew heavily on the cigarette and exhaled before replacing the lighter, never once taking his eyes from the oncoming bright lights. While putting his lighter away, he released the safety on the .45.

  After ten on-off years of enforced community, he’d taken a buddy’s offer to park on his recently purchased ranch for a while. He knew his buddy had ulterior motives, offering the respite as a means of keeping him from bolting from the fold, even to the point of insisting on helicoptering him onto the place so he couldn’t make a clean get-away. But he hadn’t cared about motives or rationales. The kind of solitude, privacy and sense of utter freedom only a desolate desert could provide was all he, himself, was after. And twice in one day he’d been treated to unwanted company.

  The vehicle pulled to a halt outside his camp and he tossed his half-finished cigarette into the fire and set his hands in a falsely relaxed position in his lap, his fingers brushing the cold metal of the .45. He hadn’t been allowed the luxury of such a weapon for many years and was reassured to have one now.

  He heard two doors open and stiffened slightly, his hand curling around the butt of the pistol.

  He heard boots impacting the sand and drew the pistol to face the headlights. His body tensed and his forefinger encircled the trigger.

  “Pete!” a child’s soprano voice called out.

  What in the hell?

  “It’s us, Pete! We’re back!”

  “Mom says we can hire you—”

  “Did you miss us?”

  “Can you come tonight? There’s graffiti on our front door, can you believe it?”

  “We’re scared to go inside.”

  “Is something wrong with your stomach?”

  Muttering a curse, Pete took his finger from the trigger, reset the safety and shoved the gun beneath the pillow of his camp bed. He told himself relief made his hand tremble while it was mere curiosity that made him frown.

  “We’re in big-time trouble!” Shawna said, bursting into the light from the fire.

  “You’re gonna help us, aren’t you?” Jenny asked, tumbling a half step behind her older sister. “We need you real bad.”

  “Really badly,” their mother’s voice corrected.

  “Yeah, really badly!” Jenny agreed.

  Pete, frozen to his camp bed, decided this was big-time really bad trouble all right, and far worse than any that might have been dealt with by a simple slug from his .45.

  He’d helicoptered into this desert terrain to gaze into forever, to spend days upon days not seeing another soul. After crowding among the dregs of society, closing his eyes every night to a pocked gray cement ceiling, he’d become convinced that only the desert loneliness would serve as a balm to the bleak terrain that had become his soul. He didn’t need or want company.

  “I’m sorry to bother you again,” the girls’ mother said, her voice as velvet dark as the night itself, “but we’ve had another visit from the Wannamachers and I think we really do need you.”

  She hadn’t said she needed his help, nor had she hemmed and hawed around a trumped-up excuse for intruding on his campsite for a second time. She’d simply said they needed him. The notion made him feel as if the world tilted sideways suddenly and it filled him with an almost stark ambivalence.

  “Please?” she asked.

  The fire crackled and three blond heads turned toward the flames. Pete decided he’d suffered sunstroke and was lying comatose in the desert, conjuring the odd trio in a dream.

  Carolyn lifted her gaze to meet his eyes. “Please?” she asked again. “Or weren’t you serious? I’m sorry...I’m afraid I have a tendency to take people up...”

  She smiled deprecatingly and gave a small shrug that made him feel even smaller.

  Pete, lost in her direct gaze, somehow understood that those other men, those lawyers, accountants, men with perfect pasts, would never have heard such a request. If they could have, she wouldn’t be out in the middle of nowhere asking a stranger for help.

  Jenny coaxed, “I’ll give you my birthday money. It’s a whole five dollars, remember?”

  He remembered that as easily as he recalled Carolyn Leary’s low, throaty chuckle. Hearing it again now as she shushed her daughter, he closed his eyes.

  “I remember, Jenny,” he said.

  This woman and her children had taken him at his word? What was that worth anymore?

  “Look,” Carolyn said, “I don’t know why you’re out here.” She drew a deep breath and added hurriedly, “And I’m not sure I care. All I know is that I need someone on the place. A man, I mean.”

  Pete could see her fiery blush even in the dim light fr
om the campfire.

  “And since you seemed willing to help, to work I mean... I know that sounds lame...but I know times are tough. And it’s true that we could use your help. Anyway, it’s late, and I’m...well, I’m afraid to go in the house,” she finished in a starkly honest rush.

  She was afraid? He thought of the past ten years of his life and knew she had good reason to be frightened.

  “Listen, this was silly,” she said, drawing her daughters closer to her side. “Forget it. I...we’ll deal with it. I’ll go stay with my sister-in-law tonight. Doc or somebody will come out with us tomorrow. It’s okay. Really.”

  If she’d asked him to hike the seventy miles to get the law, he’d have said yes immediately. If she’d asked for his entire arrowhead collection, he’d probably have handed it over. But she was asking for something he didn’t have to give: himself.

  And yet he’d offered to help her. Strange as it seemed, the words had come right out of his own mouth. Was it so strange to believe she was taking him up on his bizarre offer? He’d meant it, hadn’t he? Or had he only been mouthing words, like plane-crash prayers, a last-ditch effort for a salvation of sorts?

  “I don’t—”

  “Please?” Jenny said, and was echoed by her sister.

  He would have to be a robot, completely devoid of all human emotions—and desires—to deny the entreaty in the three pairs of bluer-than-blue eyes. And while Carolyn was blushing, she didn’t look away. He might have been out of society for ten years but he wasn’t dead, and a man would have to be just that to refuse such a woman anything. Anything.

  He heard the gruffness in his own voice as he muttered, “We’d better get the girls home before they pass out where they’re standing.”

  “Oh, thank you,” she breathed, holding out both her hands to him.

  Feeling like a moth caught in a spiraling flame, he stretched his fingers to hers and wondered why she’d said she didn’t know why he was out in the desert... and what had made her add that she didn’t care.

  Pete was still pondering this question a couple of days later. And still questioning why he’d agreed to join Carolyn and the girls at her small ranch.

  He rubbed off some of the dirt from one of the panes of glass in the narrow window of the bunkhouse and peered out at the roseate dawn. Not quite light yet, but no longer pitch black, the flat terrain that made up the Leary ranch seemed to stretch into infinity. From his stance, he couldn’t see the main house, the barn, or the largely empty and woebegone corrals. He could only see miles of open graze land, grasses made pink by the cloudless early morning. No wind blew yet, as if it still slumbered, as if the wind, like himself, was waiting for something to happen.

  He knew the girls would be up soon and would come tearing out of the house and across the dusty driveway to bang on his door. They’d done so each of the past two mornings and again at least once in the late evenings.

  And Carolyn would be standing over the stove in the kitchen, her hair still tousled from sleep, her lush figure enshrouded in faded jeans and an over-size, shabby shirt that should have detracted from her looks but had exactly the opposite effect on him. Her face would be flushed with the heat from the flames. He couldn’t have begun to speculate why his own cheeks seemed overwarm just thinking about her.

  One of the roosters crowed and a split second later, the loose, creaking screen partially attached to the back door of the main house slammed against the weathered wooden siding. He’d fix that this morning; it wouldn’t survive the Leary girls much longer.

  “I’m going to get him.”

  “No, me! It’s my turn.”

  “You got him yesterday.”

  “Did not! We both did.”

  His escort had arrived. He thought of how different this escort was than those that had called him for breakfast every day for the past ten years. The contrast was unsettling.

  As he let them drag him across the cold expanse separating bunkhouse from primary residence, he asked himself for the fiftieth time what he was doing there. And received an instant answer upon stepping through the back door and into the heated kitchen redolent with the scent of herbs, a desert harbor warm with Carolyn’s presence.

  “Good morning,” she said, not looking at him.

  “Morning,” he murmured back, staring openly at her.

  She wasn’t dressed in her faded jeans and old shirt this dawn. She wore an elegant trouser ensemble that made her look as if she had stepped right from the pages of some ritzy magazine.

  Pete wasn’t sure he liked it. The silken blouse, the linen jacket and matching pants bespoke a class of woman he wasn’t used to dealing with, not that he’d dealt with any kind of female in the past ten years. And where she’d been drop-dead gorgeous in jeans and shirt, lovely in a shabby housecoat, she was flat-out unapproachable in linen.

  “Mom’s going with us to school,” Shawna explained.

  “She’s our substitute teacher today,” Jenny added.

  “They only have eight teachers at the Almost School, so when one of them’s out, they either double up or see if someone from the area can fill in,” Carolyn said as she tipped the omelet pan to slide a perfectly browned concoction to a warmed plate. “I’ve got a Master’s in social psychology, so they’re happy to have someone with higher than a high school diploma they can call on. And luckily, they’ve been calling me quite a lot.” She handed the breakfast to Pete.

  Not since the first morning had he said anything about eating in the main house. When the girls had rousted him out of the bunkhouse and hauled him over to the main house, he’d been embarrassed and frankly told Carolyn Leary she didn’t have to provide him family meals.

  She’d stared at him so blankly that he’d been half convinced he’d spoken in a foreign language before she let him know that no one around her place would ever be expected to eat meals away from the kitchen table. Except on special occasions, she’d said darkly, and then they would all eat in the dining room.

  She’d banged so many pots and pans for a few seconds that Pete had been finally forced into amusement. He’d committed some gaffe of Western etiquette, one that apparently was cause for pot banging. He wasn’t the kind of man who had to be told something twice. He’d been in the house and on time for every meal since.

  And if she didn’t have ten million projects that needed tending to around her place, he would have had to join a health spa just to maintain his waistline; Carolyn Leary whipped together a fine meal—breakfast, lunch or dinner. The “room” part of his hire might leave a considerable amount to the imagination, but the “board” half suited him perfectly.

  He waited until both girls and their mother were seated before cutting into the egg, cheese and green-chili omelet. It literally seemed to melt in his mouth.

  “The school should call you when somebody’s sick,” Shawna told him, digging into her omelet. “You know lots and lots of stuff.”

  Pete thought most of the “stuff” he knew would be highly unsuitable for any school, Almost or otherwise.

  “Yeah, Mom, did you know that if you pound a nail one time against some concrete or something hard like that you’ll be able to drive it into a board easier and it won’t split the wood? Cool, huh?”

  “Cool,” Carolyn said, meeting his eyes with a look that implied shared interest—and pride—in her children. The devil of it was that he did feel interest. And pride.

  “And did you know that the reason the moon looks so big sometimes isn’t because it’s close to the earth or anything, it’s because the atmosphere is thick with moisture?”

  Carolyn smiled at Shawna. “No, I didn’t know.”

  Jenny piped up, “And did you know—”

  “That it’s time for school? Yes, I did. And you’d better hurry, because I know for a fact that your substitute is a mean old grump and makes tardy kids stay after school.”

  Both girls giggled and scraped their chairs away from the table. They were out the door and halfway up the stairs to
their bedrooms before remembering their plates. With a noise Pete would have associated with recreation time at a prison, they clomped and clambered back into the kitchen and hurriedly slipped their plates from the table and clattered them onto the countertop.

  “Aliens,” Carolyn said as they stormed away.

  “What?” Pete asked.

  “Aliens inhabited their bodies about two years ago. My aunt-in-law says the aliens give our real children back when they get to be thirty or so. Until then, we’re forced to live with these strange and unusual creatures passing themselves off as our kids.”

  Pete chuckled. “They’re good kids.”

  Carolyn raised her eyebrows as she pushed away from the table. “But from some other galaxy. You must never forget that.” She carried her own plate to the garbage container—later to become compost, she’d told him that first morning—scraped the remainder of her omelet on top of the muck and set the plate in the sink of cold dishwater to rinse.

  It was odd to realize how quickly he’d begun to recognize her morning routine. Breakfast, roust the girls for school, scrape the dishes, set them aside to soak. And sometimes a cup of coffee shared with him.

  “I never know when the school’s going to call me,” she said. “I hope being carless won’t be a problem for you.”

  “I don’t see how it could,” he said, genuinely puzzled. She turned to stare at him and the color drained from her face only to be immediately replaced by a wash of dark russet.

  “I forgot...I don’t know what I was thinking...”

  And her embarrassment let him understand. Something in the easy familiarity of sharing a kitchen, preparing for going to work, perhaps just because he was a man at her table in the early morning, for a split second, she’d simply forgotten he was a stranger. It was up to him to smooth the moment away, but he couldn’t think of a single thing to say that would do the trick.

  He’d been aware of her diffident attempts to get him to tell her about his past, about the reasons he’d been in the Panhandle in February, on the MacLaine ranch without benefit of any means of transportation, but he hadn’t wanted to tell her. It was far easier to let her believe him to be a vagabond, a drifter than it was to clue her in on the hell he’d lived for ten long years.