Her Minnesota Man (A Christian Romance Novel) (5 page)

"Here, give it to me," another Grace said.

Jeb adjusted his overhead air vent while he awaited the outcome of the latest telephone tug-of-war.

"Jeb? It's Caroline. Will you be in town for a while, then?"

"I'm not sure," he said cautiously. A guy who made careless statements to the Graces was a guy who'd soon regret having opened his mouth. "Tell Laney I expect to be there by—"

"I guess you're coming home to list your house with a real estate agent, huh?"

"List my house?" As the baby next to him began to wail, Jeb frowned and wondered why Caroline's words sounded more like a suggestion than a request for information.

Were the Graces trying to get rid of him? They had always watched over Laney like dragons guarding a treasure, but they knew he'd never represented any danger to her. Certain other attractive young women would have been wiser to avoid him, because although he never meant to do it, he tended to leave a lot of damage in his wake. But Laney would always be safe with him.

"Sir?" The flight attendant pitched her voice to be heard over the baby's robust crying. "I need you to turn off your phone now."

"I have to go," Jeb told Caroline. "Just give her my message, okay?"

"Well, sure, Jeb. What's the message?"

Shaking his head, he pressed the Power button and slipped the phone into his shirt pocket.

The baby had the shrillest cry Jeb had ever heard. Its mother jiggled it and tried to reason with it, and by the time they were airborne, she had resorted to singing. Her absolute inability to carry a tune disturbed Jeb far more than the kid's caterwauling, so he reached for his iPod.

As he inserted his ear buds and selected the first movement of Tchaikovsky's "Piano Concerto No. 1," Jeb wondered if his mother had ever sung to him. He closed his eyes and concentrated, but the phone call he'd made on the day of her death was as far into the past as his mind could reach.

He'd been "Jackson" back then, although he couldn't remember what that name had sounded like on his mother's lips. He couldn't picture her face, either. But with a clarity that made him shudder, he recalled the awkward sprawl of her body on the kitchen floor and the terror that had gripped him as he'd pressed the numbers 9
-
1
-
1 on the phone and waited an eon for someone to answer.

"What's your emergency?" the lady asked. She had to repeat the question twice before eight-year-old Jackson found his voice.

"My mom won't wake up!" he blurted, and then he began to cry.

The house quickly filled up with adults speaking in hushed, shocked voices, but nobody told Jackson why his mother was dead. It wasn't until the next evening that he screwed up his courage to knock on the door of his father's study and ask.

"She killed herself," Jackson Senior said bluntly. "Does Mrs. Lee know you're out of bed?"

Trembling in the doorway in his pajamas, Jackson ignored the reference to the mean-faced housekeeper his father had hired just that afternoon and dared even further. "Is she
 
in heaven?"

"No." Seated behind the desk, his father downed the last of the whiskey in his glass and reached for the bottle. "Heaven isn't real. Only fools and cowards believe that garbage."

"Yes, Dad," Jackson whispered, trembling harder. When his father drank whiskey, he wasn't very nice. And his father drank whiskey every night.

"She's gone." Jackson Senior's hand shook as he poured more of the amber liquid into his glass. Some of it dribbled down the side, wetting a pile of papers on the desk, but he didn't appear to notice. He lifted the glass and unwrapped his long index finger from it to point at his son as he added, "She no longer exists."

"Y-yes, Dad."

A hand clamped down on Jackson's shoulder and he yelped like a startled puppy. Twisting free of Mrs. Lee's grasp, he ran to his room, where he cried himself to sleep.

The next morning he stood in front of his bathroom mirror for a very long time, staring into his puffy, red-rimmed eyes as he struggled to process his grief and confusion.

"Heaven isn't real," he whispered over and over, forcing himself to accept that horrible truth. "She isn't there. She isn't
anywhere
. Heaven isn't real."

Mrs. Lee kept a spotless house and had no patience with grubby little boys. She smacked Jackson's backside with a wooden spoon if he didn't comb his hair or get his fingernails clean. His father didn't like being disturbed, so Jackson didn't tell on her, not even when she began hitting him harder and more often, leaving angry purple marks on his back and his shoulders and his ribs.

He seethed in silence until just after his ninth birthday, when Mrs. Lee reached for her spoon to punish him for leaving dirty socks on his bathroom floor.

"Don't you hit me anymore!" he screamed, turning on her like a wild thing, fists punching and feet kicking as she swatted at him with the long-handled spoon. "I'll call the police and show them my back and they'll make you go to prison!"

Mrs. Lee was stunned enough to stop, and she never touched him again. She continued to prepare his meals and launder his clothes, but she gave up trying to correct him and just treated him as his father did, barely acknowledging his presence in the house.

That was fine with Jackson. He could take care of himself. Except for basic material needs like school supplies and winter coats, he never asked anybody for anything. He became as sullen as his father, and continued in that bleak existence for two long years before Laney Ryland found him and changed his life.

Jeb's eyes snapped open as the back of the seat in front of him pushed against his knees. When a crabby-looking old lady peered between her seat and her neighbor's to see why she couldn't recline, Jeb behaved like a good Christian for once and refrained from assaulting her with a look.

The baby had stopped crying and was watching him, a calculating look in its bulgy blue eyes. Guessing its intent a split-second before it lunged and tried to grab the wire of his iPod, Jeb leaned out of its reach.

He had never touched a baby. He was fascinated by their jabbering and their knowing stares, but babies were too pure to be handled by the likes of him. He left the baby-touching to Laney, who'd been known to strike up conversations with stroller-pushing strangers just so she could bend down and coo at their infants. Jeb teased her about that, but there wasn't a sweeter sight in all the world than Laney cuddling a baby in her arms.

He got off the plane in Houston and headed for the designated smoking area, which was outside the terminal. He had already passed Security when he remembered he didn't smoke anymore, so with a sigh he turned around and got in line to take off his shoes and his belt and get frisked all over again.

After he put himself back together, he plopped onto the nearest chair and called Laney.

"
Houston?
" She chuckled. "I hate to tell you this, Jeb, but you're heading the wrong way."

"Don't look for logic in airline routes," he advised her. "That way lies madness."

"Will you still be home by six?" she asked.

"Looks like it. I just hope I can rent a vehicle with roof racks." Although the rental company had promised him a Ford Explorer, he knew better than to count on things like that. "But even if it means duct-taping my canoe to the top of a sub-
compact, I'm going fishing tomorrow." There was no better place to think than in the middle of a quiet Minnesota lake.

"I can't wait to see you," Laney said warmly.

"Yeah. Me, too. But I'd better let you get back to work."

Forty minutes later, he boarded a normal-size plane and settled comfortably into a First Class window seat. He killed some flight time by reading part of a spy thriller he'd stowed in his backpack, and then he listened to music for a while. When he couldn't think of anything else to do, he closed his eyes and savored his earliest memories of Laney.

She had just moved into the house next door. Eleven-year-old Jackson knew her name because every evening at six her mom hollered for Laney to come in for supper. He knew her age because he'd counted nine pink birthday balloons tied to the lamppost in her front yard. The more he saw of her, the more he despised the pampered little girl whose mother escorted her to school every morning and then kissed her right there on the sidewalk, in front of the whole town.

One day as he walked past her house, Laney called his name. He was amazed by her nerve, but he kept walking.

"Jackson!" she called again. "Wait!" Her quick, light footsteps pattered like raindrops on the sidewalk behind him.

He whirled to face her, a rude word dying on his lips as he blinked in confusion at the silvery crown-thing with big fake jewels perched on top of her tangled blond curls.

"You dropped this." Laney extended a twiggy arm. Across her palm lay the pocketknife Jackson had filched from his father's underwear drawer.

He snatched it and shoved it back into his pocket.

"Why does it say 'Jeb' on it?" she asked. "Your name is Jackson."

"Those are my initials," he snapped, irritated by the reminder that he didn't have a name of his own, but had to use his old man's.

"J-E-B," she repeated thoughtfully. "What does the E stand for?"

"None of your business." Hating his curiosity about the sparkly crown-thing and about the saggy, ankle-length blue dress she wore, Jackson swept her head to toe with the insolent look he always counted on to make other kids and even adults back away.

Laney Ryland didn't back away.

"Do you like my dress?" she chirped with an innocent eagerness that sent a wave of unease through Jackson. He wasn't a good kid, but neither did he go around pulling the wings off butterflies. "It's for a play at school." She raised her arms and twirled, making the dress inflate bell
-
shaped around her. "I'm supposed to be a princess."

She seemed to vibrate with joy, an emotion wholly unfamiliar and therefore suspect to Jackson.

"You look dumb," he said.

She beamed at him, still amazingly unaware that she was being insulted. "I know it's too big," she said as she tugged at a sleeve that had slipped off one boney shoulder. "But my mom can fix it." She touched the sparkly thing on her head. "Isn't the tiara pretty, though?"

It was a bright afternoon, and the sunlight glinting off the silver metal and the faceted bits of glass dazzled Jackson's eyes, irritating him further. He glared at Laney and waited for her to scamper away.

She tilted her head to one side and stared calmly back at him, her elfin face alive with frank curiosity. "Why are you doing that with your eyes? It makes you look mean."

"I
am
mean." He took a threatening step toward her, but she still didn't move. She just gazed up at him, her round blue eyes suddenly full of something that looked alarmingly like pity.

Heat crept up Jackson's neck and flooded his cheeks. When cornered, he always protected himself by glaring at people until they backed off. He didn't know if Laney Ryland was fearless or just plain stupid, but his hardest stare had no discernible effect on her.

"Mrs. Lindstrom says you're so bad you can't stay in school," she said softly.

Jackson didn't know where the old lady across the street got her information, but it was true that he'd been suspended again for fighting. This time he'd thrown the first punch, but only because the other three boys had taunted him about his mother's suicide. The way Jackson saw it, they had all but begged him to shove their smug faces in the dirt.

Principal Peterson hadn't seen it that way. He never did.

"It's just a three-day suspension." Hating his defensive tone, Jackson aimed a vicious kick at a weed growing through a crack in the sidewalk.

"Mrs. Lindstrom says you're a modern-day Huckleberry Finn." Laney sucked her bottom lip for a moment before adding, "I don't know what that means."

Jackson did. He'd read the book last year, and had initially identified with Huck, the motherless child of a mean, drunken father. But as he got deeper into the story, he'd realized that he and Huck had little else in common. The fictional boy had friends, people who cared what happened to him. And Jackson Edward Bell, Jr. had nobody at all.

But so what? He didn't need anybody.

"I'm surprised Mrs. Lindstrom didn't warn you about talking to me," he sneered.

"Oh, she did." Laney's curls bounced as she nodded vigorously. "She says you're a very bad boy."

"Bad to the bone," Jackson confirmed with all the bravado he could muster.

"Don't talk that way." Laney adjusted her slipping tiara. "My mom says you smoke cigarettes and do bad things because nobody loves you enough to make you stop. So we pray for you."

Jackson almost snorted at that piece of foolishness, but something in Laney's earnest gaze made him reluctant to hurt her feelings. He might be the meanest kid in town, but he knew a real princess when he saw one.

"Hey!" Laney's face lit up. "Do you want some ice cream?"

Jackson loved ice cream, but Mrs. Lee never bought any kind of treats, and of course he never asked her to. "I wouldn't mind some," he said cautiously.