Leaving Necessity (2 page)

“Clara? Clara Graves, is that you?’

Crap. I almost made it.

Clara winced as Mrs. Jordan, the elderly woman next door, waved her cane in the air. “Wait just a minute there, missy.”

Missy? Seriously, did anyone outside of sitcoms say “missy”?

Apparently Virginia Jordan did.

Forcing a smile, Clara turned to face her one-time neighbor. “Hello, Mrs. Jordan. How are you?”

The old woman peered at her through thick glasses, her lips pressed together in an unforgiving line. “I am disappointed in you, Clarissa Ann Graves.”

Here we go.

Years of dealing with advertising clients allowed Clara to maintain a pleasant, neutral expression. “It’s Clara, Mrs. Jordan. I haven’t gone by Clarissa since I came to live with Uncle Gavin. You know that.”

Sidetrack the argument. That was the ticket. Distract the woman from whatever she was going to say, then go inside for a shower.

And maybe a long, hard cry.

“Don’t you try to change the subject. I am disappointed in you. You never once came to visit your uncle here. You know that just broke his heart.”

Clara had to duck the gesticulating cane, which had always been more theatrical prop than physical aid, as she well remembered. “Uncle Gavin came to see me in New York, Mrs. Jordan. Several times every year. We always had a wonderful time. I promise you, his heart was not broken.”

He would have her undying gratitude for that willingness to travel to her, too. More than once he had said he understood her reluctance to return to Necessity—not that he could ever truly realize how deep that unwillingness ran. He had never heard the whole story, but he had known the thought of any kind of homecoming made her feel sick, and that was enough for Gavin Graves.

He had been a better father to her than she could have ever expected after her real father died.

There were the tears, springing to her eyes. She had to get away from the nosy neighbor, get inside the house before she broke down. It would do no good for everyone in town to hear how she had fallen apart “right there on the front steps.” Clara could almost hear Mrs. Jordan’s voice, see her cane stabbing the air to underscore the severity of the prodigal niece’s public breakdown.

Drawing herself to her full height, plus the three inches added by the heels she had re-donned after the tire fiasco, Clara worked to make her voice as dignified as possible. “If you’ll excuse me, I need to go inside. I had a bit of car trouble on the way out here, and I need to clean up.”

Mrs. Jordan seemed taken aback at the announcement, her mouth gaping open and closed several times as she gazed myopically at the younger woman.

Probably had a whole tirade planned, designed to put me in my place, just like she did when I was sixteen.

Well, Clara wasn’t sixteen any longer. And she wasn’t so easily cowed these days. “Good evening, Mrs. Jordan,” she said coldly, lifting her suitcase off the bottom step where she had set it when she first heard her name being called.

Without looking back, she moved up to the porch of the old Craftsman-style house, opened the screen door, and slipped the key she had picked up from the attorney in Dallas into the lock.

Clara didn’t remember ever using a key to enter the house the whole time she had lived there, from the time she was ten until she was almost nineteen.

That was the only thing that had changed, though.

As she stepped into the hallway, the smell of the house overwhelmed her, and she had barely enough time to close the door behind her, to shut out nosy Mrs. Jordan and the rest of Necessity, Texas, before a sob tore through her chest and out her throat.

* * *

An hour and a long, hot shower later, Clara sat in the darkened living room, drinking a Shiner Bock. She would have preferred wine, honestly, but beer was all she could find in the house. Even this surprised her—Shiner was a little upscale for her uncle’s usual tastes.

The thought made her smile, then sigh.

Settling back into the corner of the couch—the one that had been hers when she lived there, where she had watched television and read books and lived—she considered the room around her.

It looked just like it had ten years ago, when she had taken a last, long look at it before closing the door on Necessity and everything it represented.

What was she going to do with the house? It wasn’t like Necessity was a growing metropolis. Even most of the recent growth from the oil and gas industry had skipped Necessity. Though Uncle Gavin had said enough companies were investing in the area to keep the town alive, it hadn’t turned into a boomtown like Odessa or Midland.

And with the recent downturn in oil prices, Clara was certain that the smaller, start-up companies would be shutting down and pulling out of the area.

She wouldn’t have even known that much, if not for her weekly phone conversations with her uncle.

Anyway, it all added up to the possibility that she was about to inherit an albatross of a house in the one town she wanted to avoid.

Wanted to avoi
d was mild. She had sworn, more than once, never to set foot in the place again.

“So much for that plan,” she muttered, draining the last of the beer.

She could deal with the rest of this tomorrow, after the reading of the will.

Once she knew exactly what she had to work with.

For all she knew, Uncle Gavin had willed the house to a local church or the school or something, and she would be able to get right back on a plane after the funeral in two days, back to her real life, the one in New York.

Yeah, right.

She was stuck in Necessity.

Again.

At least this time, she knew how to get out.

She had done it before, and she would do it again.

As soon as possible.

* * *

Mac slid into the attorney’s office at the last minute and stood at the back of the small room. He didn’t even know why he had to be here, except maybe as the oil company’s foreman, he was supposed to explain the business to Clara.

Several other people were there to hear the reading, too—presumably people the attorney, Mr. Pritchard, had invited because they were in the will in one way or another.

And there was Clara, at the front of the room, sitting with her back to him.

He had attended Gavin Graves’s funeral that morning the exact same way, arriving late and slipping into a back pew. But he hadn’t been able to bring himself to go out to the graveside service. Gavin had been much loved, and the church was packed. Probably the graveside ceremony would be, as well, but Mac couldn’t bear the thought of seeing any more of Clara’s grief, even from a distance.

Ten years, and still his gaze was drawn to Clara instantly, as if magnetized to her. Right now, from the back, he couldn’t see any change. Her hair was a little different—wavy and down around her shoulders rather than hanging straight down her back or in a ponytail—but when she shifted in her seat, she moved the same way she always had. A little tense, as if she might bolt at any moment.

Like she bolted ten years ago.

A glimpse of her profile showed pale skin, much paler than she had been when he had known her. The result of a decade in New York City, probably—not as much sun up there. Plus losing her uncle. She wasn’t crying now like she had in the church, but she looked drawn. Worn. For all that people in town gossiped about the fact that she never came back to Necessity to visit, Mac knew Clara loved her uncle with all her heart.

Much more than she liked Necessity.

Certainly more than she had ever loved Mac.

Rolling his eyes at the maudlin direction his thoughts were taking, Mac pulled out a chair and took a seat on the back row, almost directly behind Clara, where she was less likely to catch a glimpse of him out of the corner of her eye.

Turning cowardly in your old age, Mac?

Maybe
, he admitted to himself.

He would have to talk to her eventually. But not until he had some idea of whether he and his crews would even have jobs tomorrow. That meant sitting through the reading of the will.

So here he was, seated in the back row like a coward, as if he hadn’t spent the last decade learning to live just fine without Clara Graves in his life. He even managed to sit up straight, as if the sight of her didn’t still tear him up inside.

Yeah. He would have to talk to her eventually.

But he didn’t have to tell her anything about himself—nothing that mattered, anyway.

Never again.

I’ve inherited an oil company?

Maybe she had misheard. After all, her attention had drifted away a little in the midst of a long list of small assets Uncle Gavin had left to friends. Not family, though—Clara and Gavin were each the only family the other had.

Her eyes had misted up a bit at that thought, until she was jerked out of her thoughts by the sound of her name and something that sounded suspiciously like a business name with “oil and gas” in it.

Clara stared at the attorney sitting behind a desk at the front of the room, and had to remind herself to close her mouth before she spoke up to interrupt the older man’s reading of the will, waving her hand in the air a little to catch his attention. “I’m sorry, Mr. Pritchard. Could you back up a little?”

He blinked at her from behind rounded glasses. “Certainly, Ms. Graves. What part should I repeat?” Clara had known John Pritchard for most of her life, and even when she was a child, he had called her “Ms. Graves,” as if she were as important as the adult clients of his law firm. She had adored him for that. But at the moment, she wished he were less courtly, and more direct.

“The part where it sounds like you said Uncle Gavin left me some kind of oil company.”

“Ah. Yes.” Mr. Pritchard pushed those glasses up on his nose, scanning the papers in front of him, then read the passage again. It said something about the company and its holdings and rights and some other things that didn’t quite make sense to Clara about the company’s vitality and viability and conferring with the company’s current foreman.

“Just to clarify: that means that Aerio Oil and Gas, LLC, belongs entirely to me?” She tried to keep her voice from squeaking, but she didn’t entirely succeed.

“We can discuss it in detail momentarily, but almost, yes,” the attorney replied. He raised an eyebrow at her, as if making certain she was ready for him to keep reading.

Almost
? What did that mean?

Slumping back into her chair with a surprised whoosh, Clara nodded and waved her hand again, this time motioning Mr. Pritchard to keep reading.

An oil company? What had Uncle Gavin been thinking? This was not what she thought he meant when he told her he had “invested a little in oil and gas.”

She listened with only half her attention as Mr. Pritchard finished out the reading of the will.

The rest of it was pretty simple. With the exception of a few mementos and monetary gifts left to people like the woman who had cleaned his house every week for as long as Clara could remember, Gavin Graves had left everything to Clara. Much of it was specified in the will—the house and all its contents other than those otherwise disposed by the will, an old Mustang he had restored years before, a new Dodge pickup truck, and several bank accounts—but the document also closed by noting that everything not otherwise mentioned went to Clara.

“Thank you all for coming,” Mr. Pritchard said, standing. “In the next few days, I will be contacting those of you to whom Mr. Graves bequeathed personal gifts.”

Clara kept her seat as several townspeople came to offer their condolences, some for the second or third time that day. A cynical part of her couldn’t help but wonder how many of them were more interested in getting a better look at her after ten years in order to add fuel to the gossip fire than their sincere expressions and kind words might otherwise suggest.

That’s not fair, Clara
. She could almost hear her uncle’s kind voice chiding her.

With a sigh, she finally stood up. “Tell me more about this oil company, Mr. Pritchard?”

The attorney nodded. “Of course. But really, Mac will be able to tell you more.” He gestured behind her.

When she turned to look, though, all she caught was a bare glimpse of a dark-haired man in jeans and a cowboy hat as he shut the door behind him.

“Mac?” she asked, turning back to Mr. Pritchard, whose brow creased in a frown.

“The foreman. Your uncle didn’t tell you any of this?”

“No. This is the first I’ve heard of the oil company.”

“Well, I’ll set up a meeting between you for tomorrow.” Bending to make a note on his calendar, he suddenly paused, then stood up straight. A worried expression flitted across his face. “If that’s okay.”

“Tell me again why I need to meet with him?” If it worried Mr. Pritchard, it might not be a good idea.

“The will stipulates that, if you are planning to sell Aerio, you must work with the current foreman of the company to conduct a thorough review of all aspects of the company before doing so.”

Clara tilted her head. “Is that even enforceable, legally?”

The twist of Mr. Pritchard’s lips gave Clara most of the information she needed. “Not following the guidelines could allow the sale to be challenged in court,” he clarified. “Although you might be able to get a judge to strike down the provision, it would take time and money that could be spent just as easily fulfilling the terms of the will.”

“Fine.” She smoothed down the skirt of her black dress before picking up her matching Balenciaga bag. “Give me a call once you have the meeting scheduled? Thank you again, Mr. Pritchard.”

As she walked out toward her rental car with its mismatched tire—the one she hadn’t yet had a chance to deal with—she tried not to think too much about the next few weeks. Still, she couldn’t help but realize that she had more to do here than she had anticipated.

I’m not going to be leaving Necessity as quickly as I had hoped.

But she was definitely going to get the hell out of Dodge—or at least Necessity—as soon as possible.

* * *

Mac had heard his name as he slipped out of the attorney’s office, but he hadn’t turned back.

Coward
, that mocking voice in his head repeated. Shoving the thought out of his mind, he headed out to his truck.

He had also heard enough to know that John Pritchard would be contacting him to meet with Clara the next day. Until then, he had work to do. Wells to see to, reports to run, problems to solve.

Pulling his pickup out of the parking spot and onto the road, he headed out to the Rittman B site again. Mac almost hoped Duke was out on the ranch today. He was in the right mood to take the rancher down a few notches.

Getting into an argument with the landowner wouldn’t do anyone any good, though, and might cause more trouble than any satisfaction he might gain from it would be worth.

After all, it looked like he and his guys would have at least a few more days of work. From what he could decipher of the legal language as Pritchard read the will aloud—and Mac had gotten better at reading contracts in the last few years than he ever anticipated—Clara couldn’t sell the company until she had thoroughly reviewed all aspects of it. With his help, apparently.

His stomach twisted, even after ten years.

Why did Gavin make her inheritance contingent on working with Mac, in particular, to review it? Clara could just as easily go over the financials with an accountant.

Of course, if she got all of her information from an accountant, she very well might sell the business immediately. Or worse, shut it down. At least now he might have the chance to convince her to keep the company going—to make sure Bobby and Juan and George and all the other guys still had jobs, could still buy groceries and feed their kids.

If Mac had any sense at all, he would be more worried about the welfare of all the Aerio employees than he was about how Clara might act when they were finally forced to speak to one another.

If he were willing to acknowledge it to himself, though, he’d have to admit that everything about this situation tied him in knots. For the first time ever, he almost wished he hadn’t accepted this position in the first place.

The fact that Clara was the owner’s niece had been the only reason Mac had hesitated at all when Gavin offered him the job running Aerio’s crews. He didn’t know how much Clara had told her uncle about the reason she lit out of Necessity, but Gavin Graves was no fool. He knew that Mac had something to do with Clara’s decision to leave and never come back.

Yet Gavin had never brought up the past. In fact, he had never hesitated to talk about his niece in perfectly normal tones—about Clara’s life in New York, her job at the advertising agency, the trips he took to visit her every few months.

Meeting with Clara will be fine. We are both adults now. Our breakup was a decade ago. We have both had plenty of time to move on.

And he would just keep telling himself that for as long as he needed to.

Besides, he had more important things to do right now than worry about Clara. Like take care of a burned-out pump motor.

He only hoped it would be enough to keep him distracted from thinking about tomorrow’s meeting with his high-school sweetheart, the only girl he'd ever considered marrying.

As if anything could ever be that distracting.