Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (28 page)

“I can’t.”

She really couldn’t. She wasn’t certain she could move. She simply couldn’t face him. She didn’t want him to see her anger, which she knew was foolish. It wasn’t anger at him. At herself, maybe. She was overwhelmed, overwrought, and plainly feeling as if she were out of control, and she didn’t want him to see her like this.

She didn’t think she could show him how much he meant to her. Thinking this, confused by it all, she could barely get her breath.

He didn’t say anything else. After a few more long seconds, she listened to his footsteps as he went back down the hall and down the stairs. She listened until she could not hear any footsteps at all, nor any voices. As if the house had gone empty and silent around her.

Maybe Harry had left, she thought.

With this prospect, she jumped up, wildly flung open the door, raced down the stairs and through the rooms, looking for him. “Harry? Oh, Harry!”

Not finding him inside, she burst out the front door, thinking she might have to chase down his car as he drove away.

She stopped short, seeing him sitting with her father. Two men in the deepening shadows of the front porch.

He leaped to his feet and came directly to her and swept her into his arms, just as she had imagined.

“I was afraid you’d left,” she mumbled into his chest.

“I’m not that easily put off,” he said, with his warm, familiar chuckle.

“Oh, Harry.”

In the privacy of the kitchen, Harry explained immediately about where he had been, as if he could not get the words out fast enough. “I was up at the University of Oklahoma, putting in an application and arranging for an interview next month for a psychiatry residency.”

Rainey flicked the switch on the coffeemaker and then slid into the chair across the table from him, leaning forward and saying, “You’ll be at OU?”

“Well, if I get accepted after the interview.”

He told her then that he had written a letter to his father at last, pouring out his heart, and part of that was about Rainey. “I told him, ‘Look, I’m in love with this Oklahoma girl, and I want to marry her, and to do that I’ve got to get up there with her, so I’m going to apply to the medical school up there for a psychiatry residency. They have a real good program, and if you can help get me in, I’d sure appreciate it.’”

“And he did?” she asked, breathless, already going on to imagine it, his burly father coming in his double-breasted suit and talking gruffly, hating every minute of it, but being overcome by his magnetic son.

Harry nodded. “He came to see me at the clinic, and he said, ‘I guess if you’re going to be stubborn about this, I might as well see what I can do to help you get the best training. Let’s go.’
There’s nothing my father likes better. Control is why he’s the surgeon he is.”

He told how he and his father had driven up to Oklahoma City Thursday morning. In addition to putting in his application and arranging for an interview, which wouldn’t take place until January, his father had hauled him over to the VA hospital, where his father knew a bigwig and got Harry an interview on the spot. Harry would start a position there at the end of January. Doctors weren’t exactly beating down the doors of VA hospitals, but it was a good place for Harry, as this was a place for old men in need of help.

“I guess I was hitting Oklahoma City about the time you were heading for Houston,” he said, reaching for her hand. “I didn’t call and tell you about what I was doing because I wanted to come over here and surprise you with the news, if it looked like it was going to work out. And I didn’t want to tell you, in case it didn’t turn out.”

She gazed at his hand holding hers. She felt awfully guilty for her angry and doubtful thoughts.

“I appreciate so much that you went down to see me,” he said.

“I wanted to surprise you, too.”

“Well, you sure did.” He rose and pulled her up, cupped her face in his hands, gazed longingly into her eyes and then kissed her in such a way as to melt her entire body.

When he’d finished with that, he told her, “Rainey, I love you and I want you to marry me. All I want right now is to set a date. You can pick any day from now until June, right before I start my residency in July. That ought to give us plenty of time to work out any thorns in our relationship.

“Will you do that, Rainey? Will you say you’ll marry me?”

Gazing into his beautiful brown eyes, she said, “Yes.” Then she added, “I love you, Harry, with all my heart.”

As they embraced, she thought that she would have to try very hard to give to Harry as much as he had already given to
her. She thought of the verse: Perfect love casteth out fear. Her fear, she thought, as she brought them coffee and he pulled her into his lap and nuzzled her breast, was fading away, at last.

It wasn’t, she thought in a moment of sheer clarity, that she believed they would never have problems. There would be plenty of adjustments and even hard times. But now she believed that she could handle whatever came her way.

Winston Valentine smiled as he gazed through the glowing window at his daughter in the young man’s lap.

“Well, Mama, you got it done,” he said, turning his eyes to his wife’s shimmering ethereal image standing four feet away and looking into the house, too.

She smiled at him and nodded in that knowing way she had.

He had not told anyone—they would think he was fully gone loony—but he had been seeing her since he’d had his heart attack. He could converse with her, although he never heard her speak. It was as if what she had to say just popped into his mind. Once he’d tried to reach for her, but she had faded. There was no solidness to her, but she was there.

“How we ever stayed together, I don’t know, Coweta, but we did okay, don’t you think?”

She smiled in agreement, and he heard,
“Yes, my darlin’.”

“I would not trade those years with you, honey, for anything in this ol’ world. I came to love you more than I love life. And you know what, it was because of the difficulties, not in spite of ‘em.”

“Yes…now you know this.”
Her look was a little sardonic.

He noticed her clothing then, silvery-white as always. “What are you got up for? You look like a Wild West gal.”

She did a little spin, extending her arms and showing off her sparkling fringed shirt.

“Well, I’ll be dogged. They got barrel racin’ up in heaven?”

“It is heaven.”

She threw back her head with a laugh in the way that had always so attracted him. And over her shoulder he thought he caught a glimpse of a silvery-white horse back in the darkness of the trees, as if it awaited her.

“Winston, who are you talkin’ to out here?” It was Bill, shouting his question.

Annoyed, Winston said, “Don’t come out here yellin’, Bill.” He felt a little guilty, as Bill could not help yelling. But he could help tagging after Winston all the time.

Coweta grinned, fading and blowing him a kiss as she went. Bill couldn’t see her, of course. No one else had acted like they saw her, although she’d been around plenty when others were with him.

“Winston, you shouldn’t be peekin’ in the window at Rainey and her fella.”

“I’m not peekin’ at Rainey,” Winston said, and then he saw Bill step closer to the window and stare in as hard as he could, his mouth falling open.

Winston saw then what his old friend was looking at. He took Bill firmly by the arm and jerked him away.

“Don’t be indulgin’ in voyeurism with my daughter,” he said.

“What’d you say?”

“Shush!” He continued to pull Bill along, and at the corner of the house, he said, loudly, “Come on, we’ll go see if Mildred will let us watch her cable television all night. I bet she’ll be thrilled.”

ISBN: 978-1-4603-6199-3

LOST HIGHWAYS

Copyright © 1999 by Curtiss Ann Matlock.

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All characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

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