Lost Highways (A Valentine Novel) (9 page)

Taking up her coffee, she leaned against the counter, listening to the familiar story of Uncle Doyle almost losing his leg. She watched the enjoyment of the telling on her uncle’s lean, weathered face and the way Harry sat forward at the table, as if listening intently, with the quirk of that sad smile on his lips. She wondered what type of doctor he was—perhaps by perfect fate a bone doctor.

When her uncle had finished his tale, she said, “Neva and Buck are married, Uncle Doyle. She is not living in sin with him.”

She felt perfectly justified in interfering by both the need for expediency and her experience with what happened when people hid things that needed to be said. She intended to see Uncle Doyle and Neva put to rights before she left the following evening for Amarillo. She had a feeling her mother was right on her shoulder, giving her the words.

Uncle Doyle’s head came around, his deep-set eyes widening, a mixture of emotions flying across his face: surprise, dismay, anger.

“There’s no use in gettin’ all mad over it,” Rainey said before he could find any words.

Then she proceeded to tell her uncle how he would surely be needed soon in the capacity of grandfather, which she thought might be just the idea to warm his heart, as he had always wanted a number of boys. One thing that had been a great disappointment to Uncle Doyle, she knew, was having only one child and that being a daughter.

“Well, just think of it, Uncle Doyle…” she said and presented in great detail the picture of boys racing around him, while he
taught them to drive the tractor and grow alfalfa and dry and bale it to the perfection for which he himself was known. She saw the anger on his face slip into thoughtfulness.

“It seems to me that Buck will also be just the man to help you with cuttin’ and haulin’ hay, and he’s bound to give Neva a lot of little boys to do the same thing. I think he looks like a man who’ll give off boys, don’t you, Harry?”

Harry jumped in with the spirit of things and agreed. “Bound to,” he said. Rainey was very proud that he didn’t let the facts of life get in the way.

About all Uncle Doyle said to everything was, “Well, it’s done…and I don’t guess I can shoot him.” He said those gruff words in a decidedly accepting manner, she thought.

Satisfied that she had things going in the right direction, she left the men at the table talking over old joint injuries and went upstairs to take a nice long hot soak, which for her was the equivalent of tossing back several fortifying jiggers of Jack Daniel’s.

Running the water hot enough to fill the room with steam, she squirted shampoo into the stream, filling the tub with bubbles. Shedding her clothes, she swept up her hair and stepped into the sudsy wet warmth. Deeper and deeper she sank her body, until her shoulders were under, only her knees and head sticking out, and inhaled the moist air, relishing being alone. When she was thoroughly warmed, she spread her wet washcloth on the cool enamel back of the tub and reclined with her head resting on a folded hand towel, lazily watching water drip from the tarnished chrome faucet.

Plop…plop…plop
. The drips formed, slowly growing silver and plump, like life, until, one by one, they overgrew and fell into the sudsy water.

Lifting her foot, she toed the drop, wiping it away. She watched another form, and when it was about to drop, she touched her toe to it, too, wiping the water from the sharp edge of the faucet. She toed the opening of the faucet, into which her toe wriggled neat and smooth.

She had a moment of panic, when her toe seemed to be stuck, but it came free, and with thankfulness, she sank her foot beneath the warm water, lay back and listened to the water drip.
Plop…plop…plop…

Pictures plopped into her mind with each drip, coming slowly, one after the other.

Plop
, and it was Harry, gazing at her with haunted eyes when he asked to be taken to a hotel.

Plop
, and it was Harry at breakfast, digging into her biscuits and gravy.

Plop
, and it was Uncle Doyle, all hurt when he spoke of his daughter’s betrayal of him with the man of her dreams.

Plop
, and it was Harry, running across the dirt to the injured girl, so intent he had almost been run down by a horse.

Plop, plop, plop
, and it was Buck in the truck, and Neva running to kiss him, and the pup at Rainey’s heels, and her mother’s whispered voice,
Oh, honey, I have to tell you…

We can sure live a lifetime in a moment, can’t we, Mama? she whispered,
Whether we want to or not
.

She did not realize that she had dozed off until a knock at the door startled her.

“Rainey, did you fall asleep?”

“Oh. I guess I did.”

She sat up, feeling warm and fuzzy and a little like asking him to come in. “I’m okay, though.”

“Well…just checking,” he said in something of a shy voice. “I’ll be down in the kitchen.”

“Okay.”

She was sure he was saying, “I’m here, and I’m ready to tell my story.”

Out Where It Gets Lonesome

W
hen Rainey came downstairs she was wearing her blue robe over her nightgown, and she knew she smelled lovely, as a woman fresh from a bath always does. She had in fact spritzed herself with the expensive perfume Helen had given her. She had done this before realizing, stopped, and been very annoyed with herself and stuffed the bottle way to the bottom of her purse.

She stopped in the doorway to see Harry at the table, his head bent over a small brown box, and his dark hair catching the shine of the overhead light.

He looked up at her. A thick strand of hair fell over his forehead. His gaze quickly swept her from head to toe, and then came back up to her eyes. She jerked the belt of her robe tighter and wished she’d remembered to put on socks.

“Gosh, it’s freezing in here,” she said, hurrying past him to slam down the window over the sink. “I guess we could light the furnace.”

Rubbing her arms, she turned to face him, but he had again bent his head over the brown box on the table.

With some surprise, she saw that the box was the old fifties radio that had sat gathering dust on the second shelf of the microwave cart. Her eyes widened as she saw he was poking inside the back of it, while it crackled with static.

“Shouldn’t you unplug it while you do that? You might get shocked. Freddy was fiddlin’ in the back of a radio once and got shocked so bad he lost his hearing for three days. Scared us all to death.”

Slowly he turned his head to look over his shoulder. “Just how many husbands have you had?”

“Well…two. Why?”

He frowned. “By my count, Freddy is number three.”

“You are counting?” This was interesting.

He blinked, and he actually blushed, she was sure of it.

Returning his gaze to the bowels of the radio, he said that he had not been exactly counting, but that he seemed to recall a Robert and a Monte, and now here was a Freddy.

“Freddy’s my brother. Robert and Monte are my ex-husbands,” she said in a clarifying manner. “Robert was number one and Monte number two and gone now for two years. Well, not my husband for two years, but he does show up every three or four weeks to borrow money.”

She bent, peering over his shoulder. “I really think you should unplug that thing.”

His brown eyes came round to hers, close enough for her to see the gold flecks in them.

“Then I can’t tell if all the tubes are tight,” he said.

“Oh.”

She came up straight and occupied herself with making certain
her robe was folded over her gown. He returned to the radio, as if she were not there.

“Do you know what you’re doin’?” she asked.

“Pretty much,” he said. He carefully adjusted the tuner, and the music became stronger. “Old radios are a hobby. I have about a dozen—radios, not hobbies. The tubes have to warm.”

She thought, A doctor with old radios as a hobby. This is interesting.

The music was blues, out of an Austin station. She remarked about the miracle of hearing music from an album turning so far away, coming over the airwaves, skipping over the hills and flowing across the range and over cattle and right into the box in the small kitchen.

“It is something of a miracle,” she said, cocking her head to listen.

He nodded at her with satisfaction. “They don’t make ‘em like this anymore.”

She looked at the radio and then at him. “Is that the kind of music you like?” she asked disbelievingly.

“You need to broaden your musical taste,” he said, with that hint of a grin.

She said that she imagined he liked opera, too. “And I bet you drink expensive wine and cappuccino or expresso and whatnot.”

“Yeah.
Ex
presso and whatnot.”

“I know it is
es
presso,” she said into his grin. “I may not drink it, but I know what it is.”

At that moment the differences between them were so very stark, she in her cotton and bare feet, with her preference for cowboy coffee and country music. Even in his denim, he would not be taken for any man she had ever known. What did he think of this
thing
between them?

Then she jumped up and went to the shallow pantry, from which she drew a slim, green bottle.

“Dandelion wine. Uncle Doyle makes it every spring. Want to try it?”

“Sure.”

She brought glasses, but she could not find a corkscrew. He took the bottle from her, produced a small pocket knife, and within a minute of delicate operation had it uncorked.

“You seem very proficient at that,” she said.

“I’ve taken out a couple of bullets,” he said.

“Is this harder or easier?” She thought of him taking bullets out of flesh and wondered if he’d had the same expression.

At her question, he looked surprised. “Actually, I guess flesh is harder, only because one is so conscious of it being alive.”

She studied his face, couldn’t keep her eyes from it.

He poured a couple of swallows into a glass, and then he tasted, while she watched him with a curious expression. “Not bad,” he said, seeming highly pleased. “Not bad at all.”

Delight washed over her. She gestured for him to pour both glasses and, watching his deft hand movements and the glistening liquid swirl, she stretched her legs. He passed her a glass and waited to tap his own to hers. She felt him watching her as she took her first sip.

“Uncle Doyle has won awards for his wine,” she said.

“Your uncle is a man of many talents,” he said. He looked at her a moment, and then he sat back and drank deeply.

“You are a far cry away from where you were this time last night,” she said.

“I guess I’m a much farther cry from where I was a week ago,” he said frankly, and she knew that he was about to tell
her everything, and she was so very glad she had not pried it from him with insistent questions but had waited for him to be ready.

Land of the Living

“J
ust what would you like to know?” he asked her, his mouth forming his amused, sad grin.

“Well, all of it,” she said, causing him to blink. “Start with your family.” In her experience, everything in a person’s life, good or bad, began with one’s family.

With a chuckle, he lifted his glass to tap hers in a silent toast, after which he downed a good swallow and then proceeded to tell her that he and the four generations before him were natives of Houston, Texas. His full name was Harrison James Furneaux—a name that seemed very substantial and to fit perfectly with his expensive watch—and that his father always called him Harrison and his mother called him James.

Rainey felt this was a telling point about his parents’ relationship. “Do you have brothers and sisters—and what do they call you?” she asked, her mind fitting puzzle pieces together.

“Two older brothers and one younger sister, and they call me
Harrison,” he answered just as rapidly. “Most people call me Harrison.”

“I like Harry,” she said.

That smile came again. “I took it up recently,” he said, and regarded her as if to judge her reaction.

“Good idea.” Leaning forward, she propped her chin in her hand, in an attempt to show she was keenly listening.

He shifted his eyes away and took a breath, then told her that his father was a physician, as were both of his older brothers. His mother had a career in charity work and sat on the board of a number of charitable organizations.

“People always come to her when they need money—I’ve seen her make a couple of phone calls and raise a hundred thousand dollars in fifteen minutes.”

Rainey, forming vague impressions of a tall, broad-shouldered father and brothers, and a mother in pearls and slim skirts, asked about his sister. He said she had married a doctor and gone to live in New Orleans, where she was embarking on a career in raising great sums of money for charities in the manner of their mother, producing a duplicate image of a woman in pearls in Rainey’s mind.

“What kind of doctor are you?” she asked.

He told her that he was a family physician, had just finished his residency. She took this news with the apprehension of any woman who finds the man she is attracted to is likely younger than herself.

“My father was quite disappointed,” he said, folding his arms and leaning on the table. “Family physicians do not, as a general rule, achieve the preeminence required in my family. My father would have preferred I be a surgeon and fit in with the family ‘team.’ Between them, my father and brothers cut and splice all the available organs.”

She watched his expression grow grim, as he explained, with a mixture of sarcasm and sadness, that from birth, it was dictated that he would follow in the family footsteps. As it had been presented to him:
This
is what the men of the Furneaux family do. The men of his family were
physicians
—not simply doctors—and the women of the family married physicians, all of them being notable, of course, and it was expected each of them would hold high the flame and pass it along for the next generation.

“And you don’t want to do that,” she said, wanting him to get the idea that she understood completely.

His eyes, deep-brown, met hers, and he smiled that sad, crooked smile. “Not exactly.”

He frowned thoughtfully, passing his hand over the back of his head in a manner she had come to associate with him pondering, and began to tell her that one of his brothers had broken ground when he had dared to show an interest in family practice, too.

“Actually,” he explained, “I believe my brother had always wanted to be a veterinarian, but he couldn’t bring himself to go that far astray. And after my father worked him over, he decided he had made a mistake with his family practice leanings and that he really wanted to be a surgeon after all. I guess Dad thought I would go along the same way and eventually decide I wanted to be a surgeon, too.

“But I get a little too queasy,” he said in an amused confessional manner, “and I simply don’t have the inclination.” He breathed deeply. “I realized this, and it was a pretty big disappointment to my father, but he could have handled it sooner or later. What he couldn’t handle was my conclusion, after going all the way through residency, that I don’t really have the inclination to be an especially stellar physician, period.”

She broke in with, “Oh, but I think you are a very good doctor. You might not do well for yourself when you have a head injury, but you were very good with Pammy tonight.”

Again the crooked smile. “Ah, but a good doctor is not equal to a stellar physician in my family.”

He splashed more wine into their glasses, then sat back, saying, “I went to my father and told him I had decided not to continue in general practice…and further, committed pure heresy, by telling him that I had decided to pursue the practice of psychiatry.”

“Oh.”

“Exactly. You must understand that, to my family, all forms of emotional anguish are a weakness not to be tolerated, and emotional therapy is quackery. In fact, they don’t believe in emotions at all. Emotions are not allowed in my family—one leaves them at the door, along with muddy shoes.”

Beneath his cavalier tone was the strain of it. The deep hurt. The scene played like an old black-and-white film in her mind, his broad-shouldered giant of a father rising up in his double-breasted suit, while his son stood before him in a collarless silk shirt.

“I imagine your father was rather upset,” she said.

“Oh, yes, I’d say that he was upset. You see, this was not the first time I had disappointed him. Two years before this, in the midst of my residency, I had a nervous breakdown.”

He watched her, and she looked him in the eye.

“My family is very emotional,” she said.

“I had imagined so,” he commented with a crooked grin.

His gaze fell to his glass, and he continued. “When I told my father that I had already resigned from the hospital that bore a wing named after our family, I think he would have shot me, if he’d had a gun.”

Watching him throw back a good gulp of the wine, she saw etched into the handsome planes of his face the painful disappointment of a son who has fallen short of fatherly expectations.

“He hated that he could not control you,” she said.

“Oh, I guess he still manages to control me to an extent,” he said. “But not as he wishes.”

“So what happened?” she asked after a moment of silence. “He obviously didn’t shoot you. Did he disinherit you?”

“Something like that,” he said, grinning at her expression. “I think he said something like, ‘No son of mine is going to toss his future down the toilet….’”

He looked at the glass in his hand. “I was wise enough to get out of his sight. I spent a few days holed up in my apartment not answering the telephone. My father came over once, to yell at me some more, and then I figured I needed to get out and drive around and think it all over.”

“Oh, driving is very good for that,” she said.

“If one stays on the road,” he said. Then he drank from his glass, his brows knotted with thought. A second later, he leaned forward, his eyes intense.

“For weeks now, I’ve been struggling to figure out what I really want—to make certain I’m not simply rebelling against my father.”

“I don’t think you are doing that. I think you are much too careful to do that. You know too much.”

She saw appreciation of her comment reflected on his face. Then he sat back, and his gaze drifted to the table. She watched the pondering expression come over his features again. She thought that his eyes were beautiful. He had very long dark eyelashes that a woman would like to kiss.

“How old are you?” she asked.

He blinked, looking a little surprised. “Thirty-one.”

“I’ll be thirty-five next month.”

He looked at her with curious confusion. Then his eyebrows went up, and he ran his gaze over her face, as if both assessing her physical attributes and wondering why she should point out their ages.

Rainey turned her head, reached for the bottle and boldly splashed the last of the wine into each of their glasses, saying, “Well, I think you are already a good doctor. You care. I’ve always thought that what makes a good doctor is simply wanting to help. Anyone can look up facts in a medical book, but treating the person as a human being is what doctoring is all about.”

He inclined his head. “In psychiatry, I can use my training to treat the entire person, body and mind. The deepest wounds are those you can’t see, the ones people carry around with them every day.”

“Yes, I think so,” she said.

“I have to be sure,” he said, almost as if he had not heard her agreement. “I know I’ll figure it out, and right now I’m going to give myself the time I need to think about it. About what I really want.”

He leaned forward and looked at her with those beautiful brown eyes. “You see, this is the first time in my life that I’ve really thought about what I want to do. I know that sounds strange…but I…well, I guess it’s been a lot easier to follow the road mapped out for me by my parents and grandfather. All those physician Furneauxs, you know. Not that it’s their fault—my actions are all my own. But my father and the others, they’re pretty powerful sorts, and it is a little difficult to question the wisdom of those who have achieved what they all have.”

She liked the way he didn’t just slip the blame for his lapse all off on his family. She thought of his father. She had seen fathers
of the sort she imagined his to be and knew it couldn’t have been easy for a son who very naturally wanted to please. A son who marched to a different drummer. What courage it must have taken. She wondered how a father such as his had managed to produce such a special son.

He said, “Once, when I was about fifteen, my father discovered that I wrote music lyrics. Several of us guys at the school I went to had formed a band—I played guitar, not well, but I did play. I wasn’t a good student, and I’d already lost a year, because of a car accident just before first grade, and so my father was always pushing me. He tore the paper with my lyrics into pieces and said I was wasting my time. He made me stay at school over the Thanksgiving holidays and study in order to bring my grades up.”

His jaw was tight, his eyes far away, as if being drawn back into the past. She imagined the cruelty of it, a child away at school, alone and abandoned by an ambitious father with no charity. She wondered at a mother who would allow such treatment of her child. She saw his father in the double-breasted suit, making a martini after work, standing over his wife, Harry’s mother, who wore pearls and a perpetually distracted expression, probably considering whom she could next prevail upon for charity money. Probably his father always stood while insisting everyone else sit. People of power always did that. It was Freddy’s habit to pace in front of them all. Of course, their mother had always seemed to emit quiet power, and eventually Freddy would have to sit down, would sort of plop down in disgusted capitulation.

Somehow she found herself telling Harry about her family, first about how Freddy would get so aggravated at the way their father always deferred to their mother.

“In my family, the women generally run things,” she said.

“Now why doesn’t that surprise me?” he said, his voice low and filled with amusement.

She gave him a condescending look, and then went on to tell the funny story of how, when her mother’s sisters would all gather at the house, her daddy would go out back and stay in his workshop that he’d fixed up with a bunk and stove, because he said the women didn’t leave him any air to breathe. He might sit out on the porch and when anyone came he’d say, “Better take a good breath now, afore you go inside. The women are suckin’ up all the air.”

She was pleased to see him smile a true smile.

“It isn’t at all that Daddy is weak or passive,” she explained, wanting to correctly portray a man she thought was about the best in the world. “What Mama said was that Daddy’s easygoin’ way was his strength. She said that strong, rough waters can carry a person away and drown them, but still waters run deep, and that still waters will hold a person up.”

He gazed at her, and she at him. He said she obviously had special parents.

“Yes,” she said, “I did…I do.”

She related that her parents had married later than most and that her mother had been thirty when she’d had Freddy and thirty-seven when she’d had Charlene. Then, at forty-seven, her mother had turned up with another baby, which of course had been a shock to everyone.

“Freddy always calls me the ‘late child,’” she said, her gaze on the glass in her hands. “I think it was hard on him, another girl in a family where the two women already dominated, not that Charlene is as domineering as Mama was, but she isn’t any wallflower, either. And Freddy was in his teens and the type that it probably embarrassed him to death that his mother gave concrete evidence of havin’ sex.”

He was gazing at her, listening intensely and as if hearing down beyond the words. It was very natural for her to tell him the rest of it—that Freddy and her mother had always seemed to have this battle of wills, and of how she now suspected Freddy’s resentment of her stemmed from his having known all along that their mother had conceived her with a lover, instead of their own father.

It was the first time she had spoken the bald truth aloud.

“Mama told it all as she was dyin’,” she said, as mystified now as she had been then. “Right there with her dyin’, I found out that my real daddy was an oil geologist who’d more or less been passin’ through and not the man I called Daddy at all.”

She played with her glass as she spoke of it, the words spilling out and rolling away like a string of broken beads.

“We have a lot of emotion in my family,” she said. “We acknowledge it, and then what we do with it is try to stamp it out.”

She tried for a grin, and then she found herself on her feet and stepping to the counter. She might have gone right out the door into the night, had she not gotten a hold of herself.