Snow Angel (9 page)

It would be interesting to see how the dynamic changed once some of her cousins and friends started marrying and having kids of their own.

Most of the time she didn’t mind being the only girl, and even enjoyed it. When the boys weren’t ribbing her about something-or-other, they either treated her like a princess or like one of the guys, either of which suited her, depending on the circumstances—though when they got going with the guy humor, she often elected to join the women.

On the ski slopes, she got lonely sometimes, though. The guys were all expert-level skiers, and even the grown-ups skied the more difficult trails. While she was a competent athlete, her secret fear of heights kept her from attempting the tougher runs, which meant she spent most of her time skiing alone.

She’d hoped to spend those hours with Mitch this year. Holding hands, riding the lifts together, teasing each other down the runs. Being playful. Staring into each other’s eyes or watching the stars overhead from the hot tub outside the lodge.

Melinda snorted to herself silently. So much for those romantic plans.

CHAPTER SIX

The SUV crested the small rise leading out of Barstow and started down the other side, a sea of frost-tipped brown undulating before them for miles.

Calico Ghost Town sat way off to the left, midway up another hill stretching from the desert floor, as it had for more than a hundred years. She hadn’t been to the old mining-town-turned-tourist-attraction since the summer after high school when a bunch of them had camped on the grounds for a few days, Jacob included.

As though he’d heard her thoughts, Jacob piped up. “Hey, Calico. Mel, remember—”

“Yeah.”

Jacob stretched forward and patted the top of her head again, and she smiled. It had been a good trip, despite the conditions. They’d been scoured raw with blowing sand and parched dry by the hot desert winds. Half of the plastic spikes that had come with their tents had shattered when they’d tried to drive them into the hard-packed earth. The ice in their coolers had melted so fast that by evening of the first day all of their drinks had gone lukewarm, necessitating many repeat trips to the local mini-mart for more and more ice.

And Sherise, one of her girlfriends, had surprised a huge rattlesnake in the restroom where it had gone to escape the heat, slithering its length across the marginally cooler concrete floor.

Melinda shuddered as they passed the Ghost Town Road exit and its giant cowboy signpost. She could still hear Sherise screaming her head off in the back of her mind, her piercing shrieks echoing off the bathroom’s cinder-block walls, scaring them all half to death. Melinda’s first thought had been axe-murderer.

She laughed quietly at the memory.

More than that, though, they’d all still been mourning Seth, and that trip had been the first time since his passing that they’d been able to make themselves let go and laugh again. Guiltily at first, but gradually it had expanded and loosened. Normalled out a bit, as Seth would have wanted. They’d toasted him liberally, sharing memories and tall tales, and though his loss was an always-present ache to this day, that trip had been the beginning of their healing.

It had also birthed the first ideas that had blossomed into positive ways to keep Seth’s memory alive, to turn their sorrow over his tragic death into an affirmation of his life.

They’d started with the rodeo, now held annually over a summer weekend at Eddie’s parents’ ranch. Their fundraising endowed the scholarship they’d set up in Seth’s name, and supported the nonprofit his parents had developed to raise awareness about the dangers of distracted driving. It also helped maintain the memorial garden nearly all of Pasodoro had pitched in to create.

Overlooking the Mojave River, the garden was situated on the favorite spot where Melinda, Jacob, and Seth had spent many afternoons whiling away the hours, solving the problems of the world over bottles of soda and Seth’s mother’s homemade cookies.

That one camping trip had become a turning point for many of them, full of fun, friendship, and a new sense of purpose for their lives.

Melinda turned to catch one more look of the old ghost town as it receded from view. They should go again sometime. Maybe next summer when they were on break from school. They could rustle up the same crowd and make a party of it, especially now that they were all over twenty-one.

Evidently following her train of thought along the same memory track, Jacob said, “We should do that again. Only don’t invite Carl and Donna.”

Snickering, Melinda nodded in full agreement.

On their second night of camping, Carl and Donna had retreated from the campfire, where everyone else sat roasting marshmallows, to go bounce on each other inside Carl’s parents’ borrowed trailer-tent. Only they’d bounced so enthusiastically that they’d torn away the rivets attaching the tent fabric to the sides of the trailer along the edge of the twin bed they’d been using and had tumbled out through the resulting hole, buck-naked.

“They sure knew how to put on a show,” Melinda said, recalling the way the two had fallen all over themselves, giggling like loons, then stood, hand-in-hand, to take a bow before their startled friends.

“Yeah,” Jacob said, “but let’s book different entertainment next time. Donna’s one thing, but naked Carl scarred me for life. Now if just the girls want to—
oof!
”

Jacob broke off, snickering when Melinda’s water bottle hit him squarely in the forehead.

“They broke up, anyway,” Melinda reminded him.

Tossing back her water bottle, Jacob said, “Yeah, but still.”

The subdued note that had crept into his voice told her he wasn’t happy to be reminded of the way their friends’ relationship had ended.

Melinda sobered, too, as memories of Carl and Donna’s breakup brought Mitch back to mind. She held his face there—so endearingly handsome with his puppy-dog brown eyes and slightly crooked nose, his wide smile with the dimple only on one side—and mentally drew a big red ‘X’ over him. The jackass.

Breaking up would have hurt badly enough. On Christmas Day, with no warning, and to go back to
Christina
…

No, Melinda scolded herself. Don’t drag it up.

At least her breakup with Mitch hadn’t affected anyone else. The thing with Carl and Donna had caused a rift in their entire group, since they’d all been friends. No one had wanted to pick sides, but even two-and-a-half-years later, it was still tough hanging out with either of them without the other. Their broken relationship was a big, unhappy elephant in any room, and a solid argument against friends getting involved.

Not that she needed an argument. Friendship wasn’t the issue with her and Jacob, at least on her end. Her parents were great friends. So were Jacob’s. So were all of her aunts and uncles. Friends could make great mates as long as they had similar goals.

She and Jacob didn’t qualify.

Melinda shifted again, annoyed with herself. None of that mattered. She was not getting involved with any friends, certainly not Jacob. Just because she’d had a crazy dream...

And okay, yes, maybe her body tingled whenever he touched her or looked at her a certain way, and in her heart of hearts she feared she’d never find anyone as perfect for her as her best friend.

But she was not in love with Jacob. She once was in love with the rat, Mitch, and now her heart was broken and sending out all sorts of stupid mixed signals.

Shutting it away again, she stared sightlessly out the passenger window and allowed the desert speeding past to haze into a dull, blank wall of nothing. No thoughts, no emotions, only the soothing blur.

Now that everyone was truly awake, Danny turned on the music. Melinda brushed off the brief dip in her mood, and soon they were all singing along at the tops of their lungs to classic Eagles and
Hotel California
, followed by
Life In the Fast Lane
.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~

Unobserved from his spot behind her, Jacob followed the many expressions crossing Melinda’s gorgeous face in the passenger-side mirror. Nostalgia to humor to sadness to a determined sort of grim acceptance.

Thinking about Mitch again, probably.

Asshole.

He’d like to plow his fist in the dude’s face for hurting her, especially on Christmas.

Okay, he was glad they were through, he’d already admitted that to himself. For some reason he could never fully pin down, he hadn’t liked the guy.

But man, he hated seeing Melinda unhappy.

His own feelings aside, Melinda sure had liked the dude. Jacob gave a mental grimace. She’d been gaga over him. Now she stared out the window, her big blue eyes deliberately blank, even as she sang along to the music.

She had the prettiest eyes he’d ever seen, a true, deep blue with even darker blue rings around the irises, and long, thick, dark lashes. When she smiled, they lit up like sparkly sapphires.

By the time they got back home from this trip, they’d be sparkling again. He’d make sure of it.

As her friend, making her smile was both his duty and his pleasure.

~*~*~*~*~*~*~*

One hundred miles later, Melinda’s throat had gone happily dust-dry from singing, and she’d successfully banished Mitch from her mind. They’d worked their way through half of the Eagle’s canon and some of Foreigner’s, ignoring Wendell and Christian’s repeated calls for music from the current century.

They were into a rousing rendition of
Cold As Ice
by the time they reached Whiskey Pete’s and Buffalo Bill’s, the casino-resorts at the state line dividing California and Nevada, and their first hint of trouble.

Melinda turned down the music and answered her cell when her mom called from the front car. She frowned, her eyes tracking over the giant rollercoaster surrounding the casino on her right as Karen filled her in on the news.

“Okay,” she said. “Bye.”

Danny glanced at her once she’d hung up. “What’s wrong?”

“There’s some big accident outside Vegas. We might sit in traffic for a while.”

“It’s not even nine o’clock in the morning,” Jacob complained.

“Great,” Danny said, disregarding Jacob. “Alternate routes?”

“They’re looking.”

As it turned out, the accident was south of Jean, which was itself south of Las Vegas, and only a few miles from the state line. There were no good routes around it, nor freeway exits to access them in any case, just the long stretch of highway and miles of desert on either side. They hit the backup three miles after Karen’s call and came to a dead stop.

“Great,” Danny said again.

With a sigh, Melinda broke out the snacks, and Christian and Wendell wrestled the lid off the cooler in the very back to pass out drinks.

After twenty minutes without moving more than a few inches, the cars in front of them turned off their engines. Danny followed suit.

Karen, Stan, Lois, and Bill left their car and strolled to the SUV. Everyone got out to stretch and chat, stamping their feet against the cold and blowing plumes of white into the chilly morning air with every breath.

Melinda hopped down from her seat, her blanket wrapped around her body, and burrowed into her dad’s arms. Stan rubbed his hands up and down her arms and back to warm her, tucking her beneath his chin and resting his cheek on her hair.

“Awake now, Sunshine?” he asked.

“Kinda,” she said, stifling another yawn behind her mitten-covered hands.

Peter and Nancy Thomas wandered up from the third car in their caravan to announce that helicopters were on the way to airlift the injured from the scene of the accident. It was likely to be a while before the cars got moving again.

A small, birdlike woman with lively brown eyes and a sassy cap of Marilyn-Monroe-platinum-blond hair, Nancy barely topped five feet, but she could always be found in the middle of things with her sunny personality. Peter shared their son’s brown hair, gray eyes, and studious demeanor, and had the perfect temperament for working with the many horses on their ranch.

Uncle Allan and Aunt Pat joined them next, hand in hand and well-bundled against the cold, then Rick and Eddie, who’d obviously just woken from naps.

Up ahead, a few cars made u-turns, four-bying over the bumpy desert median to head back to Primm and the state-line casinos.

“What do you think?” Stan asked, looking around the group. “Should we go back and sit it out in one of the hotels?”

They debated it for a while but eventually decided to stay in place and wait.

“We’ll lose our shirts at the tables, and no one will want to ski,” Peter said.

“Huh,” said Bill, winking at Lois. “It’s not the tables that worry me, my friend. It’s my wife, bored, in a bunch of over-priced stores with designer names.”

“Too right,” Uncle Allan said, evading Aunt Pat’s jabbing elbow with a hop, skip, and a girlish squeal that made everyone laugh.

Lois only smiled serenely at Bill. The glint in her eye said Jacob’s dad would pay for that little comment later. Probably with a large credit card balance.

More and more people climbed out of the cars surrounding theirs, adding their voices to the mix, shaking hands and greeting each other like old friends, until it looked like they were having some weird highway-block party in the middle of the road.

With nothing to do but speculate about the cause of the accident, the extent of the “poor bastards” injuries, and wait, they milled about in small groups, leaned against the many vehicles, and shared whatever snacks and bottles of water or soda anyone had on hand, as first one hour, then the second, ticked slowly past.

By unspoken agreement, no one mentioned Seth or the accident that had taken his life. It wasn’t the moment, though his memory shone in everyone’s eyes.

They alternated napping and reading with calisthenics, or walked along the side of the highway and back to keep warm. The adults huddled over thermoses of coffee, and her parents took turns handling calls from the nursery, dealing with questions and calming Manami after a small inventory crisis.