The Prodigal's Return (16 page)

T
HE BANGING WOKE
N
EAL
out of a deep sleep. Deeper sleep than he'd ever remembered having. So deep, for a minute he had no idea where he was. Just the vague longing to make the noise stop so he could go on sleeping.

The next crash had other ideas.

He jerked awake to find himself sitting in his childhood bed, in a room overflowing with memories his father had held on to, the sheet twisted around his naked body. Sleeping naked was another post-prison luxury, one that came along with privacy and closed doors that people couldn't see through.

A louder crash had him reaching for his jeans, thoughts of Jeremy Compton's angry face and threats from last night propelling him out of the room and down the stairs. The ruckus was definitely coming from out back. Jenn and her daughter and Traci had moved in that afternoon, and he'd be damned if he'd let Jeremy keep making trouble for them.

He'd almost reached the kitchen door to the
backyard when a shadow by the sink moved. Turning, he found himself face-to-face with the amazing sight of Jennifer Gardner in her nightshirt, standing in the puddle of moonlight streaming through the window.

And then it was as if he were still dreaming. As if walking toward her, taking her hand and laying it on his bare chest, over his heart, was the answer to eight years of feeling nothing. Just this once, just in this dream, he wouldn't be alone anymore. In this moment, he could feel again, and the emotions wouldn't destroy him.

There were tears in her eyes. He kissed them away, but more followed. Tears that broke his heart.

“Don't be afraid, Jennifer,” he said. In his dreams, he could call her Jennifer. “Let me make you happy. We don't have to be alone anymore.”

She shook her head.

“It's too late,” she whispered. “It's—”

His mouth covered the words that would break the spell, wanting this dream to be about what they both needed, rather than what they wouldn't let themselves have.

Her hands came up to cup his face as his covered her breasts. Her soft moan, the fingers now tugging at his hair, tugging his mouth closer as their tongues began to dance, shot him to the edge of release—from just kissing her. And because it was a dream,
he didn't make himself stop. He pushed her against the counter instead. Let his hand roam down her side to her hip, and then around to the sweet feel of her bottom. Sweetness he'd once kissed every inch of and thought he'd have forever to memorize.

An enormous crash and the sound of glass breaking jerked them apart. Jenn strained against the counter beside the sink, the moon still shrouding her in dreamlike mystery, while he stumbled away until he bumped against the refrigerator, reality returning with a rush.

She still needed him; there was no way she could deny it now. But her wrecked expression said it all. There was also no way she could let herself have what the last few minutes promised.

It's too late.

She needed to be free of the past too badly. And as he'd promised himself earlier, he couldn't do anything but give her what she needed. He owed her at least that.

Crash!

He stalked toward the back door, sexual frustration and regret fueling the need to stomp Jeremy Compton into the ground.

“Neal, no!” Jenn grabbed his arm. “It… It's Nathan. He's in the garage.”

Her tears were back, this time for his father, whom she was strong enough to help even though it meant
watching the man die. Compassion and strength. Amazing gifts in anyone, but especially someone who'd been through all she had. He'd shut down completely. He'd run from feeling anything. But her ability to love and protect had grown even stronger—even if she was caring for everyone but herself.

“Go back to bed,” he said, brushing a chaste kiss across the lips he wanted to still be devouring. “I'll take care of him.”

And when he stepped into the yard and headed toward the clanging mess his father was making in the garage they'd once worked side by side in, he knew this time there'd be no running. This time, because it was important to Jenn—and because of her, important to him now, too—he and his…
dad
…were going to face each other and the past they'd both been running from for too long.

 

N
ATHAN LIFTED
the wooden mallet and took another swing at the vintage car he'd wasted years restoring. So many years of waiting, of not giving up hope that one day Neal would walk through the door, pick up a wrench and start helping him. Give the boy time, he'd reasoned. One day, Neal would be there and want this hunk of junk as much as he did. Want to fight for their relationship, even though Nathan didn't deserve that kind of loyalty from the son he'd adandoned.

Wham!
He broke through the passenger window
he'd custom ordered from some body shop in Macon.
Wham!
He kept beating away at it, the way he should have two years ago when he'd finally finished the thing and Neal still hadn't come back. When it had become clear he was never coming. That Nathan had gotten what he'd said he'd wanted. He was totally alone.

Wham!
Only the boy was here now.
Wham!
Now that there was no time for anything but goodbye.

Why the hell had he kept this damn thing? That was the question. Polishing it. Hiding it away. Keeping it in top running condition while everything else in his world rotted away.

“Dad,” a quiet voice said from the door. “Dad? Are you all right?”

Nathan wielded the mallet at his boy.

Was he all right?

“What are you doing?” Neal asked, wincing as he surveyed the destruction Nathan had achieved in the last half hour.

Just about anyone else could have accomplished more. But his throbbing head made every slam against the car excruciating—exactly the way he'd wanted it.

“I'm settling my estate,” he quipped, the mallet breaking off the rearview mirror this time, the momentum of the swing pitching him sideways. The tool slipped from his hand. He braced himself against
his worktable—a table filled with tools he'd never use again. “Downsizing. Getting rid of crap so I don't have to deal with it anymore. So no one else has to deal with it later.”

“I can't believe you finished this car.” His son ran a reverent hand over the paint job Nathan had left several not-big-enough-to-be-satisfying dents in.

Letting the worktable take more of his weight so he could catch his breath, Nathan snorted. “Neither can I.”

“I never thought I'd see this place again.” The man his boy had become looked around him, memories of countless hours they'd tinkered out here together playing across his face.

“Neither did I,” Nathan responded carefully.

“If…” Neal took a step closer. “If I'd known you needed help…I'd have come back sooner…. I've been working on my own hunk of scrap for three years now.”

Nathan nodded.

I'd have come back sooner.

“Yeah, I saw your ride in the driveway. Looks like you've done a fine job with it.”

The kind of job any father would be proud of.

“I never forgot about this one, though.” His boy stooped and glanced inside at the vintage leather seats Nathan had bought off the Internet, from a junk dealer in Alaska, of all places. He straightened back up.
“I…I just thought it was better that I stayed put in Atlanta. I thought you were doing fine on your own, so…”

“I don't want to talk about this.” Nathan reached down for the mallet. The floor was suddenly rushing toward him.

Neal caught his arm and helped him back to the workbench.

“Well, I
do
want to talk about it,” his boy said. “If we don't talk about it now, then when?”

“How about never!” Nathan managed to grab the mallet. Pushing to his feet, he took aim for the right front quarter panel. “Sometimes it's just too late. Some things can't be saved.”

Neal stopped his swing with ridiculously little effort and took the mallet away.

“You can beat away at this thing all you want, Dad, but it's not going to disappear. And neither am I. I know you don't want me here—”

“Don't want you here!” Nathan jerked away from his grasp, then shoved his son back several feet. “I want this damn car. I want you. I want it all so badly I can't stand to look at either one of you anymore!”

“Dad—”

“Damn it, get out!” He shoved again, only this time the kid was ready and he didn't move an inch. “Get out! Take your car and the life you've built.
You deserve to be happy. I don't want you here watching…”

“Watching you die?”

Nathan turned and swept every tool off the workbench.

“Do you have any idea,” he rasped, “what it's like to look at what you'd give anything to keep? Only it's all slipping away right before your eyes, and there's nothing you can do to stop it? Don't you see? If you're not here…”

The silence between them went on so long, Nathan finally turned back to his son.

“If I'm not here, then there's nothing to lose?” his boy asked.

“Yeah,” was all Nathan could manage.

Neal nodded, staring down at the mallet he'd confiscated. “Prison was like that. As long as I had nothing, no one, it was okay. But remembering…seeing you every month when you came to visit. It was like dying every time you left. Being trapped in something like that can make a man want to destroy what he cares the most about.”

The understanding in his boy's words, the perfect picture he'd painted of the ugliness raging through Nathan, reached out like a benediction. A bridge to the kind of understanding that shouldn't be possible between them. Not after all this time.

“Yeah,” Nathan agreed again, finding a monkey
wrench and testing its weight in his hand. “Like maybe destroying it will make you stop wanting it so much.”

He took a swing at the back fender. The impact shot pain through his skull at the same time that the wrench dented the lovingly hand-buffed chrome.

“It doesn't work, you know,” his son said between his teeth as he wielded the mallet against the windshield, shattering it and sending shards of vintage glass everywhere. “Making what you want the most go away… In the long run, it only ends up making you want it even more.”

“Then I guess it's my lucky day.” Nathan took aim at the roof, grinning at his boy as he did. “'Cause I ain't got no long run to worry about anymore.”

“M
OMMY
,
ARE
N
ATHAN
and Neal making up?” Mandy asked Jenn while they took out garbage.

Traci had tried to make her first lasagna tonight, with questionable results. Which meant there were more scraps in the trash than there were leftovers in the fridge.

“They're trying, honey.” Father and son had finally talked. They'd destroyed half the garage and Nathan's remodeled car, but in the days since, there had been a lessening of tension between them, giving Jenn hope that their relationship was mending.

Neal had made a point of avoiding her since that night. Since their heartbreaking kiss in the kitchen. He worked over the phone or on his laptop, picked odd jobs around the house that he could do by himself or was off running for hours on end. Often running late at night because it seemed he wasn't having any easier time sleeping than she was. He kept busy and kept out of her way. Exactly what she'd needed him to do.

He and Nathan were together inside, playing a quiet game of Monopoly while Nathan's favorite Miles Davis album filled the den with jazz. The old man still glared at Neal every few minutes, as if he hated his son for being exactly where he needed him. They bickered over nonsense, what little they did speak. But Nathan was no longer telling Neal to leave. She'd even seen him smile at his son's back more than once as Neal walked away. She'd seen light begin to shine in those old, dark eyes again.

Maybe they'd said everything they needed to the other night. Or maybe they'd agreed to avoid what needed to be said most of all. Either way, Nathan was being cared for—
knew
he was cared for—and that's what mattered. Things were going so well in fact, if it weren't for Traci still needing someplace to crash, Jenn would have quietly slipped away days ago.

From both the Cain men.

“So Neal came home to help his daddy?” Mandy asked. “The way you did Grandpa?”

“Sort of.”

Mandy hadn't wanted to move away from her Grandpa's—a fact that had both charmed and alarmed Jenn's father the morning he'd helped them pack to come here. Then Jenn had explained that Mr. Cain was still sick and needed a lot of help. After that, her little trouper had signed on, ready to do her part.

Ready to help her friend.

She threw both her and Mandy's trash bags into the container at the curb. “Honey, you know how Grandpa's getting better now?”

“Yeah, he was grumpy, too, when we first moved in. But the better he got the nicer he got.” The world's most beautiful smile told Jenn just how much this child had fallen in love with the grandfather she would never have known if they hadn't moved home to Rivermist. “That's why I don't mind Grandpa Nathan's grumpy face so much. I know it'll get better, just like my real grandpa's did. I know he likes me, anyway.”

“Of course he likes you.” It had taken the child's little finger less time to snag Nathan than it had Jenn's dad. “But, honey, not everyone gets better like Grandpa. Sometimes the people we help get worse, no matter what we do.”

“Is Mr. Cain getting worse?” Mandy's forehead wrinkled with worry. “That doesn't mean we're going to stop helping, does it?”

“No, we're not going to stop helping.” Jenn knelt until they were eye-to-eye. “We're going to stay for as long as Traci and Mr. Cain need us to. As long as that's okay with you. Grandpa's offered to let you stay with him while I'm here with Traci, if you want to go back.”

“But I want to stay,” Mandy insisted. “You get to help people all the time. It's my turn.”

Jenn pulled her daughter into her arms. Held tight to the new beginning Mandy had found in Rivermist. A grandfather she hadn't known before. New friends, and a growing desire to help other people, either through activities at her grandfather's church or living with a grumpy old man, she didn't seem to care which.

This was what Jenn had longed for when she'd decided to give this home of her childhood a chance to be more than somewhere she dreaded. She cuddled her child's sweet-smelling body close, her miracle second chance that rivaled anything she could have dreamed of when she'd left. Even when Nathan and Traci no longer needed her, even when she had to leave this house and Neal behind, she'd have Mandy's new beginning to hold on to.

Neal.

Don't be afraid, Jennifer. Let me make you happy. We don't have to be alone anymore.

How had he known she still felt alone, even back in this town with people who'd known her since she was a baby?

Helping other people, taking care of them, was her life. A life that satisfied her on so many levels. But happy? Just the thought of trying for happy again, trying with Neal, had kept her from tracking him down in this monstrous place for days. Kept her from trying to explain how much his kisses had meant, and why they terrified her.

Hugging Mandy a little tighter, she looked through the chilly night at the Cain house, thinking of the happiness that had once ruled there. The joy that was creeping back into Nathan's life now, because he wasn't alone anymore. He had Neal back.

Joy she didn't know how to grab hold of for herself and not need to shove away just as quickly.

Had it really been so long since she'd been truly happy, that she was actually afraid to want it anymore?

 

“H
EY
, T
RACI
.” Brett Hamilton slipped around the corner and caught Traci hiding behind her locker door. “Got a second?”

Oh, no.

No, no, no, no, no.

Mortified, even more than when she'd seen him at the church council meeting, Traci slammed her locker door and made a beeline for first period honors calculus. Please let Brett take the hint, be the good guy he'd always been before and leave her to wallow in her mess.

There was no point in saying she was sorry. Cheating on the town's favorite Boy Scout, so she could move on to being knocked up by a loser, wasn't something you could
sorry
away.
Let's be friends
made even less sense. She'd given up on her friends, mostly because they'd given up on her. Even Shelly
had gone out of her way to be too busy talking with another girl that morning to say hi. Traci was quickly becoming damaged goods that no one would be seen with.

At least it was Friday, and she'd have the weekend to hide away and bury herself in cleaning up the old Cain house some more.

“Traci.” Brett caught up, even though his English class was on the other side of the building. “I need to talk with you.”

She stopped at that.

No one
needed
to talk with her anymore. For sure not her rule-freak parents who still hadn't visited her at the Cain place.

“I wanted to…” Brett steered her toward the stairwell. Everyone else was in class or trying to get there before the late bell, leaving the normally busy alcove empty but still smelling like sweaty socks. “I wanted to ask, you know, if you and the baby were okay?”

Okay?

Was he kidding?

Was she really supposed to stand there looking at Brett, the boy who'd worshiped her since kindergarten, and talk about the baby she'd basically punked him to make with another guy?

Had her choices really dwindled to either humiliating herself, or taking the calculus test she hadn't studied for last night?

“Everyone's talking about you moving over to the Cain house,” he added.

Differential equations, here she came.

Brett blocked her escape, something he'd never done before. In fact, part of the reason she'd started looking at other guys was to see if Brett would ever work up the nerve to try and stop her.

“I haven't been listening to any of the gossip,” he assured her. “Especially all that shit Jeremy Compton's saying about Neal Cain, and how dangerous he is, and how he and Jenn are getting it on again now that you're all living at his dad's place.”

Brett blushed.

Traci smiled before she had time to remember that she no longer had any right to get mushy over how cute he was.

“Okay,” he amended. “I've listened to some of it. But only because I'm worried you're getting yourself into more trouble. I didn't want to butt in, but I thought maybe if you wanted to talk… You know, maybe I could help if you needed something.”

She blinked.

He was actually giving her the chance to speak for herself? He was worried?

“You really are a nice guy, Brett.”

He shrugged her words away. “So are things okay? Over there I mean. Is Neal Cain—”

“Neal's fine, I guess. I mean, I don't know what
goes on during the day while I'm here. But he and Jenn are working on the house all the time. Or he's playing some stupid game with Mr. Cain. They keep arguing over which lousy old record to play. Nobody talks to me much but Jenn and Mandy, and the kid's—”

“How about you?” More blushing. “You and the baby. Are things getting any better, you know, with your parents?”

Before she'd lost her mind with
the jackass,
Brett had listened to all her crap about her parents. Really listened. He'd actually been interested, not just trying to get into her pants.

And she'd tossed him away.

“You know what Bob and Betty are like,” she said. “Nothing's going to be okay unless they have their way. And that's not going to happen this time. I can't go back home if they won't even talk to me. What kind of life would that be for my baby, seeing how Grandma and Grandpa are so totally sure Mommy's not capable of doing anything on her own? I'm nobody's dream-mom, but I know enough not to warp a kid from the cradle like that.”

Brett's blue, blue eyes actually smiled.

“You're doing the right thing,” he said. “A lot of us think so.”

“A lot of who?” He didn't mean it. He couldn't, not after—

“A lot of the kids. What you and Ms. Gardner are doing, making this about your choices instead of just about what your folks want, it's great.”

Great?

“I cheated on you, Brett.”

“Yeah.” His smile vanished. His eyes filled with shadows she'd never seen before. “Why didn't you just tell me you wanted us over? Why all the cloak-and-dagger shit, just to make me look stupid?”

“I don't know why I did any of it.”

Except she did. Hours of talking with Jenn while they worked around the Cain house the last couple of days—spending hours at night by herself, since her parents and the
friends
who thought she was doing the right thing had conveniently forgotten to come around—had helped her figure out more than she'd ever wanted to know about the shallow, selfish things she'd done. She hadn't wanted things over with Brett, as much as she'd been trying to prove to herself that being with him wasn't all she was. That what her parents expected wasn't all she'd ever be.

Never once had she stopped to think that she didn't have the first clue who she wanted to be herself. The hot single chick with the older guy thing had certainly been a bust. And hiding out at the Cain place waiting for everything to magically work out on its own hadn't been going much better.

“I'm not sure I know anything anymore.” Looking
at Brett's confused frown, the strength in his mile-wide shoulders, made her want to throw her arms around him and beg him to take her back. To make everything okay by loving her again. Like that was going to happen. “But I'm learning, thanks to Jenn. She's the one who's great.”

“You don't seem to be doing so badly.” It was a reluctant smile this time, but the fact that he could still smile at her at all had the mushy stuff inside turning even mushier. “I can't see Shelly Ackerson or the rest of the crew buckling down and going the full ten rounds with their parents. You're tougher than you think, Carpenter.”

He gave her a guy's nudge to the shoulder that felt better than a thousand hugs.

“But if you need anything in that crazy place you're living in, I want you to…” He ducked his head. “You know… Call me. No matter what's happened, I want you to be okay. You and your baby both.”

He was jogging away before she could say anything else. Running from what he'd said, and from the tears streaming down her face.

It was a bunch of crap, him saying she was stronger than her friends. That she was up for this ridiculous stand she'd taken. She'd felt strong for, like, a minute when she stood up to her parents at that meeting. Now, days of puking up her breakfast later,
she was back to wanting to run like the scared little girl she still was.

You're stronger than you think.

Maybe Brett could clue her parents in, if he was so sure!

All Bob and Betty saw when they looked at her was their baby girl, and their biggest disappointment.

The darkness of the empty stairwell closed in around her. The sound of another girl's laughter filtered down from one of the floors above. Someone else's happiness echoing just how alone she really was.

Stop being such a baby!

She had Jenn in her corner, and even sick old Mr. Cain. And hadn't Brett just offered to help if she needed him. An offer of unspoken forgiveness she so didn't deserve.

Giving up, wasting even a second feeling sorry for herself would let everyone down, her baby most of all. The tiny life that just yesterday the clinic doctor had said was perfectly healthy as she did an ultrasound. The life growing deep inside her that she couldn't believe she'd ever considered ending.

No matter how easy it would be, giving up wasn't an option. And she was tired of waiting for her parents to come to her, too. If she was so strong, what was she waiting for? After school, she was heading
to her parents' house and inviting them to dinner. Something Jenn had been on her case to do since the church council meeting. Tomorrow was her night to cook, and she and Jenn had already planned the menu—one more thing she could do now that she'd never even thought about just weeks ago.