All The Way

She hadn’t meant to say that, either. Maybe it was just hormones making her shaky. Or maybe it was just that night after lonely night, she watched her friends with their men, aching inside for her own as Hunter chased wild dreams a continent away. He’d spent the past month in New England on a fishing boat. And she’d slept by herself, and sometimes she’d cried with frustration. Why couldn’t she just have a normal relationship? Why couldn’t he love her enough?

Unconsciously she put a hand to her tummy, wondering if a baby would make the difference. She pulled out of his arms.

“Let’s go. I can’t be late starting my first night.”

“Liv, are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I just wish I wasn’t working tonight, now.” She managed to grin for him. “Why didn’t you write that you were coming back?”

“Because I didn’t know until two days ago, and then I just hit the road. I figured I’d get here before the mail could.”

“There’s always the telephone.” She scowled at him. “Did you get fired?”

“Actually, I quit.”

“You didn’t like fishing?”

“I found something I might like more.”

Her heart lurched. Please, please, please let it be me.

“It’s a long story,” he continued. “I’ll tell you when you get home tonight. You’re going to be late, babe. Better get moving.”

Liv had no choice but to agree. Her shift had started one minute ago.

They went to the kitchen and she gave him her key. She kissed him goodbye at the back door and somehow she got through the night. She didn’t learn much about the bar business, but then, she hadn’t expected to under the circumstances. Everything inside her tugged her toward the door, toward home and Hunter and whatever it was he had finally found. Only a tiny corner of her mind was on the patrons, the bar, the tips she shoved relentlessly and absently into the pocket of her gruesome petticoated skirt.

At 12:45, she fairly burst out the bar door. She jogged to her car and drove home faster than she should have. Hunter, Hunter, Hunter, her mind chanted. He would tell her he was going to stay this time—he had come home unexpectedly, after all, and in the rest room he had hinted that he’d finally figured out what he wanted to do with his life. He would stay, and she would tell him about the baby. Her period was a month late. The test was only a formality, after all.

When she parked her car outside her apartment building, her palms were slick with perspiration and her heart felt as though a riot of microscopic beings was going on in there. She pressed her hand to her tummy again as she raced up the stairs to her second-floor unit. He was asleep on the sofa when she let herself inside.

For a moment Liv just stood, watching him. How could a man be so beautiful? He made something ache inside her. Most of it was loving him, but part of it was pure appreciation. Even in repose, one arm tossed back over his head, the other dangling over the edge of the sofa, he looked as arrogant and magnificent as the hawk his mother’s family was named for. Liv went to kneel on the floor beside him. She kissed his mouth to wake him.

“You look just like those ancestors you used to talk about all the time when we were kids,” she murmured. “You look like a warrior.”

“Maybe a dead warrior.” He sat up. “I was out cold, wasn’t I?”

Liv chuckled. “Well, that’s one way to pass the time until you could see me again.”

His eyes narrowed on her as she stood. “That is the ugliest outfit I’ve ever seen.”

She cocked a hip. “Then get me out of it.”

Her gasp turned to laughter when he leaped off the sofa, caught her about the waist and tossed her over his shoulder. A moment later they were in the bedroom, and the pieces of her uniform were strewn all over the floor. And finally, as her hands flew over his skin and she arched up to press herself against him, her nerves were gone and the only thing that ached for him was her body.

When they were spent and wrapped around each other, Liv decided to tell him about the baby now, right now, while her heart was still thudding from their lovemaking. They were so close, skin to skin, heart to heart. It was perfect.

“Hunter.”

“Hmmm.” His fingers played absently with her hair. “Hey, you cut it.”

She frowned, impatient. “I do that every fall. Listen to me. There’s something—”

“I know,” he interrupted. “The thing I started to tell you about at the bar. You sidetracked me with all that white frou-frou there under your skirt.”

Liv set her teeth. “They’re petticoats.”

“They’re still ugly.”

“Well, I’m not wearing them now, so—”

“Come here.” She’d started to sit up, but he pulled her close again. “There really is something important I need to tell you.”

Okay, Liv thought. He could go first. “Spill.” She laid her cheek against his chest.

“I’m heading for California tomorrow.”

For a moment she lay perfectly still. She wasn’t sure she could move. “What’s so different about that? Louisiana, New Mexico, Maine…now California. You’re always heading somewhere.”

“I have a chance there, Livie, a great chance. I met some guy in Bangor. He’s got a garage in Anaheim.”

“A garage?”

“Stock cars.”

“What’s a stock car?”

“Pared-down, fast-as-lightning, zoom around the race track.”

“Zoom,” Liv repeated.

“Livie, I was talking to him. He thinks I have the right stuff. This could be the one thing I’ve always wanted to do.”

“Chasing alligators was the one thing you always wanted to do.”

“This is different. I can’t explain it.”

“Try.”

He was quiet for a very long time. “From the time I could walk, people were always putting me somewhere. My parents couldn’t stay together. I lived with relative after relative while they tried to sort out their own mess, until I acted up enough and the auntie or uncle of the week would call them home. You know that.”

She nodded against his body, back in his arms again, waiting, praying…for something, some word that would make all this right.

“My father always said I was trying to kill myself.”

She knew that, too.

“When they finally broke up for good, when Mom stayed on the Navajo res and Dad went back to Tuba City, she sent me with him because I was too much of a handful. Then he sent me right back for the same reason.”

“Hunter,” she said, exasperated. “You went eagle-hunting, fell down a cliff, lay there with a broken leg for three days while the whole town frantically combed the mesas looking for you. Then you practically crawled home on your hands and knees and the Feds arrested you for poaching. You were a handful.”

“I was just looking for…I don’t know, something that made me feel right.”

Tell me it’s me.

“I sort of feel that way when I’m driving. Complete.”

Her heart couldn’t have fallen to her feet any quicker if she had been standing. “This guy let you drive a race car in Bangor?”

“No, no. I gave him a ride home from a bar. But there was nearly an accident and I avoided it and he liked what he saw.”

Liv was quiet for a long time. “You’re not coming home, then.”

“Livie, you’re my home. Wherever you are. That’s all I need.”

But I need more. She punched his shoulder as she sat up. “Home is a place you go to each night to lay your head on your pillow!”

“I lay my head on dreams of you.”

“That’s not enough!”

“I want you to come with me this time. Can you?”

Her heart staggered. “Where?”

“I just told you. To California. You can find a resort to work at there.” He sat up slowly, watching her, looking both sad and confused again, maybe even a little angry. “Babe, you’re really off the wall tonight.”

He didn’t understand.

It hit her then, in all its enormity. She was probably pregnant. And he was going to run off to California tomorrow to try his hand at racing cars. When that failed, it would be something else. God help her, it would always be something else.

She wasn’t—had never been—enough to hold him in one place. Whatever it was that he was looking for to make him feel complete…it wasn’t in her arms.

She drove her hands into her hair. She slid out of bed, shaking. “I can’t do this.”

“Do what?”

Raise a child like this, while you chase the wind.

This time she didn’t say it aloud. She snatched her bathrobe off the hook on the back of her bedroom door. When was it going to stop? Never, Livie, never, and you always knew that. The voice in her head mocked her and scoured the life right out of her soul.

She’d accepted him on his terms, and their crazy life together, apart more than they were in each other’s arms. She loved him with all of her heart. But how—oh, God, how?—was she supposed to explain his whereabouts to a child when he was gone for months, here for a day? How could they go with him? How could she tell this child, “No, baby, this isn’t home, but maybe the next stop will be?”

How could she pawn off on this little one the same kind of upheaval her parents had destroyed her with when they had died?

“I’ll have to learn the business from the ground up,” Hunter said from the bed, “and a lot of drivers have a head start on me. They cut their teeth in their daddy’s garages. And, granted, they’re all pretty much a bunch of Southerners, so I’ll break the mold. But this guy—his name is Pritchard Spikes—he says he’ll let me test drive at his track in Anaheim and he’ll see what I can do. If I really have the right stuff, he’ll give me a chance.”

“What?” Liv turned to him vacantly, belting her robe. “What are you talking about?”

“The stock car circuit. This chance. This is it, Livie, I feel it in my bones.”

She stared at him. She couldn’t think of a single thing to say. Liv went to the bathroom to throw up.

Liv found herself leaning against the bathroom sink now, fighting nausea again. Only this time she wasn’t pregnant. She hadn’t been with a man since…that night.

She’d done the test kit that weekend after Hunter had gone again. It had turned up positive. That had been in October.

He’d written, once, to tell her that Pritchard Spikes had indeed liked the way he handled his cars. He was going to give him a shot in his NASCAR garage in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Not driving, not yet, but in the background, learning. Hunter told her that starting in February, he’d spend the next ten months in a different part of the country every weekend, on the race circuit.

He’d said he would stop in Flag on his way to the East Coast. She’d told him not to bother. It was over for them.

She had a child to raise. So she had married Johnny Guenther. He’d given her security, a home, everything she’d always needed. She had given him…nothing.

What she had done to Johnny out of sheer desperation had been cruel and despicable. She’d never been able to be a wife to him. She’d ended up alone after all. But she’d raised her daughter in one place, in one home, if not conventionally.

Shuddering, Liv went back to her bedroom and slipped out of her robe. She pulled on a pair of khaki slacks and a sleek, black top. Shoved her feet into black sandals.

She was ready for the Spirit Room now. Hunter had made his choice. She had made hers. There was nothing left now but to say goodbye—for good this time.

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