A Soldier's Promise

“That’s a shame,” he responded. He lifted his glasses long enough to stare into her eyes before performing a cursory check of the items on her car seats. What did he expect to find? A half-empty bottle of wine? There was nothing incriminating there. Her phone, her purse, a Diet Coke.

The glasses dropped back to his nose. “You just ran into me,” he said needlessly.

Common sense should have made her hold her tongue. But apparently common sense had just flown out that two inches of window space. “You’re not even supposed to be here,” she said. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

He frowned. “That’s funny. Since I live here, I thought I had every right to be here.”

“What I meant was...” There was no way out of this. “I’m not supposed to be here.”

He nodded once. “That makes more sense. But seeing as you obviously are here, you might want to pull up a little. Right now my front bumper is close to riding the trunk of your dandy little foreign automobile. I’m thinking that’s not good—especially since you seem to have so much trouble with this car anyway.”

Well, that comment wasn’t at all necessary.

“I expect we ought to exchange insurance cards,” he added. “Though I doubt you need mine.”

She definitely wasn’t going to roll her window down more and invite blood suckers inside. She’d be a mass of swollen spots within minutes. “Can’t you reverse?” she suggested. “We can both back onto White Deer from here and discuss the situation away from these insect-infested woods.”

“I’m not going to let you back your vehicle up anywhere in the vicinity of mine,” he said. “Go forward to the house.”

To his house? She didn’t think so. She rubbed her hand over a bite, hoping to illicit his sympathy.

“I have a bug zapper on the porch,” he said. “You’ll be fine.” He leaned on the side of her car. Only a thin layer of glass separated her from those honey-brown eyes she could imagine staring at her through the dark shades.

His nose practically touched the window when he said, “And since your whole purpose for being on this drive had to be to snoop on my property, this invitation should make you very happy.”

She sensed his mind still churning, as if he weren’t finished proving to her he’d figured out her scheme. She wouldn’t have been surprised if he’d said, “And you’ll never be invited back so you’d better take advantage of this offer right now.”

For some reason, she decided if he did say that, she’d feel the loss, much more than she would have expected. Maybe it was the way he looked in those aviator sunglasses. He had a movie-star quality that she quite inappropriately noticed at this particular moment. Sort of a Gerard Butler cocky masculinity. She had a long way to go before forming a lasting impression of Mike Langston, but she really liked Gerard Butler.

Besides, what choice did she have? If he wouldn’t move his car, she couldn’t go anywhere. The only direction open to her was forward. She could pull in front of the house, wait until he pulled in as well and then maneuver quickly around and head down the drive. If Carrie was still wearing the earbuds, she might not even look out the window. And perhaps Mike wouldn’t tell his daughter about the spy mission.

Brenna spoke out the two inches open at the top of her window. “Fine. But don’t think for a minute that I’m interpreting this as a social invitation.”

He almost smiled. “I know you’re smarter than that. Actually, this is more an intimidation tactic. I’m much better in that arena than I am the social one.”

I’ll bet you are. She eased her car into Drive and gently pressed the accelerator. The Mazda made a mournful screech and cleared a foot or so between it and the truck. Brenna didn’t want to look at her trunk lid. She’d check it out when she was back in her own drive and could cry in private.

A moment later she pulled in front of Mike’s cabin. She waited for him to park and then shifted into Reverse. Her ploy to execute a quick escape was working. Until the front door opened and Carrie stepped out.

“Miss Sullivan, hi!”

Darn it. She stopped, rolled her window down all the way and looked for mosquitoes. The zapper appeared to be doing its job, so she stepped out of the car. Leaving now would look much more suspicious than following through with a good ol’ North Georgia howdy. “Hi, Carrie.”

“What are you doing here?”

She glanced at Mike, who had an elbow on the top of his truck and was watching her through those sunglasses. His full mouth quirked up in a smirk that made the teacher in her want to threaten him with a visit to the assistant principal. And made the woman in her want to—

Stop it, Brenna. Not helpful.

She had to answer Carrie, not let her thoughts careen in another inappropriate direction. “Well, I...I was...”

“Miss Sullivan got lost, Carrie,” Mike said. “I encountered her trying to back out of our driveway and suggested she come up to the house and turn around.”

Carrie gave Brenna an incredulous stare. “But you’ve lived in this stupid town for, like, forever. How could you get lost?”

Brenna shot a quick look at Mike. “I’ve only lived here four years,” she said. “And I...ah, I’ve never ventured beyond the gristmill.”

Mike threw his keys on a rough-hewn table next to the front door. “You must have been daydreaming today, then,” he said. “There aren’t any houses but this one past the mill.”

“We live in the booniest of the boondocks,” Carrie said. “No one ever comes out this far.”

“Why don’t you offer Miss Sullivan some iced tea?” Mike said.

“I r-really shouldn’t stay....” Brenna stammered.

Carrie clasped her hands together. “Oh, please. Other than repair guys, you’re our first visitor. Can’t you come inside and talk for a while?” As an added incentive, she said, “We have air-conditioning.” She swept her arm around the porch, indicating the objects her great-grandmother had probably left behind. “You wouldn’t think so because of all this old stuff, but I swear we do.”

Brenna recognized an old wooden butter churn, handmade baskets, a few primitive iron tools on the wall. “These things are interesting,” she said.

“If you like all these old things, you’ll love the inside.” A hopeful look on her face, Carrie held the door open.

“But your father...” Brenna said. “I’m sure he doesn’t want company after working all day.”

“I suggested the tea, didn’t I?” Mike said. “Besides, after you have a look around, this place will have left a permanent impression on you.” He lowered his voice. “And that should be well worth the trouble of the minor car damage you’re taking home as a souvenir.”

With no way to decline, Brenna preceded him inside and into one large room with a door and a hallway leading from it.

The inside of the cabin was basically Spartan, with a few well-used furnishings that Brenna decided must have been favorites of Mrs. Langston. An antique oak sideboard stood against one wall. A matching washstand and primitive chair occupied another. Facing a rugged stone fireplace was an early-twentieth-century sofa with wood arms and cushions that had been flattened by years of sitting. Only a floppy-eared coonhound lying on the braided rug in front of the hearth would have made the scene a perfect blend of countrified necessity and simplicity. But there was no dog, just the three of them.

Carrie called from the kitchen. “Dad, why are you home? Isn’t it early?”

He glanced at Brenna before answering. “I came to check on things here. I got a call from an unidentified female at the shop, and when I went to answer, no one was there.”

His glance mutated into a hard stare. Feeling her face flush, Brenna began concentrating on native animal prints on the walls.

“It wasn’t me,” Carrie said.

“I didn’t know that,” he answered. “I called here, but no one answered. I was worried.”

Brenna remembered the earbud cords dangling from Carrie’s head. No wonder she didn’t hear the phone ring.

“Sheesh, Dad, you don’t have to check up on me every minute,” Carrie said from the kitchen.

“I’ll try to remember that,” he said, settling on the plaid sofa. “How’s that tea coming?”

Carrie came into the living room with a tray holding three glasses. She set the tray on a scarred but clean pine coffee table and handed a tumbler to Brenna. Brenna sat on the other end of the sofa and smiled at the faded images of deer frolicking around the frosty outside of the glass.

“It’s instant,” Carrie said, looking down at Brenna. “Dad said I should learn to make it from real tea bags, but I don’t see why.”

Mike picked up a glass and took a sip. “I just thought you might like to do things the way your great-grandmother did.”

Carrie gave him an incredulous look. “Why would I want to do that? Everything was such work back then.”

He crossed and uncrossed his legs, cleared his throat, took another sip of tea and finally stood. “I’m going to change out of this uniform.”

“Good idea, Dad,” Carrie said. “You have grease on your shirt.”

“Goes with the job,” he said and headed toward the hallway off the living room. “I’ll just be in there. You ladies talk all you want.”

A few seconds later, Brenna heard a door close. Carrie sat in the spot vacated by her father and leaned close. “Do you see how awful it is out here, Miss Sullivan?” she said, keeping her voice low.

Brenna didn’t want to put herself in the middle of any family dispute. Besides, she truly didn’t find Carrie’s living conditions to be “awful.” Remote, yes, especially for a teen who was still more than a year away from getting her driver’s license.

“I know it’s hard to believe,” Carrie said, “but my father really likes it out here. He keeps talking about nature and fresh air until I just want to scream. Spiders and mice are nature, too, you know.”

Brenna smiled. “Your cabin is really only about three or four miles out of town,” she said. “I’ll bet some of the people in town have spiders, too.”

“I suppose, but we might as well be a hundred miles away for all the times I get to go to the stores and do fun stuff.”

“Your dad never takes you shopping?”

“Oh, sure, to the grocery and the hardware store.” She grimaced. “I guess that’s his idea of fun. And any time I complain he just tells me that we have all we need.”

Brenna doubted that statement. “Other than some specialty stores, gift shops and local antique dealers, we don’t have much. But there are malls in Libertyville, Athens and Augusta.”

“Dad has taken me to those a couple of times,” Carrie admitted.

Poor deprived child...

“But this dumb town is nothing like California, where I used to live. Out there we had tons of cool places to go, outlets and twenty-four-screen movie theaters.”

Brenna understood that moves required periods of adjustments. Some people needed a lot of time to get used to a new environment, whereas others just seemed to fit in almost instantly. Brenna had been like that when she moved to Mount Union. The people who lived here, the town itself, offered much of what she wanted, the closeness of a community along with the privacy she needed, and especially a job she appreciated for many reasons. The students came from good, mostly two-parent families and didn’t arrive at class with heartbreaking baggage every day. Brenna had had too much experience trying to deal with students’ sad home lives, and she appreciated Mount Union’s solid family values immediately.

For four years now she had done an admirable job in the classroom while maintaining the independence and separation she expected in a town like Mount Union. Okay, maybe she’d never been voted teacher of the year like Diana, but no one had ever complained about the job she did. Now here she was sitting in a backwoods cabin listening to a morose, lonely girl complain about the place Brenna had come to love. And she didn’t know how she was going to handle it.

So she took a stab at counseling even though she knew it wasn’t her strong suit. “You know, Carrie, maybe you should give Mount Union a chance. You’ve only been here a few months, right?”

The girl slumped down in her seat. “Three long, miserable months. It feels like ten years.”

“Once you make some friends...”

She sat upright. “Friends? How can I make friends when I’m not allowed to leave this—” she stared around the room as if she were watching a horror movie “—this prison.” She grabbed Brenna’s hand. “Talk to my dad, will you, Miss Sullivan? Tell him to cut me some slack. He doesn’t know anything about being a father.”

“I’m sure that’s not true. He seems like a nice—”

“You don’t understand. Not only does my dad not know anything about being a dad, he doesn’t even know me. You ask him any question about me—what music I like, what movies I’ve seen. Heck, ask him my favorite color—he won’t know. He never tried to know me. Not when I was growing up and especially not now.”

The girl was close to tears. Brenna patted her hand. “What are you talking about? Why wouldn’t your dad know you?”

“He was in the army the whole time I was a kid. He hardly ever came home, and if he did, he stayed a couple of weeks and left again. He was always in Afghanistan or Iraq or someplace.” Her eyes grew moist. “That’s not the way a family’s supposed to be, is it, Miss Sullivan?”

Brenna had no idea how to answer. Her own family situation had been very different from Carrie’s. Brenna’s father never kept a job for more than a few weeks at a time, so he was home too much. Because of her dad’s inability to find steady work, Brenna hadn’t experienced stability in her life, either, for reasons very unlike Carrie’s.

“He didn’t have to be in the army all that time,” Carrie continued. “He wanted to be. It’s like he forgot he had a family.”

Agreeing with Carrie would mean betraying Mike, a man Brenna suspected was trying in his own way to make up for lost time. To disagree with Carrie would only alienate a young girl who was opening up about her feelings. After a moment Brenna said, “You know times of war are hard on everyone, the soldiers and their families.”

“Yeah, well, maybe. My mom just told me to appreciate the times Dad was home. But truthfully, the two of us learned to get along without him just fine. We didn’t need him.” She stared down at her lap. “At least until...”

“Until what?” Brenna asked.

She remained silent for several seconds, and then a voice, soft and low, came from the hallway. “Until her mother died,” Mike said.

CHAPTER FIVE

MIKE’S GUT FELT as if it had just been slammed with a cinder block. Why had he said that? Five minutes ago, he’d gone into his bedroom to shed his dirty uniform and put on shorts and a T-shirt. He’d intended to walk Miss Busybody out the door to her car and wave goodbye. Yet, he just blurted out the one fact that Brenna could use to explain the dysfunction in his relationship with his daughter. No wonder Carrie was sitting on the sofa slack-jawed and wide-eyed.

“Dad, I can’t believe you told Miss Sullivan about that,” his confused daughter said. “I thought we weren’t supposed to talk about Mom.”

“I said until we knew people better.” His defense sounded weak, but he had advised his daughter that the tragedy they’d suffered was best kept secret until they’d settled into their new town and started over. He didn’t think his daughter needed the well-intended sympathies of people who were practically strangers. And he knew he didn’t.

Well, he couldn’t take the revelation back now. And in a way, he was relieved Brenna knew. This nosy home ec teacher had worked pretty hard the past few days to find out what was going on with him and Carrie—lying and snooping and telling him what she intended to do about his daughter—maybe she had earned the right to know. If Carrie seemed sad, there was good cause. And her depression wasn’t his fault. Well, not entirely.

In the quiet shock that had settled over the women, Mike’s sandals flapped loudly against his heels as he crossed the room. He supposed it was his responsibility to break the awkward silence and offer some sort of explanation. He started to, but Carrie stood and reminded him again of his mistake.

“You always say we shouldn’t bring this up.”

“I know. Before, when I said that, I was concerned that people would ask questions about your mom and upset you,” Mike said. “Remember all the questions you got in California, all the forms we filled out? It wasn’t easy for you.”

“No, it wasn’t, but now you just told my teacher!”

“Yeah, well, all the secrecy doesn’t seem so important now.”

Brenna stood and moved close to Carrie, making him feel seriously outnumbered. “Excuse me, Mike,” Brenna said, “but why wouldn’t you tell people about your wi...Carrie’s mother? It would seem to me—”

Here she goes again. He held up his hand. “We didn’t move here to draw that kind of attention to ourselves. We don’t need anybody’s pity.”

“Again, maybe I’m overstepping...”

Since when did that stop you?

“...but sincere sympathy is different from pity. And the people in this town—”

“I know. You all have hearts of gold.” He regretted the sarcasm the minute he said it, but he didn’t want folks patting him on the back, offering artificial condolences and advising him how to raise his daughter. He’d figure it out on his own, even if it took him until she went off to college.

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