Yesterday's Embers Page 23

  Kayeleigh dashed ahead of him and opened the front door. The minute she stepped inside, she started yelling. “What did you do? Why did you do this?”

  Doug shot Mickey a look. She only turned and ran up the steps.

  He raced up the porch behind her. “Kayeleigh? What’s wrong?”

  Kayeleigh stood in the doorway with an expression of horror mixed with accusation. He followed her gaze to a living room he barely recognized. He moved through the room and quickly realized that the transformation applied to the entire downstairs.

  Not only had the furniture been rearranged and new rugs laid on the floors, but every table and countertop had been cleared of clutter, leaving only the sparest of decorations in their place. His house looked a lot like Mickey’s house in town, and the thought brought the realization that she’d moved a lot of her stuff in. So then, where was his stuff?

  “Dad? Do something!” Kayeleigh stood there with her arms outstretched and with that horror-struck expression now cemented on her face.

  He turned to Mickey, making great effort to keep his voice even. “This is what you did while I was gone?”

  She nodded, obviously pleased with herself, and waiting for his praise.

  Well, he couldn’t give it to her. Speechless, he walked slowly through the rooms. Kayeleigh trailed him, repeating, “Dad? Dad?” as if a tornado had struck and she thought he could somehow undo the damage.

  “Where’s the wing chair?” He pointed to an empty corner of the dining room.

  “I moved it into our bedroom…for now. It could use reupholstering eventually. What do you think?” She looked at him with wide eyes, an eager puppy waiting for a bone.

  He strode through an equally naked kitchen to the laundry room.

  “Here are the shelves I was telling you about.” Mickey stood in front of the curtains—curtains Kaye had spent hours sewing for the dining room, curtains that were perfectly suited to the dining room. With a Vanna White flourish, Mickey indicated the labeled shelves beneath the curtains.

  By now the other kids had traipsed in behind them. “Hey! How come Mom’s curtains are in here?” Landon had a befuddled look in his eyes, and the little girls were wandering around, looking lost in their own house.

  “Dad?” Kayeleigh said again.

  “Hang on, Kaye.”

  “Don’t call me that, Dad!”

  He shook his head, confused by her remark, but when his own words replayed in his mind, he realized he’d shortened her name to Kaye’s. He put a hand at the nape of her neck and gently massaged. “Sorry, honey.”

  “What do you think?” Seeming oblivious to Kayeleigh’s pain, Mickey waited, looking ever more like a needy puppy.

  He shrugged, angling for an answer that wouldn’t hurt her.

  Mickey straightened a pile of books and junk mail on the shelf marked with his name. “If everybody could start using the back door,” she chirped, “then you can each pile your stuff on your own shelf as soon as you walk in the door. That way the clutter won’t make it into the rest of the house in the first place.”

  Doug spun around, taking in the rest of the room. The tops of the washer and dryer were spotless, and the usual piles of clean and dirty laundry had been put away, and the area around them swept and scrubbed clean. His easel was in the corner where it always stood, an empty stool in front. “Where are my paints?”

  Almost strutting, Mickey crossed the room and pulled a shoebox off a low shelf adjacent to the washer. She lifted the lid to reveal his oil paints neatly lined up. Not exactly convenient, but it wasn’t like he used them every week. And it did get them out of harm’s way. He stuck his hands in his pocket and went back through the kitchen to the main living area.

  Mickey followed him. “So what do you think?”

  “It…it looks like you worked your tail off.”

  He hadn’t meant it as a compliment exactly, but she preened like a proud peacock. The kids trailed into the living room one by one.

  “Do you like it?” Mickey pressed.

  “Mickey, I’m not sure we can keep everything the way it is.”

  Her face fell. “What do you mean?”

  Kayeleigh took up her battle cry again. “Dad? Do something!”

  “You stay out of this, Kayeleigh.”

  His daughter looked as though he’d struck her, and he was immediately sorry for snapping at her. He understood how she was feeling, but the last thing he needed was to take sides with her against Mickey.

  Mickey tilted her head. “Stay out of what? Did I miss something here?”

  Doug tried to change the subject. “Have you guys eaten?”

  “Wren fed the kids. I’m not hungry.” Mickey glanced from Kayeleigh to Doug and back again, looking confused. “What’s wrong, Doug?”

  “We’ll talk later.”

  He looked at Kayeleigh, who suddenly seemed overly interested in the rug they were standing on. Her face was flushed, and she was biting at the corner of her lip, looking like she’d just robbed a bank. Okay, maybe he was the one who’d missed something here. “What’s going on?”

  “Kayeleigh?” Mickey turned to her, waiting.

  No response.

  “I’m giving you a chance to tell your dad your side of the story,” Mickey coaxed, “but if you don’t, then I’ll tell him mine.”

  Doug tensed. “What story? What’s going on?”

  When Kayeleigh finally looked up, there was venom in her eyes. “I’ll tell you what’s going on!” She pointed at Mickey, practically hissing. “She comes in here and takes over our house! Look at it, Dad.” She opened her arms. “It doesn’t even look like our house anymore. It looks like her dumb house. Did you tell her she could take all Mom’s stuff down?” Her poison was aimed at Doug now.

  “Kayeleigh—stop it right now.” He struggled to find a defense for Mickey. She had taken over their house. She’d led him to believe she was going to do some cleaning and some simple organization. If he’d known she had this…makeover…in mind, he never would have allowed it.

  But he wasn’t about to discuss it with her in front of the kids. He took a deep breath and turned to Kayeleigh. “Listen, I want you to supervise the kids…get everybody ready for bed. Mickey and I are going to take a walk, and when we get back, we’ll sort things out.” He wasn’t even sure what all needed sorting out, but Mickey could fill him in, and together they’d talk to Kayeleigh about whatever it was that was going on between them.

  But first he needed to have a word with Mickey. Before she obliterated every scrap, every memory of Kaye from his house.

  Oh, if only they could go back. If only they could undo this colossal mistake.

  Chapter Thirty-eight

  The sound of their tennis shoes crunching along the gravel road couldn’t drown out the anger simmering between them. Mickey walked faster, pretending she couldn’t sense that Doug was trying to slow her down.

  He reached to touch her, and his hand felt hot on her bare arm. “Do you see what I’m saying, Mick?”

  She pulled away, and he sidestepped, placing more distance between them. They walked in silence for a full minute before she finally found her voice. “Doug, I was only trying to help. To make things easier for you and the kids—and for me. I’m the one who has to deal with all the messes. I’m the one who suffers most because of the clutter.” She shook off the voice inside that took her to task for daring to call what she’d experienced “suffering” in light of all Doug had been through.

  “I already told you,” he said, “it’s not the clutter. The shelves in the laundry room are great. That was a good idea. But you redecorated the whole house. You didn’t ask anybody, you just started rearranging our furniture, taking down our things—her things….” His voice trailed off, and she sensed the emotion behind it.

  But she was tired of tiptoeing around his emotion. It was high time they talked about it. And this was as good a night as any. She took a deep breath. “Doug, is it fair that I have to live in a mausol
eum of memories of Kaye? It’s my house, too. I gave up everything for you, for your kids. It seems only fair that I could have a little say in how the house is decorated. That I could fix things up so they’re not so hard to clean, and so we don’t have to be ashamed to have company over.”

  He stared over at her, his legs pumping faster. “I think you care a little too much about what people think.”

  “And maybe you don’t care enough.” She quickened her pace to catch up.

  “It never bothered Kaye if the house didn’t look like a page out of a magazine. She was too busy caring about people to worry whether she was making a good impression or not. She knew how to make people feel at home in our little hovel.”

  Sarcasm did not become him, and she shot him a look that said as much.

  He ignored it. “I happen to like the way Kaye had the house fixed up, and I don’t appreciate you ripping into it. The least you could have done is ask me first.”

  She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I thought that’s what this weekend was all about. I told you what I wanted to do.”

  “You told me you wanted to get things organized. I came home to a house I didn’t recognize. Did you think for one minute about the kids, Mickey? As if they haven’t lost enough, as if they haven’t had enough upheaval in their lives, you go and change everything about their home. Everything that would remind them of their mother.”

  If he was trying to make her feel like an insensitive moron, it was working. “I didn’t touch their rooms, Doug. Or your room.”

  He narrowed his eyes. “My room?”

  She ignored that and started walking again. He tramped beside her.

  “Doug, I was just—trying to create some space that was ours. I didn’t even really intend to redecorate. But once I started moving things to clean, I saw how some of my furniture fit the spaces better.” They were walking fast enough now that her breath came in short huffs. “One thing led to another, and it sort of snowballed.”

  He gave her a look that said that was a gross understatement.

  “I don’t think it’s asking too much to put a few of my own touches on the house. And it’s an insult that you couldn’t even tell me it looked nice.”

  “And it’s an insult to my wife that you felt the need to redecorate a house that was perfectly fine the way it was.”

  She stopped dead in the middle of the road, hand on hips, breathing hard. “Excuse me. Your wife? I thought I was your wife.”

  A red line crawled up his neck until his cheeks were flushed. He stared at the road. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean it that way.”

  She worked to keep the pain from her voice. “How did you mean it, then?”

  He acted like he was about to say something, then closed his mouth, shook his head. His silence hurt her more than she could have imagined.

  “Doug?”

  He looked anywhere but at her. “Mickey, I just—Everything’s happened so fast. For you and me. For…us. I take full responsibility for that. I’m not trying to shift the blame onto you for what we’ve—”

  She held up a hand, her eyes stinging, not wanting to hear whatever it was that he was going to say next.

  His contrition seemed sincere enough, but the weight of his blunder anchored her to the country road. His words had revealed the truth: he still saw Kaye as his wife. Not her.

  The fact that he didn’t reach for her in that moment, that he didn’t repeat his apology, sealed her perception. A wave of nausea swept over her. Like an animal caught in a trap, she struggled against the truth, not wanting to believe what she knew in her heart.

  Doug didn’t love her. He never had. He’d always—and still—loved a woman she could never compete with. Never measure up to. And she could see no way out of her trap.

  It was foolish to try to convince him of her right to change the house. There was nothing to be accomplished arguing. For whether he realized it or not, it wasn’t her changing the house he was angry about. It was her—and the fact that she wasn’t, and never could be, the woman he went on loving.

  This wouldn’t be solved. Only dealt with. She swallowed hard. “I’ll put things back the way they were—in the house. As much as I can.”

  “No—leave it. Leave it. There’s no reason.”

  He shook his head, and she didn’t think she’d ever seen such profound sadness in a man’s eyes. In that instant she wanted to reach out, take him in her arms, and comfort him, kiss away his sorrow. But he’d made it clear her kisses had lost their value with him—if they ever had any.

  She couldn’t cure a wound she was partly responsible for. And they still had the more immediate problem of Kayeleigh to worry about first. They were coming to the end of the road, where they usually turned around to head back. But Doug kept walking. Fine. That would give her time to open another wound, too.

  “Doug, we need to talk about Kayeleigh.”

  He bristled and slowed his pace. “What about Kayeleigh? What was all that about?” He gestured back toward the house.

  “She ran off from Wren’s.”

  “What do you mean, ‘ran off’?”

  “She snuck out this morning…with Seth Berger. Wren called, frantic. I guess Bart walked all over town looking for them.”

  “What? You didn’t call me?”

  “You can’t be serious? After what you told me the last time I called you?”

  He opened his mouth to speak, and she could almost see him recalling his own words—you should have let me handle it—from the last incident with Kayeleigh. He closed his mouth and said nothing.

  She let it go. For Kayeleigh’s sake, they had to talk this out. “I went into town and found Kayeleigh at the Bergers’ house. The parents are on vacation, and the boys were there alone. Kayeleigh was there with them.”

  “What are you talking about?” His tone said he didn’t believe her.

  She nodded, prepared to be the bad guy. “When I told her to come out to the car with me, she refused. I left her there. By the time I got—”

  “You left her there? Why would you do that?”

  The dagger didn’t hurt any less because she was expecting it. “What was I supposed to do—drag her out by her hair? As I was backing out of the driveway, I saw her running out of the house. I let her walk back to Wren’s. She didn’t argue when we loaded the car to come home.”

  “You’re sure she didn’t tell Wren she was leaving? How did you know where to find her?”

  “She told Landon. But she never got anyone’s permission. Wren and Bart were worried sick. And so was I.”

  “Maybe she didn’t realize—”

  “Doug.” He didn’t want to believe his little girl could have become the lying, disrespectful adolescent Mickey had seen her become. But as much as possible, she was staying out of it. It only put a thicker wedge between them as a couple. She put up her hands in surrender. “I’m leaving it for you to deal with, but I wanted you to know the truth about what happened.”

  “I’m not sure you know the truth.”

  “Fine. Believe whatever you want.” Feeling as if her knees might buckle, she turned to head back to the house. “I’m tired. Can we just…go back?”

  He waved her off and kept on walking.

  Oh, if only they could go back. If only they could undo this colossal mistake. She couldn’t stand the pain of leaving herself exposed, vulnerable to Doug. She imagined stepping into a suit of armor. But before she locked herself into the protective fortress, she allowed her love story with Doug to parade before her one last time, like a person’s life flashing before them in the throes of death.

  She seemed to view with clarity every tender moment she’d shared with him in their short time together. Holding hands under the table, stolen kisses when the children were otherwise occupied. The silver twist-tie ring Doug had fashioned for her the night he’d asked her to marry him. His tender way with her on their wedding night, as she’d offered herself to him, willing and pure.

  Why sh
e tortured herself with the memories, she didn’t know. They were all a sham. She would not parade them out again. It was done.

  There was no annulment in the world that could undo what had happened to her heart.

  Something about the sweet way he’d spoken the apology put a lump in her throat. At least somebody here loved her.

  Chapter Thirty-nine

  The sun was low in the sky as Mickey drove home from Salina on Highway 40. June was half over and almost overnight, the wheat fields had turned to gold. Doug predicted they’d be harvesting in a week and finished by the Fourth of July. She discovered that he always took his vacation time from his job in town at harvest time…which meant he rarely got a real vacation. Which meant she probably wouldn’t, either.

  Pulling into the driveway a few minutes later, she tooted the horn for help unloading the car. She’d taken advantage of Doug’s rare evening home to make a grocery run.

  Landon was the first one out the kitchen door. He flung open the back door and started rummaging through grocery bags. “Did you get anything good?”

  “Hey, buddy, let’s get them in the house before we start eating them, okay?”

  Landon shot her a sly grin. “Sorry.” He threaded his skinny arms through the handles of four bags and lugged them into the house. Something about the sweet way he’d spoken the apology put a lump in her throat. At least somebody here loved her.

  The twins showed up behind Landon, and Mickey came around the car to load them up with bags.

  She was gathering up the last of the groceries when Doug appeared beside her. “You got everything.”

  They’d gotten good at avoiding each other’s eyes. “Yeah, I’ve got it.”

  “Sorry. I was getting Harley to bed.”

  “It’s okay. I’ve got it. The kids helped.”

  “Good. Everything go okay?”

  She nodded and risked a glance at him. He was in need of a haircut, and his face was sunburned. He looked tired.

  She worried about how hard he worked. Between the farm and his job in town, he often put in twelve-hour days or longer. But he’d promised the kids that they’d all go to Wilson Lake for a long weekend as soon as the wheat was cut.