Kurt Read online

  As her hand came up, the two lanky teens came to a stop in the kitchen. Kurt looked on, as she didn’t even know what to say to him. And then proper manners took over. “Jeremy, this is a friend of mine, Kurt. This is Jeremy, my son, and his friend, Frank.”

  Kurt looked at them both, pulling his shirt over the bandage, and smiled at the boys. “Hey, nice to meet you guys. Your mom and I are old friends. I left after graduation.”

  “Yeah, I don’t remember meeting you before,” Jeremy said, his focus completely on Kurt.

  She looked at her son, wondering what was going through his mind. “We were in school together.”

  He looked at her and frowned and said, “Really?”

  “Yes,” she said. “He’s in town looking for a missing War Dog.”

  “Oh, wow,” Frank said. “What does that mean?”

  And then Kurt explained the reason he was in town.

  “I heard about that dog,” Jeremy said. “I think it attacked some of those kids in the gang,” he said, turning to Frank.

  “Yeah, well, they’re not much of a gang. They’re just bullies.”

  “Five of them?” Kurt asked. The two boys looked at him in surprise. “I think I met them.”

  “Yeah, there’s five of them.”

  “Or is there a sixth?” Kurt asked. “They rode off in a vehicle, but someone else was driving.”

  The two teens shrugged. Jeremy added, “An older guy hangs around with them a lot. Maybe they do stuff for him. I’m not sure.” Jeremy lifted his eyebrows. “Did you see them?”

  “Yeah, I met them at the truck stop,” he said, with a sideways look at Laurie Ann.

  She shook her head slightly, a plea in her gaze, hoping that Kurt wouldn’t say anything more about who shot him.

  “Yeah, they tend to hang around there a lot.” Jeremy walked over to the sink and grabbed a glass of water.

  “So the dog might have had a good reason for attacking them, huh?”

  “Are you kidding? Absolutely would have a reason. Nothing good about those kids.”

  “That’s too bad,” Kurt said. “I’ve heard that a time or two about other young men.”

  “Some of them are salvageable,” Jeremy said, “but not these ones.”

  She stepped in at that point. “What are you two guys up to?”

  “We want to get soda pop,” he said, “please.”

  She groaned, reached for her purse, and handed over a twenty-dollar bill. “Bring me back the change.”

  They grabbed the twenty and raced out. She shook her head. “He just gets so big every day.”

  “He is big,” Kurt said, eyeing her intently.

  “I know. It’s a bit of a shock all the time,” she said with a smile.

  “He also looks familiar,” Kurt said in an odd voice.

  She looked at him, hesitant. “In what way?”

  “Well, he’s definitely got your hair and your eyes,” he said, his voice hardening. “But then he’s also got my nose, my jaw, and my size,” he said in a frigid voice. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

  She just stared at him, too shocked to even answer it.

  He stood, the chair screeching, almost falling over, and turned toward her. “Were you going to tell me that I had a son?”

  She shook her head mutely. She hadn’t expected him to recognize his son so fast, so soon. And how would she answer him now?

  “No?” he asked in outrage.

  She held up her hand. “Yes, I planned to tell you,” she said, “but, after you left, I didn’t know how to. As soon as I realized that you were here in town, I thought it was a perfect opportunity—one I’ve been thinking about for a couple years.”

  “You’ve been thinking. For two years,” he said, “but did you know that you were pregnant before I left?”

  She took a slow deep breath, knowing that whatever chance at friendship they might have had was about to die right now, and she nodded. “Yes, but you were leaving in two weeks. What did you want me to do? Tell you that I was carrying your child and have you tell me to get an abortion? Or have you stay behind, that same angry young man who hated his life here and who would hate me for chaining him to this life? I let you go, and I had Jeremy,” she said, “and it was the best decision of my life.”

  He stared at her, as if not knowing what to say.

  “And, if you think it was an easy yes-or-no decision, you’re right. It was. However, it wasn’t an easy choice to then deal with the day-to-day living,” she said. “Although I would have done anything to have Jeremy, yet raising him on my own, without my parents, was not easy.”

  Kurt stared at her in shock, and, at the same time, a part of him wanted to throw his arms around her and hold her close. He exhaled a long breath and took a step back.

  Laurie Ann winced at that movement more than anything. “I didn’t know what to do,” she said, “but I refused to give up my child.”

  He shook his head, not knowing what to say.

  “There’s no way,” she said, “that you wouldn’t have hated your life, if forced to stay here, when you were so eager to go.”

  “I was a mess back then,” he said, sitting down on the chair hard. All he could see was the tall, strapping young man who had been in the kitchen just moments before, knowing instinctively that he was his. “My God,” he said as he looked at her. “I don’t mean to besmirch your honor or anything else, but is there any doubt?”

  “No,” she said, “none.”

  He sagged into the chair and sat, frozen. He knew she was worried about him. Hell, he was worried about him too. Of all the blows he’d taken in life, this one had knocked his feet out from under him. He didn’t even know how to feel. He was relieved that she’d decided to carry his child, saddened that he had missed out on the child’s life, horrified that he hadn’t been here in the first place and that she hadn’t even told him because she was trying to save him. Was he so pathetic and had he been such a mess that he didn’t see anything else around him?

  “You wouldn’t have known,” she said, as if reading his mind. “I didn’t show for several months.”

  “Your parents?”

  “They basically kicked me out of the house.”

  He blanched at that. “I never did like them.”

  “They never did like you,” she said cheerfully.

  He let his breath out with a whoosh. “And they had good reason. I knocked up their daughter and walked out.”

  She stopped, looked at him with a hard gaze, and said, “I know you were a mess back then, but you aren’t now.”

  “No, I’m not now,” he said, “but I missed something major in my life.”

  “We all miss things in life,” she said. “I think the greatest gift we can give ourselves is to capture what we can and to hang on to what we hold in our hands. The rest is too intangible, and it’s gone within seconds.”

  “I missed his entire life,” he said, staring at her in shock. “You got to hold him. You got to watch his first step. You got to get up in the middle of the night and soothe him and make him feel better.”

  “Yes, I did,” she said, “and that’s why I couldn’t terminate the pregnancy. And believe me. I was under an awful lot of pressure to do so.”

  He nodded. “I can imagine. Your parents were also fairly religious, and I didn’t fit their mold of a good future son-in-law.”

  “Not only didn’t fit the mold,” she said, “you weren’t here.”

  He winced. “And that all goes back to the fact that I would have stayed if I’d known.”

  “And where would that have taken us?” she asked quietly.

  He looked at her with a pain-filled gaze. “You could have told me before now. I didn’t have to lose all his life.”

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe that’s true. But, at the same time, when was I supposed to contact you? A year later? When he was one year old? Or on his fifth birthday, when you were probably off, for all I know, married with a whole life completely inde
pendent of me, of this place? You didn’t ever want to come back here. Remember?”

  “Nothing was here for me,” he said sadly.

  “And you say that,” she said, “but I was always here.”

  “But I didn’t know that,” he said, looking at her in surprise. “All you talked about was leaving.”

  She tilted her head and studied him and then nodded. “I forgot that,” she said. “I always did talk about leaving, didn’t I?”

  He nodded. “It’s one of the reasons I think we spent as much time with each other before we left because we were both caught up in this need to get away. But I did, and you never did.”

  “No, I never did,” she said calmly, “because I found home here instead.”

  “Where did you go after your parents?”

  “My sister’s.”

  He nodded slowly. “I remember she lived on her own, didn’t she?”

  “Yes, and she took me in and helped me raise Jeremy for the first few years while he was baby. When I got accepted into med school, I pushed the start off for one year, but then I had to make a decision, if I would finally go or stay home with my child.”

  “How did you manage financially?”

  “My grandmother. She passed away not long after Jeremy turned one, and she left me enough money to at least get started,” she said. “I’m still paying off student loans. I applied for a lot of grants, and I did get some, but, as you can imagine, it was hard with a baby at home, trying to keep a roof over my head. If not for my sister, I never would have made it.”

  “I can’t believe that you made it even now,” he said. “I’m really proud of you.”

  She stared at him in shock.

  “I know it’s not what you expected to hear,” he said, “and I’m still reeling with the pain of having lost all those years with Jeremy. I don’t know how to reconcile that because I know I was an ass back then, and I know I needed to leave, and I also know that leaving was the best thing for me. But it wasn’t the best thing for you, and that’s very hard for me to accept.”

  She walked over, pulled out a chair, and sat down beside him, picking up his hand. “I wish you’d come back to town years ago. I finished school and only in the last year or two did it really occurred to me that maybe I wasn’t being fair to Jeremy. I didn’t know how to get a hold of you, but I didn’t try either. So I’ve been feeling guilty as hell, and that made it very difficult.”

  “No, you wouldn’t have known how to contact me,” he said, staring off in the distance. “I had no ties here. I had nobody here to keep in touch with—except for you—and I knew that you were better off without me. All I could see was our life together here and me dragging you down to the level I was in, and that was not what I wanted for you. I wanted you to go to med school, to become a doctor, to become somebody, and to have that family you always wanted.”

  She gave him a misty smile. “And you gave me that,” she said. “You just didn’t know it.”

  “Until today.” He pulled away his hand, looked at her, and shook his head. “It’s a lot to take in.”

  “Yes,” she said, “but you have no idea how happy I am that we’re talking about it right now.”

  He searched her gaze, looking for a hint of deceit, but couldn’t see any. “You were always one of the most honest people I ever knew,” he said. “So this isn’t about you being dishonest. Yet it does feel like a betrayal. But I don’t know if it’s a betrayal of you to me or of me to me,” he murmured.

  She reached out her hand again, grabbing his. “And I get the first one,” she said, “because I feel betrayal too, but I feel like I betrayed my son by not giving him a father. And it did cross my mind, at one point in time, that maybe, just maybe, I should do something about giving him a father. But, every time I thought about it, it felt wrong.”

  He looked at her, dazed. “You mean, like, marry somebody else?”

  “Yes,” she said honestly. “Not the best idea if I didn’t feel the emotions to go with it, but a lot of women have married for a lot less reasons,” she admitted. “Security, companionship, help raising a child are all part and parcel of that.”

  He stared down at her hand that held his, and he laced their fingers together. “When you’re young and stupid, you don’t really realize the consequences. I can’t imagine how shocked and scared you were at the time.”

  “No,” she said, “but you have to balance that with how absolutely delighted I was too.”

  His lips tilted. “You always wanted a child.”

  “I always wanted to be a mother, yes. I’d hoped to have more than one, but life being what it is …” She shrugged. “I could probably afford the time off now, but, up until now, all I’ve done is raise Jeremy, go to school, and get established in my practice.”

  “But you’ve done it all,” he said, allowing his amazement to show through. “I mean, I can’t name more than a half-dozen people I’ve met in my entire life who could have done what you’ve done. Even then I don’t know if they could have because they’re all men,” he said. “It’s astronomical what you’ve been through, and you’re still sane,” he said with a laugh.

  She grinned. “Well, I don’t know about the sane part, but I’m working on it.”

  “Being a single parent is never easy.”

  “No, but he’s a good kid,” she said honestly with pride. “He’s got a good head on his shoulders. He’s not stupid about life. He knows that I had him out of wedlock and that his father took off to join the navy and that I didn’t tell you.”

  “So you were honest all the time,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t know, if our positions were reversed, if I could have been quite so honest back then.”

  “Remember how we used to sit out on the back porch, away from everybody, just spending time together, trying to decide exactly what it was that we wanted out of life? You were pretty damn honest about it back then.”

  “And yet here I wasn’t thinking of leaving you behind with a child,” he said. “My life wasn’t easy, but I certainly wasn’t trying to raise a kid on my own.”

  “If my grandmother and my sister hadn’t been around, it would have been a lot harder. When my grandmother passed away, it was very difficult for me because she was one of my biggest supporters.”

  “She was a great woman,” he said affectionately. “She used to give me hell all the time.”

  “Yeah, she was trying to protect me, I think,” she said with a laugh. “She told me privately that she always thought you were the one.”

  “Well, I was the one all right. The one who got you pregnant.” Even hearing the words made him shake his head.

  “Now that we’ve had that out,” she said, standing up, “I’ll put on some coffee, and then you can tell me what happened this afternoon and what you’ll do now.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do now,” he said.

  “I meant about the dog,” she said for clarity’s sake.

  “Ah,” he said, wondering at how different his world looked now. He wanted to get to know his son. That meant staying close, and, for the first time, that didn’t feel wrong. It felt right. Right now he very much felt like he didn’t ever want to walk out that door again.

  “I’m not sure yet,” he said slowly. “I’ve got to find a place to stay for a couple days. I headed to a motel first, but then I stopped in at the truck stop to see what the lay of the land was, and I didn’t get any farther.”

  “Well, I’m sure you can find a motel around here not too far from the truck stop,” she said.

  “That’s the plan,” he said, rubbing his face. He stood, looked at his shoulder, and said, “Thank you for this.”

  “Not a problem,” she said. “Like I said, old times.”

  With that came a flash of heat, as he remembered a lot of the other old times. He nodded and took a step back, carefully distancing himself from the feelings overwhelming him. Not only had he missed seeing his child being born and being there for all the milestone
s, he’d also missed seeing the only woman he’d ever cared about carrying his child, and a sense of possessiveness rippled through him that he never would have thought was even possible. He took a long slow breath. “I need to leave.”

  “It’s probably a good idea,” she said, her voice catching in the back of her throat.

  He nodded and turned suddenly, heading for the front door.

  “Feel free to stop by again.”

  At the front door, he stopped and rested his head against the door. “Does he know?”

  “That it’s you? No,” she said. He nodded, opened the door, and she asked, “Do you want him to?”

  And his heart stopped; he turned to look at her and whispered, “If he would like to, yes,” he said. “I feel like I already missed everything that was important in his life—and mine. I don’t want to miss anything more.”

  “I hear you,” she said, “but I think, at this stage and at his age, that’ll be Jeremy’s choice.”

  Kurt winced, nodded, and said, “Here’s my card. You can always call me if he decides he wants something to do with his father.” He handed her the card, feeling strangely formal, and then out of sorts. He gave her one last long glance and said, “I’m so sorry,” and then he turned and left.

  Chapter 4

  As days went, this one had been a whopper. Laurie Ann was exhausted inside and out. She had put on coffee and then hadn’t even offered Kurt any. Now she sat here, his card in her hand, wondering what she was supposed to do. When Jeremy returned home alone, not very long afterward, he walked into the door, loud, noisy, heading straight to the fridge. She shook her head and said, “Dinner soon. Don’t ruin your appetite.”

  “Won’t,” Jeremy said, as he shoved his head into the fridge and came out with pepperoni sticks.

  She groaned. “How can you eat so much?” she muttered.

  “It’s easy,” he said. “I’m a growing boy.” He turned and looked around and said, “He left, huh?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “I like him,” Jeremy added. “Too bad he left.”

  “And why is that?”

  “I don’t know.”