The thought was like the tip of a knife twisting and turning at her very core.
But the chaplain had said it’d been instant.
No suffering.
Not so for her. Nor for Jonathan. He’d now lost two dads, though she’d make sure he’d never learn about the first. Kevin would be the only father Jonathan knew and Claire’s one true love.
They would honor Kevin that way.
Always.
She rolled onto her back and pressed the heels of her palms to her wet eyelids. Losing Kevin felt like an actual breach between her ribs, a tear at the bottom of her lungs.
“Momma?” Her son’s voice quavered from the doorway.
She swiped her eyes, sat up and held out her arms. Time to think about Jonathan. She gestured when he stayed still, his short nose scrunched, green eyes wide, as if he sensed the bad coming his way.
“Come here, honey. Momma’s got some sad news.”
He glanced over his shoulder at a scratch against the back door. “Can Roxy hear it, too?”
Claire dug her fingernails into the soft fabric and nodded. “Of course. Go on and let her in.”
Jonathan flew down the hall, one sock half off his foot, trailing from his toes like a streamer. A chasm cracked open in her chest. How to make sense of this to her son? Cushion its blow?
Their silver-haired terrier rocketed into the room and leaped onto the bed, lavishing Claire with tongue kisses. Jonathan hitched up his slipping shorts and climbed next to her and the squirming dog.
“How come I had to go to my room?”
Claire smoothed back his cowlick. Kevin loved—had loved, she painfully corrected herself—ruffling it.
“Is Daddy okay?” Jonathan grabbed Roxy and pulled the writhing dog to his chest.
Kids. Never underestimate them, she marveled. He climbed into her lap and buried his face against her neck. His little body was warm and heavy. She pressed her lips against the silken skin of his cheek and protectiveness surged. After this, she’d never let Jonathan hurt again. Would keep him safe always.
She took a deep breath and began explaining the inexplicable... How their life would be now, even though, deep down, she hadn’t a clue.
Two years later.
“HAPPY ANNIVERSARY, DARLIN’,” Claire murmured as she drove past a Route 36 sign just outside of Coltrane, Texas. A car’s lights flared in her rearview mirror.
She adjusted the mirror, the only thing she ever changed in the vehicle. Everything in her husband’s vintage truck stayed as he’d left it. All but the paint job. She’d added the teal body coat when he didn’t return from Afghanistan to finish its restoration...or take her on that promised first ride.
Her eyes stung and she cranked the volume dial on her radio. An old country tune played and Claire hummed along, feeling as if she knew the heartbroken singer...or, at least, what she’d gone through. The years since her husband’s death had been tough, and she still felt the need to commemorate their wedding anniversary and talk to him, strange as some might think her.
“Can you believe this would have been nine years?” She twisted her wedding ring then picked up her coffee thermos.
A sports car flashed its brights then sped past. Her gaze dropped to the speedometer. Thirty miles per hour in a forty-five zone. Slow, but not slow enough to make this annual trip last as long as she wished.
The countryside loomed gray wherever her headlights touched, bluebonnets waving in thick clusters from the roadside, their sweet fragrance carrying on the warm March wind through the open windows. The road unrolled in front of her and she felt its thrum in her bones.
“Jonathan’s doing well. Got all A’s in homeschool. He’s smart, like his daddy.”
Her voice cracked at the end, evaporating in the back of her tight throat. She recalled Jonathan’s hushed voice when he’d admitted to being bullied and had begged not to return to public school. To spend his days on her father’s ranch, the home they’d moved to after she’d been widowed. He’d always been small for his age and she’d hated thinking of him being pushed around by the bigger boys.
Would Kevin have handled it as she had? Let their son stay away, even after the bullies were punished? Jonathan had grown so withdrawn after losing his father, and she was concerned that the lack of social interaction with kids his age kept him from maturing the way he should. He was different from the rambunctious child Kevin had left behind.
A night bird ghosted over the Chevy Apache’s hood and vanished. Outside the windshield, the full moon ran wild with streaks of cloud, its light pouring down thick enough to drench her on this humid night.
“Dad’s got his speech back but his left side’s still troubling him. Can’t get around like he wants and won’t use the electric scooter. But he’s dragging his foot less, so that’s progress. Right?”
Silence unfurled in the space and she imagined Kevin nodding, his hand dropping from the wheel to cradle hers. He would have known how to help her father accept his post-stroke limitations with that quiet self-assurance that had once steadied her spinning world.
“We finally got an offer on the ranch. Mr. Ruddell, the neighbor who’s been helping us, said he’ll take it off our hands. He can’t afford much, but it’ll be a quick sale so we’ll beat the bank foreclosure. Just.”
Her father’s grim face and terse silences around her lately practically screamed “traitor.” As if she’d engineered the proposed sale. Had twisted his arm to accept it...
Well...she had, but how else to avoid bankruptcy? A total loss on their generations-old ranch? With her dad’s health failing, he didn’t need extra pressure trying to save a lost cause. The doctor said more stress could kill him.
Ever since she’d intercepted a bank call and uncovered the horrible financial news, Claire would wake up each morning in a panic, sure that she’d run out of air. Then the breath would hit her like a horse’s kick to the heart. She couldn’t imagine selling her childhood home, but what choice did she have? Even her older sister, Dani, a horse wrangler who managed a Colorado dude ranch, supported the decision. Although, she’d never been as attached to the ranch as Claire. She’d preferred wandering on horseback to rocking on a porch swing as Claire did every night with her father.
If her dad passed away, leaving her as Kevin had... The thought scared her so much she wanted to take it back, swallow it down in a great gulp and drive faster, flee the possibility before it caught her.
“Do you remember the time you stopped by to help Dad fix one of the tractors and caught me sleeping in it?” She took a sip of her cooled coffee. “I was such a mess then. You knew I was.”
She could imagine her husband’s firm head shake. He’d built her back up when she’d been breaking down. Restored her as he repaired everything else, like this 1959 truck. Not content there, he always improved on the original. Even her.
Especially her.
“I miss you, babe.” And she did, the stabbing loss as deep as the day the Army broke the news. “But I’m doing okay.”
She envisioned the skeptical, downward slant of his eyes.
“Want to hear our wedding song?”
A yellow light in the near distance caught her attention. She attempted to replace her thermos in its holder, missed and grabbed for it before it spilled on the reupholstered front seat. Out of the corner of her eye, she glimpsed the top edge of the traffic fixture as she entered the intersection.
Everything