Page 21

Seriously, did she not see how this affected her own life? My life? Everyone’s lives? People like Red Graves were the problem with our country. Sure, you could have a difference of opinion. I’d even be fine with him hating gay people, but when he went out of his way to be cruel and to cause pain to innocent people, well, that I just could not stand for.

But those thoughts were completely at war with the memories of her hands and tongue all over my naked body, warm as they caressed my skin, sliding into my?—

“You ever think about it?”

“Nope,” I lied, and I dashed from the room, down the hallway, out of the station, and all the way home, like the good little lawbreaker I was.

* * *

Stupid wilting mums.

Weren’t they supposed to be late-summer/fall flowers? They’d died the day after I’d bought them, which was three days ago!

“Mom, I’m home,” I called when I walked through the door to our little two-bedroom house on the outskirts of Barton, purposefully ignoring the dying plants on the porch. It usually took about twenty minutes to get home from Ace’s House in the summer, but if there was snow on the mountain roads, it could take an hour or more. “We really need to switch out this lock. My key got stuck again.”

“Then don’t lock the door,” my mom called from her bedroom. “I think your mums are dead.”

This was the house we’d lived in since we moved up from Solo, New Mexico, except for the year I’d lived with my ex-girlfriend over in Idaho. Before that, I’d lived with my parents and my brother and sister near my mom’s family on the Mescalero Reservation. My mom and dad had both been raised there, but when I was sixteen, my dad had taken a job near Barton at a horse ranch, which he’d quickly lost.

He died a year later, and I hadn’t really missed him since. He’d never been a supportive dad. Or husband. I could still remember the relief we’d all felt when he was gone, when his debts and the fights he always seemed to get into couldn’t make my mom’s anxiety go berserk anymore.

Maybe it was a harsh thing to admit that I didn’t miss him, even just to myself, but he’d always been a miserable person. He took it out on my mom and my brother and sister and me. The fact that he’d never been physically abusive didn’t endear him to his family. The lack of his positive presence in our lives and the daily strife he’d caused had been painful enough.

The memory I had from seven or eight years old of my brother and sister standing on either side of me, holding my hands, gripping them painfully while we watched and listened to our dad scream and rage at our mom in our old kitchen because she wouldn’t give him her paycheck had made an impact on me. We’d needed groceries, but my dad had wanted the money for gambling or beer or whatever else he’d considered more important than feeding his children, and I remembered wondering if my mom had ever even loved him. And if she had, why?

When I was thirteen, I came home from school one day and told my parents I was gay. I could still see the look on my dad’s face when he rolled his eyes, shook his head, and walked out of the house.

My mom, on the other hand, celebrated with me. She baked me a cake.

“Yeah, I can see that the mums are dead,” I said, walking through the living room toward the hallway, “and Mom, I told you, it’s not safe for you to be out here by yourself without at least lockin’ the door.”

“That’s what you keep sayin’, Devil, but we’ve lived here for years and never had a problem. And I keep the windows open, so what difference does it make anyway?”

“Good point.” Leaning against the door jamb outside her bedroom, I looked past her shoulders at the photograph that had been hanging near her workspace since the day we moved in. Before that, the carefully framed image had hung in our living room. She said she’d found it at a flea market a year or two after I had been born. It kind of surprised me that it had lasted all these years; it was the only piece of art that survived our move from New Mexico to Barton. “But I wish you wouldn’t. We have that brand-new air conditioner. Why don’t you use it?”

She loved that picture. At least once a day, she’d pause in front of it to sip her coffee and admire the way the photographer had captured a mountain stream swollen with water that flowed and cascaded over fallen trees and river rocks of varying shades of browns, lilacs, and moss greens. The water itself glistened in all shades of blue, deepening and lightening where the sun gave its light or stole it away. Fir trees lined the edges of the small waterway, protecting it as it carved out its place in the world through the passage of time.

Mom said she’d never seen anything so beautiful, had never had such a visceral connection to an image. Sometimes, I’d even catch her touching the protective glass with the tips of her fingers, as if she could gauge the temperature of the water through the photo, could soak up the oxygen held within, and it would make her breathing easier.

When things had gotten bad with my dad, she’d spend hours gazing at that photo, like just the look of it soothed and comforted her.

I’d searched and searched but couldn’t find who the photographer was. All we had was a vague location where the photograph had been taken. The words “Holly Lake Trail” had been scribbled on the back left-corner edge of the picture. I had hoped to find prints of the photo I could’ve had made into a blanket for her or coasters or something so she could see it everywhere, could wrap herself up in this thing she loved so much.

But I’d had no luck. The photographer was a ghost. The person was probably long dead. And there was more than one Holly Lake in the world, one right here in Wyoming, up in the Tetons, in fact, but my mom had found the image when we still lived in New Mexico, so it was more likely a lake down there somewhere. And I wasn’t about to go trekking through the mountains to try to find it anyway. Yeah, not my style at all. I was more of a TV and potato chips kind of girl. I did drive up there, though, but the Bridger-Teton National Forest was huge. There was no way I could find one bend in a stream from twenty-something years ago, if it was even in Wyoming.

“How was work?” she asked, and she adjusted her table fan so it was aimed right at her face. She followed my line of sight to the photo and ignored the air-conditioning subject or any subject that had anything to do with me spending my money on her, as usual.

She could be so old-school. Apart from the super-fancy sewing machine I’d bought her with my first paycheck from my assistant director gig at Ace’s House, she hated any kind of upgrades I tried to make to our little home. Our landlord was lazy, so we’d learned to do any repairs ourselves.

My mom had taken care of our family pretty much by herself for years, and that was while having to survive through all my dad’s crap. She deserved to live in a nice place, whether she liked it or not. This house, while full of good memories after my dad passed, was kind of a dump. I had plans to buy her a nice house. Even if I got married someday or lived with someone, I’d bring my mom with. She deserved to be taken care of.

“It was… fine,” I lied. I sighed and dropped my bag on the seat of the armchair next to the door, then took a step inside the room and plopped down on it.

“Devona!”

“What? It’s my bag. It’s not like I sat on your stuff. Ow, my keys are diggin’ into my butt.” I adjusted them and burrowed further back into the chair with my legs hanging over the arm.

“Serves you right, and why’re you lyin’ to me?” she accused, tightening her lips around the end of the thread between her teeth and narrowing her eyes at me over the top of her reading glasses. She didn’t use them to read, but she couldn’t thread a needle without them.