Booker T would say such a thing. Something so mean.
“No! You know it’s not-shoot, we take disabled people on the river all the time, you know we do.”
“Well, then?”
“Jeez, Booker T, he wants to go on the Forks. That’s a class V. He can’t-”
“He’s done it before, dozens of times.”
“Not in five years, he hasn’t!”
Booker T pulled up in front of Alex’s little house, set among the granite boulders and bull pines with the privacy and isolation she normally loved. He cut off the motor, and in the silence said quietly, “That’s what’s bothering you, isn’t it? The fact he’s been gone five years. What are you afraid of, Alex? That he can’t do it, or that he still can?”
She sucked in another breath-an angry one, this time-and whooshed it out along with, “No, that’s not-Look, I’m not afraid, okay? That’s just stupid.”
“Okay, you’re not afraid. So, why not book his trip?” He opened his door and got out, then opened hers for her and held out his hand to help her down. “You’re not chicken, are you, baby doll?”
She could see the snaggletoothed smile lurking underneath that mustache. Damn him.
“Damn you, Booker T.” She let him walk her to her door and open it for her and turn on the lights, then paused in the doorway to give him a sideways look. “You know you’re the only person on God’s green earth that gets to call me ‘baby doll.’ You know that, don’t you?”
“Maybe that’s what’s wrong with you,” Booker T said as he started off down the pine needle-strewn walk, heading back to his pickup.
“What’s that supposed to mean? Hey, Booker T-” She stomped her foot and started after him, and he paused with one hand on the truck’s door handle to turn back to her.
“You never got to be any lovin’ daddy’s little girl,” he said, then yanked open the door, climbed in and drove away.
He left Alex standing there with tears smarting her eyes, cussing out loud and ashamed at herself because she’d just remembered. Booker T and Linda’s only daughter, Sherry Ann, had died in a car accident when she was just seventeen.
But she still wasn’t booking Matt Callahan and his brother on a trip down the Forks of the Kern. No way, Jose.
Chapter 3
Alex spent a restless night in the company of dreams that weren’t quite awful enough to be called nightmares, but close.
First, she was back on the Mojave Desert where she’d spent her childhood. She, the grown-up Alex, was climbing the tree that stood beside their mobile home. It was an old tree shaped by decades of desert wind so that it seemed to hover with its limbs spread protectively over the trailer, sheltering it from the relentless desert sun. Down below, her mother was yelling at her to come down from there before she fell and broke her neck. Alex smiled and kept climbing. And then she fell.
Except, instead of the tree, it was a rocky cliff she was falling from, and as she was falling she looked up and saw a face peering down at her from a ledge up above. Matt’s face. He was yelling at her, something she couldn’t hear because of the wind rushing past her ears, and he was holding out his hand for her to grab hold of. But she wouldn’t. She scowled at him and kept falling, and just before she hit the ground, she woke up.
She was drenched in sweat, so she threw aside all her covers and pulled off the oversized T-shirt she’d worn to bed, flipped the pillow to a dry side and went back to sleep.
And she was right back on that cliff, still falling. Only now she was naked, and Matt was still peering down at her, holding out his hand for her to grab on to, and instead of yelling at her, he was smiling. Smiling that beautiful Matt Callahan smile that could melt her heart like vanilla ice cream in the Mojave sun. She watched the smile get smaller and farther away as she fell, and fell, and fell, and again, just before she hit the ground, she woke up.
The ringing telephone woke Matt in the darkness. He groped for the handset, squinted at the time in the lighted window. Jeez, was that…4:00 a.m.? He thumbed it on, swearing under his breath. “Who the hell is this?”
“Are you insane?”
“Alex?” He jerked himself half upright, got himself propped on one elbow and his throat cleared, stalling for time, waiting for his heart rate to get back to normal. When it didn’t appear it was going to anytime soon, he tried instead for the lazy Clint Eastwood drawl he sometimes adopted with the kids when he wanted to appear cool. “Nice of you to call. Haven’t heard from you in a while. What’s it been, five years?”
“You’re the one who broke up with me, remember?” He heard some heavy nasal breathing, and then, “The
His scalp prickled in a familiar way, and instead of confessing to her that the whole river trip had been his brother’s idea and he’d only insisted on the Forks of the Kern run and its Class V rapids to scare Cory off the notion, he dropped the temperature of his tone a couple more degrees and said, “No, don’t think I have.”
“Okay, then, you can’t be serious.”
“Why’s that?”
“Oh, for-” There was a long pause, filled with some more of that breathing. “You’re going to make me say it? Okay, I’ll say it. You can’t do a Class V run. Not the Forks.”
Another shower of prickles enveloped him, and it was like getting hit by a gust of wind-driven sleet. Five years he’d dreamed of hearing her voice again, talking to her, and he should have known it would be like this, picking up right where they’d left off. Shouting at each other. Just proved he’d been right to end it when he did.
He closed his eyes and fought to hang on to his temper. “I’ve made that run a dozen times. You’ve been with me on most of ’em. What’s the problem?”
“Jeez, Matt. That was more than five years ago. Before-”
“Before I got hurt? Before I was paralyzed? Last time I checked, you didn’t need legs to row a boat. Somebody change that when I wasn’t looking?” He felt a childish urge to brag, to tell her how he played basketball and tennis and won medals in wheelchair races all over the country and had a good chance of making the U.S. Paralympic Team, if he put his mind to it. But he managed to keep his mouth shut, and after listening to the silence on the other end of the line, said in his coolest drawl, “Alex? What’s the matter? Scared I won’t be able to do it, or scared I will?”
“Okay, but I’m sending two Class V guides.” She’d cleared her throat, but her voice sounded raspy anyway.
He’d always loved that little froggy voice of hers. Never failed to stoke his fires, not then. And evidently not now, either.
“Why? You already got me. You only need one more.”
“Two. Besides you. And that’s not negotiable.”
He sat for a minute, smiling to himself, savoring the moment. Making sure to keep the smile out of his voice, making it sound grudging, he said, “Who’ve you got?”
There was an exhaled breath. “Tahoe, for sure.”
“Tahoe-he’s that big dude with the beard, the one that does trips in the Andes in the off-season, right? Surprised he’s still around.”
“He isn’t, always. But he’s here right now. He’s the most experienced Class V guide we’ve got. Him, definitely.”
“Okay. Who else?”
Another whoosh of breath. “I don’t know. I’ll have to think about it. I’ll find somebody, okay? I just need to-
