Shooting Starr

mornin’?”

Caitlyn gave a shaky little laugh. “Hungry.”

Betty’s voice came close again. “Here’s your coffee, hon’. I put it in a mug and only filled it halfway so you don’t need to worry about slopping it on yourself. Sure you don’t want some cream in that?”

“No, thanks, this is fine.” Fragrant steam drifted into her face. It smelled like heaven.

“Momma, quit tryin’ to fatten her up,” Jess said, and added in a murmur just for her, “Twelve o’clock, hon’… that’s right.”

Caitlyn’s fingers touched, then closed on warm heavy crockery. She lifted the mug and inhaled, then carefully tipped the hot liquid to her lips. Warmth and pleasure flooded through her, and with it that strange, poignant joy she’d experienced when she’d first felt the morning breeze on her face. “Oh my,” she breathed, “that’s good.”

“Well now.” Betty’s hand rested lightly on her shoulder. “What can I get you for breakfast? How about some-”

“Whatever you have is fine,” Caitlyn said quickly, before she could go through the menu again. It had been mind-boggling the first time. Caitlyn’s idea of a big breakfast was to put milk on her Cheerios instead of eating a handful dry on her way out the door. She couldn’t recall the last time she’d eaten hotcakes. Or bacon, for that matter, except maybe in a tomato sandwich. “Please, don’t go to any trouble.”

Jess snorted. “Momma always fries bacon and makes hotcakes for C.J. when he’s here.” And there was that same wordless but good-natured denial from Betty as Jess continued, “We normally just have toast and eggs or cereal or something.”

Caitlyn lifted her coffee mug, hoping the flush in her cheeks might be explained by the heat. “Is, um, is he here? I thought- I was under the impression he had his own place.”

“He does. It’s just up the road. Momma called him when we heard you were up. He said he was gonna jump in the shower and then run right over. Ought to be showin’ up any minute. Right about now, in fact.” She added that last part with a smile in her voice as somewhere outside a screen door banged-by the sound of it, the same screen door Caitlyn had heard earlier from her bedroom window.

She set her coffee mug carefully on the table but kept her hands curled around it, firmly anchoring them there so they couldn’t betray her by reaching up to check on the state of what was left of her hair. She had that vulnerable, exposed, “Oh, God, what must I look like?” feeling again. It’s only because I can’t see, she told herself; it must be. She’d never worried about such things before.

Her heartbeat quickened inexplicably as she heard footsteps scrape and stomp across a plank floor. There came the sound of a door opening. Cool, fresh air flooded her cheeks and ruffled the short tufts of hair on top of her head.

“Calvin James,” his mother exclaimed, “it’s October! Where is your shirt?”

“Got it right here, Momma.” C.J. wasn’t about to tell her he’d taken it off because he didn’t want to sweat in it. He didn’t want for her-or Jess, either-to get the idea he was going to any extra effort on account of Caitlyn being there. He would never hear the end of it.

He glanced automatically at the digital clock on the stove and checked it against the stopwatch on his wrist. Still hadn’t got his time down under five minutes, but he was gettin’ there.

“Wash up, son, these hotcakes’ll be ready in a minute.”

He took the dish towel his mother threw at him and mopped his face and chest with it. After he’d done that, he let himself look over at the woman sitting there facing him across his mother’s familiar old oak table.

He’d never seen anyone look so calm and cool…or so unbelievably beautiful. Seeing her in his mother’s kitchen didn’t seem real. Like finding a real-live fairy perched on the front porch rocker. To his eyes she seemed to shimmer around the edges; he had the feeling if he blinked she might disappear.

He cleared his throat and growled, “Good mornin’,” as he pulled out a chair, the one next to Caitlyn and across from his sister. Caitlyn’s eyes were hidden behind a curtain of eyelashes as she murmured, “’Morning,” back to him. He hitched himself up to the table and parked his elbows on it while he tried to think of something else to say. It wasn’t easy with Jess sitting there watching him, with her chin in her hand and a way- too-interested look on her face. He had to quell a shameful urge to kick her under the table the way he used to do when he was six and she was a brand-new and stuck-up teenager.

Reminding himself it wasn’t good practice for a lawyer to be at a loss for words or thinking like a six-year-old, he frowned, concentrated and came up with, “How’re you doin’?”

Caitlyn took a careful sip of her coffee and informed him she was doing okay. Which didn’t give him much time to work on a rebuttal, but he had his next question ready for her, anyway.

“Sleep well?”

“Yes, very well. Thank you.”

Then, thank the Lord, she looked as if she might be going to elaborate on that, and he held his breath, waiting for it. But before she got around to it, his mother turned from the stove with a plateful of hotcakes in her hand and said, “She found her way down here to the kitchen all by herself,” sounding as proud as if one of her students had won the national spelling bee.

Caitlyn muttered, “It wasn’t that difficult. Jess gave me good directions.” And she was setting her coffee cup down, not realizing there was a plateful of food sitting in front of her.

Jess barked, “Plate!” C.J. reached for it to snatch it out of her way, but neither one of them was quick enough. Plate and mug made contact with a loud clank, Caitlyn jerked and coffee slopped out and splattered onto the hotcakes and her hands.

She gasped out, “Oh, God-I’m so sorry.” But by that time C.J. had her hands safely wrapped in his.

That was the way he thought of it: safe. Lord, how fragile and fine they felt, her hands. And were they trembling or was that something way down deep inside of him?

“Didn’t burn you, did it?” he calmly asked as he was rescuing the coffee cup and brushing cooling liquid from her skin. As an answer she gave her head a quick, hard shake. “Well, no harm done, then.” He got the smile into his voice, but that was as far as it went; he’d never felt less like smiling. What he wanted to do more than anything was touch her face…brush away that stricken, frightened look with his fingers.

His mother was fussing over her, mopping up what was left of the spill with a dishcloth and scolding herself. “Hon’, I just set that plate right down there without thinking. I don’t know where my mind was. Don’t you feel bad, now. That wasn’t your fault, it was mine. Let me fix you some more hotcakes.”

“Oh, no, please don’t.” Caitlyn’s hands stirred in C.J.’s grasp, and when he reluctantly let them go she put one on each side of the plate and held on to it, guarding it like a big dog guards a bone. “These are fine. Really. I’ll just, um…” Her eyes lifted from the plate and darted here and there in a way that made him think of panic-stricken birds.

He watched her swallow, and a patch of color appeared in each cheek. And it came to him-he didn’t know where he got it, that faint flicker of insight, like lightning in the daytime. Maybe it was because he’d been thinking so much lately about what it must feel like to be blind, but all at once he knew, with absolute certainty, why she was looking so uncertain and scared. Hell, he thought, it’s bad enough trying to eat when everybody’s looking at you, when you can see what you’re doing. What must it be like to do it blind?

He coughed and rubbed his nose and said gruffly, “Hey, you want some help with that?” Her eyes flicked his way, and he braced himself, but instead of the expected bright flash of silver, they held the dark and stormy, defiant look that made him abandon the idea of cutting up her food for her, right quick.

The same unbidden insight that had told him of her fear now warned him of her pride. He picked up the syrup pitcher and poured a puddle over her hotcakes with a deft little flourish.

“Bacon’s at twelve o’clock,” he said in a casual tone of voice as he did the same for his own plateful. “Knife and fork on your right.” He cut himself a wedge of syrupy hotcakes, put it in his mouth, chewed, and after he swallowed said thoughtfully, “What I’d do if I was you, I’d stick my fork in close to the edge of my stack and cut off what I’d got stabbed. That way, you’ll know what you’ve got on your fork.”

Jess gave a hoot of laughter. “Say what?”

Well, okay, he hadn’t said it very well, but it was the best he could come up with on the spur of the moment.

But when he stole another glance at Caitlyn, he saw that her lips weren’t clamped together anymore. In fact, it