with Hope, and he’d been yanked out of a chair and sent to his room. Things could only get better. “I’ll go get Adam from his room,” he said, but stopped by the bathroom first to down four aspirins.
Two hours later, he figured he should have just run his head through a wall, for all the good those aspirins did him.
From the back door he watched Julie’s rental car pull out of his driveway and head toward town. She hadn’t been able to get a flight out of Sun Valley until the next afternoon, and she’d just assumed she would be staying with him and Adam. After the past hours he’d spent with her, there wasn’t a chance in hell he’d agree to let her stay with him. He’d called the Sandman and got her a room for the night. By morning, the whole town would know his business, but for once he didn’t care. If he had to spend any more time with Julie, he couldn’t promise that he wouldn’t strangle her.
She’d totally crapped out on him, making it sound as if she would have married him if he’d ever asked her. He’d never asked her, because they’d talked about it and decided that a baby wasn’t a good enough reason to get married. They’d both decided that, not just him, because the truth was, if she’d felt strongly about it, he would have married her even knowing it would be a mistake.
He shut the back door and went in search of his son. He found him lying on his bed, crying into his pillow. One of his sneakers had disappeared, his socks were scrunched down around his ankles, and his shorts were twisted around his waist. He was a pitiful lump of misery.
“Are you hungry?” Dylan asked from the doorway.
“No.” Adam rolled onto his back, and his face was splotched from crying. “Why’s my backpack outside?”
“Hope and I hiked up to Sawtooth Lake.”
Adam looked across the room at his father. “She used
“Yes, she did.”
“I don’t want her to touch my stuff. I hate her.”
Dylan moved toward the bed. “Just a few weeks ago you liked her.”
“That was before.”
“Before what?”
Adam turned his face to the wall. “Before you guys were doing sex!”
About a year ago Dylan had explained most of the birds and the bees to Adam, but not the real embarrassing stuff. He thought about his response and chose his words carefully. “There is nothing wrong with what Hope and I were doing. We’re both adults and you weren’t even supposed to be here until Sunday.”
Adam sat up and his eyes got squinty. “You don’t have to do that any more ‘cause you got me. Let her find someone else to make her a baby.”
“What?” Dylan sat on the edge of the bed. “People don’t have sex just to make babies, Adam.”
“Uh-huh. That’s what you said. You said men put their penis in women to make babies.”
Okay, maybe he’d screwed up the whole birds-and-the-bees thing more than he thought. “Men want to make love to women even when they don’t want to make babies.”
“Why?”
“Because… well…” He didn’t know what to say, but he’d already messed up, so he figured he’d just muddle through with the truth. “Well, because it feels really good.”
“Like how?”
How did you explain sex to a seven-year-old kid? “Hmm… like when you finally scratch an itch that you’ve waited all day to scratch. Or when your feet are really cold and you slide into a warm tub and get all shivery,” he said and watched himself fall in his son’s eyes.
“Sick!”
“You’ll feel different about it in a few years.”
Adam shook his head. “No way.”
Dylan figured it was time to change the subject. “Why don’t you tell me about your trip?”
Adam looked as if he wasn’t going to let the subject drop, but he did. “It was okay.”
“Your mom said you met her boyfriend, Gerard.”
“He talked funny.”
“Your mom also said you called him a fag. That wasn’t very nice.”
“Why couldn’t Mom stay here?” Adam asked, obviously figuring it was time to change that subject, too. Dylan would let him, for now.
“There was no place for her to sleep.”
“She could sleep with you. Hope did.”
Yes, Hope certainly had, but truth be told, there had been very little sleeping. “That’s different. Your mom’s marrying that French dude.”
“Maybe you could marry her instead,” Adam suggested as he picked at the Band-Aid on his knee. “She said she would have married you if you’d asked her. So go ask her now.”
“Too late. She loves Gerard LaFollete.” Dylan patted his thigh and Adam crawled into his lap. “There are a lot of different reasons why people don’t get married, but just because your mom and I never got married doesn’t mean we don’t love you. Or,” he added, stretching the truth a bit, “that we don’t care about each other. I’ll always love your momma because she gave me you. And if I didn’t have you, I’d be real sad all the time.”
“Yeah.” Adam laid his head on Dylan’s shoulder. “I’m your little buddy.”
“Yep.” He wrapped his arms around his son and squeezed. “I’m glad you’re home.”
“Me, too. Where’s Mandy?”
“The last time I saw your puppy, she was chasing your grandmother’s peacocks, and your grandmother was chasing her.”
Adam pulled back, his eyes bright. No one loved naughty-dog stories more than Adam. “Did Grandma catch her?”
“Nope, but maybe we should go get her.”
Adam nodded and laid his head again on Dylan’s shoulder.
“When Mom gets married, will my name be Adam LaFollete?”
“No, you’ll always be Adam Taber.”
“Good.”
Yeah, good. For the first time since Adam had walked in the door, things were looking better. The fact that he’d mentioned Julie’s marriage was a step in the right direction. Perhaps Adam was letting go of his dream of them all living together. Julie was free to live her life, and Dylan suddenly felt a lot freer to live his. Yeah, now that it was too late.
“And you’re not going to be doing sex any more with Hope, right?”
Maybe not so free after all. He didn’t know how to answer. He knew what Adam wanted to hear, but he couldn’t say it. It would be like taking a step back when he was finally moving forward. And the funny thing was, he hadn’t known how badly he wanted to move forward until he’d met Hope.
Sitting on his son’s bed, holding him tight, he felt more alone than he could ever remember feeling. Before Hope, he’d known he was lonely, but now he felt it more keenly than ever. Somehow she’d crawled inside him, and it was like she’d breathed new life into his lungs, made his blood and his juices flow again. And now that she was probably gone from his life, he just felt hollow.
“Let’s go get that dog of yours,” he said, because he just couldn’t tell Adam what he wanted to hear. Not yet. Not until he knew what he was going to do. Not until he figured out exactly what he felt about Hope and the whole screwed-up mess.
Hope wasn’t going to hide like she’d done something wrong. She wasn’t going to hide in her house, pacing the old wooden floors and running to the window every few minutes. At seven-forty-five that evening, she changed into her peach sundress, put on her makeup and took herself to dinner. Unfortunately, the fanciest establishment in town was the Cozy Corner Cafe.
Honky-tonk played on the jukebox, and the diner smelled exactly how it had the first time Hope had set foot inside. The dinner rush had died down and a couple with a baby occupied one booth, while three teenage girls sat at the counter laughing and smoking cigarettes.
