Sunburst

originally Martha’s family’s farm. When I was a kid, I thought it was the richest place on earth.”

“It is,” she agreed. In love and laughter. She was only beginning to understand that Kyle had been short- changed on these things as a child. The way Martha had whipped her arms around him and hugged… Erica had the unaccountable impression that Martha was still seeing a lonely, sensitive, stubborn little boy with too much pride, totally overwhelmed by the effusive O’Flaherty clan. Erica saw, too, that Martha loved to bully him with love, that she was delighted Kyle had turned out strong and handsome, and not quite so difficult to bully. The thought made her smile, even as she felt a lingering sadness, thinking of Kyle as a child, then of their quarrel the night before.

“Where exactly are we going?” she asked idly. They had crossed out of the farmyard and were striding along a farmer’s path bordering a field of wheat.

“There’s only one place that kid could be, if she loves climbing trees as much as Martha says she does.” The trail forked; they left the wheat field in favor of a wooded path. The sloping woods had the pungent, rich smell of black earth, the special stillness that was part of woods on an early evening. Kyle found his way unerringly to a huge old oak standing massive and proud, its thick limbs reaching toward the sky, “Joanie?” he called.

The voice that answered was so high up that Erica gasped in surprise. “Is it dinnertime? I haven’t missed it, have I? Mom’ll kill me.” The little voice hesitated. “You Mr. McCrery? How’d you find me?”

“This was my favorite tree as a kid. I figured if you were a climber, you wouldn’t settle for less than the best.”

A few branches parted long enough to disclose a bright pair of blue eyes looking down at them, interested. “You sound nice.”

“We are nice,” Kyle assured her wryly. “Mind some company?”

“Heck, no!”

Erica blinked. One minute she was definitely on solid ground and the next Kyle’s hands had hooked around her waist from behind her. “Kyle!”

“Get that first handhold, beauty.”

“But I’ve never climbed a tree. And this one-”

“You’ve never climbed a tree?” Kyle said incredulously. “What did you do the whole time you were a kid?”

“Shopped for clothes…” Erica’s hands fumbled for a hold on the branch. Kyle’s hand cupped her buttocks for one last heave upward that struck her as distinctly intimate. She turned around to glare at him. The little one was giggling. “Played with dolls. Played school. Kyle-”

“Deprived childhood, it sounds like to me.” He was right behind her, motioning which branches to take, shielding her body with his own so that the only place she could fall was against him.

“Exactly how high did you have in mind?” she wondered aloud.

“Heaven.”

Joanie Calhoun burst into chuckles. Breathless, Erica kept climbing into the leafy haven, until she came on a level with the little girl. Joanie was a blonde with big blue yes. She was wearing jeans that could have used a wash, and she had lined up a trio of apple cores on a limb next to her. Where a single branch swayed slightly in the breeze, Erica could see the arched roofs of the barns and a long, undulating field of wheat. She’d been lower in a plane.

“Mom said you were the guy who lived in a tree as a kid,” the little girl said interestedly.

“I came close, I’ll have to admit that. Best place to escape from your troubles that I ever found.”

Joanie concurred. The two appeared to agree on a great many things. Erica was captivated by the way Kyle handled the child, as he maneuvered up and behind her, then motioned. Erica shook her head emphatically. Kyle bent down, with feet braced against two forked limbs, and hauled her up against him, still talking to the little girl. In a moment, she was wedged in the cradle of his thighs and chest, his arms loosely supportive under her breasts. For some insane reason, she was comfortable.

“I wasn’t going to like you,” Joanie told him. “Mom said you made stuff out of wood. I kept thinking you’d be the kind to cut down a tree like this, just to make some dumb stuff. I think you should leave a tree a tree…”

“I would cut off a toe before I’d touch this oak,” he promised her, “but I hear you, Joanie. A tree’s a special thing. Every culture that’s ever existed has had a concept of the Tree of Life, and all people-no matter how different they are-have a special feeling for the trees of their land. But when I make something out of wood, I don’t think of it as destroying but as creating.”

“I don’t get you,” the little girl said flatly.

“The tree would die someday in the cycle of nature. But when something is made of its wood, that thing can last-much longer than that tree might have lived, much longer than it would take one of that tree’s acorns to grow to full size. We’ll skip the boring stuff we need from wood, like floors and furniture-but what about music, little one? Guitars and violins are made from wood; those instruments last and in turn create something that lasts-music. So that tree keeps living on, just in a different way-you understand?”

They both understood, the man and child, with their mutual affinity for trees. Erica leaned back against her husband and felt his arm tighten under her breast, as aware of her as she was of him. With his free hand, he brushed a wisp of hair from her cheek and then let the hand linger in the curve of her shoulder.

Her two companions refused to tire of their subject, Kyle willingly expanding into folklore. The oak had always symbolized strength and protection. Rowan was used as a charm against witchcraft. A witch, on the other hand, could turn herself into an elder in a pinch; if you cut an elder branch it was said to bleed. People used to believe that ash cured rickets; the willow symbolized lost love; yews represented everlasting life. “Now the hawthorn tree’s a very special one,” Kyle added. “If you bring its blossoms into the house, you’re risking a death in the family. But if you sit under a hawthorn in the middle of summer…you might just fall under a fairy’s spell.”

“You don’t believe that,” said the little girl, who had clearly believed every word. “Mom would say that was ’stitious.”

“Superstitious?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Hmm.” Kyle shook his head, gently smiling. “I guess I must be ’stitious then, because whenever I make something out of oak, I get this good feeling. Like the house it’s going to will have just a little more protection against storms, against trouble…”

“Really?”

Erica leaned her head back to look at him. He was entertaining the child, but she could feel the depth of commitment in him, a commitment based not on superstition, but on his love of the craft he’d taken on. She thought of the sunburst, of the love that went into that work, of the skill that came from the heart. And she thought of the days he’d once spent poring over dry profit and loss sheets, something he’d been very good at but that had never really involved the core of the man she was coming to know. “Why did you leave all this?” she whispered to him.

His arm tightened around her. “Because I was eighteen and running. Because I was ashamed of all the wrong things.” His eyes hovered intensely on hers, dark blue as the sky above took on evening shadows through their leafy ceiling. He hesitated, and she knew he meant to explain that…but they were interrupted by a bubble of laughter from below.

“Kyle McCrery, you get down from there! I’ll be darned if I finally do get dinner on and there isn’t a soul to serve it to but Leonard. I should have known better than to send you out after Joanie! You haven’t changed a whit since you were a kid; the very first tree you see… Poor Erica’s probably scared out of her mind, and as for you, miss…” She scolded the three of them like children as they followed her back to the house.

Kyle unlocked the door, and Erica stepped inside the dark house. Automatically, she slipped off her shoes and then fumbled for a lamp switch, pleasantly weary and a little bit numb from the homemade wine Martha had kept pouring for her. The small light flooded the couch where Kyle had spent a lonely night the evening before, and something chilled inside her, something she had been trying hard not to think about.

She turned. Kyle was still standing in the doorway. His hands rested loosely on his hips, and his blue eyes were intense on hers. Very quietly, he came toward her until he could place both his arms around her shoulders and press his forehead to hers.