“I mean, who gives a kid a beer? What kind of mother gives her thirteen-year-old child a beer?” He took a sip of his bourbon and ran his finger around the ring of condensation the glass left on the pistachio-green metal table on the back porch, a table so old it was now vintage and quite chic, Randie had told him. Meals on the back porch were her favorite part of her trips to Camilla. After him, he hoped. She wore a thin lilac-colored sweater. Cashmere, he’d guess. It belled at the sleeves like the petals of the flower and showed off the many layers of gold bangles on her bronze wrists. He didn’t know where she got her money, how much a freelance photographer could really pull in, or if her late husband, Michael, had left her a nest egg of some sort. Somehow in three years, they hadn’t gotten that far. Money, who had what and where and, if this ever became something real, would they share and how. Darren blamed it on her career — why they had not made their relationship official in some capacity — and she lay the blame on his. She traveled from job to job around the country and the world, filling out the in-between times with trips to East Texas, having developed a strange affection for it that she couldn’t explain. Strange because she had once blamed the state for her husband’s murder, a case that Darren had solved. It was how they’d met, and he was the reason her feelings about the state had shifted. She now saw its raw grace and beauty through Darren’s eyes, felt the warmth of its people in the arms he wrapped around her during the nights they spent together. If Texas had made this man, whom she loved and trusted completely, who made her feel safe in ways she never had in her life before, then she would make peace with the complicated state.
Darren’s job moved him around less frequently than it had before the multiagency Aryan Brotherhood of Texas task force was dissolved; he had been mostly stationed out of the Rangers’ office in Houston, driving up to the farmhouse in Camilla every weekend and holiday until he and his wife made their separation official, about six months after the case of the missing boy in Hopetown, up near Caddo Lake. It made no sense for Randie to relocate, she’d said, to make Texas her home base if Darren was rarely ever in one place. But the divorce was final now, and he’d turned in his badge this morning. He was ready to test the idea of the two of them making things more permanent. There was a ring. His grandmother’s, actually. One he’d not wanted to give to Lisa, had feared it wasn’t to her taste, as it had no stone, nothing that shone too brightly. It was a band of gold with an intricate engraving, so old it was now vintage and maybe quite chic? Would Randie think so? Was a ring, and the permanent life with Darren it represented, even what she wanted? It was on this visit that he had planned to find out. But then his mother had shown up. And he’d drunk more than he’d intended at what could only loosely be called “dinner.” He’d eaten only a few bites between long rants about the viciousness of Bell Callis. Randie, who had stopped after a single glass of wine, was shaking her head. “I’m just saying, she didn’t seem… vicious.”
“That’s because you don’t know her,” Darren said. “You don’t know all the stories Clayton told me about what she was like, is like, why he had to take me away from her. There’s no telling how awful my life would have been if she had been allowed to raise me.” He reached for his whiskey again, caught something familiar in the way Randie’s eyes tracked his hand, its nearness to the glass. Lisa had worn the same monitoring gaze at times, Clayton too. The look from Randie stilled his hand.
“Of course I don’t,” she said softly. “Because I’ve never met Clayton.”
Right.
They each knew of the other, his uncle and Randie, but no, they’d never met. Darren hadn’t wanted to share her was the simple truth of it. They had so little time together, a week or two here and there; the longest stretch had been a month and a half around the holidays last year. Darren always found a reason why it was inconvenient to drive up to Austin, where his uncle lived. Clayton still taught constitutional law at the university there, but his course load was light, and he could have likewise come to Camilla to meet Randie. But Darren always managed it so that somehow Randie had just left whenever Clayton made a serious inquiry about driving down to Camilla, returning to his ancestral home and his beloved nephew. It’s been a while, son.
It was a sore spot for Randie, that she hadn’t met his surviving uncle, one of the two men who had raised him. He was hiding either her or Clayton, and both scenarios spoke to a crack in their relationship. But she misunderstood his reluctance to introduce them, and he was wary of correcting her opinion on the matter. He had vowed not to be the kind of man who drug the problems of his marriage into his new relationship. So he tried to keep from Randie all the ways his ex-wife and Clayton’s closeness had put a strain on his union with Lisa, even from its early days when they were high-school sweethearts. Clayton had set his sights on Lisa as a right fit for Darren and had practically been a third party in their marriage, so intense was his investment in the two of them. That Lisa often sided with Clayton about Darren’s life choices made him feel ganged up on and infantilized, and it frankly embarrassed him to talk to Randie about it.
But she knew.
“I’m not Lisa, Darren.”
He reached across the table for her hand, which necessitated gently pushing the whiskey glass to the side. He held her hand, thumb stroking her skin. “I’m sorry,” he said. The setting sun bathed the back of the house in light the color of buttered rum. A breeze ruffled the pine tops in the distance so that they perfumed the air around the back porch sweetly. He felt a surge of overwhelming love for Randie, gratitude for the part of her that was ever a straight shooter. No bullshit and no lies, which she likewise demanded of him. It kept him up nights, the fact that he hadn’t been all the way honest with her. She didn’t know he’d pinned the murder of Ronnie Malvo on Bill King. Would she marry a man who’d done something so vile? He was scared to tell her and so bore this quiet shame alone, sometimes turning his back to her when he couldn’t look her in the eye. He knew she sensed he withheld things. “I don’t see how we take next steps if you won’t let me all the way in.” Randie slipped her hand from his, and Darren filled the void by reaching for his whiskey, taking a hearty sip, ice clinking as he drained it. “Would I have ever met your mother if she hadn’t shown up here today?”
“No,” he said. “Absolutely not, and you know why.”
“She seems sorry, Darren.”
“She seems sorry, just like she doesn’t seem vicious,” he said. “You don’t know her like I do. She can’t be trusted, Randie — like, at all. She lies. All the time.”
“I know it was an unwelcome surprise, seeing her here, but maybe there’s an opportunity for healing, for both of you.”
“Heal? What does my mother need to heal?”
“Darren…” Randie took a breath, as if her next words were a large set of stairs it was going to take a great effort to climb. “Has it ever occurred to you that your mother suffered a trauma when you were born?”
“What are you talking about?” He felt betrayed by this whole conversation, mad at Bell for putting on a trickster’s costume of a remorseful woman, and mad at Randie for falling for it.
“I know it’s this defining story in your family, how, grief-stricken, Clayton nobly saved you from a woman incapable of properly caring for you, but she was also grieving, Darren. She’d lost your father too. And she had her child taken away from her within a day of giving birth. Women are extraordinarily vulnerable postpartum.”
“Says a woman who has no children.” He heard the nastiness in his voice and felt a vague sense of self-disgust, but he couldn’t fully access the feeling, not after this many drinks. Anger — that was still at hand. It was familiar and comfortable.
“Seriously, Darren, I’ve thought about this. About your story. And hers.”
“Why are you doing this?” he said. “Why are you taking her side?”
“I’m only acknowledging that she has one. Truth is, I feel sorry for both of you.”
She sighed and looked out across the expanse of acreage behind the house.
Then, quietly, she said, “You’ve both lost so much.”
“She could have taken me back, Randie. She could have fought for me.”
“She was a teenager up against your uncles, one a lawyer and one a DPS police officer at that time, men who had way more money than she and her family did.”
“How do you know what her family did or didn’t have?”
“I got curious a while back when it was clear you didn’t want to say anything more about her, and, I don’t know, I guess I just wanted to know more about you. I felt we’d hit a wall, behind which some part of you was locked away,” she said, trying to hold his gaze, afraid she might lose their connection at any moment. “I looked up some things about the Callis family. You’d spoken so much about the Mathews men and all they accomplished, how your grandparents and your uncles made you the man you are, that I guess I just got curious about the other side.”
“You looked up my mother’s family?”
Darren felt something seize him then. He stood and backed up to the porch’s railing, leaned on it for support, as he searched Randie’s face to see if the woman he wanted to marry was in there somewhere. “Did you do this? Did you tell her to come here?” He felt his stomach flip and then sink with dread. “Randie, if you…”
One thing Lisa would never do, he thought and then immediately felt guilty for the comparison. Randie’s brows knit together as she gave him an alien look. “Can you hear how paranoid you sound? Before today, I had never met your mother, Darren, and knowing how you feel about her, the problems you guys have, the ways you both —”
“No, don’t do that. Don’t ‘both sides’ my mother and me.”
He was so heated, he left Randie on the back porch and walked into the house, bore left toward the kitchen and the bottle of bourbon on the counter. He heard her footsteps behind him. He had to stop himself from turning to face her — he was afraid he might tell her to leave and never come back because she was talking about things she didn’t understand; she was dismissing the ways his mother had turned his life upside down. Randie rested her hand on his waist, and he felt his lower body flush with warmth and wanting. They hadn’t yet had a proper reunion, not even a real kiss, he’d been so angry after his mother left.
“Darren, look at me.” She tightened her touch into a squeeze. He poured himself another bourbon and turned, tried to avoid her eyes but found that he couldn’t. “I know how much your mother has hurt you. But even I had no idea that she would have the gall to just show up like this, that she would just walk into your house —”
“This is who she is. This is what I’m trying to tell you.” He took a big bite out of the bourbon, welcomed the burn of it going down. “You realize if I go to prison, I might not make it out alive. You think a black Texas Ranger who spent his career trying to take down the Aryan Brotherhood of Texas is going to get a warm welcome in a Texas penal system running rampant with ABT?”
It finally hit him.
He was facing prison.
Randie saw the haunted look on his face, the utter soul exhaustion.
“Oh, Darren,” she said, resting her head against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, then kissed the top of her head, as he stood a good four inches taller than her. He breathed in her vanilla scent mixed with the smells in the kitchen, the bounty from his garden and the open bottle of bourbon. He was at home here, with her.
This was all he wanted.
