River Road(12)
Author: Jayne Ann Krentz

“I miss her, too,” she said into the silence.

Her phone chirped. She took the device out of her tote and glanced at the screen. The very pricey online matchmaking service with which she was registered had identified another match. All she had to do was log on for more information. Mr. Almost Perfect was waiting out there somewhere in the ether.

She deleted the message and dropped the phone back into the tote.

She put the baby bok choy, the fresh salmon, the white wine and a few other items, including a wedge of excellent cheese from a local artisanal cheesemaker, into the vintage refrigerator. Thirteen years ago the selection of cheeses available in Summer River had been limited to what the chain supermarket on Main Street carried. That afternoon she had spotted two specialty shops stocked with a dazzling array of exotically named cheeses, many made in the surrounding area.

She placed the loaf of crusty French bread on the counter and then turned to contemplate the six-pack. The brown bottles wore designer labels, but there was no getting around the fact that the stuff inside was beer. What had she been thinking? She didn’t drink beer. She didn’t know if Mason drank it, but she had a feeling he would prefer beer to white wine. Manly men drank beer, didn’t they? Or possibly whiskey. She wasn’t sure, because she hadn’t met a lot of manly men. Mostly the thirtysomething guys she knew were still boys waiting to grow up.

Maybe she should have bought a bottle of whiskey instead of beer.

“You’re an idiot, Lucy. It is probably not a good idea to get tangled up with Mason Fletcher.”

But she was not getting tangled up with him. He had been gracious enough to offer to see if he could save her some money by tearing out the tiles that blocked the fireplace. The least she could do was give him a glass of wine and feed him. That did not constitute a date. A real date was having coffee or drinks with one of the string of possible matches the dating service had come up with in the past three months.

“Nice job rationalizing,” she said. “Spoken like a true commitment-phobe. Dr. Preston would be proud.”

Six weeks of cognitive therapy taught a woman a lot about herself.

She got busy opening up the packages of lightbulbs.

7

What the hell do you mean, you’ve got a date?” Deke demanded. “I’ve been trying to get you to go out with a woman—any woman—ever since you landed on my doorstep two weeks ago. You kept saying you weren’t in the mood. I figured you were depressed or something.”

“Or something,” Mason said. He did not pause in the act of stacking rolls of duct tape on a shelf.

“And now, out of the blue, you announce you’ve finally got a date?”

“Breathe, Deke. Don’t hyperventilate on me. You can deal with this.”

Deke snorted. “Don’t be too sure of that. It’s a shock to the system, I tell you.”

It was doubtful that anything, not even the apocalypse, would come as a stunning shock to Deke Fletcher, Mason thought. If any man could roll with the punches, it was his uncle. He’d sure as hell taken enough of them in his time. And delivered his share.

Deke Fletcher had run through three wives before he’d given up on marriage. All three women had filed for divorce claiming irreconcilable differences. Mason suspected that the term was a polite gloss for the real truth—none of them could take the demanding life of a military spouse married to a soldier who always chose deployment over hearth and home.

Mason and Aaron had had only limited contact with Deke when they were very young. They were vaguely aware that he spent a lot of time abroad fighting wars in far-off places. He was a larger-than-life figure in their vivid imaginations, and they were proud of him. But most of what they knew about him came from overheard conversations between their parents. Their mother had complained that Deke drank too much and that he was a womanizer, and said that it was no wonder he couldn’t keep a marriage together. Their father said Deke probably had some form of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Once in a while Deke surprised everyone by showing up for Thanksgiving or New Year’s, and when Mason turned ten he and Aaron had spent a memorable two weeks with Deke while their parents took a cruise. Deke had taken Mason and Aaron camping and taught them how to fish. Deke didn’t drink much during that visit—a beer in the evenings or a glass of whiskey late at night was about it—so Mason couldn’t tell if Deke had a drinking problem. Deke hadn’t brought a woman along, either, so it was hard to gauge whether or not he was a womanizer.

The car crash had been caused by a drunk driver, and it had changed everything. Mason was thirteen at the time; Aaron, eleven. Rebecca Fletcher had died at the scene. Jack Fletcher had survived long enough to make it to the hospital—just long enough to say good-bye to his sons and give Mason his marching orders. Take care of Aaron. You two stick together, no matter what happens.

The authorities had put Mason and Aaron into foster care while they set out to track down next of kin. Everyone had an excuse. Rebecca’s parents explained that they were living in a retirement community and could not bring in young children. Jack’s parents had divorced and remarried years earlier. Neither of them wanted to start all over again with two young boys. An aunt on Rebecca’s side refused on the grounds that she had never gotten along with her sister and, besides, she was a single mom with two kids of her own to raise. An uncle declined because he had recently remarried and his new wife refused to get stuck with someone else’s children.

And so it went. Everyone expressed sympathy; everyone maintained that they wanted to stay in touch with Mason and Aaron—everyone presented a logical reason for why they could not take on the responsibility of raising two boys.

That left Deke.

No one, least of all Mason and Aaron, expected him to step forward and shoulder the responsibility of two boys. After all, he had the very best excuse of all. He was single, and he frequently deployed to war zones. Certainly no one thought that he was fatherhood material—just the opposite. The general opinion was that he would be a bad influence on impressionable youths.

At that point, Mason had understood with blinding clarity that he and Aaron were staring down the very real possibility that they would both end up permanently in the foster care system. If that happened it was likely that they would be separated. He would not be able to carry out his mission to protect Aaron.

He was making plans to disappear into the streets with Aaron when Deke Fletcher arrived, fresh from yet another war zone.