Chapter Fourteen
Hannah
She coaxed hertruck into gear, and after giving it a quick pep talk, it staggered its way onto the street. The sky’s gray, low-hanging belly suggested another downpour was pending. The nip in the air warned it might bring sleet with it, too.
While she was glad for the space Dallas gave her, she wished he hadn’t given her quite so much. She longed to see him and begin making amends, but he and his friends would be gone the whole upcoming week. She had no way to reach him, either. The men had headed into the Badlands, where cell phone reception was either nonexistent or so sketchy as to be next to useless, for some rock climbing and fly-fishing. She hoped they’d prepared for the weather, because tonight promised to be wild.
Her check-engine light began to flash as she turned onto her street. Her heart sank. This was beyond her level of mechanical skill. She’d have to replace either the engine or the truck and she’d given away every spare penny she had. Her brother would have told her to pull over and shut it down, but she didn’t have much farther to go and it was already a dead man walking, so she kept on going.
Moments later, the truck limped into the parking lot behind the brewery, then coughed its last breath as she turned off the engine. A few spatters of rain hissed on the hood.
Poopy-sticks.
This was no big deal, she told herself. The truck had rolled off the lot during the Clinton administration. She’d known it wouldn’t last forever. The warning signs it was on its last legs had definitely been there. She’d simply have to suspend her customer taxi service and hire a truck to make the few local product deliveries commitments she had. She’d get by.
Her phone jangled in her purse. It was the duty nurse at the home. “Hi Hannah,” he said, “Marsh passed away in his sleep a few moments ago. He didn’t have any immediate family, but I thought you might like to know.” They’d found him when they took him a tray for dinner.
“Thank you,” Hannah managed to say, although her insides were numb. If she’d stayed another half hour, he wouldn’t have died alone. She stared at the phone in her hand. She tried Dallas’s number without any real hope, but the call didn’t go through, so she sent him a text.Call me when you get a chance pls.
Someone knocked on her window, making her jump.
Tim.One more thing she didn’t need. She’d been so caught up in the shock over Marsh that she hadn’t paid any attention to the other cars in the lot. Neighbors often parked here on street cleaning nights. She dropped her phone in her purse, blinked the tears back, got herfight or flightinstincts under control, and rolled down her window.
Tim’s expression grew concerned when he noticed the look in her face.
“Hey, Hans. You okay?”
It was on the tip of her tongue to tell him about Marsh. She’d told him everything for years. He knew all of her secrets—or most of them, at least—but she couldn’t bring herself to say anything because Tim hadn’t known Marsh. He didn’t know how special he was. He’d hear that Marsh was ninety-eight, and say he’d lived a full life, which was true enough, but it was Marsh’s contributions to her life, not hers to his, that she would miss. Her throat went dry and sticky. The backs of her eyes burned. She missed Dallas so much.
“My truck died,” she said.
“And you gave me the last of your money, didn’t you?” Tim rubbed the back of his neck, true remorse on his face. “I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can, Hans. I promise. You can borrow my car, if you like. I don’t mind walking.”
The gesture was second nature, the same way he’d borrowed money from her, without any real thought. They’d done this for years. Those years were behind them, however.
“I’ll manage,” she said. “I don’t mind walking, either.” She couldn’t sit here all evening. “Was there something you wanted?”
He turned on the boy charm that she’d once adored but was now more a source of irritation. “You never called me for coffee. I thought I might take you to dinner.”
“You don’t have any money, remember?” she said. Now, thanks to him, neither did she.
He ramped up the charm. “I can swing takeout for two from a drive through.”
She could think of lots of reasons why having dinner with him would be a bad idea. Dallas had told her flat out that he’d mind if she went for coffee with Tim again. He’d mind the idea of her having dinner with him even more.
She was about to refuse. Then, she recalled Marsh’s words. “I never once asked her to turn off her feelings for him. We had a different relationship between us, that’s all.”
She liked the relationship she was developing with Dallas a lot more than the one she’d had with Tim. It was more mature. More equal. And so, so much more fun. Loving a man was far different from loving a boy. Dallas really didn’t have anything to worry about.
But she and Tim had grown up together. They were always going to have friends in common. Their mothers knew each other quite well, and for years had expected to share grandchildren between them. That didn’t mean he got to drop in and out of her life for the rest of her days, screwing things up for her whenever his life was a mess. She had no business letting him do it, either. Marsh was right—Tim was a taker, not a giver. When she looked at him, she felt nothing but negative emotions. She didn’t want to feel this way about him forever. They needed to set a few things straight between them as to what their relationship moving forward would be. He’d never been a very good listener, so she’d have to find a way to make sure he understood there’d be no turning back.
Letting him into her personal space—space she shared with Dallas—felt wrong, however. They’d eat in public and she’d tell Dallas all about it the minute he called.
“Grand is a small town, and if we’re both going to live here, it doesn’t need to be awkward. We don’t have to pretend we don’t know each other, but we aren’t going to pretend we’re friends, either. We need to set boundaries. If we each pay for our own meal, we can go to Lou’s Pub. The food is good,” she said.
The clouds let go before they reached Yellowstone Drive. Tim parked on the street and they dashed for the door of the pub through sheets of rain that bounced off the pavement. The interior of Lou’s was warm, dry, dimly lit, and smelled of stale beer and fried food, exactly the same as most pubs.
Lou’s was almost empty. Simone and three of her girlfriends were drinking and playing a loud game of darts. Luke and Zack McGregor, two of the brothers who owned the Wagging Tongue Ranch, shot pool while their wives cheered them on. Tim chose a table near the back, away from the racket.