Summer of Fire - Linda Jacobs [17]
In the hallway outside Deering’s room, Clare spotted a coffee machine and went for the dual jolt of caffeine and sugar. Sidetracked from her mission to check on Steve Haywood, she slumped into a plastic waiting room chair and cupped her hands around the warm cup.
The pilot . . . Deering was cocky. Especially for a guy who’d just crashed and, well . . . he hadn’t burned. Not in a lake kept cold year round by eight thousand feet of elevation.
Something about him reminded her of her ex. Jay was a hard driving, in-your-face kind of guy. It was what had originally attracted her and, ultimately, had been their downfall.
She’d known something was wrong with her marriage, but hadn’t wanted to face it.
First, the family suppers she and Jay had prepared together and called culinary delights gave way to his business dinners. A moderately successful homebuilder, Jay had told her, “You have to schmooze the clients.”
There was never a satisfactory explanation for why she could not join him. It was always “You’d be bored,” or “Devon needs somebody home.” After a while, she stopped asking and devoted herself to her job, with its evening basketball practices and games.
Then the scent of perfume, that Jay supposedly hated, came wafting from his size eighteen collar or maybe from his newly styled pale brown hair. “Oh, that damned Karen Eisner at the office,” he’d bitch. “She must bathe in the damned stuff.” Clare went along because Jay was so emphatic in his distaste when she wore fragrance.
The phone calls with nobody there were amusing at first. “If a woman answers,” Clare had teased. Soon nobody was laughing.
Finally, there had been the woman friend who was no longer a friend. Over chicken salad and white wine on the patio of a French-style café, at a table overhung by fuchsia bougainvillea, “I just think you ought to know, Clare, that everybody’s laughing at you.” The news came with a name, Elyssa Hendron, unmarried twenty-something with doe eyes and a developer daddy with a fortune.
Clare had asked herself the question Dear Abby, or was it Ann Landers, always posed. Would she be better off with Jay or without him? After studying how just-turned-thirteen Devon adored her father, Clare determined to stick it out.
Looking the other way and stomaching the nausea lasted a bare month.
Jay had breezed in at one-thirty a.m., smelling of Obsession and musk. That he lacked the garden variety respect to shower before coming home turned a key in the box she’d locked her feelings in.
“You want to go to her, then go!” Clare shouted.
Without hesitation, Jay roared, “If that’s what you want, you’ve got it.”
They stared at each other. Her pulse leaped at her temples while a vein in his forehead throbbed. She waited for his expression to soften, for him to take it back.
His footsteps sounded loud on the hardwood floors as he went back and forth to the garage. Devon crept down the stairs, her cotton nightdress flowing like Cinderella’s gown, golden hair the color Clare had seen in Jay’s childhood pictures, spread wild over her shoulders.
When Jay came out of the bedroom with a load of shirts on hangers, Devon clasped his arm with both hands. “No, Daddy!”
Jay shoved his daughter away. “Someday you’ll understand.”
All Clare understood after nearly five years was that she was alone, trying to raise her daughter as best she could, while Jay built his second wife a million dollar house. The contacts he’d made through Elyssa’s developer father had made him wealthy. Since it happened after the divorce, the judge had not seen fit to raise the child support.
Clare pushed to her feet in the waiting room and dumped her coffee in the trash. Once more, she searched for Steve Haywood, finding the room with the correct number vacant. Upon learning that he’d checked out without permission, she felt a stab of concern. She tried to comfort herself with how many times she’d transported someone and never learned his or her fate.
That was the norm. You used the Jaws of Life to open a car roof like a can of tuna, stabilized and packaged