Redeeming the Past
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Linda Goodnight
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Chapter One
They say you can’t go home again.
But could a man go home for the very first time?
John-Parker Wisdom was about to find out.
The rambling, two-story house on a sunshiny lot on Wedgewood Lane looked the same. Mostly. John-Parker spotted a sag here, paint chips there, but the house was still standing.
He’d thought of this place every day since he was an ornery, wayward eighteen-year-old eager to take on the world by himself. Independence day, he’d thought back then.
Now he knew better.
Miss Mamie’s house. The house that had built him.
The closest thing to a home he’d known since he was eleven years old, a time so faded in memory, he couldn’t conjure his parents’ faces. They were an ache, somewhere deep in his soul, that he rarely visited.
Truth was, he didn’t often visit any of his past. It hurt too much.
But that was about to change.
He pulled his gleaming blue Dodge Ram to the curb adjacent to the house and killed the engine. His eyes trained on the old structure, his mind tumbled back in time to the first day he’d come here.
Scared, mad, heartsick, and ready to run away.
He shook his head, amused and amazed at how far he’d come. How disciplined he was now, considering how wild he’d been back then. He’d been wilder than the dark tangle of shrubs and woods bordering the creek behind Mamie Bezek’s house.
Would Miss Mamie be surprised to see him on her doorstep? Would she even recognize him after fifteen years? From a boy to a man, he’d changed plenty.
He’d planned this day in his head a hundred times. The day when John-Parker Wisdom had made something of himself and returned to make amends.
His gaze roamed the yard. John-Parker frowned, puzzled.
The lawn was empty. A little overgrown. There was no football some boy had forgotten to bring inside. No ancient pickup truck that one of Mamie’s street rats was trying to make drivable.
Street rats. That’s what the small Oklahoma town had called them. Mamie’s street rats.
He supposed they had been. But in true rebel fashion, the ornery lot of them had grabbed onto the moniker to wear like a badge of pride. A protective mechanism, he knew now.
The derision had hurt, burrowing deep into each of them until they’d believed the worst of themselves like everyone else. Except for Mamie.
At nearly thirty-four, the moniker still stung John-Parker a little. Not much, but some. The lingering scent of some taints never quite went away.
He squinted around the sparse neighborhood, growing uneasy for reasons he couldn’t pinpoint.
Where were the kids? The next generation of rowdy boys with trouble in their souls and on their minds. The kids Mamie saved from themselves?
School maybe? Miss Mamie was a stickler for education.
That must be it. School.
John-Parker took his summer Stetson from the passenger seat and clapped it on his head.
Might as well knock on the door and find out.
Hope and a thrill of excitement shimmied through him. Miss Mamie would be over the moon to see him. He was sure of it.
She’d forgive him. He knew she would. All he had to do was ask. She’d wrap her fleshy arms around him and, smelling of talcum powder, she’d welcome him home. Forgiven and loved.
Miss Mamie with her messy mouse-colored bun and twinkling black eyes lived and breathed her faith.
Hopping out of the truck, he did a quick boot check. Shiny brown Ariats. Clean as a whistle.
Miss Mamie said you could tell a lot about a person by their footwear.
Smiling at the memory, he stepped up on the wooden porch with a hollow thud. The weathered boards needed a coat of paint.
Another memory of long ago flashed through his head. A Saturday afternoon when he and Rio had covered the porch and each other with pale blue paint, a mismatch donation from the local hardware store.
“Rio,” he murmured.
Over the years and miles, they’d lost touch, this man he’d once considered an almost-brother. He’d looked for Rio, now a man his age, a few times. Nothing. Not even social media. John-Parker prayed that the pretty-boy delinquent hadn’t gotten himself killed or sent to prison. Considering Rio’s tendency for misbehavior, a tragic end was a definite possibility.
He wondered if Miss Mamie would know where Rio had ended up.
Raising his knuckles, he tapped. Butterflies swirled in his stomach. He refused to believe he was nervous. Excited, yes. Nervous, never. Lives depended on his steel nerves.
Any moment now, he’d see the woman who’d dedicated her life to boys like him. Any moment now, he could begin to right the wrongs he’d done.
He listened, his ear close to the door. Nothing. No sound. Not even the blast of the old-time Southern gospel radio station Mamie favored.
Wasn’t she home?
He rapped again and, after another long, disappointing moment, turned to leave. The old door creaked open behind him.
He pivoted, grinning, eager for this moment he’d dreamed of for fifteen years.
“Miss Mamie...” The words died away. This was definitely not Miss Mamie.
The young woman standing in the doorway was five and half feet of brunette beneath a straw sunhat tied with yellow ribbons. Her face was...interesting. Not beautiful, but intriguing. Rounded chin, apple cheeks, warmly tanned skin.
“I’m sorry to keep you waiting,” she said in a soft tone that sounded sincere. “I was in the garden.”
Mamie’s vegetable garden. When money was tight or the house too full of kids, she’d planted more and kept them healthy and fed with canned goods from her garden. He’d helped can a quart or two himself in Mamie’s kitchen.
“Does Mamie Bezek still live here? Is she home?”
The woman’s eyes widened. Her mouth opened, closed, opened again. “No. She’s—not here anymore.”
The woman untied the ribbons and slid the floppy straw from her head, lowering it to her side. The ribbons trailed against the threshold, sunshine yellow on dark damaged wood. Brown wisps of hair caught the light behind her and danced with static.
“Not here? Did she retire?” That made no sense. This was Mamie’s home. If she retired, she’d still be here on Wedgewood Lane. “Can you tell me where to find her?”
The woman’s bow lips flat-lined. Two tidy brown eyebrows pulled together in a frown.
“Were you one of her boys?” A pair of onyx eyes pinned to his face.
“Yes, ma’am. I was. I’m John-Parker Wisdom.”
The interesting woman turned her head to one side, licked full lips, avoided his gaze.
“John-Parker Wisdom,” she repeated softly as if she knew the name. Turning back, barely meeting his eyes, she added, “I’m Zoey Chavez, Mamie’s niece.”
She didn’t invite him in. Rather, she stood there, blocking the doorway with her slender frame, as if he wasn’t welcome.
“I didn’t know Mamie had a niece.” Why hadn’t he known that?
“She didn’t until...” Zoey Chavez waved one hand.
Until what?
He was starting to have that spider-crawling-up-his-back feeling. The one he got when a security gig was about to turn sour.
Where was Mamie?
John-Parker cleared his throat. “Forgive the intrusion, but I grew up in this house, and I’ve waited a long time to see Mamie again. Do you mind if come inside for a few minutes? Maybe have a look around the old place for memories’ sake while you find her address for me?”
“I don’t know you.”
“But you recognized my name. Mamie spoke of me, didn’t she?”
“Yes, but—”
Had Mamie said something negative about him?
A stab of betrayal found its mark. Mamie had always believed in him. Hadn’t she?
“Did Mamie tell you what a punk I was? Is that it? I’m not that guy anymore.”
“Mr. Wisdom.”
“John. John-Parker.”
She tilted her head. Thick brown hair flared out to one side, revealing large, gold, earring hoops. “We’ll both be happier in the long run if you go back to wherever you’ve lived since you left Rosemary Ridge. Waxing nostalgic is a waste of time.”
They’d both be happier? What did she mean by that?
Something was wrong. He knew it as well as he knew what Mamie had done for him all those years ago.
He blocked the first terrible thought that pinged into his head.
Don’t go there.
Mamie was fine. She’d moved away. Nothing to get twisted about.
In his business, he’d learned persistence. He wasn’t leaving without that address.
“I won’t stay long. Only long enough to look around a bit and get Mamie’s new address.”
Zoey gave a heavy sigh and then stepped back, holding the peeling wooden door open so he could enter.
John-Parker ducked beneath the doorframe, a habit from years of ducking ceiling fans and low doorways. A man six feet two inches didn’t always fit.
As he stepped inside the living room, he was swamped with nostalgia. The battered old sectional looked the same, but it couldn’t be. Could it? Dirty white stuffing spilled from the arms and cushions.
A tired bouquet of fake flowers languished in the center of a scarred wooden coffee table.
John-Parker had played a thousand games at that table. Mostly chess. Mamie had taught all her boys to play, insisting chess was good for the brain.
One time, a new kid had kicked the table and scattered the pieces. Rio had pounded the punk until Mamie had flown into the room to break them apart.
Mamie’s things were here. This house still echoed her presence.
But where was Miss Mamie?
“I only have a minute,” the niece said. “So, if you want to look around real quick...”
Right. Look around. Then go away.
He got the message.
She glanced toward the stairway. “I need to run upstairs.”
“To call the police and ask if I’m a criminal?”
She blinked. Her mouth opened in a silent shock. “Are you?”
“No.” Not now anyway. “I’m a security specialist.”
He withdrew a business card from his shirt pocket and offered it to her.
She took the elegantly engraved card with her thumb and index finger as if his hands were dirty, read it, and slid it into the side pocket of her long floral skirt. Unimpressed. Okay. Fine. He wasn’t all that impressed with her either. She obviously considered him a street rat.
“I’ll be right back,” she said.
“You’ll get that address for me.” He didn’t ask, another psychological trick he’d learned in business. Don’t ask. Tell nicely. Lay out the expectation and leave it hanging in the air. Most people avoid confrontation.
Without replying, Zoey Chavez started up the stairs.
He called after her, mostly to get a reaction. “I promise not to steal anything while you’re gone.”
When she whirled her head to glare at him over one shoulder, John-Parker smirked.
She didn’t trust him. He got that. She didn’t know him and she was right not to trust a strange man standing on the stoop. But why toss out power vibes of instant dislike?
During her absence, John-Parker strolled through the house. The eat-in kitchen that had once seemed enormous and fancy to him as a kid now appeared small and outdated. Way outdated.
Worn, faded brown Formica counters. Green-and-white-linoleum floors that had long since given up their pattern. But the solid oak in the cabinets, even though old-fashioned, remained in good repair.
He slid his hand across the long, heavy wooden table where he and at least five other boys had stuffed their faces and fought over the last piece of chicken.
He really wanted to walk around the upstairs sleeping quarters but, considering Mamie’s niece was up there and he might frighten her, he decided to remember the rooms as they’d been. Wood floors. Double bunk beds in each bedroom. Two dressers. Not room for much else, but all the items growing boys had needed.
Miss Mamie’s room was downstairs, toward the back of the house, so he strolled that way, letting memory take him through the laundry room, the den and to her bedroom.
He paused in the doorway, suddenly feeling awkward about invading Mamie’s space.
If Mamie had moved away from here, she’d done so recently. Too much was the same.
His mind rolled through the possibilities.
Was Mamie in a nursing home? Was that it?
But why hadn’t the niece simply said so?
A ragged old Bible lay on the nightstand. A Bible that Mamie had read to them each night. No matter how the boys had rolled their eyes and groused, she’d insisted they sit and listen.
The pictures on the wall were the same, too.
The stairs overhead creaked. John-Parker glanced up. The niece was coming down again.
Eager for the address, his long strides took him quickly back to the living room.
As Zoey came into sight, he crossed the room and took a seat on the sectional. The worn springs gave beneath his weight. His backside wasn’t more than two inches off the hardwood floor.
He felt a little foolish with his knees in the air and his hat in his hand.
The woman pressed a hand to her lips, needing to laugh but refusing to give in. He wondered why she was afraid to laugh.
“Did you get your fill of nostalgia?” she asked, one hand absently smoothing the side of her skirt.
“Yes, and thank you.” He would have casually crossed an ankle over his knee but, from this position, he couldn’t. “Didn’t steal the good silver either.”
She gave him a sharp look. “There is silver, you know. The good stuff.”
He knew. Oh, did he ever know.
“Look, Miss Chavez, I’ve driven a thousand miles to see Mamie. At the risk of being rude—” something he was good at him when necessary, although he preferred diplomacy “—I’m here to see Mamie. If you have her address, I’ll take it and get out of your way.”
Zoey bounced a fist against her mouth. Once. Twice. Finally, she smacked her lips and huffed a sigh. “I don’t know how to tell you this. There’s no easy way.”
A knowing dread rose, dark as circling black buzzards and more terrible than the first day he’d seen this house. The buzzards that had been circling since the moment she’d told him Mamie no longer lived here.
“Is she sick?” Please, God, let her only be sick.
“Not anymore. Aunt Mamie passed away in February.”
Zoey watched the change come over John-Parker Wisdom. Disbelief. Grief. Anger.
“She can’t be.” He jerked up from his near-comical position on a couch that needed to be in the dumpster. She’d see it gone soon. Him, too.
“I’m sorry to be the bearer of such news.” Very sorry. The last thing she’d needed was for John-Parker Wisdom to show up now.
What were the odds?
Mamie had waited years for this man to come back. So why now? Now that it was too late for him to do anything but cause trouble.
“What happened?” His expression was stricken, his gray eyes haunted. “She was always so vital.”
Zoey battled against feeling sorry for him.
“How long since you’ve seen her, John-Parker?”
“Fifteen years.”
“When was the last time the two of you spoke?”
He sighed. Pinched his bottom lip. “Fifteen years ago.”
Exactly the reason he should turn his big truck around and head out of Rosemary Ridge. Though not the only one.
“You haven’t spoken to her or kept in touch since you left here fifteen years ago.”
Her derisive words weren’t a question. They were an accusation.
Some of Aunt Mamie’s “kids” sent cards or emails. Some had even returned for a visit. But John-Parker Wisdom hadn’t been one of them. Zoey knew because, in her final year, Mamie had worried about him the most.
“I should have, but I needed to...” He shook his head, leaving the thought to dangle in the tense air separating them.
Needed to what?
He gazed up at the high dingy ceiling, his handsome face tragic.
Even though Zoey didn’t want to notice, the man was good-looking.
He was dressed well in upscale Western style, more like a Dallas businessman than an actual cowboy. He held a white Stetson in one hand. Not a bedraggled work hat, but a pristine Stetson a Western man would wear for dress-up. His brown hair was neatly cut and groomed. A shadow of dark scruff outlined his lower face.
Except for the wide scar running across his thick left eyebrow like a two-lane highway, his sculpted face was near perfection.
Pretty is as pretty does.
Zoey practically heard Aunt Mamie speaking in her ear. And her aunt was exactly right.
John-Parker Wisdom might look good on the outside, but his actions had left him woefully lacking.
Where had he been all this time?
And what right did he have to show up now?
Boys like him had taken everything Aunt Mamie had had to give, stolen her adult years, her money, her chances at marriage and a family of her own. They were selfish street rats Mamie had prayed for and grieved.
This one in particular.
Why, Aunt Mamie? Why him?
“Was she sick?” His glazed eyes, the color of a cloudy morning, stared unseeing at the squeaky ceiling fan. Five blades emitted a rhythmic squeak as they rotated a lazy breezeless circle. “I don’t remember her ever being sick.”
Zoey wanted to say her aunt had died of a broken heart, but instead she named the diagnosis. “Cancer.”
His teeth bared in a hiss. “I hate cancer.”
She scoffed. “Welcome to the universe.”
Her sharp tone brought his gaze back to her.
“How long was she sick?” he asked as if the thought of Mamie suffering brought him pain. She could credit him for the compassion if little else.
“Over three years, but she didn’t tell anyone until the last year when she was too weak to foster her boys any longer.”
His eyes slammed shut. Pain wracked his face. “She went right on fostering teenage throwaways even after she got sick. Yeah. I can see her doing that. As long as she could.”
“She shouldn’t have. The stress, the financial strain—” Zoey clamped her lips shut.
Blaming John-Parker wouldn’t bring Mamie back.
Neither would resentment. But Zoey felt the gnawing fury in every fiber of her being.
The man’s eyes settled on her. “Mamie left her house to you?”
That was not the subject Zoey wanted to discuss. Not with him.
She went to the staircase, listening. No sound. They still slept.
“Miss Chavez. Zoey?” The tall, fancy cowboy stood in the center of the room, circling that hat over and over again between his hands, pensive.
She’d give a dollar to know what he was thinking.
“What?” The word was too sharp and she’d give herself away if she wasn’t careful. No use raising his suspicions.
“Were you and Mamie close?” He seemed to be trying to fit her into his paradigm of Mamie and her foster kids.
He should give up. She didn’t fit. But she didn’t want him to know that.
Zoey stepped away from the staircase.
“In the last year of her life, we became very close. I moved in with her.” She waved one hand. “Long story.”
A story she didn’t want to share with John-Parker Wisdom. She wanted him to get back in his big fancy pickup, drive to wherever he’d been for the last fifteen years, and stay there.
Silence dangled between them, a venomous snake.
He shifted on the shiniest brown boots she’d ever seen. Awkward. Unsure. Adjectives she wouldn’t have ascribed to the confident man in front of her.
“Well—” When she didn’t pick up the conversation, he dipped his chin and moved toward the door. Very astute of him.
“The town has probably changed a lot. Can you recommend a hotel or bed-and-breakfast?”
“You’re staying in Rosemary Ridge?” Horror prickled the hairs on her arms.
No. No. He had to leave!
The cowboy offered her a look, the kind that said she was a few croutons short of a chef’s salad.
“Lady, I’m not driving another thirteen hundred miles without some sleep.”
“Oh.” She gnawed the inside of her lip.
His eyebrows rose. “Don’t look so sad.” She clearly didn’t. “You don’t have to see me again.”
“It’s not that.”
“Yes, it is. Having one of Mamie’s street rats show up on your doorstep isn’t your idea of a pleasant afternoon of tea and crumpets with friends. My presence might turn the neighbors against you.”
He was bitter. But why should she care?
Her conscience twanged, a tuning fork in her ear.
She did care, which could become a serious problem in this situation.
Zoey didn’t judge people by their childhoods. She’d be a fool to do that, considering her own destructive upbringing. She judged them by how they behaved as adults.
In her estimation, John-Parker Wisdom had been found guilty and condemned.
Tuning fork or not.
A cry broke from upstairs.
John-Parker Wisdom’s head whipped upward so fast, she thought he might suffer whiplash.
“A baby’s crying.” He spun his head toward her. “You have a baby?”
Another cry joined the first one.
“Yes. Two of them.” She ushered him to the door, thankful for her crying children. An excuse to get rid of John-Parker Wisdom. “Wildwood Bed-and-Breakfast on Walker and Seventh. Walker is on a side road off Main—”
“I know where Walker is.”
Of course, he did. He’d lived in Rosemary Ridge. Small towns weren’t in the habit of changing street names. “Fine. Nice meeting you. Have a safe trip home.”
She gave him a not-too-gentle shove out the door and slammed it behind him.
Turning the lock, Zoey rested all of four seconds against the door before racing up the stairs.
John-Parker Wisdom’s absence from this house, this town, was the only solution to what had suddenly become a monumental problem.
