Chapter 12
Amanda didn’t know what to do. She should have walked back into the kitchen and asked him for the truth. She should confront him with it so that they could get it out in the open and get past it.
But suddenly, facing it, naming it, she was afraid of it. Jake had spent his entire life maintaining a lie, a crippling, debilitating lie that kept him at arm’s length even from the people he loved the most in the world. She’d just seen the pain in his eyes. She knew how much he loved Lee. She could only imagine what it would have meant to him to read her sentiments to him, to carry them away with him somewhere and not have to share them with anyone. She knew what he’d lost, what he’d forfeited.
But she knew that right now she couldn’t face him with her knowledge. Not when the anger and sympathy for him battled in her. Not when it would show so plainly in her expression that it would drive him away. It had happened once before. She couldn’t let it again. She couldn’t.
“Hey, what about these eggs?” he demanded from the kitchen, only the slightest edge to his voice giving him away.
Amanda fought the rush of frustration, the urge to salve that pain that had been accumulating for all these years. She had to step carefully now, and this would be the first one.
Until she knew what to do.
Until she had the courage to do it.
“Just what I like to see,” she retorted with a too-bright grin as she turned back for the kitchen, “a semi-naked man in my kitchen.”
Jake turned on her, outraged. “You don’t mean thatyouuse this cabin as a place for a...”
“Tryst?” she countered, sidling up to slip her arms around his bare chest, seeing the dark residue in his eyes and hurting for him. “You betcha, buddy. And I plan on continuing that, too, if I can find a rancher who will take time out of his busy day, that is.”
“Only if you keep feeding me lunch.”
“Watch it, big boy. I know where those broken ribs are, and I know how to hurt them.”
“So do I,” he said. “You make me get on a horse and ride you through the snow.”
Amanda gave him a quick punch to prove her point. He grunted agreeably and then dropped a kiss on her forehead. “Explain this to me,” he begged, wrapping his arms around her in return. “I haven’t taken time off from the ranch since I was in the hospital the time Alabaster broke my leg. And yet, here I am, in the middle of a work day, with my shoes off, making eggs Benedict, and I can’t seem to want to go back to fixing fences.”
“Sounds to me,” she offered lazily, hoping the staccato of her heart didn’t give her away, “like you’re falling in love.”
“I’ll let you know,” Jake informed her with another, longer kiss that involved some sighs, “after I’ve eaten the eggs Benedict.”
She really gave him a smack for that one. They ended up having to poach more eggs.
Amanda had no one to go to. No friend who would keep her confidence, no mentor to share sage counsel. She was two thousand miles from her resources, and caught in a town that would broadcast any and all attempts she made for help.
So the next day, instead of bringing her books back to the table, she climbed into the car and visited Pinedale, a town a good distance away. It took her most of the day just to track down the literacy resource group there. She returned the following day to update her information so that when she finally faced Jake with his secret, she could do it armed with the most current literature, the best outlook.
Amanda knew better, though. Reading was tough enough when you were seven, and everybody was learning at the same time. It was quite another when you were a grown man, struggling to comprehend something most people by then take for granted. It was the solution as much as the problem that battered at a man’s pride, and that was the only answer she had to give Jake. Even knowing that learning to read would be the logical answer, Amanda knew she had an uphill battle to get Jake to do it.
At first she was angry. At Jake, at his parents, at his family. How could a man so intelligent, so driven and quick, not demand the right to read? How could he just accept his handicap as a failing and leave it at that? Amanda had been brought up in a worse environment than Jake had, but she’d made it. She’d attacked school like a holy mission, had seen books as the magic carpet out of a house where chickens scratched at the door and old cars lay in pieces out in the yard.
But Amanda had been given the chance to go to school. Her parents had struggled hard to give her that, if they couldn’t give anything else to her and her brother. It had gotten her away. For William Paul, the mines had gotten him first.
It was the gift Jake had given his family. A gift he’d given at his own expense, pushing them through their schooling by sheer willpower, sometimes. Nagging, demanding, encouraging. And all the while left behind by the very gift he was giving. Because to give them the chance to stay together, to stay in school and escape the grinding poverty that was all his father had been able to leave him, he’d forfeited his own chance at freedom.
Not freedom from the ranch. Amanda truly believed that Jake Kendall would wither up and die any place other than the Wyoming mountains where his horses grazed the meadows and the mountains crowded the sky. But the freedom to dream, to ever step beyond the tiny, controlled world he’d created and then finally become imprisoned in.
Jake’s way. Everybody said it, but nobody really understood it. And that made Amanda angriest of all.
She had to get him away from the ranch to talk to him. And she had to do it before Lee came home. She wasn’t looking forward to it.
The card. That stupid, silly little card he hadn’t seen in years. Jake shook just thinking about it, the crinkle of that paper in his hands, the bright smudges of colors Lee had collected into flowers. The silly sentiment he’d made her read to him, because she knew he liked her to read as much as possible. Just to learn. To learn to read well so that she could do whatever she’d wanted in the world.
He could still hear her reedy little voice, caught between defiance, assurance and fear. Reading her own words, and then carefully explaining to him that she’d had to scratch out one of the bests because he hadn’t allowed her to have her very own cat in the house. Not a barn cat, she’d explained, that ate mice and moved too fast to catch. A nice, fat tabby that would give her hugs when Jake wouldn’t.
He heard the words again, heard his own gruff laughter at his sister’s logic. But he’d never been able to have those words to himself. Never once, in all the years the kids had written, Gen from med school, Zeke from the sites, and now, Lee, his baby sister, so far away he couldn’t ever think of visiting her, and it had been Betty who’d heard about her loneliness first, her sense of disorientation in the big city, her homesickness. It had been Betty who had smiled first, like a caregiver seeing a child’s first steps.
