Searching for Cate Read Free

among other things, had done such a good job with Lukas, he’d decided to stay on and offer his own brand of rough-handed counseling to some of the other troubled teenagers on the reservation. He built a gym and gave them a way to work off their anger productively. In his late sixties and fifteen years’ his mother’s senior, the man gave no sign of letting up despite the emergency bypass surgery he’d received from Lukas some years back.
    Grit and determination against all odds ran in the family. Henry had pulled himself out of a self-destructive lifestyle that would have killed him before he reached forty. Lukas had become the first of their family not just to graduate high school and college, but to become a doctor. And Christian was the second.
    Christian’s mouth curved slightly. He and Lukas both owed a great deal to their mother, who had refused to follow a path of self-indulgence and self-pity, the way so many other of her contemporaries had. Just to put her sons through school, she’d worked two jobs without a word of complaint, behaving as if it was the norm.
    At fifty-three, Juanita Graywolf looked younger now than he remembered her looking while he was growing up. Back then, he thought of her as just his mother, who was also a schoolteacher. Now she was principal of the school where she’d once sat in the back row as a student. It was the reservation’s only school, taking children from kindergarten to twelfth grade. His mother had almost single-handedly brought up the standard of teaching there, so that now the school was held up as an example to other reservations.
    She was a remarkable woman, and he had grown up thinking that all women were that strong, that determined not to allow life to best them.
    His late Alma had shown him how wrong he was.
    Juanita suppressed a chuckle. “It sounds like your ride is grumbling,” she said as she nodded toward the rear of the small house.
    There had been just three rooms when Henry had come to live with them, a combination living room and kitchen and two small bedrooms. The first thing Henry had done was add on his own room. After that, he’d built on another room and expanded the living room, then added a porch. Henry liked to say that he left his mark wherever he went. Truer words were never spoken.
    Christian finished the remainder of the black pitch in his coffee cup and set it on the table. “Uncle Henry wouldn’t be Uncle Henry if he didn’t grumble.”
    Juanita looked at her son, her mother’s heart tugging hard. He looked so sad, so different from the boy he’d once been. Her brain told her to avoid the subject, to let it slide, because to raise it would serve no purpose,heal no wounds. The fact that Christian had gone there told her that the wound he bore was far from healed.
    Seasons had gone by. And it was time he let go of the past.
    Long past time.
    Juanita almost wished that Christian wouldn’t come home as frequently as he did. She dearly loved seeing him, loved seeing both her sons when they came to work at the clinic to tend to the sick and the forgotten. But whenever Christian came, he was also returning to the scene of his greatest heartache.
    She would rather never see him again than have him relive his pain, time and again.
    He needed to put it all behind him. And she couldn’t hold her tongue any longer. It wasn’t in her. She set down her cup again and looked into his eyes. “You went there, didn’t you?”
    â€œWhy shouldn’t I?” He met her gaze unwaveringly. Of her two sons, Christian was the more sensitive one. The one more like her.
    â€œWhy should you?” Juanita challenged. She spoke quickly, before he could answer. Before he could defend actions that to her were undefendable. “Christian, every time you go, you come back with this look on your face, as if your heart has been torn out of your chest all over again. As if,” she