Texas Redeemed Read Free

the
key fob as she tried to lock her Chrysler crossover and walk backward across
the east-wing lot toward the hospital entrance at the same time. “What
doesn’t?” she asked her daughter, Lucy, who stood on the other side of the
vehicle, burdened with a heavy backpack, an oversized hobo handbag and a huge
red-and-white umbrella that had seen better days.
    “The chant, ‘rain, rain, go away.’ It doesn’t work at all, ” the girl said darkly, her scowl
emphasizing the subtle slant of her long-lidded eyes. She tried the passenger
side door handle and rain splashed the interior when her grip and the blustery
wind hauled the door open wider than she’d intended. “Car’s still unlocked,
Mom.”
    “Shut it, please, and let me try again.” Getting used to
a vehicle with so many gadgets that her old Grand Prix had lacked was a slow
process. Valerie tried the lock button again, pressing twice firmly. The
taillights flashed and the vehicle beeped, announcing that the doors were
locked and the alarm activated.
    Lightning speared through the gray sky with a startling
crackle and thunder reverberated in the October air.
    Lucy’s mouth contorted in a pout as she rounded the rear
of the car and joined her mother in just a few strides.
    At twelve, she’d had one growth spurt after the other,
and was now as tall as her mother and the tallest girl in the seventh grade by
nearly a foot. She had the long-limbed, coltish build that Valerie had had as a
teen. But she had her father’s sulky look, his smoky eyes and a softly cleft
chin. Her toffee-brown hair had a curl to it, and she was known for sectioning
a triangle at the front and pinning it back with the old jeweled hairclip that
had belonged to her twin sister, Anna.
    “I hate hospitals.” Lucy looked at Valerie in a way she
never had when she was a child and thought her mother could fix anything. “No
offense.”
    “If you meant ‘no offense,’ you wouldn’t have said it,”
Valerie retorted. The hospital’s doors slid open and they stepped inside.
    Lucy’s bad moods fell into either of two plain-and-simple
categories: quiet or loud. Ask any parent within a twenty-mile radius and
they’d disagree, but Valerie preferred the latter. A fired-up and vocal Lucy
was the devil that she knew. But it was the devil that she didn’t know—the Lucy
who could be withdrawn and deceptively calm like the eye of a cyclone—that
worried her. The girl was the product of two magma-hot-tempered bloodlines, and
Valerie knew that the only thing worse than setting anger free like a wild
horse would be to tuck it away and let it brew.
    If serving after-school detention and then having a bus
splash her with muddy rainwater didn’t get stuck in the girl’s craw, missing a
get-together with her friends surely did.
    Because instead of hanging out at the diner, scarfing
down one of Bud Frowler’s famous quarter-pound Angus cheeseburgers and Junie
Peera’s “tie-dye” milkshakes—which were the same as any other milkshake, except
they looked like victims of food coloring explosions—she’d be cooling her heels
at the hospital while Valerie attended a board meeting.
    Between holding down the ranch and keeping up with Lucy,
Valerie hadn’t time for much else. Still, Night Sky Memorial Hospital’s
children’s foundation was especially important to her family, and she’d never
considered giving up her position on the board.
    Valerie hustled to the nurses’ station to borrow a set of
scrubs for Lucy, and then checked the nearest mirror for smeared makeup.
    She touched the silvery scar just shy of her left eye. A
makeup counter saleswoman had said the crescent moon gave Valerie’s face character.
But there was a story behind the scar many people probably wouldn’t want to
hear.
    As Valerie and her daughter hustled toward the elevators
that would take them to Pediatrics, Lucy slapped at the construction-paper
cutouts of cartoonish spiders and ghosts that hung by strings from the