The Man She Once Knew Read Free

taught him.
    When the police had come to arrest him, he’d left the knife behind so it wouldn’t be confiscated in jail. His fingers had gone blind after that, no longer able to create beauty or humor from only a stick, a block of wood. The last carving he’d completed before prison was one he wasn’t ready to see yet.
    He flexed his hands, his father’s hands, then closed his fingers one by one into a fist.
    No. Not yet. Until he could carve with the rage purged from his heart, he would leave the knife unopened.
    David shook himself like a dog shedding rain.
    Lock it down. Get a grip.
     
    C ALLIE HALTED two steps into the kitchen. Unbelievably, the small, scrubbed-to-an-inch-of-its-life house still smelled of the lavender water Miss Margaret used to iron her sheets, underlaid by frying bacon, homemade bread and a million or so cups of mint tea. She expected the older woman to pop around the corner any second.
    By rote, Callie had entered the back door from the driveway. The front door was only for company, Miss Margaret had told her that first day. Callie was family, she’d insisted, however little Callie could believe back then that she belonged anywhere, especially in this warm refuge.
    Callie glanced out the picture window that had been Miss Margaret’s pride and joy, the one that gave her great-aunt a good view of the backyard she’d labored so many hours to create. Oh, she’d tended the front and sides, as well—weeds were not tolerated, and she’d had an eagle’s eye for the slightest up-cropping—but the back was where her heart was planted. Vegetable garden off in the right-hand corner, roses lining the left. In between lay her rock garden, an exotic Southwestern creation as out of place in these ancient, rounded green mountains as Miss Margaret would have been in the desert.
    I do believe I was a cowgirl in another life, she would say. On my one trip to Los Angeles by train, I saw the desert for the first time and something in my soul expanded. A look of intense regret would furrow her brow at the mention, but she never explained beyond one admonition. Do not let your dreams pass you by, Callie Anne. When your heart tells you you’re home, you listen, you hear me?
    Miss Margaret had been as foreign to a fourteen-year-old in full rebellion as a rose was to a coyote. Callie had rolled her eyes that first time, but after seeing the hurt she’d dealt to someone more harmless and innocent than Callie had ever been, she’d kept her cynicism to herself. Miss Margaret had been out of another century and older than dirt to boot in Callie’s view, but a kindness in her smoothed off some of the edges of Callie’s wild misery.
    Miss Margaret had taken one look at her full-on Goth attire and pressed her lips together so hard they’d nearlydisappeared. Just when Callie was ready to bolt, Miss Margaret had confided that two of her little earrings resembled a pair she’d wanted when she was young, except that her father would have sent her to the woodshed for piercing her ears. Ladies didn’t do that, she’d said, then, with a puckish grin, she’d asked if Callie thought she was too old to try it now.
    An astonished Callie had found herself offering to do the deed.
    The Callie who stood in nearly the same spot now was surprised to find herself smiling.
    Okay . She exhaled slowly. It’s only one night.
    She walked through the space, trailing her fingers over the old Tell City maple table and chairs in front of the picture window, the rocking recliner where Miss Margaret had sat to watch her television at night. Beside it stood a table groaning under the weight of not only a lamp but a good six months’ worth of catalogs and magazines and, of course, Miss Margaret’s ever-present King James Bible.
    Callie stooped and started to pick up the Bible but faltered, her fingers instead drifting over the cracked leather binding, the gold cross worn nearly transparent.
    Then she spotted the grocery list begun but not