“No.” Dyma sat up straighter. “No, because the brown wolf was you, Owen.” She got even more animated, her face lighting up, like the energy inside was propelling her onward. “We skied around this corner beside the river, because we were on the … the …”
“The Lone Star Trail,” Jennifer put in. She was looking tense. Troubled. She took another sip of whiskey, then smiled with the kind of determination that meant she was shaking it off. Harlan wanted to put a hand over hers, but he didn’t, because he couldn’t get a read on her.
“And my mom said something,” Dyma said, “but I didn’t hear, and then she skied up beside me and put her hand on my arm and whispered, ‘Stop.’ And pointed. Her hand was shaking. It was really dramatic. And there they were. Wolves.”
“Wait,” Harlan said. “Your mom? Your mom’s here, too? But where … She wasn’t with you when you came out.” They had looked shaken, nearly frantic, especially Jennifer, but—what? They’d left somebody behind? Not possible.
Dyma said, “What?”
Jennifer sighed, took another swallow of her drink, and said, “She means me. I’m the mom.”
9
The White Wolf
Everybody got very still, and Jennifer had to laugh.
She was still keyed up about every single bit of this, but she had to laugh. She asked Dyma, “How long were you expecting me to wait before I told them? I’ve been about to tell them since we sat down here, but all these things kept happening.” And then she told Owen, “She’s eighteen.”
Kris said, “OK. Now you do sound like a mom.” He grinned, though, and she laughed again and finished off her whiskey. It was so smooth, it tasted like you were drinking melted caramel. If melted caramel warmed up your entire self like it was running through your veins, that is. He said, “Need another one of those? I’m thinking ‘yes.’”
“Maybe,” she said. “Normally I’d say absolutely not, but tonight? Who knows. I’m so far out of my comfort zone, I don’t even have a road map.”
“Also,” Dyma said, “I’m nineteen in three months.”
“When do you graduate from high school, though?” Owen asked. “That’s the key question. I’m hoping for, ‘Oh, no, I’m in college.’”
“Nope,” Dyma said. “Four more months for that, but I’m leaving with a whole, whole lot of college credit. I’m blasting through to that B.S. just as fast as I can, and then I’m keeping on going. Places to go. Things to do.” She drummed her hands on the table.
Kris said, “Wait.” He was looking at Jennifer again, the blue eyes intense, and she got that dizzy thing again. Definitely the whiskey. He said, “Indelicate as it is to mention a lady’s age … you can’t be her mom.”
Dyma said, “She’d just turned sixteen when she had me, is why. Barely fifteen when she got knocked up. Some high school career, huh?”
The blood drained from Jennifer’s head. She felt it happen.
Kris put a hand over hers. Just resting there, that was all. He told Dyma, who had some pink in her own cheeks, “That’s a pretty lousy way to put it, don’t you think?”
“Hey,” Dyma said, still trying to brazen it out, “we live in a small town. It’s not a secret.”
Jennifer stood up, still feeling a little lightheaded, and said, “I’ll go … order another round.”
Kris stood up, too. “Sounds good. I’ll go with you. Ready to move on to beer, Owen?”
“Nope,” Owen said. “I’ll take another cider, though.” His brown eyes were watchful and calm, and so was his voice. It was a very deep voice.
Half of Jennifer wanted to make a run for the ladies’ room. Why, though? So Dyma had said that, and it had come out flippant and almost … cruel. It was true all the same, and it always had been. But ... her daughter. For whose sake she’d done all of it. She thought that, too?
She headed to the bar and told Kris, keeping her voice steady, “She’s just excited. This trip is … pretty unusual for us, and she’s graduating soon, like she said. She’s halfway gone already, she maybe feels a little guilty about that, and she wants to be …”
“Grown up,” Kris said. “It wasn’t a very nice way to say it, but hey. We’ve all been there.” He told the bartender, “Get us another round, would you?”
“Two Gentleman Jacks neat, two hot ciders,” the barman said. “Coming up.”
“Oh,” Jennifer said. “I was going to get this one.”
“Nope,” Kris said. “My treat. Want to hang out here a second with me, lose some of the drama?”
She hesitated. “I want that so much, you cannot imagine. I hate drama, and yet drama just keeps showing up. I should go back there, though. Talk to her.”
“Oh, I expect Owen’s talking to her,” Kris said. “It’s kind of his specialty, setting people straight.”
“Not if he’s going to yell at her,” Jennifer said. “She’s young, that’s all, and sort of … heady with excitement.”
He sighed. “I definitely believe that you’re the mom. Nope. He knows how. Trust me.”
“It’s one of my rules,” she said, the words somehow slipping out before she could call them back, “that when a man says, ‘Trust me,’ he usually means, ‘Look into my hypnotizing eyes and lose your better judgment.’”
Kris laughed, and even after he stopped, he kept on grinning. The barman put the drinks in front of them, and he touched his glass to hers and said, “You’re pretty special, aren’t you? Look into my hypnotizing eyes and drink up.”
This time, she was the one laughing. He grinned some more, and she laughed harder, until she was holding her stomach, pressing the napkin to her mouth, and eventually, getting the hiccups.
“Oh—hic—shoot,” she said on a gasp. “This isn’t how I—hic—planned this to go.”
“Glass of water?” Kris asked the barman, and when it came, he told Jennifer, “Sip it slow. Take your time. I’ll go deliver these, and then I’m right back with you. We’ve got nowhere to go but here, so just relax and take it easy, and when those hiccups are gone? You can tell me that wolf story.”
When Harlan got to the table with the drinks, Dyma jumped up and said, “I should go talk to my mom. Owen says I was a jerk.”
“I didn’t say that,” Owen said. “I said it came out wrong.” His tone was mild, the way he talked when he was running his football camp for kids, not the way he’d talk to a rookie. Which was good, if it meant he was treating her like a kid. Eighteen might be legal, but it sure as hell wasn’t twenty-one. A guy could get confused, because she sure was cute, but Harlan had three little sisters. Eighteen wasn’t twenty-one.
Harlan said, “I’ll tell her. Hey, Owen, want to see if they’ve got a table for us in there? Ten minutes?”
“You bet,” Owen said.