Chapter 21: No Messenger

Waylon's POV

Her mother was on my porch at six on Saturday morning, the day her daughter should have been married.

She sat in the rocker in last night's navy dress, with her purse on her knees and her pearls still on.

I stood in the doorway in my socks.

Behind me the house was dark, with Ray snoring on the couch and Samantha asleep upstairs.

"Mr. Corrigan," Dot Larkham said.

"Mrs. Larkham."

"I'd like you to give your girl a message."

She didn't look like the woman from the diner anymore.

Her bob was flat on one side from the car seat.

"I'll hear it," I said. "I won't carry it."

"I'm sorry?"

"Say what you came to say to me, and I'll tell you whether I'll pass it on."

She smoothed her skirt over her knees.

"I'd like her to know I'm sorry," she said.

"I'll say it in my own time, in the right way. But I can't go through the front door of that diner with the whole town looking."

"So you want me to tell her to wait."

"I want you to tell her to come home next Sunday. Just us. A nice dinner. She listens to you."

"No."

"I beg your pardon?"

"She's got a mouth of her own, Mrs. Larkham."

"I only meant..."

"I won't carry a message that asks her to put herself back in your house."

"It's only a dinner."

"It was only a rest stop."

She went very still.

I hadn't meant to say it so flat.

I took a breath and tried again, quieter.

"I'm not saying it to be hard. I sat in my truck at that plaza and watched your van pull out."

She stared at me.

"I did nothing for forty minutes. I know what it costs to say sorry for that. You can't hand it off to somebody else."

Her lip trembled.

"I never saw it, you know," she said. "Samantha. Not once. She was always so easy."

"She wasn't easy. She was quiet."

"What's the difference?"

"A person who's easy isn't carrying anything."

She looked down.

Then she reached into her purse and took out a flat tin, the kind that holds shortbread at Christmas.

She set it on the porch rail between us.

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