High Noon by Nora Roberts Page A

enough.”
    “Mama, is he your boyfriend?”
    “He’s just someone I’m going to have dinner with tomorrow,” Phoebe told Carly.
    “’Cause Sherrilynn’s big sister has a boyfriend, and he makes her cry all the time. She lays across the bed in her room and cries all the time, Sherrilynn says.”
    “And I bet Sherrilynn’s big sister enjoys every minute of it.” Phoebe reached down to cup Carly’s face. “I’m not much of a crier myself.”
    “You cried when you called Roy last time.”
    A mother could never hide tears from a child, and a mother who thought she could was delusional. “Not so very much. I’m going to go up and change. I heard a rumor it’s pizza night around here.”
    “And DVD and popcorn night!”
    “I heard that, too. I want to go take off my work, and put on my play.”
    Upstairs, Phoebe sat on the side of the bed. Could a mother ever really protect her child from her mistakes, or the ripples from them that spread all through a life?
    Weren’t they in this house now because of a single event from more than twenty years before? Weren’t they all who they were, with their lives tangled together under this roof, because of that steamy summer night when she was twelve? Decisions she made, actions she took, even words she spoke would affect her daughter forever. Just as her mother’s had affected her.
    Mama had done her best, Phoebe thought. But trusting a man with herself, with her children, had changed the course of their world.
    And she remembered it all, every movement, every moment, as if it were yesterday.
     
    The room was a box of heat, stained with the grease of his sweat. He’d begun to swig whiskey straight from the bottle of Wild Turkey Mama kept up high in the kitchen cupboard, so the stench of whiskey added another smear to the trapped air.
    Phoebe hoped he’d drink enough to pass out before he used the .45 clutched in his free hand that he’d taken to waving around like a mean little boy with a pointy stick.
    Put your eye out, you’re not careful.
    He’d already fired off a few rounds, but just to kill lamps or bric-a-brac and put holes in the walls. He’d held it to Mama’s head, too, screaming and cursing as he’d dragged her across the floor by her long red hair.
    But he hadn’t shot Mama, not yet, or made good on his threats to put a bullet in Phoebe’s little brother Carter, or Phoebe herself.
    But he could, he could, and he made sure they knew he would if they gave him any goddamn lip. So fear lived in the box, too, a terrible, helpless fear that hung in the trapped air like blackflies.
    Though all the shades were drawn or the curtains pulled tight over the windows, she knew the police were outside. He talked to them on the phone, Reuben did. She wished she knew what they were saying to him because he mostly calmed down afterward.
    If she knew, for sure, what they said to calm him, maybe she could say it, too, in the in-between times he got tired of talking to them and hung up the phone and before he stirred himself up hot again and they had to try to cool him off, one more time.
    He called the person on the other end of the phone Dave, as if they were friends, and once he’d gone on a long ramble about fishing.
    Now, he’d gone back to pacing and drinking and cursing. The terrible in-between time. Phoebe no longer flinched when he swung the barrel of the gun toward the sofa where she and Carter huddled.
    She was too tired to flinch.
    He’d broken in just after supper, when the sun had still been up. It had been down a long time now. So long, she thought maybe it would be coming up again before long.
    Reuben had shot the pretty little clock with the mother-of-pearl face that had been a wedding present to Mama and Daddy, where it sat on the dropleaf table, so Phoebe couldn’t be sure how many hours had passed since its death at five minutes past seven.
    Mama loved that clock. Phoebe knew that’s why Reuben had killed it, because Mama set such store by that