A Heart's Home - Chapter One

Chapter One - Rough Draft - Not complete

Please read the Prologue first (located in my port). Thanks.



Chapter One


It was January. That period after Christmas and New Year’s when the excitement of the season begins to slowly ebb away and the temperatures bring you back to reality with a bitterly cold wind at your back.

That particular night I was nursing a sprained ankle, having twisted it earlier that day during a nasty incident in the dairy barn with a very obstinate pregnant heifer named Princess Margaret. Apparently the vet, Dr. Jon had applied a bit too much pressure when he checked for her baby’s heartbeat. She’d scuttled away from him in the straw, then turned and gave me a kick in the upper thigh that left me sprawled out in the straw by the feed bin with my left ankle twisted slightly under me and a string of unholy curses flying from my lips.

Dr. Jon helped me to the house with Mark’s assistance and left me in Mary’s capable hands while they finished checking the pregnant heifers. After Mary had me comfortably settled on one of the sofas in the family room with my ankle on ice, I suddenly realized that it was my Dad’s birthday. So Mary brought me the cordless phone.

My father and I always had a strained relationship. Maybe in a way I blamed him for my mother’s death. She was taken from us in a car accident when I was only three and Dad and Nanny were really the ones who raised me. But Dad was always working. He owned his own tire store and it had taken him a long time to build it up to what it was when Nanny passed away. It always seemed that the store was more important to him than I was, but I never brought the subject up with him. Nanny and I would discuss it occasionally, but she was quick to assure me that my father loved me very much and that his work really was wrought with the intention of providing a good life for me.

Not knowing the security of having a mother’s constant love was hard enough. But for my father to spend every weekday and Saturday working until seven or eight o’clock at night turned me into a virtual orphan over the years. I could never feel comfortable opening up to him about my dreams for the future or the nightmares that kept me awake some nights. I didn’t trust him to know those things or expect him to feel any empathy should I actually find the courage to speak the words. So there was a wall between us that grew higher and stronger as the years passed.

There were endless babysitters. I played softball in junior high, but he never had time to attend any games. We never shared popcorn at a movie theater. He never sat with me at the kitchen table at night to help with some ridiculous math problem for homework. Always too busy. Too many things to attend to at the store. No time.

His cell phone rang twice before he answered, “Bill here.”

“Happy birthday, Dad.” I said, trying to sound upbeat.

“Sarah.” His voice didn’t sound right to me somehow. The low gravity of his tone hinted at more than just the usual fatigue of a long day’s work.

“Are you okay?” I asked him, worrying that maybe his health wasn’t good.

“I’m alright.” There was a slight pause and the sound of a bottle opening in the background before he continued in a more level sounding voice, “Just having a beer or two to celebrate. How are you? Everything going okay down there?”

“Sure. How’s work?” I already knew the answer. It was the same one he always gave me.

“’Bout the same.” Another hesitation. I could tell he’d probably been drinking for a little while, “Mark doing alright?”

“Yeah. Weather’s been pretty cold. How about up there?” Small talk. Always small talk with him and not much else. I couldn’t wait to get off the phone.

“Six inches of snow on the ground and another four or five expected tonight. You know how it is.” There was an audible short interruption in the line and he said, “Oh, I’ve got another call coming in, Sarah. You take care. Okay, honey?”

“Okay, Dad. Happy birthday.” The line went dead. I pressed the off button on the cordless phone and stared into the jumping flames of the fireplace in front of me, hearing the crackling and popping of the hard pine, smelling the aroma of it and yet all I could think about was when I’d left Indiana three years earlier.

Though the wall stood strong between us, my heart ached a little when I packed for Texas. I kept thinking if I just gave it one more chance, maybe a crack might develop in that wall. Maybe just a little courage from each of us might change things. But when I stopped at the store on the way to the airport to say goodbye, his weathered tired face seemed to show the slightest expression of relief.

Once the plane was in the air, the grief of losing Nanny and the realization that my father wasn’t all that sad to see me leaving hit me like a hurricane of anguish. In an effort not to disturb the other passengers, I kept silent with my face turned towards the window and let the tears fall. I ignored the stewardess when she asked what I’d like to drink. I ignored everything around me until the wheels touched down at DFW.

Then through the thick black emotional clouds that seemed to hover all around me, I saw the sun shining down on the tarmac, and I thought about Nanny.

“Oh, you silly girl.” She’d say with one of her gentle smiles, “Your life is just beginning. Don’t you grieve for an old lady who was ready to go. And don’t you waste time feeling badly about your father. He’s just a man who never knew any better.”

I got off the plane a little lighter. And seeing Mark and Mary standing there outside of the security gate waiting for me with hopeful smiles on their faces brought a different kind of tear to my eye. Happy tears were new to me.

And as the heat of the flames warmed the toes of my one good foot there by the fire after the short call to my Dad on his birthday, I had the strangest feeling that I had yet to experience a true heartache. My Dad had lost his wife before it was time. And Nanny had lost Grandpa when he was only sixty-two. I couldn’t quite get a grasp on that kind of loss. It made my losses seem kind of silly.

“How’s your father?” Mary glided into the room and handed me a plate of steaming roast beef, mashed potatoes, corn and a hot buttered biscuit. I yawned and thanked her. The pain medication she’d given me earlier was starting to kick in and I was feeling a bit groggy from it. She pulled a wooden TV tray out from a nearby utility closet and moved it close so that I might put my plate on it.

“He sounded tired, as always.” I answered, beginning to cut my meat but having a bit of trouble moving my fingers correctly, “What was that stuff you gave me, anyway? I’m feeling really weird.”

“It was hydrocodone.” She answered, “We had a little left over from when Mark broke his arm, remember?”

It took me a few moments before I realized she was staring at me with a grin on her face. I looked up from my plate and asked with a mouth full of roast beef, “What?”

She giggled, “You’ve still got straw in your hair. And I think you’ve a bit of manure on your chin.”

“Oh, great.” I put down my fork and rubbed at my chin with the napkin she’d given me. Cautiously I sniffed the dark smudge and sighed in relief. Just dirt. Laughing, she rushed off to get a washcloth and I continued eating. I’d had her mashed potatoes many times before, but they’d never tasted quite that delicious. Probably the drugs, I thought.

I heard the front door open out in the foyer and an unfamiliar male voice called out, “Hello? Anybody home?”

“Come on in.” I called, my voice sounding strange and heavy in my throat.

“Mary?” A man appeared around the corner of the large fireplace who I’d never seen before. I would have remembered this one.

He was tall. Perhaps six foot two or so. Recently flattened, perhaps by the cowboy hat he held politely in his hands, the golden brown waves of his hair nearly reached his shoulders. Most of it had escaped from a ponytail at the base of his neck. The angles of his face were smooth, the cheekbones being unusually high for such a masculine frame. His eyebrows were amber and arched over a very expressive pair of azure blue eyes. Those amazing eyes widened upon encountering me there before the fire.

I suddenly realized the state I was in. I had straw in my dingy black hair. I had just taken another huge bite of mashed potatoes when he’d rounded the corner. I probably still had dirt on my chin and who knows where else. My ankle was so swollen, it looked like a football attached to my leg. The bruises were slowly beginning to show as well. It was not a pretty moment for me.

Mary chose that particular moment to enter with a warm washrag and noticed the stranger there staring at me.

“Jordan! What a surprise!” She glanced at me quickly, “Have you met Mark’s niece, Sarah?”

Jordan. The name rang a bell. But the haze creeping over me from the pain medication was taking its toll. I didn’t quite remember what happened next. I recalled trying to get up for some reason and knocking over the TV tray. But after that, I could recall nothing about the rest of that evening.

When I woke up the next morning, I was safe in my bed and the sun was spreading its bright glow across the embroidered flowers of the quilt covering me. My ankle was propped up and was still very painful when I attempted to move it at all. I sank back against the soft pillows and sighed.

“Crap.”

“Good morning, sunshine.” Uncle Mark was standing in the doorway of my bedroom with a mischievous smirk on his freshly-shaved face, “How ya feeling?”

Mark was ten years younger than my father. There were vast differences between the two of them that manifested themselves more in the way they carried themselves and interacted with others than in physical appearances. Mark was easy going and carried an air of satisfaction in his features that my father never had. He was never tense and never looked overwrought or stressed as my father often did. I could only surmise that Mary’s influence had induced a deep sense of peace within Mark that couldn’t be touched or twisted by any outside influences such as work or money problems.

Like Dad and myself, Mark had a head of dark curls that were nearly ebony. Like us, his nose turned up just slightly at the end. His eyes were sea green like Grandpa’s had been, while my father and I had inherited Nanny’s grayish blue color.

Mark’s green eyes crinkled at the outside as he chuckled at me, “You were a mess last night.”

“Ugh.” I pulled the quilt over my head and groaned, “I don’t want to know.”

“Leave her alone.” Mary slid past him with a little smile on her serene face and folded the end of the quilt over so she could have a look at my ankle, “It looks better, Sarah. I’m sure it still pains you, but I think we’ll stick to Tylenol from now on, alright?”

“Excellent suggestion.” I murmured, rubbing my eyes.

“You made quite an impression on Jordan last night.” Mark said with another annoying grin, “I’ll check back in with you later to see how you’re doing.” He kissed Mary and left.

The embarrassment came rushing over me again as the hazy memory of the evening before began to come into focus. As Mary applied a new cold wrap to my ankle, I asked her about Jordan.

“I’ve heard the name before. Is he the one who went to Iraq?” I inquired with a grimace as she applied a bit of pressure to my throbbing ankle.

She wiped her hands on a towel nearby and nodded, “He’s a photojournalist. He was there for two years.” She shook her head sadly and covered my foot back up, “I can’t imagine what bloody horrors he’s seen there. I don’t think I want to know.”





Jordan awoke covered in perspiration and trembling. The images from his nightmare were fresh and haunting. Sand-encrusted bodies, broken on a desolate desert roadway. In a deserted street market, a compact German car blackened by a surprise explosion amid bloodied heaps of torn and rotting limbs covered in flies . Sleep was a necessity, but he dreaded closing his eyes each night.