Homesick Creek by Diane Hammond Page A

giggling, eyes as clear and all-seeing as a crystal ball. In her eyes Hack had found reason to hope, after such a long time. Vinny brought him through the Valley of the Shadow of Death as surely as any angel, kept him from the memories that had chased him there, cornering him in a box canyon he hadn’t thought there could be any way out of. God, to have a little girl in his arms again after coming through such a wasteland.
    So he’d courted Bunny with furious intent; he’d have offered her Venus and Saturn, if she’d wanted them as part of the deal, and then figured out some way to make good. She hadn’t, of course, but she’d asked for plenty else: fidelity; a house she could be proud of; a look the other way when she and Shirl drank too much sitting up there on Shirl’s deck in the summer sun; all those damned stuffed bunnies, until he’d have joyfully set Elmer Fudd on them, or whoever that cartoon character was that hunted wabbit.
    Not that Bunny was a bad wife, not by any stretch. She was tolerant, by and large, and had learned not to ask questions that she didn’t want to hear the answers to. Except this Rae thing had thrown her, turned the clock back to the days when he still transgressed from time to time, never infidelity, not really, not to the letter anyway; just a little casual playtime off on one of the logging roads back of Hubbard, a little head, a little hand job maybe, and then home in time for dinner. The thing of it was, none of them had ever loved him, and he’d never even seen any of them again; they were strictly roadhouse booty passing through.
    But this time maybe Bunny was right to worry. This thing with Rae was completely different. She was in love with him or at least well on the way down that road. A smart girl like her, a sophisticated girl, made him nervous sometimes, made him afraid he wouldn’t understand what she was saying, like those damned poems she wrote and wanted to talk about with him. He hadn’t made it through eleventh grade; what the hell did he know about poetry? While pretty boys like her husband Mr. Briefcase had been studying poetry in high school classrooms, he’d been busy taking care of the Katydid, making rent money at Howdy’s Market, scrounging up odd jobs to keep some kind of car going.
    Like Rae, though, the Katydid had loved poetry. One of her most treasured possessions was an old poetry book she’d bought herself and read to him every night. The one about the gingham dog and the calico cat was her favorite for a long time, a funny choice, its being the story of two nursery toys tearing each other limb from limb in the night. He’d teased her about that, but she loved to read it anyway, night after night in their sucky little apartment behind the Tin Spoon Laundro-Queen.
    There it was. With Rae Macy somehow came Katy—now, again, after all these years and all the miles—and it had been like that since the first day Rae had walked in the door. He didn’t know what it was about her that made this cave of memory suddenly yawn before him like eternity, except that she was smart like the Katydid, and she seemed to
see
him, to see right through the muscles and bones to his heart. Maybe the Katydid would have turned out like that if she’d grown up and become a woman.
    Now, sitting at his desk in a puddle of weak sunlight, he lifted his telephone receiver. “Hi, beautiful,” he said when Rae picked up the phone in her cubicle across the showroom.
    “Hi.”
    “Come see me when you can. I want to talk to you about something.”
    “I’ll be right there,” she said, and almost immediately appeared in his doorway. She was anxious. Not being able to understand what a woman like her, a woman with money and beauty and options, could possibly be anxious about, he tended to forget how anxious she was. He stood and gestured to his plastic visitor’s chair, an ugly orange thing.
    “Is everything all right?” she asked, searching his face for clues.
    He smiled