Montana Sky

couldn’t look at him, turned her face away. “I’ll start with Jesse. Could I cook breakfast?”
    He held a cup in his hand as he stared at her. “What?”
    “It will be easier for me if I have something to do while I talk. I don’t know if I can get it out just sitting here.”
    Since it was what she wanted, he set the cup down,walked to the table, and sat. “There’s bacon in the refrigerator. And eggs.”
    She let out a long, unsteady breath. “Good.” She went to the coffee first, poured him a cup. But her gaze avoided his. “I told you a little,” she began as she went to the refrigerator. “About how I was teaching. I was never as smart or as creative as my mother. She’s amazing, Adam. So strong and vital. I didn’t know until I was twelve how much he’d hurt her. My father. I heard her talking to a friend once, crying. She’d just met my stepfather, and she was, I realize now, afraid of her feelings for him. She was talking about preferring to be alone, about never wanting to be vulnerable to a man again. About how my father had turned her out, and she’d been so much in love with him. He’d turned her out, she said, because she hadn’t given him a son.”
    Adam said nothing as she arranged bacon in a black iron frying pan and set it to sizzle. “So it was because of me that she was alone and afraid.”
    “You know better than that, Lily. It was because of Jack Mercy.”
    “My heart knows it.” She smiled a little. “It’s my head again. In any case, I never forgot that. She did marry my stepfather two years later. And they’re very happy. He’s a wonderful man. He was strict with me. Never harsh, but strict, and a bit remote. It was my mother he wanted, and I came with the package. He wanted the best for me, gave me all he could, but he could never give me the kind of easy affection there might have been between a father and daughter. It was, I guess, too late in starting for us.”
    “And you were hungry for that easy affection.”
    “Oh, starved.” She whipped eggs in a bowl. “I got a lot of this out of therapy and counseling much later. It’s so easy to see it now. I’d never had a warm, loving relationship with a male figure. I’d never had a man focused on me. And I was shy, crushingly shy in school, with boys. I didn’t date much, and I was very serious about my studies.”
    Her smile was a bit more natural as she grated cheese into the eggs. “Terribly serious. I couldn’t see things the waymy mother could, so I rooted myself in facts and figures. And I was good with children, so teaching seemed a natural course. I was twenty-two and teaching fifth grade when I met Jesse. In a coffee shop near my apartment. My first apartment, the first month I was out on my own. He was so charming, so handsome, so interested in me. I was dazzled.”
    Automatically she sprinkled dill in the beaten eggs, ground a hint of pepper over them. “I suppose he picked me up. That was a new experience for me. We went to the movies that same evening. And he called me every day after school. Brought me flowers and little gifts. He was a mechanic, and he tuned up this pitiful car I had.”
    “You fell in love with him,” Adam concluded.
    “Oh, yes, completely, blindly in love. I never looked past the surface with Jesse, didn’t know I should. Later I could pick out the lies he’d told me. About his family, his past, his work. His mother, I found out later, was in an institution. She’d beaten him as a child, she drank and used drugs. So did he, but I never knew until we were married. The first time he hit me . . .”
    She trailed off, cleared her throat. For a moment there was only the sound of grease crackling as she took bacon out of the pan.
    “It was about a month after we were married. One of my friends at school was having a birthday, and we were going to go to one of those clubs. Silly. Where the men dance and women tuck dollar bills into their jockstraps. Just foolishness. Jesse seemed to think of it that way too, until I was dressing to go. Then he started on what I was wearing, the dress, the hair, the makeup. I laughed, sure that he was teasing me. Suddenly he grabbed my purse, emptied it out, tore up my driver’s license. I was so shocked, so angry, I grabbed it back from him. And he knocked me down. He was slapping me, shouting, calling me names. He tore my clothes and he raped me.”
    With surprisingly steady hands, she poured eggs into the pan. “He cried