Sweet on You (Sweet on a Cowboy) Read online

  “Ah Katya. You cannot lose something that is a part of you. It’s only gotten covered up.” Grand tucked a hank of hair behind her granddaughter’s ear, as she had a million times. “You will find it again and more. When you do, remember; gifts sometimes come in strange wrappings.”

  Katya knew better than to ask what the small smile meant. Grand was a master in the art of the arcane. They sat in the peace of quiet. Katya pulled in the vibrant energy that was her grandmother. She felt like the confused child who’d arrived here, every summer.

  There was a lot of love in her parents’ house, only most of it didn’t involve her. She’d always been the moth outside the window of her parents’ love, bumping the glass to get inside. Her parents’ relationship seemed smothering to Katya. Unnatural. If that was love, she’d do without.

  God knows what delicate negotiations took place between her parents and Grand, to allow Katya to travel from her home in DC to Chicago, but she’d loved those summers.

  In the beginning, she’d only attended Grand’s lessons to have an excuse to be close, to suck up the loving acceptance like a dry sponge. But once filled, she listened, and found herself pulled in by the art of healing.

  Now, with time and distance, she could see that she’d always wanted to be like her grandmother.

  Grand believed Katya had empathic powers. Katya knew that wasn’t true. She’d just found there were more ways to listen than with her ears. If she paid close attention, even unconscious patients had things to say.

  A door closed somewhere, and heels tapped in the hall, getting closer. The apartment door opened and her aunt’s frizzy gray-threaded black hair appeared first, followed by her face. The stamp of Gypsy was plain on her aunt’s olive skin and cat-slanted dark eyes. She put a finger to her lips, then waved Katya over.

  Eyes closed, Grand’s head rested against the back of the chair. She breathed evenly in sleep.

  Katya stood carefully, leaned over and whispered, “I love you, Puri Daj. Thank you” and walked out.

  Katya sat in a chair in her aunt’s kitchen. “Beval, she’s so frail!”

  “That happens when you reach the age of ninety-four.” She walked to the stove and clicked the burner under the teakettle. “Why did you feel the need to fight in their war, Katya?”

  Her aunt had always been plainspoken, and she hadn’t changed a bit.

  Katya opened her mouth, then closed it. She used to know the answer. She used to believe in the answer. She’d grown up outside of DC. When Flight 93 went down on 9/11, enlistment seemed to her the only response. But after ten years of patching up the young pawns of the chess match, the answer had faded like invisible ink, leaving her holding blank pages. She shook her head.

  “How is your daj, Katya?” her aunt whispered, leaning forward.

  Her sister, Katya’s mother—the outcast. A full Gypsy, Katya’s mother was raised there, living communally in the kumpania. Katya grew up hearing whispered stories of her mother’s wildness, though they were hard to believe, given the staid researcher she’d become.

  As a child, her mother had done as she pleased, defying the laws of the family. Yet when she stepped through the doors of high school and slapped eyes on Katya’s father, things got serious. He was gajo—non-Gypsy. This building must have vibrated with the buzzing of the famalia, men and women alike. When she eloped after graduation, in the eyes of the family, Katya’s mother had died.

  Only Grand kept tenuous contact, and only after Katya was born. Grand must have used magic, because Katya bore the name Grand chose, and from Katya’s earliest memory, her summers were Gypsy.

  “I haven’t seen her yet. Last I heard, she was fine.”

  Beval’s gaze darted around the room, though she knew they were alone. “Well, tell her, when you see her, that—”

  A ghostly moan echoed from the hall. It changed, rising in volume and pitch to a banshee’s wail.

  “Aaaaieeeeeeeeee!”

  Katya jerked, and before she could control her body, she was crouched under the table, sweat popping in her armpits and her heart hammering like the piston of a redlined engine. She and her aunt froze, staring at each other in horror.

  “Help me! Oh God. Katya, help me!”

  The too-human pain in the young woman’s scream shattered her aunt’s immobility. She lurched from her chair and ran out of the apartment door before Katya could crawl out from under the tablecloth. She tried to stand, but the adrenaline surge left her legs rubbery. She fell back to her knees and leaned her forehead on the carpet, for just a moment, until the black spots retreated.

  I don’t want to go! That wail had told her whatever waited down the hall was horrible. Her muddled brain processed thoughts in half-time. She tried to force her limbs to move. But as in Kandahar, they rebelled. Katya knelt in a quivering ball, exhaling coward breaths into the carpet.

  Why me? Why do they call me?

  Flashes fired behind her clenched eyelids; gaping wounds, mouths twisted in agony, the dark, fearful eyes of a strange boy.

  Move, damn it! Someone needs you! Gritting her teeth, she forced her fingers to relax and felt the nails pop out of the carpet. Her biceps shook, but supported her weight when she pushed herself upright.

  Her unwilling feet eventually carried her down the hall. She stood quivering in the doorway to Grand’s room, physically unable to force her body across the threshold. Her aunts crouched around the small body in her grandmother’s chair. Beval raised her streaming eyes to the doorway, and shook her head.

  In Washington, DC, a week later, Katya dodged students, pulled the door open, and stepped inside. The glass entry of the university chemistry building soared overhead. The huge silver helix of a carbon atom hung from the ceiling, rotating unnoticed by hurrying students. Even the smell was the same—an odd mix of books, chemicals, and sunlight. She should have known that nothing ever changed here. Shouldn’t her arms be full of textbooks? Katya hurried down the hall, the soles of her flats slapping. She’d allowed a half hour before her real appointment, and didn’t want to be late.

  She didn’t have to scan the nameplates alongside the doors she passed; her feet led her to the right one. Hand on the knob, she took a deep breath. Somewhere between Chicago and DC she’d gotten mad. The fact that she’d expected the outcome didn’t seem to matter. Seething, she turned the knob and opened the door to her parents’ lab.

  It hadn’t changed either. Table-lined walls, an island workstation in the center, all cluttered with sinks and expensive research paraphernalia. To the left, her white-coated parents huddled beside an electron microscope, deep in conversation.

  They had changed. Her father stood bent, staring into the eyepiece. He was handsome as ever, but silver glinted in the too long blond hair sweeping from his temples. He’d forgotten to get it cut again. When he glanced up, there were no smile lines at the corners of his eyes, only a deep frown; the price of decades of contemplating the mysteries of science.

  “Hello, Katya.”

  She took a step toward her father, arms open. But he’d already returned his attention to the world in the microscope lens. She dropped her arms.

  Hand on his back, her mother regarded Katya. A Gypsy in a laboratory, her mother was as paradoxically beautiful as ever. Perfect olive skin and huge dark eyes, her lips pulled into a tight line, as if she were embarrassed by their fullness. Her black curls were harnessed in a tight French twist.

  “Welcome back, Katya.” She said it as though they’d seen each other at breakfast. Her mother traveled the few steps to bridge the gap between them and opened her arms.

  Katya stepped into them and wrapped her own arms around her mother, enveloped by her scent—a blend of exotic perfume and the cold alkaline bite of chemicals. She leaned her head on her mother’s shoulder and clung as emotion washed over her, a strong mix of regret and hollow longing that swelled her throat, and pricked behind her eyes.

  Her mother gave her a brief squeeze and a pat on the shoulder.

 
Katya stepped back, as her anger flared. “You couldn’t attend your own mother’s funeral? Really, Mom?”

  “Show some respect in your tone, Katya.” Her father threw in his signature line, then checked out of the discussion, bending once more over the altar of the microscope.

  Katya tried to ignore the pinprick that tightened the muscles of her chest. She crossed her arms, leaning a hip against the counter. “Respect. Now there’s an interesting word.”

  Her mother had a large repertoire of sighs. She deployed one of her favorites, the long-suffering one. “What do you think Rom Baro would have done if I’d shown up? You know him. He’d have used the funeral as a bully pulpit from which to preach.” She pursed her lips and shook her head, once, fast, as if it were a spasm. “I made my decision years ago. I knew then it was irreversible. Just because I hadn’t thought ahead to this point doesn’t make it any less permanent.” She glanced at her husband, then back.

  Katya caught a flash of grief in the moment before her haughty mask dropped back in place.

  “Remember this when it’s time for you to choose, Katya. Reaching for one thing may require letting go of another.” She crossed the room to the coffeepot sitting among beakers and test tubes like a hillbilly at a black tie dinner. She pulled out two cups and poured.

  Katya said, “I have an appointment in a few minutes.”

  Her mother doctored them with creamer, just the way they liked them.

  Silly me.

  When her mother was done stirring, she picked them up. “Are you home for good, then?”

  God, I hope not. “I don’t know yet. I’ll know more after my meeting with Dr. Raleigh.” She consulted the clock on the wall over her mother’s head. “Which I’m going to be late for if I don’t get moving. I’ll call you later.” She didn’t bother interrupting her father’s work to say good-bye.

  She climbed the stairs, and at the first door on the right she knocked, then opened the door to an empty office. She checked her cell phone for the time. Ten minutes early. She crossed to the padded guest chair, straightened her skirt and sat. She pulled her peasant blouse a bit farther down her shoulders then smiled at her own vanity. Trace Raleigh had been many things to her: instructor, mentor, lover, then finally, and still, her friend. His had been the second number she’d dialed that awful day that Grand died.

  She looked around the office that hadn’t changed. Textbooks littered every surface, dumbbells cluttered one corner. Resistance bands hung on the wall next to a poster of the human body, stripped of skin, exposing the musculature. Pinned on the bulletin board, front and center in the place of honor, hung the photo. Trace was always in search of a picture that captured the vision of the perfect human body. The photo changed when he discovered a better one—a calf muscle, caught in the act of explosion from a starting block, or the light, shining just so on a sweating bicep. Male bodies or female, it didn’t matter. Katya had called it the Hunk of the Month Club.

  She closed her eyes, willing herself back to when she last sat in this chair. It didn’t work.

  She’d planned on a degree in physical therapy, but it was Trace who convinced her to double major. When he suggested she get her athletic trainer degree, she thought he was crazy. Katya had no love of team sports, or organized sports of any kind, for that matter. She’d watched the spoiled darlings of the high school teams strut the halls, broad shoulders set in an angle of arrogant, swaggering entitlement. She wanted nothing to do with them.

  Trace had convinced her that the practical aspects of an athletic trainer would complement her skills as a physical therapist. And he’d been right. So she gave up her job at the library for the locker room, wrapping meaty ankles and icing the hallowed knees of every team the university sponsored, for two long years.

  She jumped at the sound of the door opening. Dr. Raleigh swept in and kicked the door shut with his heel. When he saw her, he smiled. Everyone could smile, of course. But Trace Raleigh smiled. His charisma punched like a blow to the solar plexus. In that moment, in all the world, you knew you were special. Because you were special to him.

  He had the chiseled features of a Greek Olympian, and his body was sculpted by a lifetime of athletics. The lighter streaks in his golden hair hadn’t come from a bottle. She had every reason to know.

  He’d wanted the love her parents had, the love she’d never give. Sarah had, and Katya was glad when they married, two years after she enlisted.

  His eyes scanned her face. His smile slipped away. “Aw, hon. Come here.” He opened his arms.

  And she stepped into them. Leaning her head on his hard shoulder, she found more comfort than on her mother’s soft one.

  “I’m so sorry, Smitty.”

  Hearing his pet name almost undid her. A cyclic wind swept through her, stirring memories and waking a wailing she was terrified would escape.

  She’d managed to stay strong in Chicago. It was expected of her.

  What a joke.

  Since then, the keening in her chest continued to build, each day adding relentless pressure, until she fairly bulged with it. She lived in fear that if the pressure were loosed, even the tiniest bit, she’d explode like Humpty Dumpty on a hand grenade.

  No one would be able to put that mess back together again.

  She let go of Trace and eased out of his arms.

  He held her elbow and lowered her into the chair. “You start talking while I get us coffee.” He reached across the desk, unearthing two cups from a stack of paper. The pot he lifted looked to be the same one from their days together.

  “Well, I told you the facts on the phone.” She pulled at a loose thread in the cotton of her skirt.

  “Yes, and there’s always more than just facts, now, aren’t there?” He finished pouring, opened a packet of sweetener, dumped it in one, and handed it to her. He grabbed the other cup and sat. “What are you going to do now?” His gaze was level and patient, as if he were willing to wait forever for her answer.

  Time expanded.

  Her chest didn’t.

  She felt a rumble; a warning tremor deep in her gut. It rose, molten and smoking. She put a hand to her mouth, but it was like putting a napkin over a volcano. “I don’t know!” The wail broke from her, savage and loud in the small room. “I can’t work. I tried in Kandahar. I freaked out. No, really. Freaked. Out.” She took a sobbing breath. “They took me off the floor. Relieved me of my duty! Told me that I couldn’t come back to work until a shrink cleared me.” Her shame came out of her, lurching, shuddering.

  Hoping to soothe the goddess of the volcano, she whispered the rest. “I couldn’t face the humiliation of a mental exam I wouldn’t have passed. But the army is my home. My family. Losing it hurts so bad.”

  She covered her face. “I have nowhere to go!”

  Trace handed her a tissue to wipe the tears running down her face and put a hand on her knee in comfort.

  “It’s like I feel everything too much. The pain. All the patients’ fears and agony. They tear holes in me.” She sucked a short breath before taking another. “How does a physical therapist work if she can’t be around pain?”

  She wanted to put her head between her knees and howl, but she hitched a breath and blew her nose into the tissue. He handed her another.

  “I left my life over there, my friends. The army is the only family I’ve known for eight years. My friend is dead. My grand is dead.” She fought the sobs that roiled from her core. “I’ve lost everything!”

  With the admission, her chest loosened a bit. For the first time in weeks, she felt able to take in a full breath. She snuffled and honked, cleaning up the aftermath.

  She took another slow, measured breath.

  Trace patted her knee, but his eyes were laughing. “Well, shit. You are a mess.”

  She snorted a laugh. “God, I sound like an overacting soap opera diva.” She sniffed. “Maybe that should be my next career move.”

  “Geez, let’s hope it doesn’t come to that.” Trace sat
back and sipped his coffee. “Let me think a minute…”

  CHAPTER

  3

  Two weeks later

  You’re presented with an MCL level II tear. What’s the treatment?”

  The unassuming man who drawled the question didn’t look like a doctor, much less a trauma surgeon. He sat sprawled in a chair in the cinderblock office, thumbs tucked in the front pockets of his blue jeans, as he had since he began the interview a gut-wrenching hour ago.

  Katya leaned forward, tugging at the too short hem of her skirt that hadn’t been too short in the store dressing room. “Acute, sub-acute, or rehab?”

  “Acute.”

  “Ice and elevation, then compression knee brace to stabilize and decrease swelling. Crutches for a week or so.”

  She’d wondered why she’d been told to report to the First Mariner Arena for an interview with the PBR. She was used to acronyms from the army, but had to research this one. PBR stood for Professional Bull Riding. Sure, she’d heard of rodeos. She’d even watched a John Wayne movie once. But who knew there were men crazy enough to ride bulls for a living, much less people to watch it?

  A short fat man passed the doorless office yelling, “We’ve got forty-five minutes, people!”

  Dr. Cody Hanes straightened in his chair and pulled her résumé toward him. “Katya Smith.” He hesitated as if she’d made up the common last name. Her family had adopted the English name for tinker, because the Gypsy equivalent, Petulengro, was used only among their people.

  “Yes?”

  “You are overqualified for this position.” He consulted the paper before him. “A licensed physical therapist, a licensed athletic trainer, a combat medic with two tours in Afghanistan.” He tossed the sheet on his desk, leaned back in his executive chair, and gave her the twice-over. “And you’re applying for a PT job with a rodeo sports medicine team?”