I asked him about his wife. "Is she well? What was the result of the biopsy?"
"The lump on her breast turned out to be a cyst, thank God."
Only then did I realize that I'd been holding my breath. "I'm glad to hear good things can happen," I said.
In the backyard, Payne eased his weight onto the chaise lounge where Petey had sat the previous year, peering up at our bedroom window.
Kate brought us two glasses of iced tea.
We pretended not to notice that her hands shook and the ice rattled.
"Thanks," I said.
When I touched her shoulder, she actually smiled.
Payne watched her return to the house. "Has she been seeing anyone?"
"A psychiatrist? Yes," I said. "All three of us have."
"Is it doing any good?"
"My own guy has me writing a journal, describing what happened and how I feel about it. I talk to him about it once a week. Is it doing any good?" I shrugged. "He claims that it is but says that I don't have the objectivity to know it yet. He also says that because the trauma we went through lasted a long time, it isn't reasonable to expect to get over it quickly."
"Makes sense."
"Kate went into the supermarket all by herself today."
Payne looked puzzled.
"It's a big step," I explained. "She has trouble being near crowds and strangers."
"What about you? Do you plan to go back to work?"
"I'm going to have to soon," I answered. "Our insurance doesn't cover all the medical expenses. Certainly not the legal expenses."
"But how are you feeling? Are you ready to go back to work?"
I sipped my iced tea and didn't answer.
"When I was with the Bureau, I had to shoot somebody," Payne said.
"Kill him?"
He concentrated on his glass. "I got shot in the process. Three months medical leave. A lot of counseling. I think I told you that's when I put on all this weight and left the Bureau. It took me a long time to feel normal again."
"Normal's a complicated word. I wonder if I can feel normal again. In my previous life, it's like I was blundering around in a world of hurt but was too stupid to realize it."
"And now?"
"I think Kate's right to be careful of what's going on around her. Anything can happen. One moment, I was standing on a ridge, admiring the scenery. The next moment, my brother shoved me into a gorge."
"Caution's a virtue."
"So I've learned. You asked me if I planned to go back to work. I am at work."
"Oh?" Payne studied me.
"Taking care of my family. It's my job to love Kate and Jason as hard as I can, to thank God for every moment I have with them, to hold them and cherish them and do my damnedest to keep them safe."
Payne's concentration was powerful. "You know what, Mr. Denning?"
"Please call me Brad."
"The more I get to know you, the better I like you."
About the Author
My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. Books and movies were my escape. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). To make a new start, my wife and I moved to the mountains and mystical light of Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my work changed yet again, exploring the passionate relationships between men and women, highlighting them against a background of action as in the newest, Burnt Sienna. To give his stories a realistic edge, he has been trained in wilderness survival, hostage negotiation, executive protection, antiterrorist driving, assuming identities, electronic surveillance, and weapons. A former professor of American literature at the University of Iowa, Morrell now lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
