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He worked when he wanted to, took the legal cases that interested him, and the rest of the time he worked with a nonprofit group that built homes for the poor and looked after the elderly. And he let the mountains embrace him.
The only thing he couldn’t run away from, though, was the damned cell phone he couldn’t seem to throw away, no matter how many times he tried.
The bastard insisted on getting excellent reception, even here, deep within the forested land rising around him. Proof of it was the insistent beeping at his hip.
Glaring at the water stretching out before him, he pulled the phone from his pocket, scowled at the number on the display, and against his better judgment, accepted the call.
“No, I’m not bored yet,” he told his father as he brought the phone to his ear.
A second of silence greeted him.
“Of course you’re not,” his father’s cultured voice drawled sarcastically. “There’s rarely time to be bored when you’re pretending to be the luckless playboy of Lake Cumberland. The novelty hasn’t quite had a chance to wear off, has it?”
“Not yet,” John agreed happily. “Do you know what I’m doing right now?”
“Do I want to know?” his father asked warily.
“I’m maneuvering my houseboat down the lake. I’m sweating like a pig and grinning from ear to ear. When was the last time you did that, Pop?”
“You don’t want to know,” John Sr. growled warningly. “When are you returning home?”
“I told you, I am home,” he retorted. “If you called to argue with me again, then you’re wasting your time and I have better things to do. ”
He could almost see his father, an older version of himself, his lips thinning, his eyes narrowing in irritation at his son’s refusal to return home.
This was home to John, and he couldn’t see that changing anytime soon.
“You sound like your sister. ” Anger throbbed in his father’s voice. “You’d think after what she went through in that damned county, she would have left before that sheriff managed to tie her to him. What are you doing, John? Why are you doing it? How many times do I have to tell you what’s coming? Those people will turn on you as fast as they accepted you. ”
John shook his head. The hell his parents had faced here had been the fault of the individuals who had kept a hold on the county, not the people itself. The few had ruined much for the many, for too many years.
They were gone now, but John understood his father’s hatred for them, and his distrust of the county. He understood it, but he refused to return to what his life had been before.
Here, he had a sense of purpose. There, he’d had nothing but his family. A damned good family, he admitted, but there had been nothing to anchor him, nothing to ease that restless hunger that tormented him.
“How’s Mom?” he asked, rather than arguing again. He always tried to stem the flood of anger that rose between them each time they talked.
His father sighed heavily. “She misses her children. This wasn’t what she wanted, John. She raised her children with love and now you’re all deserting her. ”
In other words, his mother was doing what she always did, refusing to step into the middle of the arguments that waged between John Sr. and his children.
Not that the older Walker didn’t love his children. He did. Too much sometimes. He could never understand that he couldn’t shelter them from life, no matter how hard he tried. That he couldn’t force them to live the life he’d attempted to create for them.
It was the same fight they’d had when John had joined the Marines just out of high school. The argument they had when John had gone into criminal law rather than corporate law as his father had done.
The argument they had had when John had told his father he was asking Marlena Genoa to marry him.
“Tell her I love her,” John said.
“Sure you do,” his father grunted. “That’s why you’re cruising down a damned lake rather than having dinner with her today. ”
It was Sunday. Every Sunday it was dinner at home, no matter what, that was, as long as the particular child was in town.
“I’m sure Candace and her children are keeping her busy. ”
Candace Salyers was his sister, the oldest of the Walker siblings. Married, with three beautiful kids and a doting husband, Candace had a life she thrived on. She swore she couldn’t exist outside of Boston, and abhorred anything even remotely “country. ”
Silence filled the line again, this time longer.
