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She gave him a long, searching look.
“So, we both come from military families.”
This was a pointless conversation. Next thing, she’d want to exchange family photos. Tanner folded the empty MRE bags into small, neat squares and stowed them in his backpack.
“Time to get things moving,” he said briskly. “We want to be stowed away when all the light is gone.”
“But with one big difference. You spoke of your great-great-great-grandfather with pride. That’s not the way I feel about my father.”
Okay. The discussion still wasn’t over. There had to be a way to end it, some subtle way to change the topic.
“Listen,” he said, “I don’t know what the situation is between you but if it helps, you should know that your old man was very upset about you.”
“Why wouldn’t he be? We’re probably still some deep, dark secret.”
“We?”
“My brothers, my sister and me.”
“As I said, I don’t know anything about that, but—”
“My father, the general,” Alessandra said with forced lightness, “the guy with the four shiny stars and a bunch of medals, was a bigamist. He was married to our mother and to another woman at the same time.”
Tanner sat back on his heels. “Wow.”
“Yeah. That’s pretty much how we see it, too.”
They fell silent. Tanner wanted to say something more intelligent than “wow,” but he couldn’t come up with anything. He knew what he was probably supposed to do. Ask her how such a thing had affected her, what did she feel, or at least offer a tidbit of personal information in exchange, but he wasn’t into navel-gazing, and he’d already told her more about himself than made sense.
He was a man who kept his thoughts and feelings private.
Women didn’t like that about him. More than one had called him removed. Remote. Cold.
Even Red had.
“You’re burning hot in bed, sugar,” she’d said, “but you’re an iceman everywhere else.”
Yeah, well, if that meant he didn’t talk about himself, so be it.
“Call of nature,” Alessandra said brightly as she rose to her feet.
He nodded. “Don’t go too far. And check for—”
“Critters. I know. I’ll be right back.”
He nodded again.
She was probably moving away to avoid his silence. So what? He was the silent type. Give away too much of yourself, you might as well paint a big red X on your forehead.
That had been the big lesson of his childhood, learned first when his mother went out the door one morning and left behind a note that said she needed something more in her life. Relearned when his old man dealt with it by losing himself in cheap whiskey until he wandered away one snowy night and died on the quiet plains.
After that, Tanner had been lost for a while.
The spirit, the memory of his long-dead great-great-great-grandfather, was what had saved him.
He’d already known all those stories and he’d written them off as overblown nonsense told by a man who’d had nothing but hand-me-down tales to live by.
But when he’d gotten in trouble one time too many after his father’s death, a tribal elder had confronted him.
