The Turbulence of Butterflies (Max Howard Series Book 6) Read online

  There was something in the way she said she wanted me to come to the wedding. Forget for a moment that I was a born cynic or that she had not wanted to have anything to do with me since she was eight. I could tell by the inflection in her voice that her invitation was less than sincere.

  Yet, here she was, young, naïve, and full of wide-eyed enthusiasm for what lay ahead with Roy. We shared the same blood, but she was not a part of me. She had been stolen from me as a child and I did not know her like I did her sister, Emily. Emily and I had continued to see one another on the sly despite the divorce decree, but we were eventually caught and I went to jail for it. My stint in county jail had less to do with my violation of the court order not to see my kids and more to do with my climbing across the Judge’s bench to share my disappointment with him in his decision to deny me visitation rights.

  Anyway, Elizabeth was a stranger to me, a child that for reasons I could not understand had gone out of her way to have nothing to do with me. I always suspected that it was her allegiance to her mother during the divorce that had prompted her to take such a hardline toward me. Like most men, though, I felt guilty for what my relationship with her mother had inflicted upon her as child and I was ready to forgive her anything, or thought I was.

  That day, she could have just as easily been the postman delivering mail to the house for all the emotion she was showing. Was I as dead inside as she was, I wondered. No, despite my outward calm, my soul screamed back at me that I was alive; I still felt the pain of her rejection, and I cannot forgive you, Elizabeth, it said to me.

  “Wow,” I thought to myself sitting on the porch swing waiting on Sunny to get dressed. Even in my memory of the event from so many years ago, I could still feel the anger in my heart and I rubbed my chest.

  “When’s the big day?” I had asked Elizabeth.

  She frowned and looked at Roy. “June,” she said cautiously. “I’m seventeen,” she offered, like that mattered.

  “A June bride,” I said for lack of anything else to say to them. I nodded my head like I was happy for them and their new future together.

  “Mr. Howard, the truth is, Elizabeth would like to have a nice wedding. A real one, you know. Her stepfather can’t afford it, though,” the boy said.

  “Stepfather, my butt! You mean the guy her mother is currently living with,” I’d thought to myself and tried to remember how many men it had been since our divorce and even before while I was still in Nam.

  “The girl’s parents traditionally pay for the wedding,” Elizabeth added to remind me of my responsibility.

  I smiled. There it was. I decided not to bring up the fact that she had told the judge she didn’t want me involved in her life or that her mother was working and had a paying job. “How much do you need?”

  “Eight thousand,” Roy answered quickly.

  “That covers the reception too,” Elizabeth chimed in.

  I looked at my daughter for a moment. She didn’t have any idea who I was or that my incarceration‒what the hell, that didn’t matter anymore, I told myself. The time in jail was mine to deal with just as Nam was. Now, she just needed something. So, what else was new, I had asked myself, but knew I had been the same way with my father. I only spoke to him when I needed something. What goes around, I reminded myself.

  “Let me get my wallet,” I said.

  “Wait!” Elizabeth said as I turned to walk back into the house. I paused. “Would you mind if Frank gave me away?”

  “Frank?”

  “He was married to Mom after you.”

  I nodded like I knew who he was. What was the point of making a scene now to vent my anger? It was obvious she didn’t want me to walk her down the aisle.

  “Sure, what the hell, why not,” I said. I smiled at her and went into the house.

  I pulled on a pair of clean boots once inside the bedroom. As I picked up my wallet off the dresser, I felt the anger inside of me squeeze my heart again. The anger raged right alongside the pain. My hand trembled as I counted out all the money I had to my name. I took a deep breath, divided the money in half, and then headed back outside.

  Elizabeth and Roy were looking at the ranch from the porch as if they had plans for it one day. They smiled at me with anticipation. Roy had his arm around her shoulders. I liked Roy. Something about the way he could handle a truck made him a better kid in my mind than his family’s history would lead you to believe. His father and his two brothers were well known petty criminals in Solms County and would take anything that wasn’t tied down with a chain and lock.

  I handed her the folded bills. Her smile faded quickly. She showed the two twenties to Roy.

  “Forty dollars,” he said. He looked at me angrily.

  Elizabeth’s eyes said it all. She didn’t have to speak the two words that I knew sat on her tongue and she wanted to hurl at me. It was half of all the money I had to my name. Roy grabbed Elizabeth by the arm and stormed off toward the truck. As I watched them go I had a sudden feeling that my ex-wife had done her job well with Elizabeth and I’d never be able to do anything right by her. “Be sure and send me an invitation so I know when and where,” I said, but they didn’t hear me.

  Elizabeth kept the forty dollars and I never heard from her again. She didn’t even send me an invitation. That was okay as the itch that ruled my life back then overtook me a few months later after Elizabeth was supposed to have gotten married. As hard as I tried, I couldn’t get it under control. I sold off the last of the animals on the ranch, boarded up the house, and headed out for parts unknown. Six months later I arrived in Austin, Texas to begin the next chapter in my life.

  Chapter 2

  “Daddy,” Katie said from behind the screened door and interrupted my reverie. “Momma says you need to fix me breakfast.”

  “I’ll be there in a sec, Sweetpea,” I said and stood up a moment to make sure I was stable after sitting for so long. My knees weren’t what they used to be. One was a fairly new replacement and I was still a bit unsure of it even after having it for a couple of years.

  “What happened to your nose,” Katie wanted to know as I struggled to get up. She was seven and at that age where she questioned anything that came to her mind, especially me, and opined about everything else under the sun. She kept me on my toes.

  I touched my nose and squeezed it. “It feels fine to me. Why?”

  “Momma said it was out of joint. What’s that mean?”

  I ignored her and came inside. After fixing us breakfast, I drove up to the Meeting Center on the ranch. Emily would be in for nine that morning and I wanted to give her the opportunity to say, “I told you so.” She was the Executive Director of the Meeting Center, which was a fancy way of saying she was the Manager. The business was doing well with weddings and quinceañeras that she booked into the Center. A few years back, I’d figured every city-gal in New Haven wanted to be married on a real ranch in the Texas Hill Country, so I’d built the Meeting Center Complex on the ranch to provide such a venue and to generate income for the Howard Family Trust that now owned our ranch. I might have been a bit overly optimistic, but Emily was doing a good job of managing the Center and business was increasing.

  I rinsed the coffee pot and started the coffee while I waited for Emily. The ranch foreman, Cletus T. Blakely, who we called Clete, always stopped in for a cup of my coffee if he saw my truck parked outside. Clete liked the way I made the coffee. We had long speculated that Emily dumped my coffee and made her own pot after he and I left.

  “I see you made the papers again,” he said and made an exaggerated snicker to mess with me.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I retorted. I knew his game and would make him work for any of the details.

  “Anything you want me to tell the other fellas?”

  He was referring to the old men at the feed co-op who came in every day to jaw with one another under the feed shed. They would have a good day at my expense and Clete would be the center of attention as he was the foreman o
n the Howard Ranch. They always assumed he would have the inside track on all the ensuing gossip about me. I ignored his question.

  “You hear about the Haas woman? She escaped from jail,” he said as he poured five packets of sugar into his mug while the coffee dripped.

  The phone rang on Emily’s desk. We looked at one another, waiting to see if the other was going to answer it. It was a ruse as neither one of us wanted anything to do with the business end of the Meeting Center; it was Emily’s domain and so we were reluctant to answer the phone for her. Clete deferred to me and I decided to let it go and let the answering machine handle it.

  A few minutes later we heard Emily pull into the parking lot. She was decidedly cool toward me when she walked in. “Good morning,” she said to Clete and ignored me.

  “You had a call, Miss Emily,” Clete said.

  “Who was it?”

  Clete shrugged his shoulders to indicate he didn’t know. Emily finally looked at me. I shrugged that I didn’t know, either.

  “Why didn’t you answer it?” she said.

  Clete shook his head, that he didn’t do that. “Max was closer.”

  “It went to the answering machine,” I offered up to give us some cover for minding our own business.

  “Do you see an answering machine in this office? It could have been a client or new customer wanting to lease space for a meeting. What are they going to think when no one answers the phone at nine-ten in the morning?”

  We could both tell from her tone she was looking to unload on someone, so I sure wasn’t going to be the one to remind her that maybe she should get to work on time.

  “Thanks for the coffee, Max. I gotta get on into town,” Clete said and filled his mug. “I know you two have got some important matters to discuss.” He didn’t try to suppress the grin on his face.

  After he left, Emily confirmed my suspicions. She actually started making a new pot of coffee right in front of me and there was a perfectly good half a pot left.

  “Did you talk to Elizabeth?” I asked.

  “No! She’s not talking to me.”

  “I’m sorry, Emily. She’ll get over it. When she does, assure her for me, I won’t try to contact her again. Just so you know, I didn’t start it. All I did was ring the doorbell and knock on her door. It was that guy she married. What does she see in him, anyway?”

  “I don’t understand you, Dad, I swear. I told you how she felt about seeing you. Why didn’t you just listen to me?”

  There was no point in arguing with her. All of my daughters thought it was my duty as their father to listen to them. Anyway, we had been over it before when she and Sunny came to post my bail. I did what I felt I needed to do. If Emily didn’t understand why a man my age would try to reconcile with his estranged daughter, then despite being my closest child, Emily didn’t really know me at all. And, I was not one to explain myself twice.

  I walked over to Emily and gave her a hug. “I’ll see you later. How come we don’t have an answering machine here?”

  “The number has voice mail and forwards to my cell.”

  “So, you got the call?”

  She ignored me, sheepishly. That was the Emily I knew. She always had to have the upper hand. I headed for the door.

  “Dad, wait. Andy is coming in this weekend. I want you guys to come have dinner with us this Saturday.”

  Andy was her son and studying at UT. It seemed like he had been going to school in Austin long enough to have earned several degrees. That aside, something must be up, I figured, especially after the dressing down she gave me at the bail hearing.

  “Sure. We’ll be there, count on it. Is he ready to graduate yet?”

  She gave me an annoyed look and ignored the question. “Barbin called me,” she added before I reached the door. Emily sounded like that pretty TV weather gal in San Antonio giving a warning of pending bad weather, “Thunderstorms tomorrow.”

  I refused to take the bait. Elizabeth and Emily were my daughters from my first marriage in my early twenties. Barbin, James Lee, and Sarah were my children from my second marriage in my forties. My second wife, Barbara, had died of cancer when they were still young and I raised them on my own. Sunny was my third wife and between us, we had one daughter, Katie, as well as her sons Nick and Kevin and who I now considered my sons. I had married Sunny in my sixties. All of my children from three marriages accepted one another as siblings and got along fine, except for Elizabeth. She wanted nothing to do with any of us, except for her sister Emily.

  I knew what Barbin was up to. A few weeks before, I had asked Ava, the wife of Barbin’s son, to help me with an archeological find on another ranch property I owned. Several years ago, Ava and Bryan were living together on the Howard Ranch as caretakers for me while I sailed the Pacific Northwest. She got pregnant while they were living here and Barbin always blamed me for her son having to get married before he finished college. According to Barbin, it was my fault because I had allowed them to play house on the ranch. Anyway, Ava was a student and a budding Mayan archeologist at the time and she had to put her career on hold to raise a family. Bryan and Ava now lived in Montana on her father’s cattle ranch. Barbin, I assumed, considered me a disruptive influence in their lives and thought my asking for Ava’s help would somehow jeopardize Bryan’s marital bliss in Montana.

  When I spoke to Ava, she’d said she wanted to be involved in the archeological discovery on the Pape Ranch, as soon as her baby was born. I looked forward to her coming down. Barbin, on the other hand, did not. Even as a child, Barbin had been very controlling and thought as the oldest, she was in charge of our family while I was at work. As an adult, she was now very territorial when it came to her own kids and I knew it bothered her that I had not consulted her before calling Ava. I knew her call to Emily was an attempt at an end-run around me to keep Ava from becoming involved in our discovery of the Spanish cistern on the Pape Ranch.

  “I don’t want to be involved in whatever she’s up to,” I said to Emily concerning the phone call from Barbin. “I gotta go.”

  “Neither do I, but do I have a choice? No! Barbin thinks I have some strange mystical influence over you.”

  “Silly girl.”

  “Tell me about it,” Emily said.

  “I love you, Sweetheart. Are we making tons of money yet?”

  “Not if you keep making the news.”

  “I try to behave, I swear I do, but the Mayan gods do conspire for their own amusement and I am but a pawn in their antics. That’s what Angelina had told me. I’ll see you this weekend,” I said.

  I had taken to using Mayan deity as an explanation for my behavior ever since Angelina had shown up on our ranch. It was pretty good cover, I thought. Like, who can argue with the gods, Mayan or otherwise.

  “Oh, did I tell you, Andy’s bringing his girlfriend with him,” Emily said proudly. She was one of those mothers, who felt embarrassed that her son wasn’t in a serious relationship at his age, like it cast some kind of cloud over her role in his upbringing.

  “Good for him. I was worried maybe he was scarred for life after that pretty Turkish girl dumped him,” I said and winked at her.

  She didn’t see the humor in my comment so I left before she could get started on that. My children blamed me for everything bad that happened to them and their children and I got zero credit for the good. It was a heavy burden I carried as the Howard Family patriarch.

  . . .

  I needed to drive out to the Pape Ranch that morning, so I went back up to the house to see if Sunny was still upset with me and to get my cell phone. I couldn’t see how she could still be outdone, but it gave me an excuse to see her again and give her a little TLC before the day got away from us. I could see her car parked in the driveway that went around to the back of the house and to the garage. I didn’t know why I built that garage, we never used it. It was just easier to park in front of the house by the yard gate. Her car hadn’t been there when I went up to the Meeting Center. It’s pr
esence now in the driveway, in front of the house, was not a good sign.

  I saw Sunny come out of the house carrying her suitcase. Katie had her backpack that she used for school. I should have known something was up when Sunny had refused her normal breakfast of toast that morning. She hardly ever ate breakfast and had toast and coffee just to keep me and Katie company. Was she leaving me once again for something as silly as the incident at Elizabeth’s house? That reaction seemed a bit extreme to me but I knew from experience my wife had a mind of her own and a different opinion about what was important in her life than I did.

  After I pulled up and got out of the truck, she straightened up and started to close the lid to the trunk of her car but paused in mid-air. She glared at me.

  “Where’s your phone, Max! What’s the point of having a cell phone if you don’t carry it with you? I’ve been trying to reach you.”

  I figured it was a rhetorical question and she really wasn’t interested in my opinion about cell phones or carrying one with me at all times. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  We stood there a moment looking at one another. I’d like to say I was concerned, but I wasn’t, really. We had been married eight years and whenever Sunny got outdone with me she went home to the Lummi Indian Reservation. If anything, I was surprised that she was still upset by my arrest. It was such an insignificant event in the scheme of things and certainly a minor transgression compared to all that had happened since we had moved to Texas. Whatever her reasons, I wasn’t going to be clingy at her leaving; she was a grown woman.

  “Sybil called thus morning. Ruby has taken a turn for the worse.”

  Those were two of Sunny’s sisters. I knew Sybil well enough. She had come to live with us for a while to escape an abusive situation on the Lummi Reservation several years ago. Ruby, on the other hand, barely tolerated my presence on the res.

  I wanted to let out a sigh of relief that she wasn’t leaving me, but I didn’t. There was no point in displaying my insecurities that went with loving a younger woman; she had her own problems to deal with.