Rebecca smiled to herself. “Have you ever shot a gun?”
Cait’s eyebrows shot toward her hairline. “No. Why?”
Now it was Rebecca’s turn to be surprised. “You haven’t? You said you grew up in Texas. I thought it was like a rite of passage. My husband’s from Texas, and his grandmother had him out in the backyard with a rifle as soon as he was taller than it.”
“My brothers shoot, but I never wanted to learn. They used to call me the conscientious objector.” Cait thought about this for a second. “Probably still do. What does this have to do with your father not liking your husband?”
“My dad taught me how to shoot when I was sixteen.”
Cait shook her head in disbelief. “You’re telling me a girl from California learned how to shoot and I didn’t?”
“My dad was a navy man. He thought it was his duty to show me how to protect myself. He bought me a gun when I turned twenty-one. A Smith and Wesson M and P nine-millimeter.”
“You’re kidding. What did you say?”
“I told him he could keep it. There was no way I was going to own a gun.” Rebecca could still picture the light blue box wrapped with a white bow. When she first saw it, she thought it was from Tiffany. And then she felt the heft of it, heard the rattle of metal when she picked it up, and realized she was wrong. She should have known better. Her father was a practical man. He wanted to protect the people he loved, not indulge them.
“Was he disappointed?”
Rebecca thought about her dad’s expression when she pushed the box back in his hands, a strange mix of annoyance and amusement and pride. “I don’t know if he was disappointed, but he definitely wasn’t surprised. Anyway, that was my dad all over. He wanted me to be independent, self-sufficient. He wanted me to be able to fend for myself.” She shook her head. “My husband is one of those larger-than-life people, and I think my dad worried that I’d lose myself inside him.”
Cait’s eyes were tight on her face, watching. “Did you?”
Rebecca turned her head toward the window. “The jury’s still out.”
Mike
It started with a photograph.
He was driving through Austin on his way to see his sister in Abilene when he passed a bunch of people holding signs and shouting something he couldn’t catch over the sound of his radio. At first he didn’t pay them any attention—he didn’t consider himself political, and he didn’t have time for people who did—but then he saw a picture on one of those signs of a little baby no bigger than a walnut curled up at the bottom of a wastebasket and the word murder written over it, and he thought of the babies he’d always thought he’d have until Bonnie died and his heart broke in a thousand pieces, and that was enough to make him stop. He pulled over to the side of the road and went up to one of the sign holders and asked him what it was all about and the man looked at him, eyes solemn as a funeral, and said, “We’re trying to stop the murder of millions of innocent children.”
Which was a pretty convincing argument to be starting out with. The guy handed him a couple pamphlets with pictures of fat, smiling babies on the front and told him his name was Ken and that the building over there was a clinic where women came to kill their unborn babies and did he know that a baby’s heartbeat starts at six weeks and it’s been said that they can feel pain from as early as eight and yet these women didn’t care, and the doctors inside didn’t have a conscience because how could they go through with something like that if they did? Ripping a baby out of its mother’s womb, cutting it up with scissors, and throwing it in the trash like it was nothing. Like life was worth nothing.
That made Mike think of Bonnie and how she used to kiss him goodbye every time she left the house. Hell, every time she left the room, and how the man who’d killed her must have thought life was worth nothing if he was willing to get behind the wheel when he was three times over the legal limit—that’s what the officer said during the trial, three times over the legal limit—and smash his car straight into Bonnie’s going seventy-five