“Sorry, Art. I’m going to try harder,” Sean said.
Luke said, “Well, you seemed to be doing just fine to me.”
“Most days,” Sean said with a shrug. “I got into the plane, man. I was all caught up in the missions. I was away a lot. I got by. But every time I met a girl, all I did was compare her to Franci.” And saw Franci everywhere I looked, till I thought I was losing my mind.
“Did you keep looking for her?” Luke asked.
“No. I figured it would pass eventually. The second I saw her I realized it wasn’t going to pass. I think, in a way, this is my fault. Well, I thought for a few years it was her fault—that she was bossy and impatient and that no woman was going to tell me how the hog eats the cabbage. Now, I think there’s a good chance I was an idiot.”
“Ya think?” Luke asked. When Sean glowered, he chuckled and said, “Listen, I’m not being a jerk—but I just walked this road, brother. I’m lucky Shelby is smarter than I am, that’s all.” Luke looked at Sean seriously. “The women are in charge, my brother. We don’t have to like it, but it’s the law. I just ask Shelby what I want and she never lets me down.”
“I have to be careful here,” Sean said. “She said she doesn’t want to see me, talk to me. I can’t show up at her house like some stalker—she might call the cops. I’d call her if I had a number, but—”
“Or…you can try to figure out where she’ll be. She’s a nurse, right? Working as a nurse, right? So call all the places she might be working as a nurse. Hospitals, doctors’ offices, clinics, you know. Ask to speak to her. They’ll either say they never heard of her, say it’s her day off or put her on the phone.”
Sean was stunned. “Wow,” he said. “That’s brilliant.”
“And amazing, because I’ve never hunted for a woman before,” Luke said. “Okay. Where do women go? Women like Franci? Shopping?”
“We did everything together—camping, quadding, diving, skiing…We traveled anytime we could. Franci alone? Gyms,” Sean said. “Franci likes to work out. She loves to read—she spent a lot of time in bookstores. She loves movies, but she wouldn’t go alone—we used to rent ’em. Back then, between me, work, the gym and a little shopping, I can’t remember what she did with her time.” And Sean thought, there it is again. I wasn’t paying attention because it wasn’t about me. He almost wondered how she had endured him that long, but fought the thought that struggled to surface.
“There’s always a list for groceries on the kitchen counter,” Luke said, nodding in the direction of today’s list. “Shelby usually calls to see what we need when she’s on her way home from school, but knock yourself out. Shop for groceries in her neighborhood.”
“Yeah. Yeah, I’ll do that.” And drive around places I might bump into her, Sean thought. Just in case.
Three
Sean promised himself he’d just drive around Eureka, but his car was like a heat-seeking missile and he soon found himself in Franci’s neighborhood and then on her street. He had no intention of bothering her, just a fierce need to see how she was living without him. What was the harm in driving by her house?
Franci’s house looked like something that should belong to her. It was cute, small, tidy, at least forty years old and very homey. It seemed the kind of comfy place a woman who wanted a family would choose—a safe, friendly neighborhood, large trees and spacious yards. She had a curving driveway lined with some kind of fluffy green ground cover, flower beds that were just going fallow in the fall weather, and right outside the front door was a scarecrow and some gourds in a horn of plenty. It was pampered. Loved. A family home.
This was nothing like a house Sean would live in—he tended more toward flashy, modern, low-maintenance homes; he had a lot of toys and liked to spend his time at play, not mowing lawns and shoveling snow.
His first panicked thought upon seeing the house was: Oh God! She has a man in her life! A man to settle down with! That’s why it looks so cozy and domesticated!
He didn’t slow down too much as he passed by; he didn’t want to raise any suspicions. Having satisfied his curiosity about where she lived, Sean decided to check out the local recreational facilities.
Finding a gym Franci might like was harder to peg. There were several in the general vicinity. One was the Y, which was small but inexpensive and functional. There was a relatively large fitness center on the edge of town near the freeway. There was a women’s gym, which would be obvious for any woman but Franci; she was ex air force and therefore used to working out with men. Fairly close to her house was a community center that appeared to contain a fitness facility, judging by the people wearing sweats and carrying gym bags who came out of the building.
As he drove past the various gyms, Sean noticed there were a few used bookstores and one big bookstore in the Eureka Mall. God, how he hated malls. But this might be the price of finding his girl, so he checked out the bookstore and the mall. While he was there he bought a couple of pairs of jeans, two shirts and a down vest as the fall weather was getting very brisk in the evening. And he bought a bunch of books he knew he’d never read.
Sean located the grocery stores nearby—there were plenty of those. He had a list of hospitals, clinics, doctors’ offices and such to call. So he got himself a coffee and used his cell phone to call from his car while he sat in a grocery-store parking lot. But after countless calls there was no Francine Duncan to be found.
Over the next few days Sean developed a new routine. He’d leave Virgin River in the morning, drive to Eureka and make the rounds. He began to think of it as driving his circuit—hitting her neighborhood followed by a trip past the gyms, mall, bookstores and grocery stores. As he’d done on that first day, he’d park somewhere to make his phone calls to clinics and such, checking them off one by one. At least it was turning him into a slightly better houseguest as he would bring home groceries for a change, saving Shelby the trouble.
He was only on his fourth day of hanging out in Eureka when he started wondering if the whole thing was a waste of time. He was beginning to think that even if he did get a number for her she would probably hang up on him, leaving him no option but to go over to her house, anyway. Would she call the cops if he did pay her a call? Was it a crime to knock on her door and ask if they could just talk? He wasn’t going to beg or threaten—just ask! Avon ladies and Jehovah’s Witnesses did it all the time, and Sean was far less annoying!
But that fourth day turned out to be magic. Near the end of the day he hit the grocery store to pick up a few things. As he was choosing a head of romaine, he recognized the hand in the bin next to him. She was squeezing tomatoes. Now didn’t that say something? That he’d recognize her hand! He turned and looked at her. “Don’t make ’em go squirt,” he said.
Franci jumped a mile. She dropped her tomato and clutched her jacket tight at the throat. “God, you scared me! What are you doing here?”
He held up his produce bag. “I have a list of things to get for my sister-in-law. But I’m really glad I ran into you, Franci, because we—”
Before he’d even finished talking she turned away from him, quickly selecting three tomatoes, then she tossed them in a plastic bag and tried to escape. He noticed she was wearing a navy-blue jumpsuit and matching jacket with some kind of unit patches sewn on the arms.
“Hey, are you in the coast guard or something? Why couldn’t I find you after you left the air force?”
She stopped, looked over her shoulder and said, “I have absolutely no idea. I went to my mother’s, where I lived and worked for almost a year before moving here.”
“I left messages on your cell,” he said, tossing the lettuce in his small handheld basket, following her.
She turned toward him. “How many messages? Because I never got any.”
He was shaking his head. “I don’t understand that…”
“How many?” she demanded.
“I don’t know. A few. A couple. I don’t know—but I did,” he said. It was coming back to him now—the way she could poke him and get him all hot under the collar.
She could push him to be honest, and he hated it because he felt exposed. She smiled with mock patience. “Well, Sean, I guess we had a technological malfunction. If you had really wanted to talk to me, you’d have tried leaving more than a couple of messages a few years ago. Now, really, I have to get going. I’m running late.”
He grabbed her upper arm. “I’ve been trying to think of the best way to get in touch with you. I found your address, but no phone number, and I—”
“You know where I live?”
He looked around a little nervously; she made it sound as if he was some ax murderer or something. “Let’s not get loud here,” he suggested. “I needed to find you. I looked you up on the computer. You bought a house.”
“Oh, for God’s sake,” she said, rubbing her temples. She seemed to gather herself from within. “All right. What do you want?”
Now this was pissing him off all over again. “Gee, was I confusing you? I want us to have a conversation, maybe talk about what happened to us. I wanted to tell you that it didn’t take me long to wish I’d been more…more…cooperative when we had the argument that broke us up.”
“Well, Sean, it did actually take you too long,” she said. “So there—consider your mission accomplished. You told me. Now, can you please go away and leave me alone?”
“No, I can’t,” he said. “So I get it—you’re still mad. We can’t really deal with that without talking.”
“But I said I don’t want to!” she stated, raising her voice again.
“Franci,” he said quietly. “Could we try not to make a big scene here…”
“Look, I told you, I’m in a hurry. You still using the same cell number?” she asked. He nodded. “Great, I’ll call you sometime. Now, excuse me, if you’d please just leave me alone, I’d appreciate it very much.” Polite as that might’ve sounded, it was stated angrily, and people had stopped shopping and began watching them.
She turned away from him and he grabbed her arm again. “Franci, I am not going away. This is important.”
Suddenly there was a very large shadow over both of them, and Sean, who was a little over six feet tall and in excellent shape, was looking up at Paul Bunyan. And Paul was not happy. He was scowling.
“Everything all right, ma’am?” he asked, looking at Franci.
“Fine,” she said. “Old boyfriend. Nothing to worry about.” Then she focused on Sean. “Goodbye. Great seeing you again. Now scram.”
In a moment of temporary insanity, Sean went after her again. “No you don’t. We have to get together for that conversation,” he said. “Since I can’t call you, how about I go over to your house and wait for—”
He felt himself being plucked off his feet. His basket of produce went tumbling away as he was launched into a pile of melons. But Paul Bunyan didn’t let go of him. “She said it’s time for you to hit the road, bud.”
“Listen, pal, you got it all wrong,” Sean said. “I’d never do anything to—”
And suddenly Franci was there. Saving him. “Thank you, but it’s all right. He’s harmless.”
Sean was being held down with his back against the cantaloupe and honeydew melons and he was suddenly incensed. That statement about him being harmless made him growl and snarl dangerously.
“You gonna leave the nice lady alone, bud?” the big man asked.
“You’re gonna get your hands off me this second or you’ll be sorry,” Sean warned, his very masculinity threatened.
