Free Return to the Black Hills by Debra Salonen Page A

were always in and out with their friends. They had the coolest clothes and…oh…the perfume.” She inhaled deeply as if smelling something besides the faint locker-room scent of the car.
    “They were stuck-up cows—just like the Bullies.”
    Remy frowned but she didn’t refute the charge. Instead, she said, “I’m going to blame your negatively slanted memory on that shot the nurse gave you in the butt for pain.”
    “Yes, you are a pain in the butt,” Jessie joked. “Finally something we agree on.”
    She could tell by Remy’s tight-lipped profile she wasn’t amused.
    “Speaking of pain, I don’t have any. Isn’t that cool?”
    “It won’t last,” Remy said sagely.
    “Nothing ever does.”
    Jessie closed her eyes and let her head rest against the seat. The bounce and jolt of the gravel road should have prompted her to check out the landscape of her new, albeit temporary, home, but all she really wanted to do was sleep.
    Damn painkillers. When she’d been hospitalized as a child, she’d come to hate the gray numbing fog each IV brought. She should have welcomed the brief cessation of red-hot pokers tormenting her back, but, without her mother by her side, Jessie was afraid she’d drift so far into the fog she’d never be able to find her way out.
    “Remy? Can I ask you something?”
    “Yes.”
    “Was Mama in pain when she passed?”
    Remy didn’t answer right away. When she did, her voice sounded serious, truthful. “No. She was on morphine. All of her organs started shutting down—not only her kidneys. The end came pretty fast.”
    Fast was good, Jessie imagined, even though a part of her wished Mama could have hung on a bit longer.
    “Are you still beating yourself up for not being there?”
    “No.”
    “Liar.”
    “I don’t want to talk about it.”
    Remy made a scoffing sound. “Then why’d you bring it up?”
    “I don’t know.”
    Yes, she did. Guilt. Jessie had done everything that was asked of her when Mama’s sickness turned systemic—simply not when it was asked of her. The Bullies accused Jessie of dragging her feet as a way of payback.
    “She did the best she could when you were in the hospital, Jessie,” Bossy, the oldest of the Bullies had shrieked at her—the telephone connection with Japan as clear as if they’d been standing in the same room. “Get over it. Mama needs you now.”
    What Mama needed was a kidney. And if Jessie had been a donor match, the operation would have effectively killed her career—the one thing that defined her, gave her life purpose and proved to the world she was not a scarred victim who deserved pity, not love. Jessie had agonized over the dilemma from halfway around the world, and as much as she hated to admit it, there had been a part of her that remembered feeling abandoned by the woman she was now expected to save. That sense of righteousness pointed out Jessie’s commitments—her moral obligation to her team and her financial obligation to Dar and Girlz on Fire—as reason enough to keep from hopping the first plane back to Louisiana.
    “Maybe if I’d tried harder…” What? She didn’t know. Her mother would still be dead.
    Remy slowed the car to pass over a metal cattle guard. Yota rocked like a small boat on a rough sea. A moment later, they crested a slight rise, which afforded a vista of a cluster of buildings and trees a mile or so ahead.
    “You know, Jess, I could have mailed Mama’s letter and your copy of the will, but I could tell lately that you’ve been a little down. I was afraid you might be stewing about what happened at the funeral.”
    “I’m used to being the family scapegoat. Nothing new there.”
    Remy didn’t argue the point. They’d talked about their family dynamics many times. The fire that destroyed their childhood home, the costs—from Jessie’s hospital stay to the many subsequent operations, the terrible emotional toll for everyone—especially their mother. All assumed to be Jessie’s