Free The Alpine Nemesis by Mary Daheim Page B

with Sandra Cavanaugh was both admirable and awful. Some might laud Tom as a hero, others would damn him as a heel. At the time, I chose the latter point of view. I quit the university and moved to the Mississippi delta town where my brother, Ben, was serving in the home missions. Adam was born there, and I moved back to the West Coast, enrolling at the University of Oregon to finish my degree. I had no contact with Tom Cavanaugh for eighteen years. It was my choice. He had abandoned me, and I refused to let him see the son I had borne him.
    Then one day, after I had been in Alpine about a year, Tom showed up. Nothing had changed between us. Love doesn't go away, it merely gets shoved into the back of our emotional closets. Tom finally met Adam, and somewhat to my surprise, the two of them hit it off. Somewhat to my resentment, too: I thought I had done an excellent job of being two parents. But Adam wanted, needed, a father. Uncle Ben was a fair substitute, but he was rarely around for his nephew.
    Tom and I saw each other off and on over the next few years, but he remained loyal to Sandra. Oh, he made theoccasional promise to leave her, but though she was unstable, her sensibilities were extraordinary. Just when I'd get my hopes up, Sandra would suffer a downturn. Filled with guilt, Tom would go back on his word to me. I expected it; I got used to it. So when Sandra overdosed, intentionally or accidentally, I finally glimpsed a future for Tom and me. I realized my reaction was callous, but my evil side kept whispering that Sandra had brought it on herself. She had been raised in wealth and luxury; she was spoiled and selfish. I always wondered if she'd married Tom with the intention of being a wife and mother. It seemed that a husband and children were merely adjuncts to her persona. The symptoms of mental problems struck me as attention-getting devices. She hadn't wanted to share the limelight, and eventually, she paid for her self-absorption with her life. I may have been uncharitable, but I truly believed that Sandra had a destructive personality. Maybe such a thing emanates from self-hatred more than self-love, yet the result is often the same, ending in self-destruction.
    But after Sandra's death, my long-awaited future was delayed by the birth of Tom's daughter's illegitimate child. My child's birth hadn't delayed anything as far as Tom was concerned. I had been alone, two thousand miles away in Mississippi. Tom and Sandra had been together in Seattle when their son was born a month after Adam.
    Now circumstances seemed to have changed. Tom appeared unencumbered. He'd asked me to marry him. I'd said yes—and then suffered qualms that didn't make much sense. Having waited most of my adult life for Tom Cavanaugh, suddenly I wasn't sure of what I wanted.
    It wasn't that I didn't want Tom. It wasn't that I would hate to move away. It was losing
The Alpine Advocate
that disturbed me. Maybe I'd married the newspaper instead of Tom. Maybe my commitment to my career wasgreater than my commitment to marriage. Maybe I was as crazy as Sandra Cavanaugh.
    The phone rang, rousing me from my reverie. It was Milo, saying that Cap Hartquist's attorney, Alfred Sven-sen, couldn't make it up to Alpine today. His bunions were acting up, and he was unable to drive. The arraignment would take place tomorrow.
    I added that sentence to my story and uttered a sigh of relief. The paper was almost ready to go to bed.
    I came out into the newsroom, where Kip MacDuff was talking to Leo Walsh. “Is everybody finished?” I asked.
    Scott said he had to go over his copy one more time. Leo made a thumbs-up gesture. Vida, however, was frowning.
    “In all this excitement,” she said, “I didn't get enough items for ‘Scene.’“
    Scene Around Town was Vida's pet, a three-inch front-page column made up of gossipy little items. It was, along with the obituaries—when we had any—the best-read part of the paper.
    “Didn't you get enough stuff with