by Julia London
Hallie laughed. “Yeah, I’ve got a slight problem always thinking I’m much funnier than anyone else does.”
“I think you’re hilarious, Hallie. And that is my point—friends give each other what they need. You sent me a reminder of home in so many ways when I needed it most. And now, I’m going to return the favor and kick you out of the doldrums. Simple.” He slipped his hands into his back pockets and smiled down at her in a way that made the sparks go off in her again.
“Thanks, Rafe.” Hallie stepped forward, put her arms around him to hug him, and pressed her cheek to his chest.
But Rafe felt stiff, and his hands remained in his pockets.
He was not returning her hug.
He was probably done with her for the day. Okay, she got that—it had been a roller coaster. So Hallie lifted her head and rose up on her toes. She meant to kiss his cheek, but Rafe suddenly turned his head as if to look at her, and her mouth caught the corner of his mouth.
Hallie froze, her lips on his.
Her lips were on his soft, warm lips. Rafe put his hand on her arm, and Hallie turned her head a little more. Not so much as to suggest she was actually kissing him, but maybe a little like she was kissing him, because it felt good.
It felt very good.
It felt sort of serious, too.
But Rafe pulled himself free of her. He stepped backward and gaped at her, his hands on his waist, his eyes locked on hers. “What was that?” he demanded.
“That?” She was looking at his mouth. She wanted to go back there, just for a moment, anyway. She brushed her hair from her face. “I meant to kiss you on the cheek, but then you moved.” She shrugged. “I didn’t mean to.”
He stared at her. Hard. Like he didn’t understand what had just happened or who she was.
Well, neither did she. “It was an accident.”
He took a minute to consider that. He didn’t look convinced, but at last he nodded. “Okay,” he said. “Okay.” He dragged his fingers through his hair and stared at the ground, then slowly lifted his head. “Okay.”
Hallie tried not to smile, but she couldn’t help herself. She felt strangely giddy. Anticipation waved in her chest. She felt . . . turned on.
Rafe pointed at her. “Don’t make it weird.”
“You’re weird.”
“We need to head in. I need to get back to studying.” He started walking. Or maybe he was sprinting. Whatever he was doing, he was moving fast. So she’d made a tiny kissing mistake—he didn’t have to act like he’d contracted Ebola from her and had to get to the doctor right away.
Hallie followed him up the path and allowed him to help her onto her horse.
They chatted on the way home—well, she chatted—as they rode through prairie grass and oaks, past clumps of prickly pear cactus and limestone rocks that seemed to erupt from the surface of the earth. Rafe seemed tense . . . until she mentioned the book Sideways. Then the tension seeped out of him, and they talked about it like two friends. Their own private book club. Maybe, he said, she was a little like the main character in Sideways—maybe she needed to get away and reevaluate where she was in life, just like Miles in the book had done. “But without the wine tour,” he added with a wink.
“Are you kidding? Totally with the wine tour,” she countered.
Everything slid and molded back into place between them. No sparks, just two old friends who had known each other since childhood. Two booklovers, two Texans, two ranch kids.
It looked and felt and smelled and tasted like the friendship they’d always had—and yet, something was bothering Hallie.
Something she couldn’t quite put her finger on.
She had this confused sense that Rafe liked her, but in a way, he didn’t like her. That he wanted to be her friend . . . but he didn’t want her to be his friend.
It was weird.
Chapter Six
Cordelia Applewhite Prince put on a jacket and walked up the hill to the family cemetery. Hallie was right—it was a curious thing that she came up here as often as she did. Cordelia couldn’t explain it, other than she knew that it somehow made her feel closer to Charlie.
Next to Charlie’s grave, she’d installed two lawn chairs—one for her, obviously. The other for Dolly, her mother-in-law, who had horned her way into this little piece of paradise. Cordelia also had a cooler and, up until a month ago, a sun umbrella. Martin had taken the sun umbrella down last month because he said it would get ruined with the winter rains.
So for the winter months, Cordelia wore a wide-brimmed straw hat that she’d picked up from the end-of-season clearance aisle at Walmart.
Until her Charlie died, Cordelia had never been inside a Walmart. It had never even occurred to her—she had people to do her shopping, and honestly, if she was buying for herself, she was going to do that in Houston or New York or Los Angeles. But in the endless hours after Charlie’s death, when the days and weeks had spilled into months, Cordelia discovered that she desperately needed something to do with herself. Because if she didn’t have an activity, she was tortured by the many, many thoughts of what might have been had she and Charlie not separated.
He might still be alive. She might have noticed something in his health, might have made him go to a doctor before it was too late. Even if she’d just checked on him once in a while, made sure he was eating right and taking his blood pressure medicine, he could still be here. She hadn’t done any of those things, and then he was dead. Flat on his back on the putting green with the cigar clamped between his teeth.
To say she felt a lot of guilt was a gross understatement. Somehow, she’d managed to pin his enchilada-clogged arteries on herself.
But on the other hand, there were lucid moments when she didn’t blame herself entirely. If Charlie had managed to keep his pants zipped, they would not have separated. That was his fault. Perhaps Cordelia could have been more forgiving. But when it had happened again and again, she couldn’t take it. She couldn’t abide being disrespected like that.
Looking back on it, as she had done so often since he died, she had to wonder, was it really so awful that he cheated? It wasn’t as if they were burning up the bedsheets. It was a strange question for a woman to ask herself, but Cordelia truly didn’t know the answer anymore. All she knew was that she would rather have him around than not.
In the beginning, Cordelia had walked around her house with his ghost haunting her in every room. But after a month or two, she had to get away from the ranch and the memories. So she’d started driving every day, going wherever her car took her. And it took her, more often than not, to the new, shiny Walmart on the San Antonio highway. Who knew it was such an amazing store? Who knew you could find anything a person could possibly want in one of the aisles of that enormous store? Aisle after aisle of things she’d never known she wanted or needed.
That’s where she found these chairs and the little wicker side table. And the sun umbrella. Her hat. And more.
Cordelia plopped into a chair and propped her feet on the cooler and surveyed her little kingdom of graves. There were about two dozen, give or take, surrounded by a tidy little wrought iron fence. There was Odell Martha Prince, who had died in 1846, and the tiny headstones of the four infants who had preceded her in death. There was Leroy Prince, who’d departed this earth in 1948. He was the artist of the family, according to Dolly. And Omar Prince, who had died at the age of thirteen in 1892 from what family lore would have you believe was a bad case of constipation.
Cordelia glanced to her left, to Charlie’s gaudy headstone with the cherubs and trumpets carved into it, standing proudly at the feet of his grandparents. His ashes were buried beneath it.
An oak leaf scudded across the top of his grave, and Cordelia announced, “Your daughter thinks I’m a head case. She might be right.” With the heel of her shoe, she nudged an acorn off the cooler. “I certainly never
pictured myself as the crazy old lady in the hat hanging out at her cheating husband’s grave. Did you?”
No sound but the breeze rustling the leaves of the live oak that stretched over her head and his grave. Dozens of little brown leaves rained down on her.
“Martin’s annoyed with me. He won’t come out and just say it, but I can tell. He’s about as stubborn as you were. He and I don’t see eye to eye on running this ranch. I’m sure he thinks I ought to stay in the kitchen.”
She thought about that a minute.
“Well, maybe he doesn’t think that, but I’m telling you, he doesn’t think I know what I’m doing.”
Another rustle of wind through the tree showered another round of leaves on her.
“I miss you, Charlie. I can’t seem to help myself, you rotten lying bastard, but I do. And I damn sure don’t want to spend the rest of my life missing you like this.” She looked up. She often wondered if he was looking down at all of them like the family pastor said. She didn’t know what she really believed about an afterlife, but she liked to think he was looking over them. “Reverend Bristol told me to take comfort in the idea that you are always near me.” Cordelia snorted. “I told him I figured you were nearer to Missy Gutierrez at the title company, because you always had an eye for a good ass and I know you were sniffing around her before you died.” She sighed. “The reverend was not amused. Frankly, neither was I.”
She leaned back, propping her head against the lawn chair. This thing was as sturdy as the old retired longhorn steer that lived in a pasture behind the house. That was aluminum and plastic fabric for you—indestructible. And to think of all the money she’d spent over the years buying quality wood furniture. Those pieces wouldn’t last a month up here on the hill. Cordelia decided she was like this chair—sturdy. A little nutty, maybe, but she would outlast all the fine citizens of Three Rivers, that was for sure.
“Well, anyway, Charlie, our girl is having a rough time. You know, I get it—I know what it’s like, no thanks to you. Which I tried to tell her. And you know what she said? She told me to take a hike in so many words.” She lifted her head and glared at the headstone. “It’s a good thing I never caught you in the actual act. I can’t even imagine. But you would have met your ultimate demise a whole lot sooner if I had.”
She lowered her head again. “Hope that makes you feel bad. I hope you know what your daughter is going through right now and you feel really awful.”
She closed her eyes, thinking of Hallie. They didn’t communicate well, never had, really, and Cordelia didn’t know if that was because she was truly as offensive as Hallie seemed to believe, or if Hallie wore too many feelings on her sleeve.
“What I really wish is that you were here to help me. I don’t know what to say to our girl. She got drunk last night. Hallie! The one who is always lecturing me about how much I drink. She mopes around, she doesn’t want to see her friends, she’s eating anything that’s not nailed down. She feels worthless, I know she does, because that’s the only way you can feel after the fury dies off.”
Silence. Even the wind stilled.
“Seriously, Charlie, why are men such pigs?” Cordelia asked softly.
A crow soared overhead and cackled at her. “I wish to God I hadn’t loved you so damn much,” she muttered, and sat up, annoyed with her maudlin self.
A movement down by the airstrip caught Cordelia’s attention, and she spotted two riders. “Who the hell is that?” she asked aloud. Nick and Luca had already come back from checking in on the prairie chickens. Apparently the chickens were already hunkering down and getting ready for winter, so there wasn’t much to see.
Cordelia considered waving at the riders. A friendly wave, a welcome wave. But then again, she didn’t want anyone to get the wrong idea and actually walk up this hill to talk to her. She shuddered at the idea of small talk.
She watched them a little longer and realized that one of them was Hallie. Maybe she’d gone out with Luca. He was a good twin—he’d probably gone along to cheer her up.
“We need to put a better path up here! A good rain, and this will be dangerous, Delia!”
Cordelia didn’t even turn her head to acknowledge Dolly as the older woman hauled herself up the hill. Cordelia had given up trying to dissuade Dolly from coming up here—it was beyond Dolly’s ability to allow Cordelia this space for herself.
Dolly fell into the lawn chair beside Cordelia with a grunt. Cordelia glanced at her from the corner of her eye. She was wearing a cheap woven poncho, undoubtedly bought at one of those touristy places in Mexico. She’d rolled up her distressed jeans and was wearing red Converse high-top sneakers. Ridiculous.
“I thought you were going to Walmart,” Cordelia said.
“I did, and oooh boy, don’t go to Walmart on a Sunday afternoon. Talk about crowded—it was nut to butt in there.”
“Well, thanks for that visual,” Cordelia drawled.
“You’ve been spitting at Martin again, I see.”
Cordelia shot her a look. “Did he say that?”
“Nope. That’s how I know. He’s moping around like someone punched him, and I know only one person who can make a man feel like that.”
“He’s stubborn! He thinks he has all the answers.”
“All men do, Delia. Look what I got us.” Dolly pulled a box of donut holes from beneath her god-awful poncho.
Cordelia shook her head. “I don’t eat that crap, you know that.”
“Suit yourself,” Dolly said with a shrug, and opened the box. “You’re gonna get to my age one day and realize that life is too short to deny yourself a donut hole now and then.” She popped one in her mouth and squinted down the hill as she chewed. “Who’s that?”
“Hallie.”
“Hallie! I’m surprised she remembers how to ride a horse anymore. Who’s she with?”
“Probably Luca.”
“I don’t think so,” Dolly said. “I saw Luca and Nick at Jo’s Java.”
Cordelia looked at Dolly. “You were at Jo’s Java? I thought you didn’t like driving in town.”
“I can manage on a Sunday when there’s not so many people whipping around me and driving too fast and looking at their damn phones. So if that’s not Nick or Luca, who is it?”
That was a good question. Cordelia looked again, squinting, trying to make the riders out as they drew closer.
Something hard slid in Cordelia’s belly. “That’s not Christopher, is it?” He’d been texting and messaging Hallie, wanting to talk. As far as Cordelia knew, Hallie had ignored him.
“No,” Dolly said. “Least, I don’t think so.” She munched her way through another donut hole as she considered the rider. “Christopher’s scrawnier than that man. Fact, I can think of only one man who’s built like that.”
“Who?” Cordelia asked curiously.
“Rafe Fontana,” Dolly said. “I always did think that boy was a hunk-a-hunk of burning love.”
Martin’s son? Cordelia felt suddenly hot. “But I . . . they don’t . . .” Good Lord, she couldn’t even think. Cordelia liked Rafe, she always had. But she didn’t like the idea of him hanging out with Hallie when she was so vulnerable. Hallie didn’t handle rejection well and tended to throw her lot in with anyone she could lean on.
Dolly didn’t say a word, but extended the box of donut holes to her.
Cordelia took two. “I mean, you don’t think Rafe is getting any ideas, do you?”
“Well, if you’re worried about that, you ought to get her out of the house,” Dolly said.
Cordelia looked at Dolly. “Do you know something?”
“No,” Dolly said, waving her hand at Cordelia. “What I know is that he’s a man and Hallie is a very attractive woman. Rafe is respectful. He’s a good kid. But Hallie is who she is.”
Cordelia knew precisely what Dolly meant. Her daughter was
charming. She could attract men without even knowing she’d done it, and then hitch a ride on their star without looking to see where that star was going. “She doesn’t ever leave! She doesn’t want to see her friends, she wants to mope.”
“Maybe Ella could help,” Dolly suggested.
Ella. Luca’s fiancée. Ella had a calming influence on Cordelia’s twins. “I’m going to call her right now,” she said, and reached for her phone.
But first, she took another donut hole. Dolly was right—life was too short.
Chapter Seven
Creedy’s cows got out again on Tuesday, and this time, they ambled over to Mrs. Bachman’s place and ate half her kitchen garden. Toting a rifle, Mrs. Bachman met the sheriff and threatened “to shoot those damn cows if Creedy can’t keep them on his land.”
Once again, the sheriff called on Rafe and his dad to help move them back to the Creedy ranch. “Problem is, Creedy’s so old he probably don’t remember his cows keep getting out,” the sheriff said. “He’s got to be ninety if he’s a day.”
“I’ll get that fence fixed,” Rafe promised, and drove down to the Creedy house to have a word.
Mr. Creedy’s old ranch house was desperately in need of paint. But he had a very neat garden out front. He walked out to meet Rafe. His torso slanted east when he walked, and he moved about as slow as it took autumn to show up around here after a long hot summer. Rafe explained the problem with his cows. “Tell you what. I’ll fix that fence for fifty bucks plus materials. It’s going to need some new barbed wire and a post. I’d say that’s a bargain.”
Creedy had agreed, but not before he offered his opinion that it wasn’t any big deal if the cows wandered a little bit, and what else were the Princes going to do with all that land?
“Well, sir, it’s their land, and they don’t want your cows,” Rafe said. “But today, your cows were on Bachman land.”