B00DVWSNZ8 EBOK

by Jeffrey, Anna

  Soon a Mexican woman brought in the food and placed it on the table—barbecued brisket, pinto beans, coleslaw, and a cast-iron skillet of steaming cornbread. Despite the American Heart Association's cautions, Brady suspected beef was the daily fare in the Strayhorn house.

  As he reached for a chunk of cornbread, he looked at the empty high-backed armchair at the end of the table. It reminded him of a throne.

  Jude caught him looking. "That's Grandpa's chair," she said, passing the platter of sliced brisket to him. “He doesn't always eat dinner. He says three meals a day make him feel too full. His digestive system sometimes gives him problems."

  As Brady took a few slices of the beef, his gaze moved up to the wall behind the patriarch's chair. The portrait hanging there had to be the one Jude had mentioned when she talked to him about breeding Sal to her paint—the one of Quanah Parker and Jude's distant grandparent. Sure enough, a paint horse stood in the background, just as she had said. A feeling of time passing and dynasties dying swirled around him like a dry wind.

  "Grandpa's getting old," Jude said, spooning beans onto her plate. "He and I used to take walks in the evening after supper, but we haven't been doing that lately."

  Brady watched as she added coleslaw to her plate. She was still a hearty eater, just like that night in Stephenville. "Why not?"

  "Besides his health, it's sort of like we're headed in opposite directions. It's okay, though. Pretty soon, I have to start getting ready for school anyway."

  He finished filling his own plate. "I've heard you're a good teacher."

  "Who told you that?”

  "I don't remember. I've just heard it around."

  "I am good at teaching. And I get a thrill out of it. I like helping people and I like the kids. If I can light a spark in some kid and he or she goes on from here and gets a good education and does well, that makes me happy."

  "It sounds like a good thing you're doing. Why not concentrate on that?"

  "I do concentrate on it. Most of the time."

  He looked up from buttering half a slice of cornbread. "If you're good at teaching school and you like it, why do you want to give it up and put a bunch of cows on my place when you don't have to?"

  "But I do have to. Now more than ever."

  "To prove what, darlin'? Maybe that's why your dad can't see your point. He doesn't understand what you're trying to prove."

  Her fork stopped mid-air and she gave him a look. "Are you lecturing me? After I've invited you to dinner?" She gave a little laugh that sounded insincere. "Now you're starting to sound like Daddy."

  Oh, boy. She had tried to allay her sharp tone with that phony little laugh, but she was still uptight and uneasy—a different woman from the seemingly carefree one who spent two days and a night with him in Stephenville. "I'm not lecturing. I just see you and your dad caught in this tight jar and neither one of you seems to be able to get a breath of fresh air or climb out."

  "He’s never appreciated me,” she said. “In spite of that, until lately, we’ve always gotten along. “He doesn't value my education. He doesn’t value me as a person. He doesn't even know who I am."

  The morning’s conversation in the manager’s office sprang into Brady’s mind: Jude. Another Angus bull.

  Brady suspected that if he hadn’t been present, an argument between J.D. and Jude might have erupted. He couldn’t guess who would have won. J.D.’s tone had been laced with bewilderment and frustration, but Jude had ignored him. Now Brady wondered exactly what Jude was doing that her father learned after she had already done it. If he wasn’t computer-smart, perhaps a lot.

  A wise Fort Worth businessman had once told Brady that a smart man got smarter with the help of a smart woman, so he plowed ahead.

  “You've got control of the bulls around here, right?” Brady said.

  “More or less.”

  “How long have you been doing that?”

  “I don’t know. A couple of years maybe.”

  “How much is the bull herd worth?"

  "I'm not sure."

  He didn't believe her. Bull rotation was an ever-evolving part of ranching, large or small. Bulls were good for only six or seven years max. He suspected she could tell him to the penny what had been paid for the Circle C’s bulls if they had been bought, what had been invested in them if they were homebred and what they would sell for when the time came to move them out.

  "Then I'll guess. I'm gonna say more than a million dollars. And darlin', where I come from, that ain't chickenfeed."

  Her mouth pursed. "So what?"

  "I'm saying a cowman doesn't put the future of his herd, and consequently the ranch, in the hands of somebody he has no faith in. Especially now, when he's thinking about turning management over to some greenhorn like me."

  She stopped eating and looked at him. "What are you getting at?"

  "I’m just saying, you’ve got more power than you know or are willing to admit. And by exercising it, you’ll eventually see the changes you want. So the question I have now is will the ranch be better off if the person with the power to change the makeup of the whole herd doesn’t support a new general manager, whether it’s me or somebody else?”

  She sat back in her chair, arms crossed under her breasts, her pretty eyes drilling him. At least his question had gotten her attention.

  He met her eyes. "I picked up on your dad’s attitude about the Angus bull. I don’t intend to be like him, Jude. I’ve seen with my own eyes that crossbreeds are stronger, healthier animals. I don’t question your knowledge of genetics and the importance of it. I’m not gonna argue over what bulls you want to buy. All I’m gonna want to know why you select them. Bottom line, I'm gonna need help. Your help."

  A long, assessing gaze from those wide brown eyes came his way. Something was going on in that pretty head, but he wasn't gambler enough to try to guess what.

  "This conversation is confusing me,” she said. “Why do I feel like I'm being manipulated?"

  "No, darlin', you're not. I’d never do that. I’m being as upfront as I can be. I know a little bit about cattle and how to make a ranch work as a business, but I don’t have your education in what makes a good animal. I know the Circle C has a reputation for superior stock. I don’t want to do anything that will detract from that.

  “So I’m saying I’ll make you a deal. I told you I’d think about leasing the 6-0. And I did think about it. Here's what I’m willing to do. Postpone your plans to start your own herd for a while. Make up with your daddy. He’s been a stockman his whole life. Don’t you think he’s figured out that little by little you’re changing the makeup of the herd? He hasn’t tried to stop you, has he?”

  She looked away, delaying her answer. “No,” she finally answered.

  “So help me do this job, Jude. We’ve nothing to fight over. Your legacy, your future ownership of this place is under no threat from me. Then, later on, if you still feel like you have to go off in your own direction, I'll agree to lease you my land and we'll sit down and work out the details."

  She continued to stare at him. He held her gaze. He couldn't risk losing her respect by letting her get the best of him.

  "Like with breeding Sal and Patch, huh? Maybe next year? Don’t think I don’t know what you’re up to. You're trying to force me to stall. That’s manipulation."

  He shook his head. "No, Jude. I’m trying to get you to look at reality. We can do this together and make it work. Or we can be at odds with each other and make it hard. And besides that, it's damn near too late to start on a spring calf crop."

  A few seconds passed while his butt squirmed in his chair. "I don't know. I'll think about it," she finally said, throwing his own words back at him.

  Relieved, he suppressed a deep breath.

  Chapter 20

  After dinner, as Jude walked back to the veterinary clinic with Brady, she couldn’t get past believing she had been outmaneuvered.

  As they packed the remaining items in her former office,
he was disgustingly obsequious, as if he expected her to break into screams any minute. Ginger flashed in her mind. Maybe tantrums were what he expected from all women. Maybe his perception of women was as warped as her father's.

  Already, mentally, Jude no longer called the space in the veterinary clinic "her" office. She had moved on. Amazing how quickly one thing could change to another. Margie Wallace's death, for instance. Who could have ever foreseen the bizarre chain of events one elderly woman's dying would set off?

  Irene's husband helped her and Brady carry the packed boxes and her computer into the house, where they left everything in the hallway near the back door. Jude had been caught so off balance by the reason for the move, she had been unable to think of where else to put her things. In a house with more than twenty rooms, she had been able to think of nowhere to place a few boxes. How strange was that?

  After all the commotion of moving had died and she was left alone, she roamed every floor, looking for a new place to locate. For the first time in her entire life, she had felt out of place, as if she didn't belong here.

  She ended up at the large windowless room behind the kitchen pantry. Once long ago, it had been the pantry before the size of the household shrunk. These days, its shelves were piled with flotsam and jetsam. Junk. Miscellaneous crap that could be thrown away.

  As she stood in the doorway considering the space for an office, Windy came up behind her. "Whatcha lookin' for, Miss Jude?"

  "Just wondering if this would make a good office."

  "It's a nice big room. When you was a little girl, it was wall to wall with home cannin'. You 'member that?"

  Vignettes flashed through her memory of shelves loaded with neatly arranged glass quart jars of peaches and apricots and tomatoes and jams and jellies of every kind. No one canned fruits and vegetables or made jam at the ranch any longer. Windy probably wouldn't know where to start. "I remember," Jude replied. “I really miss Grammy Pen.”

  "I was just a tenderfoot in those days, working on the chuck wagon," the aging cook said. "I didn't come into the house much, but I recollect seein' all those jars. Yore Grandma Penny Ann loved to garden and she loved to put up vittles. Nobody could do a better job than her."

  And just like that, Jude remembered whose granddaughter she was and she determined where her new office would be.

  The next morning, for the sake of comfort and convenience, she put on athletic shoes. Before going downstairs, she prowled a huge storeroom on the third floor and found a solid oak table she could use as a computer desk. Brady might have taken the office in the veterinary clinic, but Jude had kept the computer. All of her records were stored on the hard drive. If Brady wanted a computer to use, Daddy would be forced to buy him a new one. A small price to pay for uprooting her. At some point in the future, perhaps she would go over to Lubbock and buy a real computer desk.

  Or not.

  Would she even be living here six months from now?

  It was nine o'clock before she reached the ground floor. As it always was at this hour of the morning, the house was empty except for Windy and Irene in the kitchen and Lola Mendez fussing about with a feather duster. Jude declined breakfast.

  She stood in the doorway of the octagon-shaped sunroom located just off the hallway that led to the back door—the sun room Grammy Pen had added onto the house. It hadn't been used in years. As far as Jude knew, it looked today just as Grammy Pen had left it the day a massive stroke had ended her life.

  Six of its eight walls had tall, narrow windows covered by wooden blinds. The air had a golden hue to it and pale yellow walls made it feel sunny even on cloudy days. A fat, red enamel woodstove hunkered in one of the wall's angles and would keep her toasty on cold days.

  The room was still furnished as her great-grandmother had originally done it more than fifty years earlier—tan wicker furniture with red-and-yellow-striped cushions that looked like Mexican serapes and a desk Jude viewed as being tiny. Grammy Pen had called a lady's desk.

  Her great-grandmother had used this room to sit in the morning sunshine while she drank her coffee and read a stack of newspapers and made phone calls to senators and congressmen.

  Jude had never been political, but she supposed politics was a subject she should take more interest in. Daddy constantly talked of how large-scale cattle ranching was being pressured and would someday be legislated into extinction. He and Grandpa knew many political figures in high places. But today, Jude didn't intend to think about politics.

  She conscripted Irene's husband and a helper to carry the heavy table down from the third-floor storeroom, then haul Grammy Pen's lady's desk back up. As she busied herself hooking up her computer and its devices, she remembered sitting on the settee with Grammy Pen and listening to her read stories of Peter Rabbit.

  The sunroom had limited wall space, so when she started unpacking the box holding her pictures, she found no place to hang them. She returned to the third floor. In one of the seldom-used bedrooms, she found a long old dresser and called on Irene's husband and his helper again. This was the way her life had always been. For as long as she could remember, if she couldn't manage something alone, if she needed help, she'd had to rely on hired people. No family member or friends had ever been available.

  Once the dresser was in place behind the table, she set out her favorite things, save the picture of her father. That she laid face down in one of the dresser's drawers.

  All in all, she didn't dislike the new surroundings. From one of the wicker chairs positioned by the window, she looked outside at the big red barn with a white C enclosed inside a circle painted on one end of the loft. All of the hands' vehicles were parked in front of the barn, including Brady Fallon's tan Silverado.

  Now, with him present at the ranch some part of every day, even her comfort zone in her own home would be threatened. Still, it wasn't in her nature to carry a chip on her shoulder. Just because she had lost a battle didn't mean she had lost the war. Brady had reminded her of that. For now, she tamped her stewing intentions down to a frustrated simmer.

  Dinnertime had come and gone by the time she finished, and she hadn't eaten all day. Daddy had peeked into the sunroom and reminded her it was time to eat, but she had made an excuse that she was too busy. Suzanne got off work at the grocery store at two, so she changed her athletic shoes for boots, picked up her purse and drove to town.

  Entering Lucky's Grocery was like stepping into some grocer's poorly organized attic. A combination of the outdated and modern met customers in every overstocked aisle. If Lockett had had a real fire department, Lucky's would have been ticketed heavily for multiple fire code violations.

  The first person she ran into was Joyce Harrison at Lucky's only cash register. Jude hadn't seen Joyce in months. Today she studied her. She was slightly overweight. Her hair was dark brown, styled in an outdated curly do. Bows or barrettes usually adorned her hair, but today, little red hearts were somehow attached. If Jude were asked to guess her age, she would say forty, but Jude knew the woman was only two years older than she and Suzanne.

  "Why, Jude Strayhorn," Joyce said. "I never see you in here. You slummin' today?"

  Jude wasn't sure how to take Joyce's remark. She had always guarded against appearing uppity to her Willard County friends and neighbors, constantly aware that most of them struggled to get by. It was true she didn't often go to the grocery store. She had no need to. "I'm looking for Suzanne."

  "She's in the back room. I'll page her."

  Joyce pushed a button on an intercom mounted on the wall and paged Suzanne to come to the front of the store. While Jude waited, she thumbed through one of the tabloid papers she picked off the rack beside the cash register. "How have you been, Joyce?"

  "Just fine. Guess what. I'm dating a guy who’s started working for y'all."

  Jude saw the edges of the newsprint pages begin to tremble and realized her hands were shaking. "Really?"

  "His name's Brady Fallon. Have you met him?"

&nbs
p; Jude looked up, schooling her expression to bland. Would you believe that a few weeks ago, I spent an entire night having wild and crazy sex with him. And I just gave him my office yesterday.

  "Yes, of course," she answered.

  Joyce closed her dark brown eyes and slowly shook her head. "He is so dreamy." Her eyes popped open and a direct look came at Jude. "Listen, y'all furnish houses for some of your hands, don't you?"

  "Some of them."

  "The school bus comes out there and picks up the; kids, don’t it?"

  "It comes to our front gate. It doesn't come onto the ranch."

  "So if somebody lived in one of those houses, they'd have to drive their kid to the front gate?"

  "Yes," Jude answered cautiously. "Why do you ask?"

  Joyce angled her head and gave Jude a coy smile. "Oh, just collecting information. In case it's needed."

  Before the conversation could go further, Suzanne appeared. "Hey, girlfriend. What're you doing in town?"

  "I came to buy you lunch," Jude said, sliding the tabloid newspaper back into its slot.

  "Uh-oh. Did Windy quit?"

  Jude laughed. “Windy will probably be the Circle C's cook until he can no longer drag himself into the kitchen.”

  Suzanne clocked out and they strolled up the sidewalk toward Maisie's Cafe, the only eating place in Lockett. "Joyce just asked me about the school bus coming to the ranch," Jude said as they walked. "Why does she want to know that?"

  "Oh, honey, she's planning a wedding. She's got the hots for Brady Fallon that bad."

  Mentally, Jude startled and warned herself about reacting. "Daddy hasn't mentioned that. He keeps up with what everyone's doing. I'm sure he'd know if one of the hands was planning on getting married."

  They reached the cafe's plate-glass entry door. Inside, Maisie's looked as dated as the grocery store, with the exception that Maisie had deliberately striven for the nineteenth-century look. At midafternoon, Jude and Suzanne were the only customers. Over hamburgers and iced tea, Jude told Suzanne about the recent developments in her life, all the way back to her trip with Brady to Stephenville. Afterward, she felt as if a yoke had been lifted from her shoulders.