The Virgin of Small Plains

by Nancy Pickard

  Patrick laughed.

  “I saw your mother,” she said, picking up his other sock and handing it to him.

  He took the sock but then tossed it over his shoulder and reached for her. With his arms around her waist, Abby sat down, straddling his legs, facing him so their noses were mere inches apart.

  “Where?” Patrick asked her, as his hands began to move toward her chest.

  “Umm. At the cemetery. She was visiting graves.”

  Patrick made a face and faked a shudder. “Whatever turns you on.”

  “Nice way to talk about your own mother.”

  He leaned forward to kiss her, and murmured into her lips, “I know what would make my mother happy.”

  “Hmm? What?”

  “Marry me.”

  “Marry you?” Abby reared back and nearly tumbled off his knees. He grabbed her to keep her from falling, and she stared at him. “I barely even let you sleep here! Why in the world would I want to marry you?”

  “Because it makes sense for both of us.”

  “It only makes sense for you, Patrick.” She got off his knees, batting his hands away when he tried to hold her there, stepped a safe distance away, and wagged a finger at him. “I know what you’re up to. You want to rehabilitate yourself, and you think I’m step two in your plan.”

  Patrick grinned at her. “Not really. I’d say, more like step six. No offense.”

  “Oh, believe me”—Abby rolled her eyes at him for effect—“when I say, none taken.”

  She turned and walked out of the room.

  “Hey, where are you going? I just proposed to you!”

  Patrick got up, grabbed the sock he’d tossed aside, and his shirt and his cowboy boots, and followed her into her kitchen.

  “I’m serious, Abby!”

  “You’re seriously crazy,” she retorted, without even turning around.

  It was still early, not quite 7:30, and the sun was only gently coming in through her white cotton curtains. She and Patrick were both at the start of the busiest seasons in their respective jobs. For Patrick, on most mornings when he woke up at her house, it meant riding back out to his family’s ranch to round up cattle for weaning, vaccinations, spraying, or whatever other spring work needed doing. For Abby, it meant strolling a few yards from her house to her plant nursery. Usually, some of her employees would be driving out to do yard work or plantings for the city, for businesses, or for private residences. A couple of others would stay at the nursery with Abby, to sell the annuals, perennials, seed, fertilizers, pots, saplings, shrubs, and other assorted gardening supplies she stocked there and even sold online.

  But this day, a holiday, Patrick was hanging around.

  “Okay, let’s back up a minute,” he said. “You said I’ve got a plan to rehabilitate myself and you’re supposedly one of the steps in this grand plan of mine. So if that’s true, then what was step one?”

  Abby turned to study him.

  Patrick Shellenberger, older brother of her friend Rex, teasing bane of her childhood and now an unexpected swain, had set his boots down, tossed his shirt and sock onto a chair, and leaned his back against the kitchen doorsill, so that he was suddenly all tousled hair, bare chest, and blue eyes.

  “Just out of curiosity,” he added, raising his eyebrows, which gave him an innocent appearance that didn’t fool her for a moment.

  “Well,” she said, after giving it a bit of thought, “I’d say that step one must have been coming home and taking over the ranch so your dad could quit working.”

  When he nodded to indicate she’d guessed right, Abby said, “If step two isn’t me, what is it?”

  “Working hard,” he told her, promptly. “Making a go of it.”

  “Uh.” Abby voice took on a grudging tone that suggested she had to admit he had succeeded in both of those steps, thus far. “Step three?”

  “Not drinking, and making sure everybody knows I’m not.”

  “And step four?”

  “Not getting arrested for anything.”

  Abby shook her head in wonder. “I can’t believe I am actually having a conversation with a man with such a plan. Have I really come to this?”

  Patrick laughed as he pushed himself off the doorsill and stood up straight. Suddenly the room seemed much smaller, and Abby instinctively stepped back a little. Patrick reached for the ceiling, stretching luxuriously from his bare toes to his long, tanned fingers, while she watched him.

  His jeans slipped down on his hips, revealing the lighter skin where the sun didn’t shine.

  He had a great laugh, Abby had to admit, and a sexy, husky voice, and broad shoulders and those blue eyes and in spite of her defenses against him, now and then her body responded to that laugh and those hands in a way that suggested it had a mind of its own. Standing in front of him, Abby concentrated hard on giving none of those feelings away to him. Patrick had taken her to supper in Council Grove the night before, and then he had driven her around his family’s ranch to show her the new cattle pens and other improvements he had been installing there. It had been a beautiful spring night and he’d been sweet to her, especially when he’d nicely asked if he could stay, rather than go home to his childhood bedroom at his parents’ house.

  Patrick shook off his stretch and stuck his thumbs in the belt loops at the sides of his jeans. Staring straight at her, he continued his recitation, saying, “Step five was that I would completely foil everybody’s expectations, and not date a skank.”

  “Not drink, not get arrested, not date a skank.” Abby ticked the points off on the fingers of her right hand. “Gee, how can any woman resist you?” She gave him a prim look. “I hate the word skank.”

  “Why?” Patrick looked honestly baffled.

  “Why?” She boggled at him, which made him grin again. “If you have to ask, you’ll never understand, so just stop using it, okay? You could try being nice, you know.”

  “I’m nice to you, aren’t I?”

  “Yeah, but you want something from me.”

  “I certainly do,” he leered at her.

  Before she could move out of his way, Patrick darted forward, grabbed her, and started tugging her backward with him.

  “Let me go! I’ve got to feed the birds, Patrick.”

  She not only had a business to run, but also a porch full of pet birds to tend.

  Instead of releasing her, Patrick pulled her closer, and leaned down to kiss her again.

  “See, Abby?” He nibbled around her eyebrows, kissed her down her nose, and landed softly on her lips. “We have fun together. We’re good together. We need each other. I need you to make me look good. You need me, because, frankly”—Patrick smirked right into her mouth—“with your history, who the hell else will have you?”

  “My history?” Abby pulled away from him. “What do you mean, my history?”

  He shrugged, all innocence again. “You chase your first love clear out of town so he never comes back. You never date anybody longer than a few months. You can’t find another man…”

  “You’re a fine one to talk about somebody’s history!”

  Abby placed her palms against his bare chest and shoved him away.

  “Exactly!” he said, as she stomped away from him. “My point exactly! We’re made for each other. Hey, Abs, you got a clean towel for me? I’m going to take a shower.”

  “Linen closet,” she said, “where they always are if you weren’t too lazy to look for them yourself.” And then on nothing but a wild impulse, and seemingly out of the blue, Abby blurted, “Patrick, what was it like that night you found the dead girl?”

  He blinked, frowned, and then he said, casually, and over his shoulder as he walked to the shower, as if it was no big deal, “What, did Rex tell you I was home that night? Nobody was supposed to know that. What do you think it was like? It sucked. I’d just as soon not do it again, thanks.”

  Abby stared after him, at the space he had occupied, with her mouth open.

  She had
expected him to ask her where she’d gotten such a crazy idea. She had never expected him to confirm it! Her question had been all bluff. She had only asked it because she had been confused by what she had overheard in the cemetery that morning. Especially because she remembered something that Rex had said the day they found Nadine Newquist. Or rather, something he had seemed about to say, but then didn’t. “My dad and…my dad was there, too.”

  She didn’t know why that had stuck in her mind, but it had resurfaced because of Verna’s…Verna’s what? Slip of the tongue? Verna’s senior moment of forgetfulness? Verna’s lie?

  But Abby had never expected Patrick to essentially confirm that Verna really had said “boys,” plural. And now that Abby had that information, she didn’t know what to think about it. Why did everybody think it was only Rex and Nathan who had found the girl, when Patrick had actually been there, too? And why, for heaven’s sake, had Verna lied to her about it?

  Abby realized she was fuzzier on the facts than she had ever known.

  She hadn’t paid much attention at the time. Even later, through all the years, she had tended to avoid listening to any discussions about it, because it brought up her own unhappy memories.

  Maybe everybody else didn’t have some facts wrong; maybe just she did.

  That made more sense to her, and yet…

  She felt uneasy, without even knowing precisely why.

  Feeling as if the fog had followed her home, Abby walked over to her coffeepot to pour out the dregs of her first pot of the morning and make a fresh one so that Patrick wouldn’t have to drink sludge when he got out of his shower.

  She and Patrick had been seeing each other for three months. It had taken him almost that long to get her to go out with him at all, and she thought that if there had been one other available man to date in town, she never would have. His own brother didn’t approve. Her friends didn’t like it. But what was she supposed to do? Move to a city where there were more men? Sit home all her life?

  As Patrick took his shower, Abby put the other matter out of her mind for the time being. And anyway, it was all too easy to find another subject, such as Patrick, to obsess about. She berated herself for having given in to the unfair torture of being thirty-three years old, unmarried, with no good prospects, living in an impossibly small town, and horny.

  On the other hand, he could make her laugh.

  Suddenly she ran back into her bedroom and then over to the door of her bathroom. She opened it and called in to him in the shower.

  “Patrick! You say you want to marry me. Do you love me?”

  “I could!” he yelled back at her, over the sound of the water running.

  There, she thought. It was things he said—like that—that made her smile and shake her head over him, regardless of everything else. At least he was honest in his way. Or maybe “blunt” was a better word for it. Infuriating and blunt. He was also really good looking, if you liked them a little tough. Good in the sack. There was that, there was definitely that. And, yes, sometimes he was fun to be with, in an adolescent kind of way. But marry Patrick Shellenberger, a man who had a hell of a wild reputation to rehabilitate, if he could ever do it at all?

  Rex would kill her if she ever did such a stupid thing. She’d have to be really desperate to ever think of marrying Patrick.

  One more time, she yelled at him. “Why do you want to rehabilitate yourself, Patrick? What’s in it for you?”

  From the shower, he started singing, “Mandy” at the top of his lungs.

  When he came back into the kitchen, smelling fresh and clean even though he’d had to put on yesterday’s clothes, he accepted a mug of black coffee from her and said, “That thing about me being home that night? When we found the girl? How long have you known about that?”

  “I don’t know,” she equivocated, with a little shrug.

  “Who else knows?”

  “Beats me.”

  “Well, keep it quiet, okay?”

  “Why isn’t anybody supposed to know, Patrick?”

  He gave her a crooked, charming smile. “Because yours truly had just flunked out of K-State, that’s why I was home.”

  “I didn’t know you flunked out of K-State!”

  “Exactly.” He grinned. “My parents were ashamed of me. My dad was ready to kill me. Hell, I wasn’t all that proud of it myself. Everybody was supposed to think I left because I didn’t like it.”

  “Okay. My lips are sealed,” she told him.

  He pressed his mouth against hers. “Now they are,” he murmured, and then he backed away and sat down in a kitchen chair to finish dressing.

  He reached for one of his boots and started to pull it on.

  “Goddammit!”

  Abby whirled around from where she had begun to chop fresh fruit at the sink. “What?”

  One of his brown boots dangled from his right hand. “They did it again! Your goddamn birds shit in my boots again!” He looked furious enough to wring somebody’s neck, either hers or her birds. “Look at this!”

  He turned the boot so she could see a river of white down the inside of it.

  Somebody had obviously perched on the edge of it and then let loose.

  “Oh, Patrick, I’m sorry,” she said, and tried hard not to laugh.

  “It’s not funny, goddammit! Your birds hate me, Abby.”

  She would have tried to deny it, but it was so obviously true. Her gray conure, her peach-faced South African lovebird, and her South American parrot all hated Patrick with a loathing that in another species might have been called venom. They screamed whenever he appeared, unless they were in their cages covered by sheets. They bit him if he got close enough to nip. And they shit on his belongings every chance they got.

  “That’s it,” he said, staring grimly at her. “I can’t take it anymore.”

  “Oh, come on, Patrick. Those boots have seen more cow shit than the inside of a barn. Give it to me. I’ll clean it up.”

  He handed her the boot and she washed it out with paper towels. But when she gave it back to him, he said, “Those birds have got to go.”

  “What?”

  “I mean it, Abby. It’s them or me.”

  “Oh, really?” She narrowed her eyes at him, and matched his ominous tone. “Well, then, don’t let their cage doors hit you on your way out, Patrick!”

  “I’m going to kill those birds one of these days.”

  He wasn’t joking and she didn’t laugh. This was the other Patrick, the Patrick she didn’t like, and never had, the one she remembered from when he was Rex’s hateful, sarcastic, older brother who had often teased her until she cried. Every now and then, that Patrick surfaced again, and she couldn’t stand him. Not only that, but she felt afraid of him, the way she had when she was six and he was ten, and for a lot of years after that. He had gone away that Patrick, and returned a nicer guy. But not always. And she knew that he hated the birds every bit as much as they hated him. “You ever touch them,” she said in a low, warning tone, “and I’ll have your ass in a cage.”

  He glared at her, then grabbed his boots and stomped heavily out of the kitchen and onto the porch at the side of it, hurrying past the big covered cage where the three birds spent their nights. Before she heard the screen door slam, she heard him mutter hatefully to her covered pets, “Fried chicken! Chicken cacciatore! Duck l’orange!”

  She couldn’t help it, she had to laugh again. It was the duck l’orange that did it.

  Abby realized full well that there was a not-very-hidden violence in Patrick. The couple of nights he’d spent in jail when he was younger had been because of fighting, after too many beers. If he hadn’t had a sheriff for a father there might even have been more than those couple of nights behind bars. That streak of his had always been there, as long as she could remember. But it was hard to take seriously when he said things like “chicken cacciatore”—things he knew would make her laugh.

  Abby ran after him, her bare feet picking up birdseed from th
e floor of the porch as she hurried to fling open the screen door. “Patrick!” she yelled at his departing back. “Don’t forget to bring me those bales of hay you promised me!”

  Patrick didn’t turn around, but he did raise an arm to indicate he’d heard her.

  When he didn’t also raise a third finger, Abby grinned, and took it to mean, “Okay.”

  From under the cover, harsh squawks grabbed her attention.

  With coos of greeting she lifted the covers off the spacious cage where her birds, J.D., Lovey, and Gracie spent their nights. When Abby had added two more birds to her menagerie, long after she stole J.D. from the Newquists, she found that it helped people to remember which was which if she called them something that sounded like the kind of bird they were. So the little gray conure was Gracie and the multicolored little lovebird was Lovey. Her customers got a kick out of seeing the birds on her porch in warm weather and often ran over to tap on the screens and chat with them.

  “So which one of you guys shit in Patrick’s boot, huh?”

  “Hello!” said Gracie, offering her only word.

  The three of them hitched rides on her arms and shoulders for the trip back into the kitchen for breakfast. On the way, she noticed something Patrick had missed in his rush to leave her house. “Hey, he forgot his sunglasses, guys.” The shades sat on the kitchen table where he had left them. She knew he was going to be pissed as soon as he turned east into the rising sun and had to squint to see the highway.

  “Serves him right,” she told the birds, “for talking mean about you.”

  As she distributed fruits and nuts into their bowls—while eating almost as much as she gave them—Abby complained, “Do you know what that big jerk said to me? He said I should marry him because nobody else would want me, can you believe that?”

  She carried the birds and bowls out to her screened-in porch so they could eat atop their perches. Every spring, she brought over tropical plants from her nursery, hung mirrors and toys from the rafters, and turned the porch into an aviary for them.

  “Next time?” she told the birds, feeling angry at him all over again. “Aim for both boots.”