My One and Only Cowboy

by A. J. Pine

  Jace’s gray eyes popped wide open. “Hey, now! That’s not even funny. I’m not ready for a wife or kids. Right now I just want to be your kids’ favorite uncle. Thinkin’ of marriage gives me hives,” Jace said. “Granny ain’t out kickin’ the bushes for a wife for me, is she?”

  “She was actin’ strange,” Kasey answered.

  “How so?” Jace asked.

  “Well, first she was cussin’ about Lila. Then next thing I knew, she was askin’ about Henry Thomas.”

  “Really? Why?” Brody rushed out to remove a handful of petunia blossoms from Silas’s hand. “They might be pretty, buddy, but they’d taste awful.” He turned him around and showed him a blue jay in the tree. “If you can catch that bird, you can eat every bit of him.”

  “Brody!” Kasey fussed.

  “Well, he can.” Brody grinned. “Now what about Henry?”

  “Granny got a faraway look on her face and next thing I know she’s wipin’ away tears on her apron tail. Then she went back to cussin’ about Lila was the cause of every bad thing that ever happened in Happy. Hell’s bells! I think she even blamed her for all the businesses on Main Street closing down,” she said.

  “It was a tough time everywhere, but none of it was Lila’s fault,” Jace said seriously. “We lost Gramps and Daddy. Henry disappeared and Lila left town. In her mind, it’s all rolled into one big ball. Blaming Lila for all of it would be easy.”

  “Seems like Lila’s coming back to town sure stirred up a lot of old memories,” Brody said.

  “I can’t imagine why Henry’s disappearance was such a big deal. He told his sister he was leaving. His mama had died, so he wasn’t needed on the ranch next door. I guess it’s the not knowing where he went or what happened to him that worries the gossipin’ folks.” Kasey lowered her voice. “And we all know that Granny and her church buddies keep the rumor mill going.”

  “Oh, yes, we do and the gossip vines have been about to dry up lately. This should make them happy. Maybe you ought to flirt with Lila just to give ’em something to talk about.” Jace nudged Brody in the ribs with his elbow.

  Brody put a hand on his shoulder and shoved him. “Why don’t you help me out and do something crazy so they’ll have something to talk about?”

  “Wouldn’t take the spotlight off you for anything.” Jace popped him on the shoulder in a friendly brotherly slap. “Hey, Kasey, what’s for supper? If our old-man brother will go take his shower, we might get to eat before it gets cold.”

  “Barbecued chicken and rice. I made two chocolate pies for dessert and it’ll be ready in”—Kasey checked her watch—“fifteen minutes.”

  Brody’s head bobbed once. “That’ll give me enough time for a fast shower. Emma told me that I stink.”

  “She’s an outspoken one. Reminds me of another little red-haired girl named Kasey,” Jace said.

  His sister’s and brother’s voices faded as Brody headed inside. When he and his siblings had all moved into the house a couple of months before, Kasey took the south wing for her and the children and Jace and Brody each chose a room on the north side. Granny Hope still had a bedroom in that side of the house, but she’d moved her furniture out to the house that the foreman had vacated when he moved away. Located about a quarter mile behind the house, it was where she spent a lot of her time these days.

  Brody stripped out of his clothes in his bedroom and padded barefoot to the bathroom. Letting the cool water beat down on his back, he remembered a time when he and Lila had sat under the falls at Hope Springs. The water had flowed down on her dark hair, plastering it to her naked back, and they’d made wild, passionate teenage love right there in the cold water.

  He sighed and put away the memories, and after he’d dried off, he remembered to splash on a little cologne so that Emma would be happy with him. He dressed in fresh jeans and a snowy white T-shirt and made it to the table just as Kasey and Jace put the last of the food out.

  Slinging an arm around his grandmother’s shoulders, he leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. “I hope you made plenty of biscuits. Ain’t none better than yours.”

  “Not even Molly’s down at the Happy Café?” She walked away from him.

  “Can’t compare.” He smiled. Usually a hug, a kiss, and a compliment worked, but the frown on her face said that it was going to take a while for her to cool down.

  “You smell good now,” Emma said.

  “Well, thank you.” Brody dropped a kiss on her red curls. “I wouldn’t want to be all stinky when I read to you tonight.”

  Emma sighed dramatically. “It’s not your turn. It’s Uncle Jace’s turn to read me the bedtime story.”

  Good Lord, had he lost his touch with all the female population?

  “And mine tomorrow night,” Kasey laughed. “Looks like you got all cleaned up for nothing.”

  “If I can’t read to the princess, then I’ll read to the boys,” Brody said.

  “No, it’s my turn to do that.” Hope set the hot biscuits on the table and motioned for them all to take their places.

  Brody slid into the chair to Hope’s right. “Then I’ll just go on to the Silver Spur.”

  “You can say grace, Brody,” Hope declared as she sat down at the head seat. Sure, she’d given the running of the ranch over to Brody and Jace but there were some things she didn’t relinquish and the head chair was one of them.

  Jace thanked God for the food, family, and life and then said, “Amen.”

  “I like it when Uncle Brody says the blessin’.” Rustin handed his plate to his mother. “He don’t have to talk forever like Uncle Jace.”

  “Your uncle Brody needs to talk to Jesus more and get God’s opinion on women and bars,” Hope fussed. “I’m not callin’ names but he knows exactly who I’m referring to. When it comes time for him to settle down, he needs a good churchgoin’ woman who knows how to run a ranch and can cook and—”

  “And has angel wings and a halo?” Brody quickly finished for her.

  Her green eyes squinted into slits and her mouth puckered so tight that it brought on a new set of wrinkles. “Someday I’m going to enjoy saying that I told you so. Don’t come runnin’ to me whinin’ like a baby when you make the wrong choice, because I ain’t goin’ to feel a bit sorry for you. Are you goin’ out with him, Jace?”

  Jace put a chicken leg and a thigh on his plate and passed the platter to Brody. “No, ma’am. I got other plans tonight but they don’t have anything to do with one of them angel women, Granny.”

  “I like angels,” Emma said.

  “I like cowboys. If cowboys go to bars, then I want to go.” Rustin bit into a biscuit.

  “Me too.” Emma nodded. “Can I wear my boots, Mama?”

  “Girls can’t go to bars, right, Granny?” Rustin frowned at his sister.

  Kasey shook a finger toward the kids. “Neither of you is going to a bar. When you’re thirty, you can go with your uncle Brody to the Silver Spur and not before. Now hand me your plate, Emma.”

  “Thirty?” Brody asked.

  Kasey’s finger turned toward him. “When you have a daughter, you can decide when your little girl can go to a honky-tonk.”

  “Forty,” Jace said quickly. “And only then if I go with her.”

  “Amen!” Brody agreed.

  “Well, you’d better get to lookin’ for someone who can live with your sorry asses because if your daughter is forty, then y’all will be sixty-eight and seventy. And that’s sayin’ you can find a woman in the next year.” Hope slathered a biscuit with butter and laid it on the side of her plate.

  “Granny said a bad word,” Rustin singsonged.

  “And when you’re twenty-one you can say that word.” Kasey finished helping him with his plate. “For now, you concentrate on eating a good supper and then you can have chocolate pie.”

  “And ice cream?” Emma asked.

  “If you promise to never set foot in a nasty old bar,” Hope said with another sidelong glance toward Brody.r />
  “Okay.” Emma grinned.

  “I’ll just have pie if that’s the way it is,” Brody said. “Or maybe I’ll go by the café before it closes and have a banana split.”

  “I can buy that place and burn it down to keep you out of it,” Hope said. “Don’t test me, Brody Dawson. Besides, you’ve got a work load too heavy to be gallivantin’ to town every day.”

  “Oh, Granny, we all know that inside that tough exterior is a heart full of love and sweetness.” Brody reached over and laid a hand on her shoulder. “We all love you.”

  “To the moon and back,” Emma said quickly.

  “I love you the purplest.” Rustin nodded.

  “What?” Jace asked.

  “It’s a book that I read to him last week about a mother who loves her kids in colors,” Brody explained. “I think we all love Granny Hope the purplest.”

  “Oh, hush, all of you.” Hope smiled. “Eat your supper before it gets cold.”

  Chapter Three

  Jace had thought that he might go to the bar with Brody that night, but then Paul called. He and the guys were getting together at Fred’s house for a poker game and needed a couple more guys to sit in. It didn’t take much to talk Brody into going with him rather than going to the bar that Friday night.

  But family came first and Jace had to read the kids their bedtime stories. That gave Brody a whole hour after supper with nothing to do but think of Lila.

  He paced back and forth across the porch, checked the time over and over, and finally forced himself to sit down on the steps to wait. Patience was not written in the bright stars and the moon that night. Pretty soon he was back on his feet and walking around to the back side of the house. Maybe a walk to Hope Springs, the watering hole at the back of the ranch, would clear his mind. He headed that way and then heard a coyote howling over toward the adjoining ranch, the Texas Star—Henry Thomas’s old place. If the varmint was thinking of attacking one of his calves, he’d put it running.

  When Brody reached the barbed-wire fence separating the two ranches, the coyote had found a friend because he could hear two distinct coyote voices. Brody leaned on a post for a moment and wondered where Henry had gone when he left the place. He had a sister who lived somewhere over in the eastern part of the state and now leased out the whole section of land to Paul McKay, but the house hadn’t been lived in since Henry left more than a decade ago.

  He set his hand firmly on the top of the wood post and jumped over it. Paul was his friend and Kasey’s father-in-law. He wouldn’t mind if the Dawsons walked across his land to the old hay barn where the kids used to hang out. It was only about a quarter mile from the fence and with Brody’s long strides, he got there in a few minutes.

  Sitting down on a bale of hay, he let his eyes adapt to the semidarkness in the big, old weathered barn. He’d kissed Lila while she was sitting in the seat of the old green John Deere tractor parked right over there. He could visualize her perched on the seat. She wore cutoff jeans so short that the pockets hung down below the frayed out bottoms, and her long legs looked as if they went on forever. Barefoot, a gleam in her eye as the sun set, and those bright red lips begging to be kissed. Later, she’d told him that it was her first kiss ever.

  The last time he’d kissed her was at the barn door just before they went their separate ways on a starlit night just over a dozen years ago. That was the night he’d asked her on a real date—their first date—dinner and a movie in Amarillo. He’d promised that he’d pick her up at six-thirty. The thought of living in a big place terrified her. Huntingdon, Pennsylvania, was by no means a big city, but compared to Happy, population less than seven hundred, the place seemed huge with almost eight thousand people. He didn’t tell his brother or his family that he was going out with Lila—didn’t see any use in starting a war right there in Happy.

  A huge white cat startled him when it jumped into his lap and headbutted him until he started petting her long fur. In a few minutes she jumped down and disappeared into the hay, leaving him alone.

  He’d left Lila alone that night. He just couldn’t face the tears he knew would be coming—combined with the fit his parents and Granny would pitch when they found out he’d gone on a real date with the notorious Lila Harris. So when his buddies invited him to the Silver Spur, he’d taken the chicken’s way out.

  With fake IDs they’d had a few beers and danced with a lot of girls. He’d been a jerk and was absolutely miserable all night. Nothing, not illegal beers or other girls, would ease the pain of what he’d done to his best friend and secret girlfriend. He’d tossed and turned until morning and rushed to the café to see her before she and her mother left town. He’d known that he’d screwed up really badly and was prepared to tell her that not seeing her again forever was worse than seeing her cry. That he was hurting every bit as much as she was and to beg her to call him when she got to Pennsylvania.

  He’d gotten there just as they were getting into the van. He tapped on the window but she wouldn’t roll it down. Instead she’d looked straight ahead while tears rolled down her cheeks and left wet circles on her T-shirt. He’d never forgotten her mother’s words that morning before she got into the vehicle and drove away.

  “I’ve told her for years that you were just toying with her, that you’d always feel like you were better than her and that she was in for heartache. You finally proved me right, Brody.”

  It wasn’t going to be easy to shake the memories or the yearning he still felt for Lila.

  He checked the time and started toward the fence at a slower pace. When he had his hand on the post, ready to jump, he heard something in the distance that sounded like a motorcycle, but he didn’t know anyone in Happy who owned one. He glanced over his shoulder and saw nothing.

  “Most likely an old truck about to bite the dust,” he muttered as he lengthened his stride. Jace said they were leaving at eight and he had only fifteen minutes. They usually played in the tack room at Henry’s old barn but sometimes Fred insisted they come to his house. Brody had to admit that the snacks were usually better at Fred’s place than they were when they met at the barn.

  Lila finished unpacking, took a shower, and quickly found she was too restless to stay in the small apartment her mother had built behind the café.

  It was at least an hour until dusk and she’d been inside all day. Swiping her keys from the hook by the front door, she went out to the garage and revved up her motorcycle.

  Feet still on the ground, she tucked her black hair under the helmet, popped the face mask down, and then walked the bike backward out of the garage, leaving the door open. The sun was sinking slowly out where land and sky met in the flat land of the Texas panhandle when she roared out to the cemetery. She went straight to her father’s tombstone, dismounted, and was busy pulling weeds when her phone rang.

  “Hi, Mama,” she said.

  “How’d the first day go?” Daisy asked.

  “It went fine. And fast. I’m sitting in front of Daddy’s grave right now. Decided I needed some fresh air, so I rode my bike out here,” she said.

  “What are you doing in the cemetery at dark?” Daisy asked.

  “Texas is an hour behind Pennsylvania, remember? It’s not even eight o’clock yet, so I can still see without turning on the bike’s lights.”

  “I worry about you on that thing. I wish you’d sell it,” Daisy said. “Just last week I read about a girl who was killed because she hit a pothole and went flying through the air. I know what those roads are like in Happy and—”

  “Mama, quit worryin’,” Lila interrupted. “I’m careful and I wear a helmet.” She changed the subject. “Would you believe that everyone is trying to figure out what happened to Henry Thomas? You’d think they’d be talking about Molly and Georgia, right?”

  “Molly is still there and no one believes she’ll really leave. Georgia was last week’s topic when she retired and moved,” Daisy said.

  “But she worked here and leased this place for
more than a dozen years,” Lila said. “And there’s very little talk about the café bein’ for sale. But nearly everyone who comes in mentions Henry. What was so great about him anyway? I don’t hardly even remember him except that he came in the café a few times and always ordered jalapeños on his burgers. I wonder if they even realized that you and I left.”

  “We didn’t just fall off the face of the earth like Henry did. That makes him their go-to topic when all the other gossip has gotten old like Georgia leaving Happy and moving to Florida. I’m surprised that you aren’t the center of the rumors right now,” Daisy said. “Comin’ into town with a Harley. Flirting with Brody Dawson.”

  “I’m not flirting with him and tonight is the first time I’ve taken the bike out,” Lila protested.

  “Okay, okay, have it your way. Has anyone even asked about buyin’ the café?”

  “Not yet. Word will get out that the place is for sale and I did put a sign in the window. We may have to go with a Realtor.” She braced her back on the tombstone.

  “We might have to do that. I need to get back there for a visit,” Daisy said. “I haven’t been to your daddy’s grave in all these years and...” There was a long pause. “Sometimes I wish I’d never left.”

  “Why?” Lila asked.

  “Your aunt Tina and I aren’t getting any younger and I don’t want to spend my elderly years in this cold climate,” Daisy said. “And yet I’m not so sure I want to live in Happy again, either. I guess as long as the café was mine, I kept a connection to your dad, even though he never did know I’d bought the old building and put in an apartment and a café. I don’t know, I’m rambling.”