“Whatever you do, don’t call Dennis. That woman believes that he can do anything just because he has a penis. How is he more qualified than you are to find a hot running spring on your property?”
She shrugged. “Keep looking through the stack. It gets better.”
“Palm readings?” I blurted before I considered that maybe Madison would actually be on board with palm readings since she believed in Fate.
“I know, but she’s serious.”
I was so relieved that we were on the same page about palm readers. “So what. This isn’t her place.”
“I feel bad that she spent so much time gathering all of this information. What am I supposed to say?”
“You say no.” I gathered up the papers and tossed them into her recycling. “Don’t let the time she decided to invest surfing the Internet and dreaming up what she would do in your position make you feel obligated in any way. She’s a big girl.”
She stood there brooding.
“What?”
“I didn’t think it was going to be so difficult to irrigate that field, and…”
“And the garden was my idea,” I said, easily hearing Shawneen’s argument that the garden hadn’t been Madison’s original plan either.
“Don’t be mad.”
“I’m not mad. It’s fine with me if you don’t want to put a garden in down there. Wait until Bo gets here and ask him what he thinks about whether it would be worth it to run a small herd of cattle up here. Cattle can at least walk themselves down to the river for a drink. Squash don’t.” The joke finally relaxed her. I crossed the kitchen and put my arms around her. “You’re really nervous about Bo and Ruth seeing the place?
“Yeah,” she said into my neck.
“They’re going to be so proud of you. Really. So proud. Whatever you choose to do from here, make it be what makes you happy.”
“I can visualize people getting their hands in the soil here. That feels right.”
“Then let’s see what we can do about the irrigation. Where’s your sexy tool belt?”
She pulled her eyebrows together. “My toolbox is down by the field. I don’t see why we’d need the tool belt.”
“You’re right.” I pulled out my phone and grinned at the picture I’d taken. “It really was more the drill…”
She peeked at the screen. “Oh, jeez. Delete that, would you?”
“Never! I love that picture! I clicked it to camera and squeezed her close to me clicking a photo of the two of us before we got back to work.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Madison
“Well these are awful, don’t you think?” Shawneen asked, fingering Ruth’s curtains.
Of course I didn’t, but it was my fault that Shawneen didn’t know that Ruth had made them. We’d been having breakfasts together for a month now, and while I wanted to talk more about the part of my life she’d missed out on, Shawneen generally kept bringing up what I was doing in Quincy, specifically what I’d done with the old ranch house and how she’d really like to see it. I’d held her off when I was still getting the last of the furniture in, but having had Bo and Ruth up for the weekend, I didn’t have that excuse to use any longer.
Luckily, she didn’t count on an answer and continued without any participation from me. “They’re not as bad when you pull them open. You could leave them tied like this until you get some new ones.”
“I just put these up.”
“The rods are nice, honey, and these’ll do for now, but they’re clearly not right. You need something with more color to liven up this room. Some throw pillows for the couch would be good too. You can work with minor colors in the curtains, accent them with the pillows. Definitely get ones that you can take off and wash. That’s important. These bitty little clocks aren’t going to work either. You’ve got to get something big. Take down one of these prints, and a big wall clock would look super on this wall.”
Forehead resting on my fingers, I just stared at my palm instead of following her as she criticized my decorating and talked about what she would do. Without looking up, I explained how my old employer placed the clocks unobtrusively on purpose, encouraging guests to forget about their everyday schedules. “Only bathrooms and closet doors got mirrors because it doesn’t matter how you look on vacation.”
“Oh, a big mirror! I take it back. A big mirror would be even better than a clock.”
I immediately regretted bringing up the subject. Had I mentioned it when I gave Ruth and Bo the tour, they would have congratulated me on applying something I picked up from working at Steve’s place. They didn’t barrel in with their unsolicited opinions. I had happily led them from room to room, excited to talk about what the challenge had been or what I was particularly proud of. Shawneen didn’t ask about the work I’d done, so I followed mutely, trying to grasp something positive.
She was the first stranger looking at the place, so at least I was getting an objective view. I glanced out the window of the front-facing bedroom while Shawneen argued the benefits of supplying wooden hangers in the closets instead of the plastic ones I’d bought. Houdini was nosing around the Nova with its incongruous tan door. Shawneen complained about it, but she wouldn’t spend the money to have it painted.
After viewing all of the rooms, she asked about how I decided to book and price each and started making calculations about what she anticipated the place could make each month. I felt as uncomfortable as I had the first time we’d had breakfast together. I’d waited to order, and neither of us specified separate checks, so the waitress had delivered one check. I assumed that she would sweep it up and pay. The whole assume and “ass out of you and me” saying was exactly how I felt sitting there agonizing about whether to pick it up myself. The longer it sat there, the more I stewed, feeling like she ought to pick it up. After all these years, couldn’t she spring for my pancakes?
Lead. My stomach had felt full of it then and did again now. At least at breakfast, once I’d paid for the both of us, I could jump in my truck and get along with my day. Standing back at the living room, I had no idea how to signal that I really wanted to get back to figuring out my irrigation down in the field.
“I should get the measurements for these windows. In case I see something I think would work.” She smiled brightly at me and then turned back to the window. Something out front caught her eye. “What the hell…”
She leaned forward as she drew out the words, and I came up beside her. By the time I’d reached her, she’d spun and stomped toward the front door.
“Get!” she screamed at Houdini. “Get out of here you god-damned disgusting thing! Look at this!” She waved her arms at the hood of her car.
I was looking. And inside where I knew she couldn’t see me, I had a good laugh. In the kitchen, I grabbed a handful of paper towels and a bottle of cleaner. I composed myself as best I could and jogged out front to meet her. “I am so sorry, Shawneen.”
Hands on hips, she glared at the steaming pile of horse manure on the hood of her car. “He did that on purpose!” she raged, veins in her neck standing out.
“He’s kind of a wild card.” I grabbed a shovel from the garage and moved to scoop it off the hood.
“Are you kidding me? That’ll scratch my paint,” she whined.
I stared at her quizzically. With all the dings and scratches elsewhere on the car, I didn’t see what harm the shovel would cause. Nevertheless, I returned with a broom and swept the manure onto the ground before spraying and wiping down the hood, all this with my tongue bitten tightly between my teeth to keep myself from laughing again.
While I worked, Shawneen returned to the house and grabbed her big metallic-silver purse and slung it over her elbow. “You had better corral that thing before you open. Can you imagine if he did this to a guest’s car? Can you imagine?” She shook her keys for emphasis before getting in the car and slamming its tan door shut.
“See you next week,” I called as she gassed the car in reverse.
That suited me just fine.
I swept the pile of manure out toward the trees before focusing on my irrigation problem. I’d hoped that Lacey and I could figure it out, that I wouldn’t have to embarrass myself by asking Bo for help. I didn’t want Lacey to think that I was asking him because he’s a man. I was hoping he could teach me from his experience, but he’d insisted that Charlie was my guy.
It shouldn’t be so hard to dial a number I chided myself, pulling my cell from my pocket. Getting him to talk in person was tough enough for me. The way he and Lacey got on, I almost wanted to have her call him. The awkward silences that were our norm were even more pronounced on the phone. Resigned, I pressed the call button. “Hey Charlie,” I said, glad he answered. I could picture him rubbing the back of his neck thinking about what to say, so I saved him the trouble and launched into why I was calling. “I’ve been trying to fix the irrigation down to the field by the road. Bo said you might have done some work on it back when.”
“Sure I did. Not a lot I can do on the phone though. That Lacey seems pretty handy. Did ya ask her to have a look at it?”
“We had a go at it. She got all the spigots cranked open, but we’re still not getting anything.” I was tempted to explain how impressed I’d been when she added a section of pipe to gain the torque needed to get the old cranks moving again.
“You sure it’s running from up top? They should’ve shut it down at the house to keep the pipes from freezing.”
“I opened that up first. I know there’s water up here because it’s dripping.”
“Well, if it’s not flowing down below, shut that sucker off. You’ve got some kind of trouble in the line. Don’t need to be adding stress to those old pipes if they’re not working.”
“Short of digging up the entire line, is there anything else I can do?” In the silence, I could picture his tongue checking where he used to stow his chew.
“Guess I could come up and have a look. There are a couple of places you can check first, but I know ’em by feel not by any measurement.”
I hesitated to ask. “Would you? I’d really appreciate it.”
“Sure. Let me talk to Bo about when he can spare me. You need it soon? He was saying how you’re wanting to get some plants in the ground.” I couldn’t imagine him and Bo having a conversation about me. Even more shocking was that in my stunned silence, Charlie continued talking. “He says you’ve really done something with the place, that it’s really something to see.”
“Thanks.” Bo’s praise made me stand tall. “I look forward to showing you around.”
“I’ll be up this week then.”
“Okay.” I said, clicking off. And it really did feel okay.
Chapter Thirty
Madison
I was out at the corral pushing over rotted-out fence posts with my borrowed tractor, my eye on the road. Charlie said to expect him before lunch. He would take off after his morning chores. For him, that might mean daybreak. He wasn’t one to wait on the sun to get his work started, so I’d begun early too. As I maneuvered the tractor, I brainstormed things to talk about and worried over whether he’d approve of what I’d done. I’d asked Lacey if she could stay, so it wouldn’t just be Charlie and me, but she insisted that maintaining her regular hours was important. Though I argued that everyone has to stop for lunch, frustratingly, she had not made any commitment to join us.
My stomach flip-flopped when I finally saw Charlie’s truck pull up the drive to the house. I watched him creep up the road, the wheels of the old “Love Machine” kicking up almost no dust. The way he paused before parking in front of the house, he perhaps considered going to the barn as he must have back when he managed the cattle. Stepping out of his truck, he didn’t put his hat on immediately but stood with it in his hands instead as he took the place in. Was he thinking, as I had, whether the place would have made it if he’d stayed on? His eyes landed on me, and he quickly settled the straw hat on his head and strode over to the corrals.
“What do you think of our place?” I asked.
“Our?” He looked confused.
“With how much you invested…”
He waved off my words. “It’s your place. You got a name for it?”
I hadn’t assumed a check that significant would be a gift and sat stumped at how to reply. “Nothing yet. Can’t exactly call it Hot Rocks Cattle Co. if I’m not running cattle.”
“Still got them hot rocks, though, don’tcha?”
It was my turn to look confused.
“You haven’t been out to the hot spring?”
I thought about Shawneen suggesting there might be one but felt uncomfortable saying her name. “The realtor didn’t mention it.”
“It’d take too long to walk out there today, but I could draw you a map. Where’d you think they got the hot rocks for the name from?”
“The piles of manure?” I suggested.
He shook his head as he turned from me. “I’ll grab my tools and get to the irrigation. Manure…” As he turned, I thought I caught a glimpse of a smile, but I wasn’t certain, and he wasn’t sticking around to talk. Without Lacey, he didn’t seem as comfortable.
My chest felt tight as he ambled away. I sat on the tractor and watched him reach into the bed of the truck for a shovel and his toolbox and head down to the lower pasture. Movement by the barn caught my eye, Houdini propelling himself up from where he’d been resting. He shook himself soundly and turned his big head in my direction, waiting. He reminded me of how Lacey had engaged Charlie by asking for a cup of coffee. Houdini bobbed his head as if he was impatient with me, so I finally swung down from the tractor and headed for the lower field. Charlie looked surprised when I caught up to him.
I told myself it was the horse, but he said, “You don’t have to stop what you’re doing.”
“Lacey will want to know what you did to fix it,” I said. “Like the lock.”
He hmphed at me and ran his hand along Houdini’s thick neck. “Nice-looking animal. Had myself a big white gelding like him once,” he said, before grabbing the shovel and sinking it into the dirt.
My heart pushed at my chest, and normally I would have accepted that he didn’t want to talk and walk away, but I remembered how good it felt when Lacey told Shawneen who I was. Borrowing courage from how that had gone, I said, “Why’d you take it apart?”
“What’s that?”
I didn’t want to ask again, but I did. “The lock. Lacey said you broke it on purpose.”
Air puffed out between his lips like I’d stuck a balloon. “Didn’t want you getting stuck in your room.”
“I got stuck in my room a lot?” I tried to picture how a kid as small as I must’ve been could have gotten locked in. Maybe if I locked it and took out the key but couldn’t get it back in again? I knew skeleton keys could be tricky, but if I didn’t have the key, I wouldn’t have been able to lock or unlock it at all. “Why didn’t you keep the key out of my reach?”
“You weren’t the problem.”
“I wasn’t?” I felt like he’d given me a riddle, but no solution.
“Shawneen.” He scratched his sideburn and settled his hat back into place. He wouldn’t look at me. “Sometimes I’d come home and she’d have locked you in there.” He slammed the shovel down into the earth with much more force.
I felt unstable and sat on the pine needles he’d pushed away to begin his digging. They pricked at my thighs even through my work pants. “Was I bad?”
A sound escaped him, an angry guffaw. “You bad? You didn’t have it in you. She said…she needed personal time. I said to find another way and broke the lock so I knew she’d listen. She put you in gymnastics class. I thought it was all settled.”
Charlie strode toward the lower field, poked at the soil a bit as if to test his memory, and started digging a new hole. I followed him knowing the story wasn’t ove
r but uncertain of how to ask for more. Lacey would have known what to say next, but she said that she couldn’t get away from the shop. Houdini butted his muzzle against my hand, and I reached up to stroke his broad face. “It wasn’t?”
“What?”
“Settled,” I prompted, testing whether he’d say more.
“You asked her?”
“No.”
“But you’ve seen her.” He stopped digging and leaned on the shovel. He looked like he’d chewed something hard on a bum tooth.
“I’m sorry.”
“What are you sorry for?”
What did I say? I didn’t like to see him agitated and thought that if I told him I’d seen Shawneen a bunch of times since we’d picked up the door for the Nova, he’d be hurt.
“I didn’t tell you that the door Lacey and I picked up was for her.”
I could see his jaw working as he tried to control anger I didn’t understand. “She tell you whose car it is?” He punctuated the question with the shovel biting hard into the earth.
I’d never seen him so angry. “No.”
“I’d wager it’s not hers, that it belongs to whoever she’s got in her bed. Never meant to get her pregnant, you know, but I did the honorable thing. I married her. Found a house that we could fill up with kids. A house she ended up bringing other fellas to. One afternoon, I was at work and I got a call from the police station saying that they had you and couldn’t find Shawneen.”
“Why was I at the police station?”
Loosening big bites of earth Charlie widened the hole, his heavy boot sinking the spade. “You were at your gymnastics class. Patrol officer found you hours later huddled in the doorframe, nobody around, no coat on. They’d picked you up asking you about your mama. You were wide-eyed and shivering. Shawneen was supposed to pick you up at five. They asked if you knew where your mom or dad was. You told ’em your dad worked at Hot Rocks.”
I felt hot, like I was somehow to blame for it all. “You never told me.”
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