Lenore frowned. “How many times has she been here this week?”
“I do not answer to you, Lenore,” Elizabeth said crisply. When the younger woman looked away, obviously stung by the words, her mother added, “Only twice. It’s a small pleasure, Lenore. I enjoy hearing about her plans. Please don’t deny me that.”
“Mama, I’m not trying to deny you anything,” she protested. “I’ve been trying to get you to move out of this place and out of this town for years so you can have a better life somewhere else, but you won’t go.”
“This is my home,” Elizabeth said quietly. “It is near the things I remember and that are most dear to me . . . other than you, daughter. I love you, Lenore, and I appreciate everything you do for me.”
Lenore smiled and took her mother’s hand. “I love you, too,” she said. “I know it’s hard for you, and I know listening to Mandy’s plans are a wonderful distraction.” She paused and chewed at her lip before going on worriedly. “Just please be careful, Mama. If Mandy Lockwood finds out . . .”
“That child is completely guileless,” Elizabeth assured her. “She isn’t going to find out anything. Don’t worry, Lenore. I know what I’m doing.”
48
Kate and Josh headed off to town claiming they needed to get a tire fixed. Jenny knew they’d also stop at the cafe for coffee and come back with the latest town gossip. Josh might call it “exchanging information,” but the men at the cafe could dig up more local dirt than the women at Sugar Watson’s beauty shop any day.
Every time Jenny ventured into town, she felt like she’d been dropped into a Twilight Zone episode. After Jenny moved back to Texas, she called Sugar to make an appointment the first time she needed a haircut. Jenny found the woman still sporting a jet-black beehive, still wearing cat’s eye glasses with rhinestones, and still smoking like a chimneystack.
As Jenny watched the reflection of Sugar’s 50-year-old orange lava lamp undulating in the mirror, the hairdresser stood behind her, a Camel in one hand and a can of Aqua Net in the other, “You want me to spray it, honey?” Sugar asked, her voice a well-cultivated smoker’s rasp.
“No, no,” Jenny said, envisioning the explosive juncture of a lit cigarette and a can of hairspray. “I don’t use the stuff.”
“You girls today,” Sugar croaked, putting the can down with obvious disapproval. “Just let your hair go every which ways. Mine wouldn’t move in a tornado.”
“Or nuclear wind,” Jenny thought to herself.
The random memory flitted through Jenny’s thoughts as she gathered up her cup and thermos and went into the studio. She absent-mindedly hummed, “‘Cause people like to talk, Lord, don't they love to talk,” and then laughed at herself saying, “Thank you, Charlie Rich, thank you very much.”
Settling back into the rhythm of ranch life hadn’t been as challenging as Jenny feared, but getting used to a small town was a different matter. Trying to keep something behind closed doors might work for a while, but not forever.
Almost from the second her plane landed at the San Antonio airport a year ago, Texas started creeping back in Jenny’s soul. Not that it ever really left, but she’d pushed her love for this rough land as far into the dim recesses of her heart as it would go until her father’s suicide forced her to return.
She found herself in a rented SUV driving up I-10 listening to classic country on the radio headed to her Daddy’s funeral. What she didn’t know was that 24-hours later, up a box canyon she’d meet a good-natured cowboy with an impossibly annoying and equally wonderful sense of humor. Now he put his boots under her bed every night and life was opening up before her in completely unexpected ways.
“Unexpected” seemed to be the theme of life on the Rocking L and in the Lockwood family, she thought, as she wandered over to the table where her father’s sketches were spread out. As she stared at the drawings with their near-photographic quality, a frisson passed through her — part pain, part longing, and equal parts confusion. How could the man who refused to buy his own daughter graphite pencils and art paper be capable of creating these images?
The night before when she’d awakened drenched in sweat, gasping for breath, fighting back to consciousness from yet another nightmare Josh put a careful hand on her arm. “Sugar?” he’d said gently, knowing better than to reach for her until she wanted the contact.
She’d nodded and he’d held her, stroking her hair and saying nothing. God love the man; he knew when not to talk. Finally she said, “It’s not him I’m thinking about.”
“Which ‘him,’ darling?” Josh asked. “Your Daddy or that son of a bitch Marino?”
In spite of her still hammering heart she’d laughed. “The son of a bitch.”
“Old Langston couldn’t be haunting you more if he walked in that door,” Josh said. “You want to tell me about it?”
“I just keep looking at those sketches,” she said. “I keep thinking if I stare at them hard enough, and long enough, I’ll figure him out.”
“Staring at the past won’t ever make it part of the present,” Josh said. “You can’t talk to a dead man and set things straight, any more than he could have really lived that life he made up in his mind with Alice Browning.”
“I know,” she sighed. “It’s not like I don’t have plenty of other things to do. Shutting down a business is harder than starting one. Every single client wants me to do just ‘one more thing.’ Then every five minutes I’m wandering over to that table and looking at Daddy’s drawings.”
“Maybe you should put them up for a while,” he suggested.
“Maybe,” she said, but her voice carried more doubt than agreement.
Now, in the light of day, Jenny wondered if she was allowing herself to be drawn into her father’s madness. She gazed down at a drawing of Alice Browning washing dishes at the kitchen sink in the main ranch house; a scene that never occurred in real life. Langston perfectly captured that wished-for moment. Jenny could feel the slick, soapy water on her own hands and the warmth of the morning sun lighting her face just as it illuminated Alice in profile.
Suddenly Jenny froze. She looked down at the table, spreading the top sketches out so she could see them all. Then she leafed through the stacks and flipped through the sketchbooks. Every single image of Alice Browning was drawn in profile from the left. Jenny turned to look at the unfinished oil portrait sitting on an easel in the corner of the studio, but she already knew what she would see.
Alice gazed off the right side of the canvas, her hair pinned up in a thick chignon. Her downcast countenance emphasized her high, strong cheekbones. She was dressed in an old-fashioned gown with a round neckline and wore a single strand of pearls. There was no question that she was a beautiful woman, but there was also character, evident in the line of her jaw and the poise of her posture.
But why always in profile? Did it mean something? Or was Jenny simply so desperate for meaning, for some way to enter and understand her father’s alternate reality, that she was grasping at straws? Just the idea that the tyrannical, cruel Langston Lockwood could love so deeply that grief fractured his sanity was a concept completely at odds with Jenny’s view of the man. She struggled to hold the warring characterizations in her mind at once, a cognitive dissonance that, to her, seemed incapable of resolution.
A half-formed idea nagged at Jenny. She wanted to paint Alice Browning and Langston Lockwood together, but she wanted to do it in the cave in Baxter’s Draw, working with the same light, the same isolation, and in the same room where Langston drew Alice over and over again. The problem? After everything that had happened, if she announced to Josh and her sisters that she was planning to recreate her father’s hermit lifestyle, even for the time it would take to finish a painting, they’d all have a fit.
Since the night Mandy shot Robert Marino and Jenny told her family everything that happened to her in New York City, she felt their kind eyes following her. Josh, always the gentleman and warmly funny, came to her now with such ten
derness she at first mistook it for pity. In irritation, she snapped, “Would you please quit acting like I’m going to break? I don’t want your damned pity.”
Undeterred, Josh stood his ground, “If you were gonna break, sugar, you’d be broken already. I don’t pity you. Never even entered my mind. I just want to be the partner you deserve.”
Standing alone in her studio, Jenny smiled at the memory of his earnest face, and then flushed at the thought of his hands on her body. Josh Baxter might approach the world with an “aw shucks” demeanor bordering on downright clownishness at times, but she had never known such genuine kindness. And the boy was not hard on the eyes. As far as she was concerned, Josh could keep his boots under her bed for good.
Which is why she didn’t want Langston Lockwood’s ghost leaning against the doorframe of her life. Her unfinished business with her father needed to be put to rest. Of them all, Katie would come the closest to understanding. The sisters had coffee every morning; and at least once a week, at some late hour, Jenny would look up at the house and see the dim wavering light of a kerosene lamp in the study window. She’d whisper to Josh where she was going, walk across the yard with no fear of the night, and sit with her sister for a while, offering Kate companionship in the lonely ground of her life-long insomnia.
They both loved and cherished their baby sister, Mandy, but Kate and Jenny shared a different bond. They remembered things Mandy did not, and years of rancor about their mother had, in the end, made the connection between the women only stronger and deeper. Jenny would never forget seeing Kate slumped against the wall of Baxter’s Draw, covered in her own blood.
On that night, as she knelt beside her sister, Jenny whispered in desperation, “Don’t leave me, Katie. Please, don’t leave me.”
Kate’s eyes had fluttered open and focused on her with recognition for that fleeing instant of consciousness. Her lips moved, and when Jenny leaned in to hear what she was trying to say, Kate said simply, “I’m here.”
The memory of it made Jenny’s throat close as tears filled her eyes. Through every moment of Langston’s abuse, when Jenny was an angry, defiant teenager, determined to get the hell off the Rocking L, Kate had been there. Even when they’d fought, it was as if Jenny could not run forward without looking back to assure herself Kate was there, anchoring her younger sister with a promise of something to return to, even as Jenny plunged headlong into her escape. For Jenny, the worst part of her self-imposed New York exile was being away from the only home she knew, Kate.
Jenny would talk to her sister first about her plans to go up to the draw. Maybe Kate could make Josh understand. Or maybe he just would understand. Jenny blew out a rueful sigh and shook her head, smiling. He was proving to be too damned smart for Jenny on more than one level. As much as she hated to admit it, she’d just rather have her big sister do her dirty work on this one. She had no doubt she’d have to talk to Josh about it all, but talking about it was different than telling him about it.
Jenny began to tidy up the drawings, reassembling the stacks of paper. Her elbow caught a small pile of sketchbooks that went tumbling to the floor. A black-and-white Polaroid fell out from between the pages of the bottom book and landed at her feet. She picked it up and studied the image curiously.
The photograph showed her and Kate standing beside a little paint pony. Jenny thought they must have been about 4 and 8 at the time. She frowned. They never had a paint on the Rocking L. Their father was especially fond of sorrel horses and except for Kate’s horse, Bracelet, a mahogany bay, and Horsefly, a black, no other coats were allowed on the place.
As Jenny searched her memory, she had a sudden image of Clara Wyler, her mother’s best friend, a tall, strong woman with impressive Texas big hair. The Wylers owned the land to the north of the Rocking L, but now that Clint was dead, Jenny had no idea if Clara still lived on the home place or if she’d gone to town.
Some memory about the paint horse and the Wyler’s place sat just outside Jenny’s conscious grasp. The watery image had the flavor of summer about it, but Jenny couldn’t retrieve the details. Puzzled, she put the picture on her desk. She’d ask Kate about it later when she went up to the house to talk to her about Baxter’s Draw. For now, Jenny had to get busy running the business she was supposed to be shutting down. Shaking her head, she flipped on her iMac and went to work.
49
Later that same day, Jenny found Kate in the study at the ranch house. She was working on her laptop at their father’s old roll top desk, her back perfectly erect in the chair, reading glasses perched on the end of her nose.
Jenny paused at the door to study her sister for a minute. Since the shooting, Kate had started wearing her hair shorter because it was easier to handle with one hand. The style accentuated the planes of her face, bringing out her strong resemblance to Langston Lockwood. But where their father scowled at the world Kate’s expression in moments like these, when she was engaged only with her own thoughts, was self-contained and reflective.
Jenny knew her sister didn’t entertain the slightest notion of being a beautiful woman, although she was, nor did Kate realize that her rock-solid integrity created a touchstone for everyone around her. Introverted by nature, Kate slipped easily into gregariousness on command, a broad grin lighting her face. But when the social obligations were fulfilled, she slipped away to do some bit of work, read, tend the animals, or just walk.
In quiet and solitude Kate recouped her lost energy. These past months she had seemed more tired to Jenny, more likely to go off by herself; a reclusive tendency she now realized her sister inherited from their father. At the same time that Jenny understood her sister’s behavior, it still worried her.
“Are you just going to stand there looking at me?” Kate asked without turning.
Jenny laughed. “I didn’t know you heard me.”
“I heard you when you came up the walk,” Kate said, turning to her with a smile. “You know I have bat ears. You’re looking a little rode hard, honey. Long day?”
“I’ve been staring at a computer screen since I saw you this morning trying to get these people to understand I’m not working anymore,” Jenny groaned, rubbing her eyes. “They’re not getting it.”
Kate closed the laptop and pointed to a chair, “Sit a spell.” She removed her glasses, stood up stiffly, and took the chair opposite her sister. “You’re good at what you do, Jenny. You sure you want to quit?”
“Yes,” Jenny said. “I want to do my own art. I’ve put it off far too long.”
“No argument from me on that,” Kate said, slipping her arm out of the sling and letting it rest in her lap.
Although Kate’s face would have appeared impassive to anyone else, Jenny saw the slight tightening around the eyes as Kate completed the maneuver. Jenny said gingerly, not sure how her words would be received, “You know, Josh’s idea to help you with that arm isn’t half bad.”
Kate hated the omnipresent sling, so Josh, more resourceful than any Boy Scout, spent several evenings online looking at shoulder immobilizers. He found one that combined a belt with a cuff at the waist to support the injured arm. Screwing up his courage, he told Kate he knew a craftsman who could make a custom version for her, hand tool the leather, and pad the cuff.
“It’s not that I can’t hold my arm up,” Kate said, looking away. “I just can’t do it all day.”
“Katie,” Jenny said, trying to keep her voice light, “the fact that you can move it at all is a miracle. You hate those slings. You have to find something you can live with that will help you. Maybe you won’t need to use a support forever.”
Kate swallowed hard and brought her eyes back to her sister’s face. “Well, I already told Josh I’d go with him and see this feller. It would be better to have something that didn’t look so damned institutional.”
Jenny smiled. “Josh does come up with good ideas, even if you don’t think so the first time you hear them.”
Kate laughed. “He does have a way
of wearing a person down. I don’t know what we’d have done without him since I got hurt. So, what are you doing skulking around in doorways? Something on your mind?”
“Yes,” Jenny said, clearing her throat a little nervously. “There’s something I want to run by you.”
Kate arched an eyebrow, “I know that tone of voice, young lady. You’re fixing to try to get me to agree to something.”
Jenny laughed. “Dear God, you haven’t called me ‘young lady’ since high school when you disapproved of who I was dating.”
“I disapproved of Billy Wayne Simpleton.”
“Simpkins. His name was Billy Wayne Simpkins and you know it.”
They both laughed and Kate said, “Okay. So what do you want to run by me?”
Might as well get it over with in one shot, Jenny thought to herself. “I want to go up to Baxter’s Draw, and stay by myself long enough to paint a picture of Daddy and Alice Browning together,” she said, steeling herself for her sister’s reaction.
Kate regarded her silently for a minute and then said, “This ranch is yours as much as mine. Go on up there any time you like.”
Jenny’s jaw dropped. “That’s it? You’re not going to tell me you don’t like the idea of me hiding in the same cave Daddy hid in and trying to paint my way to understanding what’s happened to me in my life?”
“Why would I?” Kate asked. “You know it already. You’re gonna go no matter what I say, and who the hell am I to tell you it’s a bad idea? And don’t go telling me I’m the head of the family. Makes me sound a hundred and fifty years old.”
“A hundred and thirty tops,” Jenny said, grinning. Then she added, a little uncertainly, “What do you think Josh will say?”
“I think he’s gonna throw a good old-fashioned, wall-eyed fit.”
A sick expression crossed Jenny’s face. “Uh, Katie . . . do you think you might . . .”
“Yes, I’ll talk to him.”
The Lockwood Legacy - Books 1-6: Plus Bonus Short Stories Page 27