by Ali Parker
"I would if my shower was bigger than a matchbox."
"Your shower is plenty big. There are many young men your age who don't have showers of their own."
"That's only because they have to share them with their wives."
She gasped and put her hand to her chest, splattering chili onto the counter beside her. There was a tense pause as if she couldn't decide whether she wanted to continue being appalled or if she should immediately jump to cleaning up the dastardly spill. She settled on appalled and turned to face me.
"You shouldn't say things like that to your mother, Davey."
"David, Mama, and all I meant is that every man I know that's my age is either married or has gotten out of this town already. I don't know anyone who has hit twenty-six and still lives at home."
"Well, if you hadn't broken up with Ella, that wouldn't be a problem, now would it? You know, you really should give her a call."
I nodded and turned away from the stove, starting my way toward the living room so I could get upstairs, not wanting to hear much more about Ella from her.
She continued regardless. "I hear that she has been visiting with her grandmother for a few weeks, but she might be back. Call her up and ask her over for supper this Sunday."
She had to lift her voice to a shout by the time she got to the end because I was already halfway up the stairs and doing my best to block her out. I had heard almost that exact same speech approximately a thousand times in the year since I broke up with my former fiancée. Mama just wouldn't let it go. Of course, she hadn't heard the entire story as to why I had abruptly called off the wedding only a few weeks after we got engaged, but it seemed that her "supportive mother" routine had shifted into a "please give me grandchildren" campaign sometime in the last six months.
It wasn't that I was completely opposed to the concept of getting married and having children. It just wasn't on my horizon anymore. The whole Ella situation hadn't exactly been kind to my heart, but it had given me fantastic fodder for songs. Silver linings.
Deciding that narrowly escaping my mother's guilt trip once was enough for one night, I showered, dressed, and snuck out the back door while the rest of the family was setting the table. I would catch hell for it later, but settling for a greasy hamburger and a beer at the bar was worth not listening to my entire family lecture me about not growing up and getting on with my life.
They were good at trying to make me feel guilty about even considering not staying at the ranch for the rest of my earthly existence as well. There was a very small range of choices it seemed they were willing to give me; either get married, produce several strong sons, and stay on the ranch raising cattle until I died, or declare myself a lifelong committed bachelor who was fully devoted to the family legacy, and stay on the ranch raising cattle until I died. "Be a singer" wasn't even on the spectrum.
I sighed as I pulled into the dusty gravel parking lot at the back of Kinsey's and turned off my truck. I would have to settle for singing there for as long as they'd let me and I could still come up with new laments to fill my set list. Every now and again I tried to slip in a more optimistic song, but the regulars had low tolerance for that. For the most part, they wanted to hear about the women who had stolen my heart and ground it up with a cheese grater or the life I longed for somewhere outside of the tiny town where I grew up. Fortunately, I had yet to run out of different ways to talk about both of those issues, so my position seemed relatively safe.
Kinsey waved at me from his corner of the bar as I walked in.
I grinned and slipped onto the barstool a couple down from him. It was hard to believe sometimes that he was still kicking. It looked like someone could sneeze in the wrong direction and it would knock him right off his stool, but there he sat, pounding back boilermakers and regaling whoever would listen with his own stories of women who had done him wrong and all the dogs he had managed to lose. I liked to think that my songs had a bit more grit than his stories did, but what his lacked in drama they certainly made up for in delivery.
"Have I ever told you," he started, swinging his drink along with his body so that the beer sloshed out over the side of the glass, "about when I dated the sisters?"
"The twins or the nuns, Kinsey?"
"Well, I guess I have," he said, catching himself on the edge of the bar so he could pull himself back into place on his stool.
"Hey, honey," I said to Lucy, the sweet but somewhat unfortunate-looking bartender who I had known since I was old enough to be aware of knowing other people, "could you grab me a hamburger?"
"You bet," she said and lowered a pint glass of dark ale to the napkin in front of me.
I took a sip and turned toward the sound of the outdated bells still attached to the top of the door. Danny, the drummer of my band, strode through and settled into place beside me.
"You're here early," he said, gesturing to Lucy.
She brought him a beer, and I let him take a sip before answering. "I'm hiding out from my mother. She's back on her 'call Ella' track."
"When are you going to just tell her why you broke up? It would get her off your back."
"It might get her off my back, but I don't know if her heart could take it. Besides, I don't want to be the one responsible for killing her."
"So you're just going to keep listening to it until she gives up?"
I took a bite of the burger Lucy put in front of me and raised my glass in a toast.
"God willing."
Chapter 2
Sarah
I was so tired I could barely see what was ahead of me as I drove down the road. Of course, from what I had seen before the sun tucked behind the sky, there wasn’t a lot to see other than rows of corn and the occasional tractor that was apparently sleeping after a long day of work. The floor of my car was littered with the remnants of far too many cups of coffee but even the constant flow of caffeine wasn't enough to keep my body going after nearly eighteen hours of driving.
What had started as a moderate drive back to Tennessee from an ill-fated visit to Texas had turned into a long drive right through Tennessee. Now I was way out in I-don't-know-where-the-hell-I-am Oklahoma and I was so exhausted I could curl up and sleep for the next week. Unfortunately, there had been nowhere to stop for more than five hours and my car was quickly running out of gas.
"Jesus, take the wheel," I said, taking my hands off the wheel and flinging myself back against the seat.
The car swerved drastically and bumped over something on the side of the road that I hoped was not and had never been alive.
"Oh, shit!" I shouted, grabbing the wheel again. "That never works."
The swerve had revealed a narrow dirt road off of the also dirt, albeit larger, road I had already been following. Figuring that either way I drove I was quite possibly just driving myself onward toward deliverance, I straightened out the car and started down the narrower road. I had only been driving for a few more minutes when I noticed lights glowing in the distance. Feeling hopeful for the first time all day, I sped up a bit and drove directly toward the lights.
As I approached, the lights seemed to separate from one glowing mass into individual light sources. They were actually two illuminated signs. The first said "Kinsey's Bar" and the second said "Dew Drop Inn”.
I was too enthralled on the promise of both alcohol and a bed to pass too much judgement on their lack of originality. I pulled into the parking lot of the hotel and dragged myself inside, sending up a prayer that there wasn't some sort of corn and tractor convention going on that had taken up all of the vacancies in the tiny hotel, forcing me to move to the next town. I was most certainly not getting back into that car tonight.
As luck would have it, there was no one else registered at the hotel for that night so I had my choice of one of the two rooms downstairs or one of the four rooms upstairs. I decided to splurge on the one room that had a king size bed, fully intending on making like a starfish and stretching to every diagonal capacity that my body
had, but first I needed to drown a few of my sorrows in Kinsey's next door.
I marveled at the fact that the motel utilized metal keys that had to be cut by a machine rather than programmed by a computer for far too long. Finally pulling myself from my silly inclination to overanalyze everything, I attached the rather cumbersome key fob to my chain, tucked it in the pocket of my jacket, and trekked across the parking lot to the bar. By the time I got close, I could hear voices pouring out into the parking lot. It was a comfort to know that I would not also be the only person at the bar that night.
I stepped inside as the jangle of bells overhead announced my arrival. No one seemed to notice, which meant that either I was the only one that had heard them, or every single other person in the bar was a regular and had heard those bells countless times before. By the way that the men's bodies seemed to mold perfectly to their barstools, I would go with the latter.
I greeted either an older man or statue, of which I wasn’t sure. His remarkable stillness made it difficult to tell as he leaned against an antiquated jukebox.
I crossed the tiny bar and slid up onto one of the stools as far in the corner as I could get. The girl behind the bar glanced over at me briefly as she filled a pint glass from one of the taps. She brought it over to a delicious-looking man positioned diagonally from me who gave her a gentle, familiar smile and took a long sip. His dark eyes moved over me as he seemed to enjoy his beer, his tongue darting out as he turned his attention from me and back to his drink. He was my type of guy, but I wasn’t interested, besides, I was simply passing through.
"You aren't from around here," she said as she walked up to stand in front of me.
I couldn't quite decipher the tone behind the words. It seemed to be somewhere between being in awe of seeing someone she had never met, and slight aggravation that I was a woman who could potentially take over some of her man-hunting territory. I shook my head at her and gave the best dazzling smile that I could muster with sleep deprivation and hunger pulling me down.
"I am definitely not from around here," I told her. "I'm from Tennessee."
She narrowed her eyes at me. "What are you doing all the way out here? Just visiting?"
"Yes."
The fact that I was only a temporary fixture in her community seemed to brighten her mood, and she gave me a somewhat lopsided smile. "Well, then. Welcome. I'm Lucy."
"Sarah," I said, taking the hand that she extended to me.
She nodded and gestured toward the taps along the back of the counter. "Can I get you a beer?"
"Oh, please."
She gave a short laugh and crossed to the sink to get a glass. The second her back was turned I felt the presence of someone step up beside me.
"Can I buy that one for you?" a loud voice asked as a man shoved his face down so close to mine I could smell his vile aftershave wafting off of him.
"Damn!" I said, so startled I almost tipped off my stool. "The greetings around here are certainly delightful."
The man climbed onto the stool beside me. "So I guess you aren't from around here?"
I pursed my lips in and shook my head. "No. No, I'm not from around here."
"She's from Tennessee," Lucy said no sooner had the words come out of my mouth.
She placed my beer on the napkin in front of me and I smiled tensely at her.
"Thank you, Lucy."
She smiled back and slid a bowl of peanuts beside my beer before crossing back over to the men on the other side of the bar.
"Tennessee?" the man asked as if it were some foreign and exotic land.
"Yeah. I just got in about fifteen minutes ago."
"That's a long drive. About ten hours, isn't it?"
I took a sip of my beer. "Actually I drove from Texas."
"Why on the great green earth would you drive all the way from Texas alone?"
He spoke like my grandfather, but watched me like my lecherous tutor in high school, leaving me to fend off a serious case of the creeps.
"I was there for work," I told him, taking another sip from my pint glass, which was emptying far too quickly for my liking. I took the last swig of my beer and gestured for Lucy to bring me another one.
"What kind of work does a pretty lady like you do?" Now he was putting on the moves hardcore.
I started to wish I had just let myself drift off into one of the cornfields for the night. I started to open my mouth to answer him when a booming, slightly high-pitched man's voice came over a crackly microphone.
"All right, everybody, who's up for some music?"
"Oh, thank God," I muttered into the cheers that suddenly rose up from around the bar.
"Great. Let's put our hands together for Davey and the boys."
I wasn't sure if that was a band name or just a general grouping, but when I turned my attention to the small stage set up on the far side of the room. The sexy guy who had been sitting at the bar when I first walked in was now approaching the microphone.
My attention was jerked toward him, and I couldn’t help but appreciate the curve of his ass in his fitted jeans, his rugged cowboy boots and perfectly made for him cowboy hat. He looked like someone had plucked him out of an advertisement for cologne that should have the tagline read, "Smells like no cowboy ever”. It was going to be a long, uncomfortable night, no doubt.
"It's David," he said into the microphone, and I immediately caught the hint of honey in his voice.
"What?" the announcer’s voice said over the microphone.
"It's David. My guitar says David, my license says David, even my flyers say David."
"Boy, I have known you since you were born and you have always been Davey."
"I'm a grown man now, Sam."
"Grown man, my ass. Don't you make me call your mama. How is your mama, by the way? I heard she had a fall a few weeks back. Is she doing ok?"
The man's voice was still coming over the microphone, but it had taken on a decidedly more concerned tone.
"She's doing fine, Sam. Thank you." A smile lifted the cowboy’s mouth.
"That's good. Now you tell her I was asking after her and that if she needs any groceries or anything to just have your daddy call me. I will be closing up the market every day this week so I can bring them on by your place right after."
"I'll be sure to tell her, Sam. I'm going to sing now, ok?" He lifted his eyebrow and my heart softened a little.
"Of course it's ok. That's why you're here, ain't it? You just go right on ahead." The microphone squealed as Sam dropped it unceremoniously to whatever table he was standing near.
David turned his attention back to the rest of us in the bar. "How's everybody doing tonight?"
The bar erupted in cheers again as if whatever just happened had made good sense.
"Do you want to get out of here?" the man beside me asked, breaking through the blissful state I had found where I had forgotten that he existed at all.
"No, I'd like to listen to the music, but thank you."
He slumped down with a disappointed pout as the first few notes of a song came from David's guitar. His mouth opened and the sound that came out made my breath catch in my throat.
"Don't tell me you're…" the man started, but I ignored him, focusing only on the young cowboy in front of us.
Still looking at David and listening to the incredible voice coming out of him, I lifted my hand and flattened it on the man's face to quiet him as he continued to blabber away.
He pulled away, and I downed more of the beer in front of me. I didn't recognize the song David was singing, but realized that it must be an original. I expected generic, possibly whiny, country music.
What I got was sexy, smoky rockabilly and a glimmer of hope that maybe my career and all prospects for future success hadn't disappeared after all.
Chapter 3
David
The next day I was back on the ranch, working with the herd as was the usual daily occurrence. I had to try like hell to keep my musical aspirations a
nd the reality of my probable future away from each other so that they didn't attempt to fight to the death.
I had just tossed a bale of hay over a fence and was arching my back to stretch and loosen the muscles when a tiny woman in a business suit moved toward me in a disconcerting half-wiggle, half-run movement. As she got closer, I realized that her movements were due to the high heels she wore that were now sinking into the grass.
She stopped a few feet away from me, and I narrowed my eyes at her. There was something familiar about her, but I couldn't quite put my finger on it. She didn't say anything, so I went back to working, tossing another bale over the fence.
"Good morning," she said a few seconds later through a slightly labored breath.
"Good morning," I replied, turning back to her. "Can I help you?"
"This is a ranch."
I glanced around. "I'm aware."
She held her arms out to her side as if gesturing to encompass the entirety of the fields around us. "I mean, like a ranch. Like a real, honest-to-God, there has to be a bottle of salad dressing around here somewhere ranch."
I nodded, pulling off my soft brown leather gloves in anticipation of this rambling conversation potentially going somewhere in the next few minutes. "Right."
I kept staring at her, trying to figure out why she looked so familiar. She definitely wasn't from the area. I knew just about everybody that lived within a 30-mile radius, and she most certainly didn't look like any of the girls I had grown up with.
She was so small it looked like I could scoop her up and tuck her in my pocket if I wanted to, but her curves made sure everyone knew she was not a little girl. Tendrils of dark brown hair had started to escape the bun she forced them into, and her enormous green eyes were seductive despite the look of utter bewilderment.
"And you're a cowboy," she said, sounding both like she was completely exasperated by the entire situation and that she was informing me of it so that I could be exasperated, too.
"Ma'am, as much as I would like to continue standing here with you and going over things that I already know about myself, I have a lot of work to do. As we've established during this conversation, I am a cowboy and this is a ranch, and I have things I need to get done."