9 Ways to Fall in Love

by Caroline Clemmons

  "Oh." Still, she sprang to her feet and thrust a fist in the air. "Go, Cody!" Then she sat back down and refocused on Joanna. "Anyway, you're gonna go with us, right?"

  "I guess so," Joanna replied, already regretting making the commitment. She would prefer to take Shari to lunch, just the two of them, and give her a nice present.

  * * *

  Dalton had forgotten what a fine cook his mother was. She, on the other hand, must have remembered how much he used to love chicken-fried steak with mashed potatoes and cream gravy. These days he rarely ate such fare, but tonight he stuffed himself.

  Joanna Walsh would be sorry she didn't stay for supper. He was still annoyed that she hadn't been all that accepting of his apology. He thought he had been gracious.

  Mom topped off the meal with hot peach cobbler made from home-canned peaches, and he couldn't resist a serving with some vanilla ice cream.

  After they ate, he helped police the kitchen. Mom washed dishes by hand, he noticed, then recalled how the ranch's hard water calcified plumbing. A dishwasher would have stood no chance. He dried the dishes for her, something he had done as a child, stacking them as he dried them on the ancient butcher block that had sat in the middle of the kitchen for as long as he could remember.

  He strained for conversation. Communication was hard with a woman he hardly knew anymore. Hell, he had never known her, really. She had been a puzzle to him forever.

  Now even her appearance seemed alien. The face of the mother that had always been affixed in his mind didn't show deep creases around her mouth or fans of wrinkles at the corners of her eyes. It struck him as he glimpsed her profile that though she had aged, he could still see the strong resemblance between himself and her—the dark brown eyes and black hair, the prominent facial features, the same olive skin. Anyone could tell they were blood kin.

  "I'm glad you went to the hospital and saw Lane," she said. "You always meant a lot to him."

  Dalton didn't like being reminded of that. Guilt pinched him that he had made little effort to stay in touch with Lane. He had sent a postcard from here, a snapshot from there, some silly souvenir that had little meaning. "He looks pitiful lying in that hospital bed."

  "I'm pretty sure a drunk drivin' charge is comin'. I asked Clyde to find us a lawyer."

  Clyde, Clyde, Clyde. Dalton searched his memory. "I must have forgotten who Clyde is."

  "Clyde Jordan? Why, Dalton Parker, I can't believe you don't remember him. He's been a friend o' this family since I was a girl. Lord, he was friends with my daddy."

  An old guy, Dalton thought. He had probably never known him. "Do you know what Lane's blood alcohol level was?"

  She shook her head. "I 'magine it was too high. He's been hittin' the bottle hard. He don't seem to be able to help hisself. Too bad he can't go to one o' them fancy clinics like them movie stars go to."

  "Yeah, I guess," Dalton said, recalling that a penchant for alcoholism was genetic. He might not know his own father's identity, but he was glad not to be the spawn of Earl Cherry.

  The chickens had been stuck in his mind since the moment he saw them and more so after he learned the story of them. He wanted to bring them up, but he didn't want to risk a quarrel so soon after his arrival. The chickens could wait.

  "So what's going on with the ranch, Mom?" He carefully set a dried bowl on top of another one. "That back fence looked like it hasn't been taken care of in a helluva long time."

  "The ranch ain't got no money, Dalton. It's been touch and go for a long time. The drought, cattle prices. Somethin' new I can't do nothin' about comes up ever' day. A lot of the old-timers have sold out." She rearranged the dishes waiting to be dried in the dish drainer. "Sometimes I think I ought to, too, but if I did, I wouldn't get nothin' in my pocket. The bank would get it all. Then I'd be even poorer than I am now."

  A red flag unfurled in Dalton's mind. "Farmers Bank downtown? Do you owe them much?"

  "They're holdin' paper on ever'thang, Dalton."

  As Dalton recalled, it wasn't unusual for some part of a rancher's livestock and equipment to be used as collateral for operating loans. "But not the land, right?"

  She continued to wash dishes without acknowledging his question.

  "Mom. You've mortgaged the land?" He couldn't mask the incredulity in the question. His grandpa, her father, would have said a rancher who mortgaged his land was on his way to doomsday.

  She heaved a huge sigh, still not looking at: him. "'Til Lane got hurt, that was my worst trouble." She shook water from her hands, picked up a dishtowel and dried them, then walked over to an envelope-filled pocket hanging on the wall. She picked one and brought it back to him. "I wasn't gonna bother you with this, but I guess you might as well know it. I 'magine ever'body in town knows it."

  He slung the dishtowel over his shoulder and took the envelope. The letter inside warned her that the land taxes hadn't been paid for the past two years and failure to pay them was grounds for foreclosure. A copy of a summary from the county tax assessor was attached. He saw that the ranch had an agriculture tax exemption, but still, two years' worth of taxes on seventeen sections added up. He looked up at her, but her eyes and hands were busy with scrubbing a skillet.

  "But you've banked there forever," he said. "They know you. They'll work with you. Just go talk to them."

  She stopped her work and finally looked at him, and he saw the angst that was in her heart in her eyes.

  "No, Dalton. Things is changed. Some foreigners bought the bank. Ain't even any o' the old people workin' there anymore. They wanted ever'body that worked there to speak Spanish. Most of 'em quit. They didn't wanna speak Spanish."

  Puzzled, Dalton's eyes narrowed. "So who owns the bank now?"

  "I don't know 'em. It's a bank from Spain."

  "Spain? As in Europe? How the hell did a bank in Spain even find Hatlow, Texas?"

  "I don't know. They've bought a bunch o' the banks in the little towns around. All I know is they ain't farmer friendly anymore. They want the Meskin bizness. They's gettin' to be more Meskins than Americans around here."

  As a resident of Southern California, Dalton well knew the dramatic changes brought by the massive Latino immigration. He had no trouble believing that the bank, seeking the Hispanic business, would require its employees to speak Spanish before it would insist that the Hispanic customers speak English. He made a mental note. Monday morning he would be on Farmers Bank's doorstep. He would get to the bottom of this situation.

  "So, Mom, that back pasture looks awful. There's big chunks of bare dirt back there. How many cows are you grazing now?"

  "I got a little over five hundred mother cows."

  The longer Dalton had been removed from the ranching industry, the farther it had receded in his thoughts, but bits came back to him. He did a simple arithmetic calculation in his head, at the same time considering that raising cattle in the arid environment of West Texas called for deft range management. Five hundred cows plus their calves were too many for the amount of grazing the Parker ranch owned. An even bigger red flag waved in his mind. "That sounds like a lot."

  She shrugged. "Lane thought if we added some extra cows, in a couple o' years, we'd get ahead o' the bank. If we could o' got some rain, it might o' worked. When the Good Lord didn't bless us, I thought we could get out of it by buyin' a little extra feed. But since they started makin' gasoline outta all the corn, feed's got so damn high. Besides that, feedin' every day makes a lot o' extra work."

  Thoughts tumbled through Dalton's mind. Overgrazing was a disaster irremediable in a short amount of time. In a fuckin' desert, it could take a generation. Hell, it was possible it couldn't be fixed at all. A sharp ache spread through his brain from temple to temple. By coming back here, what the hell had he stepped into?

  His mother finished straightening the kitchen, came over to him and looked into his face. She reached up and laid a hand on his shoulder. "I thank you for comin' home, Dalton. Seein' you makes me happy. You've been gon
e a long time."

  He patted her hand, his mind still on the ranch's problems. "I know, Mom. I've just been...well, busy."

  "I think I'll turn in." She gave him a weak smile, placing a hand on her back and rubbing. "That fence buildin's hard on an ol' woman."

  Dalton watched as she left the kitchen and disappeared into the hallway, the visual from earlier in the afternoon of her and that teenage kid struggling with a wire stretcher vivid in his mind. She was a small woman, probably didn't weigh much over a hundred pounds. She had no business building fence. But what the hell could he do about any of it? He didn't live here anymore.

  He turned on the TV and channel surfed a while, then settled on a news channel out of habit. World events dictated his daily plan. TV news was so much a part of his life, he felt as if he knew the commentators personally. He could even predict what some of them would say next. A part of him was trained to wonder if there was somewhere in the world he needed to be. Somewhere besides Hatlow, Texas.

  Chapter 9

  Joanna, Shari and Jay left the Hatlow High School stadium soon after ten o'clock. Hatlow's Mustangs had won, a fact that had Jay overjoyed.

  As far as Joanna knew, Jay and Shari, having gotten married so young, had rarely been out of Wacker County except to travel to football games. Their son's participation in high school football was the most exciting thing in Jay's life. For that matter, most of Hatlow’s citizens were the same.

  "Joanna," Jay said as the three of them walked to the parking lot, "what ever happened to that Scott dude you were hanging out with?"

  She gave an unladylike snort. "He was the last straw. Thanks to him, I gave up on men."

  "I told you that," Shari said to her husband.

  "I must've forgot," Jay said.

  "You never listen to a word I say, Jay Huddleston."

  "Shari, you say so damn many words, my ears can't sort 'em all out. Listen," he said to Joanna, "when you see ol' Dalton again, tell him to come by my shop and I'll give him a beer or a cup of coffee. I can't remember the last time I saw that guy."

  The thought of seeing Dalton again held zero appeal. In fact, she would like to figure out a way to avoid him until he departed for California. "If I ever talk to him again, I'll be sure to tell him," she grumbled.

  * * *

  At eleven Dalton decided to turn in. It was early for him. Back in California, it was only nine o'clock. He went to bed in the room where he had slept in his youth. Faded floral wallpaper, filmy white curtains, a paper window shade.

  The smell of dust and disuse surrounded him. If he had to guess, he would say he lay on the same lumpy, sagging mattress on which he had slept the last time he visited several years back, the same one that had been his as a kid. Only now it felt worse. Back when he was a teenager, he had slid a piece of plywood between the mattress and the box spring to make the bed firmer. That was more than twenty years ago. From the feel of it, the plywood had been removed.

  Hell, he should just get a new bed. In fact, he could easily do that while he was in Lubbock tomorrow and haul it back in his mom’s truck.

  Working on the fence all afternoon had worn on him, too, but not in a bad way. Most work around the ranch, any ranch, was physically demanding, but he had never minded. Besides liking the cattle, he liked the outdoors, liked the physical exertion.

  His thoughts veered to his mother. His attitude toward for her was a confused mixture of affection and resentment—respect for her role in giving him life and taking care of him growing up the best she knew how, but bitterness because she had chosen Earl Cherry's happiness and welfare over that of either of her sons.

  And after she had demonstrated so much unflinching loyalty to Cherry, he hadn't even been a faithful husband. The sonofabitch had fucked around with women all over the county and even in Lovington. Dalton had known it even as a kid, had seen women in the truck with Earl. His mother had known, too, but ignored it or made excuses for it. Of the many things about her that Dalton had never understood, number one on the list was her relationship with Cherry.

  He was stunned that she had hocked the friggin' land, the bedrock of any ranching operation. It might be too late to do much about that, but he could manage a solution to the tax problem. Monday, he would go to the courthouse and simply write a check. Catching up the taxes would lift some pressure.

  He had always believed that someday the ranch would belong to him and Lane, though he, personally, had never longed for it or felt it was owed to him. Still, seeing the chickens was a brutal reminder of how quickly things could change. Hell, even if his mother got out of this financial bind, she could get married again and as capricious as she had always been with her feelings for her sons, she could give the whole damn place to her new husband.

  Dalton had had the latter thought before, which he had used as a reason not to invest his own funds in the place. Even by paying the taxes, he could well be pouring money down a rat hole. He wasn't stingy, but he disliked wasting money.

  So was selling the place the long-term solution? When it came to the nut-cutting, he doubted Mom would do it. Generations of Parker ancestors were buried in the old family cemetery a few miles from the house. That had meaning to a family that had endured prejudice and discrimination for all of the years the Parker Comanche ancestors had. Dalton hadn't experienced those offenses himself, but he knew his grandparents had.

  He began to sink into the well of sleep, making a plan for tomorrow. Return the rental car, take his mother with him to the hospital, talk to Lane's doctor. From looking at the kid, Dalton suspected he could be out of commission for a long time.

  Following the hospital visit, he and Mom would pick up some fence-building supplies and he would find a place to buy a new bed. Then he had to find a Best Buy or somewhere to pick up some computer peripherals. He had brought his laptop and his drivers and software with him. The quiet nights would be perfect for choosing and editing the photographs he had shot overseas. Regardless of what else happened, he couldn't forget he had promised his editor he would have no problem meeting his deadline on his next book of photographs.

  Two hours later, he was wide-awake, lying in a pool of sweat, his heart pounding in his ears. The nightmare—a horror filled with chaos, Technicolor images of rubble and blood and scattered body parts—did that to him. The human screams and wails of agony, the screeching sirens were as real as when they had occurred. He could even smell the stench of cordite lingering in the air.

  He sat up, swinging his feet to the floor, mentally and emotionally fighting his way back to the reality of being in a safe place. The dream didn't come every night, but once it had awakened him, he usually remained sleepless and strung out for an hour or two or even a whole night. He rubbed his eyes and sat there a few minutes, waiting for his heartbeat to slow. Finally, he looked at his watch, which he could read in the dark. Midnight in LA.

  The clean smell of the dewy rangeland and the steady saw of crickets drifted in through two tall open windows. He didn't sleep with the windows open in his Los Angeles home. He didn't dare. But in this house, the open windows were a necessity. Built some years before 1900, the house had no ducted air-conditioning system. As a kid, Dalton had scarcely noticed. When temperatures rose to sweltering in late summer and early fall, his mother and Earl put swamp coolers in a couple of the windows. They turned them on only during the hottest part of the day.

  No question in Dalton's mind, his rugged youth had conditioned him to survive in the desert. Growing up, he had spent his days outdoors, too tired by night to let the temperature affect him. Endurance was a mental exercise anyway. He had learned that much in the Marine Corps and from the GIs in Iraq. Even with the temperature at 130 degrees, those kids slogged around the desert covered by pounds of clothing, carrying pounds of equipment.

  The open windows and the cooler outside temperature didn't keep the room from being stuffy. He rose, pulled on his shirt and jeans and slid his feet into his boots. He stole from the room, through the house
and out onto the front porch, stuffing his hands into his jeans pockets against the cool of the night.

  A three-quarter moon stained the landscape silver. A billion stars hung in a velvet sky. He had seen stars in outposts he had visited all over the world, but never in LA where he lived. He couldn’t keep from smiling at that.

  The long white caliche driveway stretched ahead of him like a pale ribbon leading to the highway. Far out on the horizon several columns of the bright white lights of oil derricks glimmered like skinny Christmas trees against the black sky.

  Nothing stirred. From a great distance he heard the call of a whippoorwill. The familiar sound brought back his childhood for a flicker of memory, but to this day, as familiar as the sound was to his ear, as far as he knew, he had never seen one of those friggin' birds.

  From an even greater distance, the shrill bark of coyotes pierced the night....Coyotes? Hell, yes, coyotes. Why weren't they out there in that nasty damn chicken yard feasting on those fuckin' chickens? What the hell was wrong with them?

  He stepped off the porch and walked over to the fenced pasture where the stinking damned things lived. He could see the silhouettes of at least four coops made of weathered plywood, and he presumed chickens roosted in all of them. The jackasses stood together beneath a small open shed that looked like a bunch of junk lumber had been thrown together. The place looked like Tobacco Road. Shit. How could his mother do this to the ranch?

  If you were so concerned about what she might be doing in your lengthy absence, perhaps you should have come home. Or at the very least, made a phone call and pretended you cared what happens to her and to this place.

  Joanna Walsh's words pushed their way into his head. He couldn't argue with what she had said to him about his approach to his family, but he hated being reminded by an outsider that he had given his mom, his brother or Texas little thought and even less time.

  Who the hell was this Walsh woman anyway? And why couldn't he remember her from school? She had been flitting in and out of his space and his mind all day. Not because she was his type, for damn sure. There was something else about her that gnawed at him.