"While I get her dressed, you could go heat up the pickup. It's cool out."
He nodded again and turned away without comment. As Joanna helped Clova to her feet, she heard the front door close.
An hour and a half later, she and Dalton departed Wacker County Hospital in the RAM dually, having left Clova behind as a patient with respiratory therapy prescribed and tests pending.
Dalton had remained stoic and silent all through the visit to the ER and the doctor's decision to admit Clova. Joanna had done most of the talking. Rather than argue with the clerk in the business office over Clova's lack of insurance, Dalton had told them he would pay her bill and handed them an American Express credit card. Now Joanna wondered just how well off he was.
They walked out of the hospital together and climbed into the RAM. The cocky arrogance she had seen in him so often had been replaced by a glum face and worry lines.
"Mom never used to get sick," he said, looking straight ahead, both hands on the steering wheel as he herded the big dually through the town's narrow streets toward the highway.
Joanna stared straight ahead, too, puzzled by his apparent obtuseness. But then, how could he be expected to know what had been going on in Texas? Even if Clova had been in touch with him, Joanna knew she wouldn't have told him the truth of things. Clova was a private person. Joanna knew of her problems herself only because she spent so much time at the ranch.
Joanna had been around Clova daily for more than two years. She had seen the weakening of her health and spirit with every new unexpected demand for cash the ranch didn't have, every juvenile and dangerous episode Lane brought home and laid on the doorstep like some damn tomcat wagging home a trophy. Clova's decline had happened so gradually, Joanna had come to terms with it the same way.
Dalton appeared to be so flummoxed, she felt a need to explain more to him about his mother. "She's older now, Dalton. And run-down. She's had the ranch to take care of all on her own and she’s been doing a man's work the last few years. I don’t mean to criticize your brother, but he hasn’t been much help. His shenanigans have kept Clova in a state of constant worry. His DUIs, his fines, his child-support payments. It's all cost—"
The pickup lurched to a jolting halt. She grabbed the dash to keep her forehead from banging the windshield. She shot a look of outrage at its driver.
Like a black, violent storm, Dalton’s dark eyes bore down on her. "What child support?" he barked.
A few seconds passed before she found words. "For—for his daughter."
"What daughter?"
She sat there stupefied, absorbing the fact that he didn't know his brother had a child or that he himself was an uncle. Uncomfortable in the heat of his glare, she turned to stare out the windshield. "He and Mandy Ferguson have a little girl. She's almost two. I—I can't believe you didn't know."
"How the hell would I know? Why the fuck didn't they get married?"
Stunned at his reaction, Joanna turned back to him. She had already said too much to stop now. "Because she doesn't want to live with a drunk," she snapped. "And her family doesn't want her to, either. And no one blames her or them."
"Jee-zus Christ!" He yanked the dually into gear. "How much are the fuckin' child-support payments?"
"I think it's eight hundred dollars a month."
"Jesus Christ. That's nearly ten thousand dollars a year. Who is this woman? Does she work?"
"Of course she works," Joanna snapped. "Her folks own the Dairy Queen. She works behind the counter."
"Goddammit," he growled.
"She's a nice girl. She and her mother used to be customers in my shop. She really cared about Lane, but the way he's been, no one can care about him for long. He's got this wild streak about him. He's just too—too...well, unpredictable."
"How many DUIs has he got?"
"Why are you grilling me?" she said, almost shouting now. "Why don't you ask your mother or your brother about these things?"
"Because I'm asking the person who seems to know every fuckin' thing that goes on around here," he almost shouted back.
She drew a calming breath and lifted her chin. "I would really appreciate it if you would spare me the profanity. You're not a marine any longer."
"Just goes to show how much you don't know," he snarled. "Once you're a marine, you're always a marine."
She sent him a fierce glare. "Look, I'm not a prude, but your language is starting to make my ears bleed. I hate the F word."
He glared back at her just as fiercely, as if he were stunned that she would dare scold him.
"I don't know how many DUIs he's got," she said, moving on. "But I won't be surprised if he loses his driver's license this time. I think it only takes three. I think it's possible he could even go to jail. I don't know what Clova will do then."
Dalton's shoulders seemed to sag. He let out a deep breath, like a deflating balloon. Still hanging on to the steering wheel with both hands, he stared straight ahead, slowly shaking his head. "I never thought... I just never …Hell, I don't know what I thought."
Joanna heard a little break in his voice. She couldn't guess what it meant. Nor could she guess Dalton's true feelings for his mother and brother. Or, now, for his niece. She had pegged him for a libertine. A traditional attitude, such as outrage that a man hadn't married the woman with whom he had fathered a child, was the last thing she had expected. Every encounter with him brought a surprise.
Chapter 12
At the ranch, Dalton parked the dually beside the ranch pickup. "I've got to get these fence posts loaded into the work truck," he said grimly, more to himself than to her. "Got to get started on that fence."
He appeared to be so upset and worried that Joanna's proclivity for worrying about other people rose to the surface. She felt sorry for him. Last night's sparring match in the kitchen and today's in the dually faded into the background of reality and now seemed silly. "Did you find someone to help you?" she asked.
He shook his head. "I'll manage."
She hesitated a few seconds, suspecting that "manage" was what he had always done. Managed whatever life handed him. Though she hadn't been around him much, she somehow knew he was a man who made the best of the worst circumstances. She knew exactly how he felt. On a different scale and under less calamitous events, she lived her life much the same.
Would he accept her help? She had to offer. She would do it for anyone. She looked up at him, shielding her eyes from the morning sun with her hand. "Look, it's not very smart to take on a barbed wire fence alone. You might have done it a long time ago, but it’s been years and you’re bound to be rusty at it. I'll make a deal with you. If you'll help me gather my eggs, I'll help you with the fence. I wasn't going to do anything special today anyway."
He stared down at her, a tic jumping in his square jaw. "Why would you do that? Building fence is man’s work. What do you know about it? Besides, you can get cut up by barbed wire."
"I know teenagers who build fence. If they can do it, I can."
Looking off into the distance, he inflated his cheeks and blew out a loud breath. "Okay. Show me what to do."
"Just wait here. I'll be right back."
She picked the baskets and the blue plastic bucket from her pickup bed and handed him the bucket and a basket. "Gathering eggs isn't rocket science. You just pick them up and put them in the basket. If you find a cracked or broken one, put it in the blue bucket so I can trash it. If you throw it on the ground or leave it in the nest, the hens will eat it and that trains them to eat eggs. I don't want them to get into that habit."
"Stupid birds," he muttered, taking the basket and the bucket and looking from one to the other as if each were tainted. “Where’s your blue bucket? You don’t have one.”
“If I find a broken egg, I’ll bring it over and put it in your bucket, okay?”
He continued to scowl.
"Look, you don't have to like the hens to gather the eggs, okay?"
They worked in silence. Dulce s
cratched and clucked along behind them. Every time Dalton turned around, she was underfoot. "Chicken, you pushing your luck," he told the little hen after he had almost stepped on her several times and sent her squawking and flapping away. Joanna suppressed a smile. Something told her Dulce was in no danger. Dalton might be arrogant and gruff, but he wasn't mean-natured.
When they finished, he handed over his basket filled with eggs and the bucket holding four cracked ones. He walked beside her as she carried them toward her room, his size and close presence making her feel small. "How are you going to get that bundle of fence posts into the ranch truck?" she asked him.
"Well, babe, I'm gonna break it up and load 'em a few at a time. I'm not Superman, you know."
She held back a grin, remembering the thought she'd had yesterday in the kitchen. “Gosh, and I thought you were.”
His head angled toward her, but she couldn’t see his eyes behind his dark sunglasses. He said nothing.
"I have to wash these eggs,” she said. “I can do it while you load the posts. I'll hurry so I can help you."
Inside her egg-washing room, she scrambled into her coveralls, cap and gloves, washed the eight dozen eggs and laid them out to dry. When she went outside, she saw the fence posts already loaded, along with all of the tools and supplies. Dalton was nowhere to be seen. Just then, he came from inside the house carrying a brown paper grocery sack, a denim shirt and a pair of gloves. "I brought some cheese and bread and water for lunch," he said.
"Ugh."
"Hey, don't bitch. I crawled all over a fu—a jungle in Thailand once with little more than that in my pack."
If anyone else had made that statement, she would have been so curious she would have asked for more information, but he wasn't just anyone. Besides, as contentious as he was, if she asked, he might tell her it was none of her damn business. "Whatever," she said. "I don't eat much anyway."
He handed her the shirt and a new pair of leather work gloves. "Maybe these will keep your arms and hands from getting cut up."
He had a point. She was wearing a T-shirt.
Soon they were in the work pickup, creeping across the pasture toward the broken fence, saying little. Finally he said, "Mom told me it was her idea about the chickens. So I guess you weren't lying."
"And of course you thought I was. Of course you thought I befriended a lonely older woman so I could steal your inheritance."
A hint of a smile played over his lips. "I'm not worried about a fu—about a damned inheritance. This place doesn't mean shit to me."
At hearing him stop himself at the F word a second time, she shot him a quick glance, feeling as if she had won a battle. And at the same time she wondered if it were true that the Lazy P meant nothing to him.
"But it was a helluva shock," he said, "seeing all those goddamn chickens living in the pasture we used to reserve for our prime cows."
She didn't like hearing "goddamn," either, but she satisfied herself with a small victory.
A few more seconds later, he said, "Mom told me you don't pay any rent."
Joanna winced inside, though she had known all along that sooner or later her free use of the land would come up. "Clova gets something out of this," she said, feeling the need for a defense. "The chicken droppings make great fertilizer. She uses it in her garden and—"
"So you're telling me you're paying my mom off in chicken shit?"
"That's ridiculous."
"Tell me something else. All that home-canned food in Mom's pantry. All of that grew in chicken shit?"
"Manure is manure. What's the difference if it comes from horses or cows or chickens? It's all organic."
"I don’t know so much about that. You know, in the old days, the cowmen fought wars with the sheepmen who brought in their herds of sheep and squatted on the land. If there had been chicken herds back then, what do you suppose a tough old cowman would've done about that?"
Joanna thought she heard teasing in his tone. She gave him an impish grin. "Probably would have been hard-nosed and narrow-minded. Like you."
He cocked his head and looked at her. "You know, you're pretty when you smile."
She couldn't keep from smiling again.
Good Lord, she couldn't help herself, especially since the compliment sent a little zing right to her center. God help her, she was having fun. She was worse than a silly teenager. "Listen, Hollywood, after all the bad things you've said about my hens, it'll take more than flattery to get on my good side."
This time, one side of his mouth lifted into that knee-weakening half grin. "Then I guess I'll have to think of what that is."
He brought the pickup to an abrupt halt, then eased the truck into a slow roll as they crept over a deep gully. Sometimes she had a hard time understanding how such a landscape could be good for grazing livestock. "You want to know something? I never did figure out why the cattle ranchers hated the sheep so much."
"'Cause all sheep do is eat and shit."
"That's what all animals do."
"But sheep shit's repulsive to cows. They won't graze where sheep have lived. And sheep chomp the grass down to nothing."
"Is that the truth? Or are you just telling me that?"
"That's the truth."
A new argument came to her and she gave him another grin. "Then I guess you don't have anything to worry about with my hens. Your mom and I have strung chicken droppings all over these pastures and I haven't seen a single cow refuse to eat. But I have seen the grass look a whole lot better where we've put it."
His head jerked in her direction. "You set me up for that."
This time she didn't grin; she laughed.
* * *
To Dalton's frustration, it was now late morning and the sun had already climbed high and heated the day. He wanted to get most of the fencing done today so he could get into town to the bank tomorrow, then to see an old high school friend whose family had always been in the oil business.
Knowing the fencing would go faster with some help had prompted him to accept Joanna's offer, though male assistance would be better. He'd had misgivings about what he could be letting himself in for, but to his surprise, she turned out to be a steady worker and a smart helper. Without being told, she managed to be where he needed her to be all of the time, and she followed his orders without argument. And she had more energy and more physical ability than any woman he knew.
Now it was well past noon. He'd had nothing but coffee all day, and he had driven two dozen posts into the ground with a handheld post driver and strung feet and feet of barbed wire. His energy level had dropped. Hunger pangs gnawed at his stomach. "You hungry yet?" he asked Joanna.
She wiped sweat and dirt off her face with her shirtsleeve. "I don't know."
Dalton felt a shred of guilt. He had pushed her hard.
She looked up at him with a dirty face and a one-eyed squint. "Every time I thought of that gourmet lunch you brought, it sort of squelched my appetite."
He let the smart-ass quip pass without a comeback. He, too, pulled off his cap and wiped his sweat-drenched face with his shirttail. "Let's stop and eat."
"Okay, you're the boss."
Yeah, right. He wondered if this wiseass female had ever had a real boss. Again he didn't see the necessity of replying. He walked toward the truck, carrying the post driver. She tagged along beside him, her cap set low over her eyes, the shirt—his shirt he had loaned her to wear—hanging to her knees. She looked cute, quickstepping to keep up with his long stride.
"When I was a kid," he said, "I used to drive posts all day long with a sixteen-pound maul. I'd drive the tractor out and park it where I needed to put in a post. Then I’d stand on the back tire to get leverage and pound those suckers into the ground."
"No kidding? That must've been killing work. They didn't have that post-driving thingy back then?"
They reached the truck and he clunked the post-driving tool into the bed. "I'm sure they did. But my stepdad, being a man who had no intention of
doing the work himself, didn't have much interest in labor-saving devices. It didn't matter. By the time I learned there was a smarter way to do it, I was already on my way out of town."
"You must know a lot about this ranch. You've never thought about coming back here and helping your mom?"
He snorted. "Not even when I was hunkered down in a fighting hole with a bunch of unwashed marines and taking mortar fire."
He opened the passenger door and dragged out the sack that held the lunch he had thrown together. He pulled a faded bandanna from his back pocket, spread it on the tailgate and laid out the cheese and bread. She gave both the handkerchief and him a dubious look. "It's clean," he told her.
She raised on her tiptoes and scooted her butt onto the tailgate as he lifted bottles of water from the sack. "I brought a surprise," he said and pulled out an apple he had found in the kitchen.
She smiled. "Oh, wow. Imagine that. Dessert."
He paused for a moment, looking into her face as he swallowed her sass. She did have the prettiest smile. Nice kissable lips and perfect white teeth. "I found only one. I'll split it with you."
He dug out his pocketknife and opened it. Holding it between his thumb and finger, he showed it to her. "It's clean, too."
She grinned. "I'll bet. You've probably been using it to gut fish."
"Nope. Never learned to fish. Did a lot of hunting, but no fishing. All I do with water is drink it and swim in it." As he sliced the apple into halves, the Adam and Eve story came to him. He handed a half to her. "This is backward, you know. The way the story goes, it's you who's supposed to be giving me an apple."
Her brow arched, but she took the apple half with a grimy hand and bit into it. He liked that she didn't make a big deal out of having dirty hands. Now he knew she had been razzing him about the handkerchief and the pocketknife.
"Since a serpent isn't involved in this scenario," she said, "it probably doesn't matter."
He used the pocketknife to slice off two pieces of cheese and tore off two hunks of the bread with his hand. "This looks like Mom’s homemade bread. You know, I don't have a lot of memories from Hatlow worth keeping, but one thing I do remember was that Mom always baked fresh bread. I'd come home from school and the house would be filled with those cooking smells."
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