Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  Which led her to the biggest thing about Pete Jackson that set her inner alarm bells to cacophony. She felt a strong attraction to him. A total stranger in the middle of the West Texas desert, and she was standing inches from him in the glow of a campfire, noticing the precise color of his eyes, listening to her racing heartbeat and feeling her mouth go painfully dry.

  “I’m afraid I only have the cot to sit on,” he said, never once taking his eyes from hers. She had the oddest sensation that they were alone in the star-studded night and that the air had been withdrawn from this small camp.

  “Th-that’s fine,” she said, turning with relief to the bed. His bed. She took a gulp of the hot coffee and welcomed its scalding reality.

  He knelt cowboy-fashion, resting on his upraised heels, and stared into the fire. And yet, she knew he wasn’t from the West. He was no more a cowboy than she was a dancehall girl.

  “Will you show Mom your arrowheads, Pete?” Jenny asked. “She’d be interested, honest.”

  Carolyn was curious to know how much experience he’d had with children, for he turned his shadowed gaze on Jenny and studied her for a long moment, as if trying to understand child speech. For a moment she thought he would deny Jenny this treat, that he was unaware it wasn’t the arrowheads that were important, interesting as they might be, but the connection between his treasures and him.

  After a long appraisal, he nodded and flicked a glance at a large tackle box. “Why don’t you?” he suggested, conferring singular trust on Jenny by allowing her to touch his things.

  Carolyn’s breath caught, watching him, and she wondered if he had any idea how his face softened when he talked to her daughters. Though she knew nothing about him, she had the intuitive impression that he wasn’t a man who had encountered much tenderness in his life. Or gave it easily.

  Though it was cool where she sat on the bed, his proximity to the fire must have gotten to him, for he set his mug aside to roll up his sleeves. He stopped in the act of reaching for his right sleeve, rolled the first one back down and moved away from the fire. Carolyn had to wonder if it was her open contemplation of his muscled forearm that had stopped him.

  He didn’t say a word while Jenny and Shawna carefully—far more carefully than they would have treated anything at home—set the box beside her on his bed and opened the treasure chest. Without touching the items inside, they reverently described each find, every point. They stammered over some of the names, looking to him for confirmation now and then—he would nod without smiling—and proceeded through the entire collection as if they’d been memorizing it for weeks instead of a single afternoon.

  Carolyn felt a pang of pride in her daughters’ bright, alert minds, but overriding it she felt a sharp stab of appreciation for Pete Jackson’s obvious gift of an archeology lesson for her girls. He’d taken the time to explain each and every artifact to them, and in such a way that they’d been totally captivated by it.

  “What’s the littlest one called?” Shawna asked him.

  “Which one?”

  “You know,” Jenny interjected, “the baby point.”

  He frowned a little and pushed upward to come join the circle at his bed. He knelt again slightly to the side so the light from the fire could illumine their question. His shoulder just brushed Carolyn’s thigh, making her hands tremble a little. She had the oddest desire to rest her hand on his back, a companionable, easy gesture of affection. But there was no intimacy between them. They were total, complete strangers.

  When he reached with his left hand for the arrowhead the girls were pointing at, his forearm lightly rested on her knee. A breathlessness nearly alien to her after all these years left her feeling remarkably weak—and stupid. She wasn’t any adolescent, snared by rampant hormones; she was a woman in her mid-thirties, a widow, a person fully accustomed to loneliness.

  But nonetheless, she was somewhat gratified to note that when he apparently realized he was resting on her leg, his hands shook a little, too. She forced herself to look away from his sculpted profile to see what he held in his hand. He didn’t jerk his arm away, merely transferred it to his own upraised knee. But she knew he was as overconscious of the contact as she.

  “...don’t you think, Mom? Mom?” Jenny jiggled her shoulder to gain her attention. She blinked at her daughter, trying to focus on the question, trying not to think of how his weight had felt against her leg.

  After an appropriate ooh and ahh, she gathered what little rational thought she had left and stammered, “I—I think it’s time we went home.” As she told the girls to gather their things, she found she could still manage to sound perfectly normal when everything in her was screaming for them to run away as fast as they could.

  Pete didn’t say anything as he pushed to his feet and closed the tackle box. Carolyn didn’t know whether she was relieved or disappointed.

  “It’s getting late,” Carolyn added, wishing she didn’t feel so inept.

  “Aw, Mom!” Jenny complained. “You just got here!”

  “Don’t you think Pete could help us with the Wannamacher brothers?” Shawna asked suddenly, just as Carolyn was about to stand.

  “No!” she said sharply. Though she wasn’t looking at him now, she was. aware of his absolute stillness.

  “He shoots real good,” Jenny offered, blithely ignoring grammar in her eagerness.

  “Really well,” Carolyn corrected automatically.

  “Yeah, really!” her daughter corroborated, misunderstanding.

  “We’ve already troubled Mr. Jackson enough,” Carolyn said, blindly handing him her coffee mug, not daring to look at his face, hoping he wasn’t able to read her chaotic thoughts. His fingers brushed hers as he took the cup from her hand. She jerked back as if he’d tried branding her.

  “We tried to hire him, Mom,” Shawna said.

  Carolyn was appalled.

  “Yeah, I offered him my whole birthday money,” Jenny said.

  Five dollars. Her daughter had offered a perfect stranger five dollars to come protect them from the Wannamacher brothers. She blushed deeply, both at the mortification of her daughter’s innocent gesture and at how much an unruly part of herself wished he’d accepted.

  “He could work around the ranch. You said we needed somebody,” Shawna offered.

  “It’s not his problem,” Carolyn said through a choked throat. “And I’m sure he has better things to do than...” She trailed off, not knowing how to finish her statement.

  “The girls told me you’re being harassed by some people,” he said. His voice seemed too deep, and his stillness unnerved her. “You should call the police.”

  “There aren’t any around here,” she said, then wished she’d kept her mouth shut; she sounded as if she were asking for his help. “But it’ll be all right. We’ll be fine. We have family and friends.”

  He didn’t say anything, and Carolyn had the feeling she’d spoken too breathlessly or perhaps a shade too loudly. His silence seemed to mock her words.

  “Come on, girls, we’ve got to get home.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  Carolyn wished he’d maintained his all-but-taunting silence. His low, graveled and Eastern-accented voice appealed to her and she didn’t want anything about the man to touch her in any way.

  And she didn’t know anything about him, from what he was doing out here to why everything about him rang those alarm bells inside her.

  “We’ll deal with it,” she said firmly.

  “How?” he asked softly.

  Carolyn had the dizzying sensation of having fallen down Alice’s rabbit hole. She was in the middle of the desert, in the cold night of an early spring, talking with a stranger about trouble that had nothing to do with him.

  She didn’t have an answer. That was part of the problem. She’d called an attorney and asked him to draw up an injunction against the brothers, but without an official complaint on record, he couldn’t do as she wanted. And without an official arm o
f the law in Almost, no complaint had been possible. When the state troopers had come at her request, they’d found no proof it was the Wannamachers who had thrown a rock through her living room window or spray-painted nasty phrases on her bunkhouse. And the Wannamacher brothers had been the very picture of innocence when the troopers had confronted them. “Who, us? Why we’d never think of scaring the widow lady.”

  “What kind of work do you need done on the ranch?” he asked.

  For a moment she longed to simply tell him. Everything needed some kind of touch. The property had been essentially abandoned when Craig’s parents died fifteen years before. Craig hadn’t wanted to sell it, had even talked about retiring there, but had never made any push to care for it. And fifteen years of Panhandle winds, storms, and the relentless sun had scalded, scorched and eroded the property. The barn needed painting, the house even more and could use some serious trim repair besides. Though only on the place a month, Carolyn thought the hay seemed heavier every day and the muck in the corral got deeper by the minute. The barbed wire fence surrounding the main house sagged in many places and was broken altogether in others.

  Neglect and abandonment showed in every piece of wood, every rusting bit of metal. It was no miracle that she’d had a place to come to when the bank repossessed their condominium she hadn’t known Craig had remort-gaged; the tiny, non-working ranch was more of a curse. But she’d had no where else to go and had arrived, a scant few weeks ago, desperate, broke, and heart sore. And wholly unprepared for either the condition of the place or the Wannamacher brothers’ enmity.

  “I’m fairly handy,” he said, and though she knew what he meant, she couldn’t help her involuntary glance at his hands, remembering the way her own had disappeared in his clasp. Her palm seemed to tingle at the recollection.

  “Mom...please?”

  “Yeah, Mom. We need him.”

  “We’ve bothered Mr. Jackson enough tonight,” she said, and wished her words didn’t sound as if she intended to bother him more the next day.

  “No bother,” he said. “And girls, the next time you decide to disobey your mother, leave a note telling her exactly where you’re going and when you’ll be back.”

  Shawna giggled at the patent absurdity of his statement.

  “And when you do skip out, be sure to tether Bratwurst so he can’t run off on you when a skunk comes skipping by and some stranger shoots him.”

  “Yes, Pete.”

  “Okay, Pete.”

  A broad hand came out of the shadows and settled on first one girl’s hair and then the other. “You’ve been a pain and trial. And if I were your mother, I’d sell you to the highest bidder first thing in the morning.”

  Instead of taking offence, the girls grinned broadly.

  Carolyn found her own lips curving into a wistful smile. She looked up in time to catch the ghost of an echoing grin on his face as well. And his gray eyes on her face, on her lips and then snaring her gaze.

  “If you need some help, you know where to find me,” he said in that graveled voice. For some reason she thought of raw silk, the way it was both rich and scratchy at the same time.

  “Thank you,” she said through dry lips, “but we’ll handle things.”

  “All right then,” he said, stepping back from her.

  She couldn’t tell him why she couldn’t hire him, didn’t have the wherewithal to admit she could barely put food on the table, let alone pay someone anything remotely close to a decent wage. If the ranch wasn’t paid for free and clear, she literally wouldn’t have a roof over their heads—such as it was. And her plans to do something with the ranch were as far away as the stars themselves. And with the Wannamachers threatening her at every turn, she’d more than once considered just packing the girls up and heading out of West Texas forever. The trouble was, there was nowhere for them to go and she had no money to go with.

  And she was turning her back on an offer of help. “He’s so big, he’ll scare the Wannamachers away just like that!” Jenny said, clapping her hands instead of snapping her fingers.

  “Please, Mom?” Shawna said. “I know he’ll be able to help us. I just know it. Like in my soul or something.”

  “Yeah. We know,” Jenny added dramatically.

  Carolyn pushed her daughters into the darkness outside the camp. The stars twinkled merrily in the sky, as if laughing at her panic.

  “I accept your offer,” Pete said.

  Carolyn whirled around. “What offer?” she asked breathlessly.

  “Jenny’s,” he said, striding forward then. “A bonafide offer of employment, I believe.”

  “Yeah!” Jenny said, frantically digging into her pocket.

  “No!” Carolyn said too sharply, too forcefully. Her daughter hesitated, looking up at her in surprise. She seldom raised her voice. She forced herself to a calm she was far from experiencing. “Thank you, Mr. Jackson. Both for caring for my daughters this evening, and for your offer of help. We’ll be fine. Now come on, girls.”

  She propelled them the final stretch to the Ranger and ushered them inside. She turned just before boarding herself and found Pete Jackson standing right beside her, his broad hand out, waiting for her to shake it.

  She jabbed her hand at his and would have withdrawn it immediately, but he was faster than she and wrapped long, warm fingers around hers. She felt trapped. Caught. And the shock of electricity that seemed to flow between them had everything to do with her panic.

  “Thanks again,” she muttered for the third time and forced her hand free.

  “My pleasure,” he said, but she had the feeling he was mocking her again. Or baiting her.

  He laid his hand on the hood of the Ranger and gave it a small slap, like he would a sluggish horse. “Good luck,” he said.

  He stood back from the Ranger as she turned the ignition and further back still as she circled forward. Her last glimpse of him was as she’d first seen him, a tall, imposing silhouette before a campfire. A solid dark figure in a desert of shadows.

  She rubbed her hand on her jeans, not so much to erase his touch from her palm, but to stop the tingling she could still feel.

  “Isn’t Pete great?” Jenny asked.

  “Isn’t he funny?” Shawna asked.

  “A riot,” Carolyn agreed dully.

  “And boy-howdy, you should see him shoot!” Jenny said.

  “Didn’t you like him, Mom?” Shawna asked, her mother’s attitude apparently finally impinging her consciousness.

  That was the whole trouble, she thought. She had liked him. She’d liked a perfect stranger just a little too much. First impressions were inevitably wrong; she knew better than most people one should never judge a book by its cover. Especially a widow alone with two little girls. She’d been down that particularly hazardous road before.

  “I liked him fine, honey,” she said. “And I’m thankful he was so good to you two. And speaking of which, we need to have a little talk about what you were thinking of, going off the property when I expressly told you not to.”

  “Aw, Mom...”

  “You’re just lucky you ran into Pete instead of the Wannamacher brothers,” she said, and immediately felt off balance.

  “I hope we see Pete again soon,” Jenny said. “I like him. He reminds me of Dad.”

  Carolyn couldn’t say a single thing to that. Except for his reticence and his height, she didn’t find a single thing about him that reminded her of Craig.

  She tried seeing him as the girls must have and she half understood. His gentleness with them, his silence when fill-up-the-air words weren’t necessary... his banter with them. Those were the things that must remind them of their father. But instinctively, Carolyn knew that he wasn’t the same.

  There was something hard in Pete Jackson. She didn’t know how she knew that, but she knew it was true. Perhaps it was simply that Craig hadn’t been that way, not weak, particularly, but not gemstone hard. And there was some quality that struck her as dangerous about Pete Ja
ckson, something that made her feel breathless and awkward. And there was also the way he’d made her feel when he touched her hand or had brushed against her leg.

  No, he wasn’t Craig, wasn’t anything like Craig. Craig Leary had been a prosecuting attorney, a joiner, a man on the rise in the political arena. This man was a drifter, a loner in every sense of the word. A military man or a recent parolee, by the way he kept his camp and the newness of his clothing. Either way, he had to be diametrically opposite to Craig. One hundred and eighty degrees.

  “What do you suppose he’s doing now?” Jenny asked Shawna.

  He’s sitting beside his fire, Carolyn thought, staring into the flames. She didn’t know why her mind’s picture should bring a feeling of pity, even sympathy.

  She lowered her hand to her leg to rub it absently against her jeans, remembering the sensation of his hand wrapped around hers.

  Less than fifteen minutes later, their lights arced across the ranch house as they pulled into the curved packed-earth driveway. The graffiti on the front door leapt out in stark relief, looking as if the words had been scrawled in blood instead of red spray paint.

  You’ll be sorry!

  Carolyn was only sorry that she hadn’t taken Pete Jackson’s offer of help.

  “I’m scared, Mom,” Shawna said. “I don’t wanna go in the house.”

  “Me, either. What if they’re still here?” Jenny agreed, her small hands clutching Carolyn’s shoulders. “What are we gonna do?”

  “Why didn’t you let Pete come with us, Mom?”

  Carolyn stared at the front door of the only home left to them and fought the urge to scream in righteous anger. But screaming wouldn’t help them. Nor would the tears that pricked at her eyes.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  After a moment’s hesitation, she threw the Ranger in Reverse and sent a spray of gravel across the dried remains of their lawn. When they faced the rutted driveway leading out of the ranch, she put the car in gear and gunned the motor.