Almost Perfect

by Marilyn Tracy

  But maybe even telling her that would be easier than watching her shaken reaction now.

  “If you ever do need the car, you’d let me know, wouldn’t you?” she asked, her blush looking painful on her cheeks.

  “Of course,” he said swiftly, not because he ever meant to take her up on the offer, but because he hated seeing her so uncomfortable in his presence.

  “We’re quite a ways outside Almost. You don’t want to get cabin fever.”

  Instead of picturing himself isolated, he imagined her Ranger breaking down halfway from Almost and she and the girls stranded out on the lonely stretch of dirt road leading to the ranch.

  “I made a lunch for you and left it in the icebox,” she said, opening the refrigerator and pulling out three sacks. Pete felt a strange pang on seeing she’d written his name on the sack she left inside. “I’ll be going by Aunt Sammie Jo’s this afternoon if you need anything.”

  He looked a question at her.

  “Sammie Jo goes to Lubbock every other day and picks up whatever odds and ends she thinks any of us might need. She runs the gas station and local grocery store—if you can call it that. But she keeps track of things her ‘special’ people like.”

  “Is she really your aunt?”

  “The girls’. She was—is, I guess—Craig’s aunt. She’s a Leary, but her last name is Spring. She’s been really sweet to the girls, and they’re thrilled with her. They’d only met her once before we came here. And they love their new uncle, especially his name...Cactus Jack.”

  This wasn’t the first mention Carolyn had made of her husband, but it was the first time she’d used his name around him. Pete knew, from the girls, that Craig Leary had died in a car accident a little over a year ago. He hadn’t asked questions about their father, some part of him afraid he would bring shadows to their guileless faces, and another part of him afraid he would be tugged into an unwanted pity for their mother. He was in deep enough trouble just being around her, feeling something more for her, even if it was only pity, might ensnare him.

  “So, if you have any preferences for anything, just let me know and I’ll pass the word on to Aunt Sammie Jo.” She looked at him questioningly.

  He shook his head then reconsidered. “A pound of tenpenny nails and a hammer that doesn’t look as though it came from a kid’s play set.”

  She flashed him that camera-ready smile that did odd things to his insides. “Don’t like my duct-tape job?”

  He thought of the miniature hammer with the head taped insecurely to the handle and couldn’t help but smile in response, shaking his head.

  “I’m crushed,” she said, looking anything but. “Okay, one hammer and some nails to go.” She yelled up the stairs, “Girls! Andale!” She turned back to Pete and said softly, “Spanish lesson, today.” She again called up the stairs. “Andale! As in hurry up!”

  Her generous smile faded when she turned back to him and beheld the twenty-dollar bill he’d fished from his wallet. Her eyes narrowed.

  “For the hammer and nails,” he said.

  She flashed him a look of utter scorn and ignored his outstretched hand. “We’ll be back around four-thirty or live.”

  She didn’t need to bang pots this time; her squared shoulders, firm tread, and tightened lips said everything a slammed frying pan could have.

  And with a clatter of feet, a whoosh and crash of the front door and roar of the Ranger’s engine, his abruptly adopted family disappeared down the dusty road.

  Pete slowly put away the twenty-dollar bill. He’d offended her, that much was certain, but he wasn’t sure how. She didn’t have any money, she’d said as much and one look around the place made that truth painfully obvious. She’d mentioned a couple of days before that her husband had been a Dallas attorney. What a lawyer’s widow was doing hard up for money in the middle of nowhere was beyond him, but he didn’t want her feeling embarrassed about it. Hell, she’d said it herself: times were tough.

  And, instead of offering him room and board for his sloppy—but improving—attempts at fixing up her place, if she knew even a glimmer of his past, she’d order him out at gun point. And pay him the twenty to speed him on his way.

  He lingered at the table, feeling out of place in the silence of the house, out of kilter with the world now that she’d left him alone in her house. He wanted to let her know how dangerous it was to trust strangers. For all she knew, he would clean her out while she was gone.

  Of course, for all she knew, he could have killed all three of them in their sleep anytime the past two days. What kind of a woman was she to trust herself and her two daughters to the imperfect care of a complete stranger? And what kind of a man was he to want her to do exactly that and accept him at face value, no questions asked?

  He downed his coffee and went to the coffeepot and poured another mugful. Feeling slightly guilty, he opened her refrigerator to withdraw the container of half-and-half she’d stocked inside. In the act of returning it, he paused at the sight of the lunchsack with his name scrawled across the front. He had a picture of her setting out eight slices of bread, sandwich meat, cheese and lettuce. He pictured the assembly line technique he’d seen her employ for the girls’ lunches and wondered why it moved him so that she’d included him in the ritual.

  He pulled the ashtray she’d offered him that first morning from its resting place atop the refrigerator. “Good heavens, smoke doesn’t bother me,” she’d said abruptly. “Watching a person looking as if they might bolt through their skin any second bothers me a lot more.”

  He’d smiled at the picture her words had conjured then, and smiled now remembering. But she’d been wrong; desire for a cigarette hadn’t had a thing to do with why he’d been so jumpy that first morning. Or any morning since.

  When he was finished with his cigarette—and with the dishes in the sink as a small apology for a second etiquette gaffe—he slowly and deliberately prowled Carolyn’s house. He tried telling himself he didn’t feel any pangs of guilt at the blatant abuse of privacy. He attempted rationalizing that since she’d asked for his help he was only trying to find out exactly who he was helping and what resources she had to offer.

  At least, that’s what he told himself as he opened doors, drawers and cabinets and dipped into boxes she hadn’t yet unpacked, closets filled with leftovers of a lifetime spent elsewhere. And with each fresh evidence of her uprooted life, her shattered marriage, he felt more and more an outand-out cad, a voyeur of her private pain.

  The formal dining room off the kitchen had an abandoned, seldom-used feel. It was a smallish, stuffy room with fake wood paneling that made him wonder what was hidden behind the sheets of thin, cheap plywood. The flatware in the hutch still had packing tape around the silver chest, letting him know she hadn’t used it since moving to the ranch. Some good pieces of crystal stood upside down behind glass doors but they were layered in dust, a testament to their disuse, though possibly only to the seemingly unceasing West Texas February wind.

  The living room struck him as another center of the house, as if the old building had two hearts: the kitchen and this warm, cozy place. The furniture was mismatched and shabby, but of good-quality oak, despite its worn and out-of-date condition: He suspected the furniture was either recently purchased at thrift shops or had been on the ranch a long time. He didn’t think she would have had such furnishings in Dallas.

  Navajo blankets dotted the sofas and chairs like brightly patterned, expensive adornments, though they were also old and a bit shabby. A quick check revealed they hid holes and worn spots on the upholstery of the sofas and chairs.

  Like Carolyn Leary herself, the rooms and their decorations seemed a dichotomy: riches overlaid by poverty. Or possibly the reverse. In such desolate surroundings and in such a remote area it was difficult to tell the difference. It was hard for him to reconcile the smiling, open-faced woman with the obvious privation he could see at every glance.

  And he pictured her keeping her grief and fear to he
rself, hiding it from the world, from her daughters. From him.

  One of Carolyn’s living room walls was devoted to family photographs, each of them overlapping one another, a collage of memories captured on film.

  Pete studied pictures of Shawna and Jenny in their years from babyhood to perhaps a month before they burst into his camp. He lingered over those of their mother, long hair in college, short fluffy hair while holding two small infants. In another she sported wild curly hair and wore a sad look on her face. One in black and white showed her as she’d been when pregnant with Jenny—heavier, a study in Zoftic lines, lovely, alluring, glowing, a baby Shawna on her lap.

  He felt a twinge of something he could only identify as jealousy when his eyes met those of the absent Craig. But the unaccustomed feeling faded as he studied Carolyn’s husband. The fair-haired, rangy man looked like someone good to know, like someone he himself would have been friends with once upon a time. In many of the pictures Craig wasn’t smiling, but his eyes conveyed a warmth all their own. And in the ones where his lips were curved into a grin, he seemed to invite a sharing of the pleasure.

  Perhaps it was the twinge of jealousy that made him decide there was something weak about Craig Leary, his jaw maybe, or some flaw in his character revealed through his smile. Or perhaps the feeling stemmed from the visible evidence of Carolyn’s straightened circumstances. How could any man have left his family so poorly provided for?

  But one picture in particular held Pete’s attention to the point of complete loss of breath: Carolyn seated on a porch swing, a giggling blond cherub on either side, her blue eyes fixed on a laughing Craig standing behind the swing, obviously intent on pushing it askew a second time. The girls and Craig stared directly at whoever took the picture—meaning they stared into Pete’s eyes now—while Carolyn’s profile angled so that she looked only at Craig.

  The humorous expectation in those three sets of gazes unnerved Pete while the raw confusion on Carolyn’s face sent a shaft of unidentified pain directly at his heart. She gazed at her husband as if she didn’t know who he was, as if he’d said something utterly incomprehensible and therefore puzzling.

  For the first time in his life Pete knew what it was to envy another man. Only a deep intimacy could engender such a look of surprise and confusion on a wife’s face. What had Craig said to make her look as if she’d never seen him before?

  The fact that the man he envied was dead and buried didn’t mitigate the feeling one iota. He turned away from the living room with a grunt that was less an expression of discomfort than one of loss.

  He didn’t have to go upstairs to the bedrooms before finding what he was really looking for. In the narrow closet beside the front door that opened into the living room he found Carolyn’s cache of weapons. The .38 she’d shakily held on him a few nights earlier, an ancient air rifle—the kind his granddad had given him when he was ten and he was far more interested in the BBs than the rifle itself—and a cumbersome sawed-off shotgun that would take as much trouble to shoot as it would to clean represented Carolyn’s full defense.

  Pete flicked the .38’s chamber open and shook his head even as a rueful smile creased his face. Carolyn Leary had held this deadly piece of machinery on him three nights ago and demanded he give up her children or she would, by God, kill him where he stood.

  And all the time the damned gun hadn’t been loaded. From what Pete could see, it hadn’t been loaded in years.

  Carolyn Leary might think she needed someone around her place, but Pete knew she did. He took all three weapons into the kitchen, poured another cup of coffee while rummaging through her kitchen drawers and cabinets for items he might need. With such unlikely tools as a barbecue skewer; an old rag and a container of sewing machine oil, he started cleaning the Leary arsenal.

  That very afternoon, he vowed, he would start teaching the girls—and their mother—how to go about scaring the living daylights out of a pair of Wannamacher brothers.

  And then he would get the hell out of there.

  Chapter 3

  “So...does he have cute buns?”

  “Sammie Jo!”

  “Don’t look at me like that, Carolyn Leary. You were married to my nephew and he had what women around these parts hail as world-class—”

  “Pete shot a skunk and gave me an arrowhead.”

  “Gave us an arrowhead.”

  “Hear tell he doesn’t have a vehicle,” Sammie Jo said, slowly filling the cardboard box with the few grocery items Carolyn had picked out. The hammer, nails and half-and-half were still waiting on the countertop.

  “I didn’t see one,” Carolyn said, not bothering to question where Sammie Jo had come by her information. In the short time she’d been in the area, she’d already discovered Almost had an information system to rival any major television network.

  She and Pete had decided that it might be better to keep his presence on her place a secret. That way the Wannamacher brothers could attempt a foray onto her place and waltz right into Pete’s able hands. But they hadn’t taken the small population and the Almost curiosity into consideration.

  Why she should be so certain that Pete would be capable of rousting the Wannamachers she didn’t know. But the certainty was as rooted in her as she knew that West Texas was in the midst of a drought.

  “Makes you wonder, doesn’t it?”

  “What?” she asked.

  “What would somebody be doing out in the plains without benefit of car or horse?”

  Carolyn smiled and shrugged a little, as if dismissing the notion as unimportant. But she didn’t answer, because there was nothing that Sammie Jo could speculate about Pete Jackson that hadn’t already crossed her own mind a time or two or seventeen in the past couple of days.

  “Yep. Come to think on it, something strange about the MacLaine place, too, that couple coming in here last year, buying it slam-bam-bang and leaving town the very next day. Cactus figures some government survey says there’s oil out there.”

  “Arrowheads,” Jenny said. “That’s what Pete was digging, Aunt Sammie Jo.”

  “Suppose there was some survey or such and the Wannamachers got wind of it? Maybe that’s why they’re after your land so bad, honey.”

  “That first time they came out to the place they tried claiming the ranch actually belonged to them. They showed me a piece of paper they claimed proved it.”

  Sammie Jo shook her head. “That’s pure bunk, and you know it. My brother—Craig’s daddy—bought that place fifty years ago. He went in debt up to his eyebrows to do it. Hard to imagine nowadays, isn’t it? But, you should have seen it back then. That was before the drought, you know. Prettiest little ranch you ever did see. Close to three sections. Apples that came from his trees were a treat.”

  “Treats?” Jenny asked hopefully.

  Sammie Jo nodded and handed each of the girls a cookie from the jar on the counter. “What I’d do is call up those MacLaines and see if he has their permission to be on their property.”

  “He isn’t on their property anymore,” Shawna observed. “He’s living with us.”

  At Sammie Jo’s arched brows, Carolyn felt a blush flash fire across her face. “In the bunkhouse,” she muttered, then wished she’d kept her mouth shut.

  “Did I say anything?” Sammie Jo asked.

  Carolyn chuckled and repeated a family phrase, “The Leary eyebrows speak louder than words.”

  “Want me to have Doc have a look at him?”

  “Aunt Sammie Jo!” Jenny said, highly offended. “Pete’s a man, not a horse!”

  “If that’s true, honey, he’ll be the first one that’s not a big-time combination of both,” Sammie Jo said with a broad wink at Carolyn. She punched a button on her cash register and took out a dollar’s worth of quarters and handed each of her great-nieces two apiece. “You gals look like you could do with a sody pop.”

  The girls barely managed to palm the quarters before shooting out the front door of Sammie Jo’s minimart and dis
appearing around the side of the building.

  “Seriously, Carolyn, I’m worried about you.”

  “I’m fine, Sammie Jo. Really.”

  “Taylor says her boys said the girls told them that you had more graffiti on your door. Why don’t you just let Cactus and Homer and some of his friends fill the Wannamachers’s backsides with a little buckshot? That’d make ’em think twice about giving you any more guff.”

  “Homer’s in his eighties.”

  “So? Nothing wrong with his trigger finger a little arthritis cream won’t cure. And I picked him up a crate of the stuff just yesterday.”

  Carolyn chuckled but shook her head. “The police would be more likely to arrest Cactus, Homer and crew than the Wannamachers. Ten to one those two have an ironclad alibi. Again. And the police don’t seem very upset by what they’re doing. Neither does the state.”

  “Doesn’t that just beat all? What is the world coming to when a person can’t trust the law to keep a couple of thugs off their property?”

  Carolyn sighed. It did seem unfair. She remembered the notice from the Dallas bank informing her that she and her children had exactly ninety days to vacate the condominium she’d shared with Craig. What if she’d hunkered down and refused to leave? Someone would have come to the bank’s rescue, that much was certain. Why couldn’t some nameless authority come to her rescue now?

  “Well, I’ll tell you, honey, it’s got everyone around here hopping mad. Pretty poor welcome to give you when you went to the trouble of bringing your daughters home to us. Taylor’s the maddest of all, I think. All those buddies of Doug’s and no one doing anything to stop her sister-in-law from being harassed.”

  Carolyn didn’t want to point out the obvious, that if it were Taylor being harassed, those buddies of a fallen officer would have rallied around immediately. And, in all honesty, she hadn’t asked her sister-in-law to intervene on her behalf. She didn’t know any of them well enough yet to really feel an inside member of the Leary clan.