Suzanne hooted. “What they want is for you to produce an heir.”
“I’m an heir.”
“But they want a boy heir.”
This was information Jude didn’t need to be told. “This isn’t medieval Europe, forgodsake.” She exhaled a deep breath of frustration. “Can I help it if I was born without a penis dangling between my legs? Sometimes I feel like saying that to Daddy, but he might not recover from the shock.”
They reached the house and stomped barn dirt off their feet on the back stoop. “How many times have we had this conversation?” Suzanne said, opening the back door and leading the way into a utility room. She began washing her hands in the deep utility sink. “As long as your daddy and your granddaddy are alive and well, and as long as you continue to live at that ranch, you’re stuck with what you’re doing. Unless you find a husband all of you like.”
Jude leaned a shoulder against the wall, watching Suzanne wash up. “Don’t I know it. That’s why I wanted to buy the Wallace land. I wanted . . . well, you know what I wanted to do.”
Indeed, Jude had told Suzanne often enough. She wanted to buy some Angus cattle and other crossbreeds. She wanted to raise some calves that she wouldn’t ship to be fattened in a feed lot. Grass-fed beef was the coming trend. It was healthier. At the ranch, they ate only grass-fed beef themselves.
Suzanne tore off sheets of paper towel and dried her hands. “I saw some of that organic beef in Albertsons down in Abilene. It costs more.” She stepped aside, giving Jude access to the sink.
Jude began washing her own hands. “But consumers are buying it. They’re proving they would rather pay more to get the healthier meat.”
“Well, you aren’t gonna change any minds at the Circle C,” Suzanne said. “There probably isn’t a living soul out there who wants to fool with grass-fed steers. They’d probably have to hire more cowboys.”
Jude didn’t disagree. Leaving the spring calves on the range to graze longer would require more care by the hands.
“So stop fighting it, girl,” Suzanne said. “Get in J.D.’s fancy plane and fly over to Fort Worth.”
She was referring to the small jet the ranch owned. It was housed at the airport in Abilene. A landing strip and hangar had been built on the ranch when the plane was purchased years ago, but keeping a jet airplane at the Circle C was a maintenance and logistical challenge. Daddy had eventually decided it made more sense to let the plane stay in Abilene and have the pilot fly the hundred miles to the ranch and pick him up when he wanted to travel somewhere. Jude could use it anytime, of course, and occasionally she had.
“Pick up some guy you like and try him out,” Suzanne went on. “He might turn out to be the one. Get a bottle of wine, rent a room, get naked and wallow in hot, unbridled sex for a couple of days.”
Jude’s curiosity had always been aroused by Suzanne’s remarks about sex. She usually said just enough to generate questions she never answered. Jude shook water off her hands and reached for a paper towel. “Something tells me you’ve done that.”
Staring out the window above the washing machine and dryer, Suzanne gave a low chuckle. “Yeah. I’ve done that.”
Jude could see that Suzanne’s mind had traveled somewhere else. Something about the plaintive ring in her voice made Jude say, “What could you possibly do for two days? I mean, the whole thing only lasts a few minutes.”
Suzanne looked at her with a Mona Lisa smile and shook her head. “Jude, Jude, Jude. For a thirty-year-old woman, you are so dumb.”
Jude threw her paper towel in the trash. “I’m not thirty. Yet.”
Suzanne walked into the kitchen. “Well, you’re close. My question is, were those two dudes you were engaged to really that stupid?”
Jude followed her. “I don’t know. I just wondered what you’d do for two whole days in a hotel room.”
Suzanne reached into the cupboard for two tall glasses. “What you do, girlfriend, is screw like rabbits and come about a dozen times. Then you start over and do it again.”
What Jude knew about sex surfaced in her mind. Her brow furrowed. “But no male animals can—what I mean is, men can’t—”
“But you can.”
The heat of embarrassment crawled up Jude’s neck. Feeling Suzanne’s eyes on her, she didn’t look up.
“Can’t you?”
Now Jude’s cheeks were flaming. “Of course I can. It’s just that . . .” She stopped talking. She had never come a dozen times. Often it hadn’t happened at all. She knew exactly how sex worked, but she didn’t know how it was supposed to feel. One thing she had always suspected, though, was that she had missed something.
“I’ll bet you’ve never come with a man inside you, have you?”
“Suzanne!”
“Seriously, didn’t they want you to? Didn’t they try?”
“Maybe . . . I don’t know.”
“Then how did they make you come? With their fingers? Tongue?”
“Tongue?”
“Of course, tongue. You know damn well people have oral sex.” Suzanne turned to the refrigerator door and filled the two glasses with ice cubes. “But not you, huh?”
Jude gave an exaggerated sigh, too embarrassed to admit her limited experience. “Suzanne, are you going to feed me lunch or what?”
Suzanne set the two glasses of ice on the counter, then opened the refrigerator. “I’m serious, Jude. You never had oral sex with either one of those guys?”
“No. Well, Webb did, but I didn’t. And Jason and I hardly had sex at all. We were only together three months. And I didn’t see that much of him.”
Suzanne came out of the refrigerator with her arms and hands loaded with jars and packages. She pushed the refrigerator door shut with her foot. “Wait a minute. You’re telling me you gave Webb blow jobs, but he didn’t return the favor?”
Jude closed her eyes and sighed, wishing now she had never asked Suzanne about her past experiences. In fact, Webb had been interested only in his own gratification. And because Jude hadn’t figured that out right away, she had put up with it for nine months.
“That’s just like a friggin’ lawyer,” Suzanne said fiercely, thrusting a jar of mayonnaise and a sealed carton into Jude’s hands. “I dated a lawyer in Lubbock. We hung out with all of his lawyer friends. Self-centered fuckers, every one of them.”
Jude leaned on the counter, watching as Suzanne began opening packages and cartons. “Webb thought it was unsanitary,” she said.
Suzanne made a little huff of disgust. “And he thought you sucking his dick wasn’t? See what I mean? Self-centered. I’m telling you, what a guy does for you in bed says a lot about him.”
“It wasn’t a big deal. I can’t believe men really like to do that anyway.”
“Well, they do. It makes them hot. And it shows unselfishness on their part. Shows they want you to have a good time, too.” She frowned and cocked her head, holding a knife and a slice of bread suspended. “Then again, maybe it’s not unselfishness. ’Cause they probably figure if they do it to you, you’ll do it to them. But on the other hand, that doesn’t count if it’s a one-sided deal.” She slathered mayonnaise on the bread and placed it on a plate. “Just take my word for it, Jude, when you find a guy who does it all, you’ll be so hungry for it, you’ll beg him.”
Jude made an unladylike snorting noise. She couldn’t imagine the day she would be so hungry for sex she would beg. “No doubt all that’s why you hung on to some character in Wyoming who beat you up.”
“A good lay’s hard to find, girlfriend. If you’ve got one, it’s worth trying to hang on to it if you can.”
3
After walking the fence lines closest to the barn and house, Brady’s frustration and worry had only deepened. So much work needed to be done. So much money needed to be spent. Brush removal alone would cost a small fortune. Most troubling of all, he didn’t know if a living could be made in this day and age on fifteen sections of West Texas pastureland, even under the best
circumstances.
His practical businessman side told him he was caught in a dubious enterprise. But the eternal optimist that had kept him going through the many highs and lows of his life told him he was a lucky man to have been given free land and he had to honor that.
Needing a diversion from the enormous tasks he saw, no matter where he looked, he turned his attention to the house. He approached it, eyeing the tumbleweeds that had collected in a corner where the wooden front porch jutted from the house. The porch roof that wrapped around three sides of the structure sagged across the front. He stepped up onto the wooden porch with caution, putting pressure on one foot and springing a couple of times to test the plank’s stability. When he didn’t fall through, he walked across, unlocked the padlock on the front door and entered the living room. The house was empty, just as Aunt Margie’s lawyer had said.
In the stifling, hot room, lit only by daylight filtering through paper window shades, a hollow silence prevailed. An odor of dust and disuse hung in the air. He looked overhead at a vintage light fixture, the opaque bottom shadowed with what was probably dirt and dead insects. He had called a few days earlier and had the electrical power turned on, so he tried a toggle switch on the wall. A dim glow showed through the fixture’s yellowed glass. He was home.
He walked slowly through the living room into the kitchen, his boot heels thudding against the linoleum floor. In the square room, its walls painted a Christmas green now dingy with age, he found two items that had not been sold: an aged refrigerator and the freestanding gas cookstove. These were the same appliances that had been here when he was a kid. His aunt had cooked hundreds of meals on this stove. When he switched on the refrigerator, it started to hum like it was new. What else did a person need? To Brady, function had always been more important than form.
Comfort, on the other hand, was extremely important. Having sweated through his T-shirt, shorts and even his jeans outside, in the hot house he was wringing wet. A swamp cooler hung in one of the living room windows. He hadn’t lived with a swamp cooler since the summers he had spent in this house.
Before plugging it in, he studied all the controls, then walked outside to check the outdoor part of it. A flurry of wasps circled the unit’s gray metal housing. He remembered his uncle Harry removing a wasp nest from the air conditioner and telling him swamp-cooler housings were perfect places for wasps. When Brady left Stephenville early this morning, he hadn’t considered flying varmints. He hadn’t brought chemicals to deal with them.
He returned to the tack room in the barn, where he had seen an assortment of cans and jugs, and found a wasp-killer bomb. At his truck, he dragged a long-sleeve shirt from behind the seat and shrugged into it, covered his head and neck with a bandana, then secured it with his cap and shoved on his sunglasses. Ready, he lifted his toolbox out of the truck bed and tackled the swamp cooler.
Half an hour later, without being attacked or stung, he had removed the cooler’s housing and bombed a wasp nest the size of a softball. While wasps expired all around him, he tore loose the nest lodged in the corner, then reassembled the cooler.
Now able to closely examine the unit, he found jagged holes peppering the housing. They were surrounded by red rust and white corrosion. Age and hard water explained both. On the ground, he spotted a rubber garden hose. Once red, it had been faded to pink by the sun. It crossed a pitiful smattering of dried grass between the air conditioner and a stand faucet ten feet away. He turned the spigot and listened as a spew of water flooded the cooler’s interior straw lining. At least that part of it worked.
Back inside the sweltering house, he plugged the old thing in and switched it on. Cool, damp air roared into the living room, along with a gust of dust, sending him into a coughing fit. When recovered, he breathed a sigh of relief that the swamp cooler, too, worked. He returned to his truck for the cleaning supplies he had brought with him.
Soon the swamp cooler had cleared itself of dust and cooled the house. He had swept a gallon of sand from the old linoleum floors. With the help of a rented dolly, he had unloaded some household items and the pieces of furniture he had bought at a Salvation Army store in Fort Worth. A used table and two chairs now sat in the kitchen, a small sofa, a reclining chair and a small TV almost filled the living room, and he had a dresser and a queen-size bed with a good mattress in the bedroom. His six feet and two inches didn’t fit comfortably on anything smaller.
Having consumed all the drinking water he had brought with him, he strode to the kitchen and dug a clean glass out of a box of dishes sitting on the table. He ran it full of tap water, sipped and found the taste slightly salty and heavy with minerals, but passable. He plopped onto a kitchen chair, the first time he had sat down since arriving this morning.
Golden afternoon light streamed through the small bare window above the kitchen sink, highlighting dust floating in the air. Except for the low hum of the refrigerator and the roar of the swamp cooler from the living room, an eerie silence surrounded him, created by the absence of the human being who had always been present in this room with him. Distinct smells from childhood came to him—animal medications Aunt Margie had kept in the refrigerator, Pine-Sol she had used to mop the floors, myriad cooking aromas, like frying bacon, black-eyed peas stewing with ham hock, fresh peach pies and lots of other desserts.
Brady looked around him at the linoleum nailed onto the countertop with galvanized roofing nails; the faded linoleum floor, its pattern worn away entirely in front of the sink and stove; a large sheet of yellowed plastic thumb-tacked to the dingy green wall as a grease shield above the cookstove’s back. He could envision his chunky aunt, her jeans covered by a canvas butcher’s apron, the heels of her cowboy boots clomping on the kitchen floor.
An outdated setting hadn’t prevented Aunt Margie from being a great cook. She had baked tres leches cake, one of his favorites, before fancy restaurants added it to their menus. She just called it “cake and pudding.” As a boy, he thought her chocolate brownies with fresh pecans and thick chocolate frosting were the best things he had ever tasted.
Thinking of his childhood brought up thoughts of his own son, and a deep anguish gripped him. Now that he owned land and would soon own cattle, he longed to share the rural ranch life with his boy, wanted to teach him stewardship of the land, and how to ride and rope and handle livestock. Giving up his Fort Worth home and everything in it to his ex-wife had hit Brady hard, but losing custody of his son had hurt more than a blow from a two-by-four. Even worse, the pain was constant, like a thorn endlessly pricking his gut.
He had spent money he couldn’t afford fighting Marvalee for Andy. He gave up only after his lawyer told him little else could be done. The judge favored mothers. What the judge didn’t know, and what Brady hadn’t been able to prove, was that the average alley cat had better parenting skills than Marvalee Fallon and probably more interest in being a parent. Brady suspected Andy was spending more time with babysitters than with his mother.
Marvalee was so bad at relating to Andy and Jarrett, her twelve-year-old son from a previous relationship, that the day Brady had packed his clothing and left the house, Jarrett had come into the bedroom, his face wet with tears, and begged Brady to take him. Rarely ever seeing his real father, Jarrett called Brady “Dad.” And why not? The boy had been a toddler when Brady married Marvalee, and Brady had always treated him as if he were his own kid. Brady would have taken Jarrett, would still take him if possible, right along with his own son.
When he began the fight for custody, he figured Marvalee would willingly, even eagerly, give up both boys. Then her father and his millions entered the fray. The person Brady had battled for custody wasn’t Marvalee. The person he had gone against indirectly was his ex-wife’s father. Fighting Marvin Lee Erikson had been a David-and-Goliath match. But with a less favorable ending for David.
Brady forced that mind-numbing crap out of his head. He had to get going. He had land, free and clear. What more could a man ask for in this li
fe than almost ten thousand unencumbered acres? And he intended to have a job before dark. He drained his glass of water and got to his feet.
As the day waned, Jude said she had to go home, and Suzanne walked with her outside. “What about this for an idea?” Suzanne said. “Get a reservation down at Lake Austin Spa. Go down and lose yourself in decadent attention. Get a facial and a massage. Do yoga. Commune with nature and feed the ducks.” Suzanne closed her eyes and lifted her shoulders. “That day down there last year was sheer heaven.”
For Suzanne’s thirtieth birthday, Jude had treated her to a day of beauty at the posh Lake Austin Spa and Resort. Suzanne mentioned it often. Jude would do more for her best friend, but she knew Suzanne wouldn’t take her charity. A birthday present was different.
“I don’t have to go to Austin to commune with nature,” Jude said. “I can look out my window.”
“The point is, change your scenery. Just screw off for a week. That’s exactly what I’d do if I had your money.”
A day idling at a spa held no appeal for Jude. “Yeah, I could do that,” she said. “And then what?”
Jude had rarely passed a day doing as little as she had done today, but her mood had improved. Suzanne’s off-the-wall approach to life always lifted her spirits.
She left the Breedlove house early enough to reach the Circle C in time for supper, conscious that showing up late would cause Daddy and Grandpa to worry. Beyond that, she disliked arriving after supper was over. Her father and grandfather started their days so early, they went to bed with the chickens. Without them awake to greet her in the Circle C’s barnlike house, the old dwelling, with its hard floors and plaster walls and high ceilings, felt hollow and too silent.
Soon she reached the limestone rock stanchions that marked the Circle C’s entrance, made a right turn off the highway and followed a winding two-mile driveway to the house’s wide wrought-iron gate. She keyed in the security code, and the gate’s two halves, each marked with the welded-in Circle C brand, silently crept open.
Lone Star Woman Page 4