Lone Star Woman

by CALLAHAN, SADIE

  Soon a Mexican woman brought in the food—barbecued brisket, pinto beans, cole slaw, and a cast-iron skillet of steaming cornbread. He had eaten breakfast with the hands at four thirty this morning, and his stomach was cheering at the aromas filling the space around them.

  He looked at the empty armchair at the end of the table. The throne. Jude caught him. “That’s Grandpa’s chair,” she said. “He doesn’t always eat dinner. He says three meals a day make him feel too full. His digestive system sometimes gives him problems.”

  Brady’s gaze moved up to the wall behind the patriarch’s chair. The portrait hanging there had to be the one Jude had mentioned—the one of Quanah Parker and Jude’s distant grandparent. Sure enough, in the background was a paint horse, just as she had said. A sudden feeling of time passing and dynasties dying swirled around him like a dry wind and made him even more uncomfortable than he was before he came in here.

  “Grandpa’s getting old,” she said, offering him the platter of thinly sliced beef brisket.

  Despite the American Heart Association’s cautions, Brady suspected beef was the daily fare in the Strayhorn house. “He and I used to take walks in the evening after supper,” she said, “but we haven’t been doing that lately.”

  He watched as she served herself. She was still a hearty eater, just like that night in Stephenville. “Why not?”

  “I don’t know exactly. It’s sort of like we’re headed in opposite directions. It’s okay, though. Pretty soon, I have to start getting ready for school anyway.”

  “I’ve heard you’re good at teaching school.”

  “Who told you that?” Joyce Harrison?

  “I don’t remember. I’ve just heard it around.”

  Joyce Harrison, Jude thought. “I am good at it. And I get a thrill out of it. I like helping people. If I can light a spark in some kid and he or she goes on from here and gets a good education and does well, that makes me happy.”

  “That sounds like a good thing you’re doing. Why not concentrate on that?”

  “I do concentrate on it. Most of the time.”

  He looked up from buttering half a slice of cornbread. “If you’re good at teaching school and you like it, why would you want to give it up and put a bunch of cows on my place when you don’t have to?”

  “But I do have to. Now more than ever.”

  “To prove what, darlin’? Maybe that’s why your dad can’t see your point. He doesn’t understand what you’re trying to prove.”

  “Are you lecturing me? After I’ve invited you to dinner?” She gave a little laugh that sounded insincere. “Now you’re starting to sound like Daddy.”

  He could tell she had tried to allay her sharp tone with that phony little laugh, but she was still uptight and uneasy—a different woman from the seemingly carefree one who spent two days with him in Stephenville. “I’m not lecturing. I just see you and your dad caught in this tight jar, and neither one of you seems to be able to get a breath of fresh air or climb out.”

  “We usually get along. In spite of him not appreciating me. He doesn’t value my education. He doesn’t even know who I am.”

  “You’ve got control of the bulls around here, right? How much is that bull herd worth?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  He didn’t believe her. Bull rotation was an ever-evolving part of ranching, large or small. Bulls were good for only six or seven years max. He suspected she could tell him to the penny what had been paid for the bulls if they had been bought, what had been invested in them if they were home-bred and what they would sell for when the decision was made to move them out. “Then I’ll guess. I’m gonna say a million dollars. And darlin’, where I come from, that ain’t chicken feed.”

  Her mouth pursed. “So what?”

  “I’m saying a cowman doesn’t put the future of his herd, and consequently the ranch, in the hands of somebody he has no faith in. Especially now, when he’s about to turn management over to a tenderfoot like me. What would I do without your support and your knowledge?”

  She had stopped eating. “What are you getting at?”

  “I’m just suggesting that if you agree to help me out a little, maybe I’ll be so backward and needy, you won’t have time to go off half-cocked and start your own little herd.” He met her eyes and captured them. “I’m gonna need your help, Jude. And I’d be really grateful if you weren’t distracted by something else.”

  She sat back in her chair and pushed her hair back, then crossed her arms over her chest. A long, assessing gaze from those wide, whiskey-colored eyes came his way. Something was going on in that pretty head, but he wasn’t gambler enough to try to guess what.

  “Why do I feel like I’m being manipulated?” she asked.

  “No, darlin’, you’re not. You wanted to make a deal? Okay, here’s my counteroffer. Postpone your plans to start your own herd for a while, make up with your daddy and help me do this job. Later on, if you still feel like you have to go in your own direction, then I’ll agree to lease you my land and we’ll sit down and work out the details.”

  She continued to stare at him, and he held her gaze. He believed he had her respect. He couldn’t risk losing it by letting her get the best of him.

  “Like with Sal, huh? Maybe next year? You’re trying to force me to stall.”

  He shrugged. “It’s damn near too late to start on a spring calf crop anyway.”

  “I don’t know. I’ll think about it,” she said, throwing his own words back at him.

  He suppressed a smile as he remembered something a wise Fort Worth businessman had once told him: A smart man could always use the help of a smart woman.

  20

  Jude was hot. She had been hot all night. The temperature hadn’t dropped as it usually did. She had also been awake half the night, but not only because of the heat.

  Yesterday’s events had scrolled through her half sleep at least two dozen times. After they had eaten dinner together, she and Brady had returned to the veterinary clinic and packed the remaining items in the office. He had been disgustingly obsequious, as if he expected her to break into screams any minute. Ginger flashed in her mind. Maybe tantrums were what Brady expected from all women. Maybe his perception of women was as warped as her father’s.

  Already, mentally, Jude no longer called the space in the veterinary clinic “her” office. She had moved on. Amazing how quickly one thing could change to another. Margie Wallace’s death, for instance. Who could have ever foreseen the bizarre chain of events one elderly woman’s dying would set off?

  Irene’s husband had helped her and Brady carry the packed boxes and computer into the house, where they left everything in the hallway near the back door. Jude had been caught so off balance by the reason for the move, she had been unable to think of where else to put her things. In a house with more than twenty rooms, she could think of nowhere to place a few boxes. How strange was that? After all the commotion had settled and she was left alone, she roamed every floor, looking for a new place to locate. For the first time in her entire life, she had felt out of place, as if she didn’t belong here.

  Then Windy had unwittingly reminded her of who she was. It had happened as she stood in the doorway of the large room behind the kitchen pantry, considering it for an office. Its shelves were piled with flotsam and jetsam. Junk. Miscellaneous items that probably could be thrown away.

  Windy came up behind her. “Whatcha lookin’ for, Miss Jude?”

  “Just wondering if this would make a good office.”

  “It’s a nice big room. When you was a little girl, it was wall to wall with home cannin’. You ’member that?”

  Vignettes flashed through her memory of shelves brimming with glass quart jars of peaches and apricots and tomatoes and jams and jellies of every kind. No one canned fruits and vegetables or made jam at the ranch any longer. Windy probably wouldn’t know where to start. “I remember,” Jude replied.

  “I was just a tenderfoot in those days,”
the aging cook said. “I didn’t work in the house, but I recollect seein’ all those jars. Yore Grandma Penny Ann loved to garden and she loved to put up vittles. Nobody could do a better job than her.”

  And just like that, Jude had remembered whose granddaughter she was and she had determined where her new office would be.

  Now she made herself get out of bed and perform her morning ritual. For the sake of comfort and convenience, she put on athletic shoes. Before going downstairs, she prowled a huge storeroom on the third floor and found a solid oak table to use as her computer desk. Brady might have taken the office in the veterinary clinic, but Jude had kept the computer with the software she needed. All of her records were stored on the computer’s hard drive, which forced Daddy to buy Brady a new machine. A small price to pay for uprooting her, she figured. At some point in the future, perhaps she would go down to Abilene or over to Lubbock and buy a real computer desk.

  Or not.

  This morning, she felt insecure enough to wonder if she would even be living here six months from now.

  It was nine o’clock before Jude reached the ground floor. As it always was at this hour of the morning, the house was empty except for Windy and Irene in the kitchen and Lola Mendez fussing about with a feather duster. Jude declined breakfast.

  She stood in the doorway of the octagon-shaped sunroom located just off the hallway that led to the back door. Six of its eight walls had tall, narrow windows covered by wooden blinds. The air had a golden hue to it, and pale yellow walls made it feel sunny even on cloudy days. A fat, red enamel woodstove hunkered in one of the wall’s angles and would keep her toasty on cold days. The room was still furnished as her great-grandmother had originally bedecked it more than fifty years earlier—tan wicker furniture with red-and-yellow-striped cushions that looked like Mexican serapes, a desk Jude viewed as being tiny, but Grammy Pen had called a lady’s desk.

  The room hadn’t been used in years. As far as Jude knew, it looked today just as Grammy Pen had left it the day a massive stroke had taken her life. Her great-grandmother had had it added on to the house so she could sit in the morning sunshine while she drank her coffee and read a stack of newspapers and made phone calls to senators and congress-men.

  Jude had never been political, but she supposed politics was a subject she should learn something about. Daddy constantly talked of how large-scale cattle ranching was being pressured and legislated into extinction.

  But today, Jude didn’t have to worry about politics. She conscripted Irene’s husband and a helper to carry the heavy table down from the third-floor storeroom, then haul Grammy Pen’s lady’s desk back up. As she busied herself hooking up her computer and its devices, she remembered sitting on the settee with Grammy Pen and listening to her read stories of Peter Rabbit.

  When she started unpacking the box holding her pictures, she realized the sunroom had limited wall space, so she returned to the third floor. In one of the seldom-used bedrooms, she found a long dresser and called on Irene’s husband and his helper again. This was the way her life had always been. For as long as she could remember, if she needed help, if she couldn’t manage something alone, she’d had to rely on hired people. No family member or friends had ever been available.

  Once the dresser was in place, she set out her favorite things, save the picture of her father. That she laid face down in one of the dresser’s drawers.

  All in all, she didn’t dislike the new surroundings. From one of the wicker chairs positioned by the window, she could look outside at the big red barn with a white encircled C painted on one end of the loft. All of the hands’ vehicles were parked in front of the barn, including Brady Fallon’s tan Silverado. Now, with him present at the ranch some part of every day, even her comfort zone in her own home was threatened. Still, it wasn’t in her nature to carry a chip on her shoulder. Just because she had lost a battle didn’t mean she had lost the war. For now, she tamped her stewing intentions down to a frustrated simmer.

  Dinnertime had come and gone by the time she finished, and she hadn’t eaten all day. Daddy had peeked into the sunroom and reminded her it was time to eat, but she had made an excuse that she was too busy. Suzanne got off work at the grocery store at two, so Jude shoved her feet into her boots, picked up her purse and drove to town.

  Entering Lucky’s Grocery was like stepping into some grocer’s poorly organized attic. A combination of the outdated and modern met customers in every overstocked aisle. If Lockett had had a real fire department, Lucky’s would have been ticketed heavily for multiple fire code violations.

  The first person she ran into was Joyce Harrison at Lucky’s only cash register. Jude hadn’t seen Joyce in months. Today she studied her. She was slightly overweight. Her hair was dark brown, styled in an outdated curly do. Bows or barrettes usually adorned her hair, but today, little red hearts were somehow attached. If Jude were asked to guess her age, she would say forty, but Jude knew the woman was only two years older than she and Suzanne.

  “Why, Jude Strayhorn,” Joyce said. “I never see you in here. You slummin’ today?”

  Jude wasn’t sure how to take Joyce’s remark. She had always guarded against appearing uppity to her Willard County friends and neighbors, constantly aware that most of them struggled to get by. It was true she didn’t often go to the grocery store. She had no need to. “I’m looking for Suzanne.”

  “She’s in the back room. I’ll page her.”

  Joyce pushed a button on an intercom mounted on the wall and paged Suzanne to come to the front of the store. While Jude waited, she thumbed through one of the tabloid papers she picked off the rack beside the cash register. “How have you been, Joyce?”

  “Just fine. Guess what. I’m dating a guy who started working for y’all.”

  Jude saw the edges of the newsprint pages begin to tremble and realized her hands were shaking. “Really?”

  “His name’s Brady Fallon. Have you met him?”

  Jude looked up, schooling her expression to bland. “Yes, of course.” A few weeks ago, I spent an entire night having wild and crazy sex with him. And I just gave him my office yesterday.

  Joyce closed her dark brown eyes and shook her head. “He is so dreamy.” Her eyes popped open and a direct look came at Jude. “Listen, y’all furnish houses for some of your hands, don’t you?”

  “Some of them.”

  “The school bus comes out there and picks up the kids, right?”

  “It comes to our front gate. It doesn’t come onto the ranch.”

  “So if somebody lived in one of those houses, they’d have to drive their kid to the front gate?”

  “Yeah,” Jude answered cautiously. “Why are you asking?”

  Joyce angled her head and gave Jude a coy smile. “Oh, just collecting information. In case it’s needed.”

  Before the conversation could go further, Suzanne appeared. “Hey, girlfriend. What’re you doing in town?”

  “I came to buy you lunch,” Jude said, sliding the tabloid newspaper back into its slot.

  “Uh-oh. The cook quit?”

  Jude laughed. Windy would probably be the Circle C’s cook until he could no longer function.

  Suzanne clocked out and they strolled up the sidewalk toward Maisie’s Café, the only eating place in Lockett. “Joyce just asked me about the school bus coming to the ranch,” Jude said as they walked. “Why does she want to know that?”

  “Oh, honey, she’s planning a wedding. She’s got the hots for Brady Fallon that bad.”

  Jude felt a start within her and warned herself about reacting. “Daddy hasn’t mentioned that. He keeps up with what everyone’s doing. I’m sure he’d know if one of the hands was getting married.”

  They reached the café’s plate-glass entry door. Inside, Maisie’s looked as dated as the grocery store, with the exception that Maisie had deliberately striven for the nineteenth-century look. At midafternoon, Jude and Suzanne were the only customers. Over hamburgers and iced tea, Jude told
Suzanne about the recent developments in her life, all the way back to her trip with Brady to Stephenville. Afterward, she felt as if a yoke had been lifted from her shoulders.

  Suzanne had listened as if she were spellbound. “Good grief,” she said. “I ought to be insulted you didn’t tell me about any of this. Is J.D. retiring?”

  “Daddy will never retire. He’s taking over some of what Grandpa does.”

  “And you’re okay with all of this?”

  “Even if I weren’t, there’s nothing I can do about it.” She pushed her plate away, planted her elbow on the table and rested her jaw on her palm. “I think deep down I knew Daddy was never going to let me have much control over what goes on.”

  “Nothing ever stays the same, Jude. These are major life changes for you. What are you gonna do now?”

  “I don’t know. I’m trying to get my wits about me so I can make some decisions. Decisions I should have made a long time ago.”

  “You aren’t planning on leaving town, are you?”

  “I should. I wonder if I could be like Cable. Just leave and never come back. Or if I could do what Jake does. Pretend the family and all its warts and history don’t exist.”

  Suzanne’s hand came across the table, and Jude felt the touch of friendship—and the intensity of her friend’s gaze. “Don’t do it, Jude. If you want to leave, that’s one thing, but don’t do it because you’re mad at J.D. You know he loves you. He’s just dumb. Hell, he can’t help it. After all, he’s male.”

  Jude huffed a humorless laugh. “It isn’t exactly anger that I feel.” She sighed and shook her head. “I don’t know what I feel. Nothing I’ve tried has gone well lately.”

  “It’s that old Chinese philosophy. Maybe you’re entering a cycle.”

  Jude frowned, wondering how Suzanne would know anything about Chinese philosophy. “What Chinese philosophy?”