Big Sky River

by Linda Lael Miller

  “I depend on the kindness of strangers,” Boone said cheerfully. He knew Opal’s question hadn’t really required an answer—she’d merely been reminding him that he needed a wife.

  Opal thought every single man in the world needed a wife.

  As for how he managed, well, he got through his days the way most everybody else did, he reckoned—by showing up and doing his best with what he had.

  “I’m no stranger, Boone Taylor,” Opal objected sweetly, starting the coffee brewing. “I’m your second mama. I just happen to be black, that’s all.”

  He chuckled and once again shoved a hand through his hair, wondered if he ought to wake up the boys or let them sleep for a while longer. They’d met Opal before, on their brief visits to Parable, and he knew they liked her a lot. They liked Hutch and Kendra, too, and Slade and Joslyn. He was the one they tended to be skittish around.

  He sobered, remembering. “Molly’s husband shattered his knee yesterday,” he said very quietly.

  Opal immediately stepped away from the counter and crossed the sagging floor of that tiny kitchen to put her arms around Boone, gave him a hard motherly squeeze and then stepped back to look up at him through the lenses of her old-fashioned glasses. The frames resembled a pair of jaunty wings, and they were studded with tiny rhinestones.

  “Bless your heart, honey, I know all about that,” she said. “Hutch told me. I won’t pretend I’m not glad the boys are back home, but I am so sorry it had to happen like this.” She paused then, squared her broad shoulders and shook a finger under his nose. “Times like now, prayer’s the ticket. It makes everything easier.”

  No prayers had made Corrie’s passing easier, not one whit, for her or for him, but he didn’t say that. Boone numbered himself among the former believers of the world, the disgruntled and doubtful ones, but that didn’t mean he could go around raining on Opal’s parade, so he kept his opinion to himself. After all, Opal was a churchgoing woman, and she did seem to get a lot of prayers answered. There was a rumor floating around that she might just marry up with the new pastor, Dr. Walter Beaumont, the two of them joining forces against the devil. They’d been seen fishing together and sharing a pancake special over at the Butter Biscuit Café, and just the other day, Slade had said he and Joslyn were on the lookout for another housekeeper.

  “I guess so,” Boone finally said, because he knew his old friend was waiting for an answer to her brief but inspirational message. “You’re an angel, Opal. Moving was a shock to my boys, sudden as it was, and they’re worried about their uncle, of course. It’ll make them feel better having you here.”

  She smiled and patted his cheek. “Let me just get breakfast on the stove,” she said. “There’ll be coffee in a few minutes, and you look like a man who needs some sustenance, pronto.”

  Boone nodded gratefully and went off to grab a shower and get dressed in his usual go-to-work getup of jeans, a cotton shirt cut Western-style and a decent pair of boots. He’d put on his badge and his service revolver later, he decided. Most of the time, he didn’t need either one, since everybody in Parable County knew who he was and no one was likely to behave in a way that would require shooting them.

  When he got back to the kitchen, Opal handed him the promised cup of coffee, and he inhaled the rich scent of it before he took a sip, savoring it as he took in the sight of his boys, sitting at the table in their cartoon pajamas, their feet bare and their eyes still puffy from sleeping hard and deep.

  “Are you mad at me?” Fletcher asked, right out of the chute, leveling a look at Boone. A blush pulsed in his freckled cheeks, and his voice dropped to a near whisper, as though Opal and Griff weren’t right there to hear every word. “For wetting the bed, I mean?”

  Boone shook his head. “Nope,” he said, taking another sip of his coffee before going on. “Stuff happens.”

  Fletcher looked relieved, but he was still holding a grudge, too. That much was abundantly clear. “I want to go back to Missoula,” he reminded his father.

  Boone let that one pass, since stubbornness ran in the family.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ELLE AND ERIN had both grown a head taller since Tara had last seen them, more than a year before, on the most recent of her rare and brief visits to New York, and they’d both had haircuts. Gone were the long blond locks she’d brushed and braided so many times—now they sported short, breezy styles that framed their faces. And they were almost the same height as she was.

  Although the girls were actually fraternal twins, and there were some marked differences between them if one knew what to look for, the resemblance was striking enough to convince most people they were identical.

  Elle, the elder by four minutes, was the confident one, the ringleader. Erin, who wore glasses despite her father’s repeated attempts to sell her on contact lenses, was shy and formidably bright. Tara suspected the glasses served as a kind of shield for the girl, something to hide behind when she was scared or simply wanted time to observe and assimilate whatever might be going on around her.

  When the pair spotted Tara, waiting with a big smile and her arms already opened wide, they rushed her, backpacks bouncing between their skinny shoulder blades, cheeks flushed, eyes glowing with delight.

  “Mom!” Elle cried jubilantly, as the three of them tangled in a group hug, at once laughing and teary-eyed.

  Since the divorce, James had expressly forbidden the twins to address Tara as “Mom,” and she thought of correcting Elle, but she didn’t have the heart to do it and, besides, her ex wasn’t there to object. He was thousands of miles away, just the way she liked him best.

  “It’s wonderful to see you two,” Tara said, when the hubbub had died down a little and they were headed for baggage claim, a zigzag trio with their arms linked at the elbows.

  “It’s wonderful to be here,” Erin answered, adjusting her wire-rims.

  Tara felt a little stab of love as she shifted, putting an arm around each of their tiny waists. They wore the narrowest of jeans, sandals and long-sleeved T-shirts, Elle’s blue, Erin’s pink. “We’re going to have a great time,” she told them. “You’ll like Parable, and the farm, too.”

  Erin’s eyes grew big and very blue. “We were so scared Dad would change his mind and make us go to summer camp instead of coming out here to stay with you.”

  Elle nodded her agreement as they all strolled purposefully through the small airport, moving aside now and then so they didn’t block foot traffic. “And summer camp started weeks ago,” she added. “The day after school let out. So everybody’s already chosen their friends. We would have been, like, geeks.”

  Tara laughed. “Geeks?” she countered. “Never.”

  “Elle likes to be in on all the action,” Erin said, wisely tolerant of her sister.

  They reached the baggage claim area and waited with the other arriving travelers, until a buzzer squawked and the first bags lurched into view.

  Erin and Elle had two large suitcases each, color coordinated like their T-shirts, with busy geometric patterns.

  Tara, after getting one luggage cart, went back for a second after her stepdaughters pointed out their bags. By the time she got back, a man in a cowboy hat had lifted one pair of suitcases onto the cart. He repeated the process, tugged at the brim of his hat and, without a word, picked up his own bag, and walked away.

  “That was a cowboy,” Erin breathed, impressed. “A real one, I think.”

  Tara grinned and nodded. “The genuine article,” she agreed.

  “How do you know?” Elle asked them both, ever practical. “Maybe he was just a guy in boots and a hat.”

  “I know he’s a cowboy,” Tara replied, “because he stepped up and helped with the suitcases without being asked.”

  Elle pondered that, looking only partially convinced, and Erin gave her sister a light prod in the ribs. “Cowboys do polite stuff,” she informed Elle. “Like lifting suitcases and opening doors.”

  “Not just cowboys,” Elle retorted. �
��Tony—” she glanced at Tara, no doubt figuring her stepmother was out of the loop, having been gone for a couple years “—he’s the doorman in our building. He does the same things.”

  “But he doesn’t wear boots and a hat,” Erin said in the tone of one bringing home a salient point. “Not one like the cowboy had on, anyway.”

  “He’d look silly if he did,” Elle said. “Right in the middle of Manhattan.”

  “I’ve seen cowboy hats in Manhattan, though,” Erin reasoned. She was the diplomat of the pair, Elle the pragmatist.

  Tara, enjoying the exchange, reveling in the presence of her beloved stepdaughters, didn’t comment. She simply led the way outside, pushing one cart while Erin managed the other, and silently counted her blessings, two of them in particular.

  Sunshine shimmered in the twins’ hair, and there was a cool breeze out.

  Life is good, Tara thought, rolling her cart through the crosswalk.

  Elle swung around her backpack in front of her as they walked, rummaged through it, extracted an expensive cell phone and switched it on before pressing a sequence of icons. By the time they’d found the SUV, she was finished with whatever she was doing and popping the device into a jeans pocket.

  “There,” she said. “The paternal unit has been duly informed of our whereabouts.”

  Tara smiled again—not that she actually stopped smiling since the moment she had spotted Elle and Erin in the flow of incoming passengers—and opened the hatch on the SUV with a button on her key fob.

  This time, there was no cowboy to step up and load the baggage into the back of the rig, but working together, they jostled the luggage inside. Then the twins flipped a coin to see who would sit in front with Tara and who would sit in back.

  Erin won the toss, crowed a little and climbed in across the console from Tara.

  “I thought you had a dog,” Elle remarked from the back as she buckled herself in for the ride home.

  “Lucy’s waiting impatiently back at the farm,” Tara told the girls, starting the engine, preparing to back out of her parking space. “She likes to ride in cars, but she’s still a puppy, really, and I think this trip would have been a little too long for her.”

  “What happened to the red car?” Erin wanted to know. “The one you sent us pictures of?”

  Tara might have sighed in memory of her zippy little convertible, if she’d been alone, or in a less ebullient mood. “I traded it in,” she replied.

  “We wouldn’t all fit in a sports car, goon-face,” Elle pointed out, affably disdainful.

  “I know that, ding-dong,” Erin answered, without a trace of hostility.

  “No name-calling,” Tara said lightly. The way the girls said “goon-face” and “ding-dong” sounded almost affectionate, but it was the principle of the thing.

  Erin bent to lift her backpack off the floorboard and ferret through it for her own phone, an exact duplicate of Elle’s, except for the case. “You texted Dad that we got here okay, right?” she asked Elle without looking back.

  “He’d be the paternal unit I mentioned, goon—” Elle paused, and her tone took on a note of mischievous acquiescence. “I mean, Erin,” she said sweetly.

  Tara concentrated on maneuvering the SUV through the exit lane and onto the road, still smiling. Talk about a goon-face, she thought, having caught a glimpse of herself in the wide-range rearview mirror. She couldn’t seem to stop grinning.

  Erin sat with her head tilted slightly forward so her short hair curtained her face, working the virtual keyboard on her phone with all the deft expertise of any contemporary child. Presently, she gave a little whoop of delight and announced, most likely for her sister’s benefit, “Savannah got her ears pierced!”

  “No way,” Elle said. “Her mom told her she had to wait until she was fifteen. I was there when she said it.”

  “Savannah’s not with her mom,” Erin answered airily. “She’s with her dad and her stepmom at their place on Cape Cod and her stepmom took her to some place at the mall. It stings a little, she says, but she has gold posts and looks at least five years older than she did fifteen minutes ago.”

  Amused, Tara marveled at the perfection of her own happiness as she drove away from the airport, headed in the direction of Parable. The twins’ front-seat/backseat conversation might have seemed pretty mundane to anybody else, but she’d been starved for the small things, like the way the twins bantered.

  “Maybe we could get our ears pierced,” Elle ventured.

  Duh, Tara thought, finally picking up on the stepmom correlation. She wondered if the text exchange with Savannah had been a ruse. It was possible that the sisters had rehearsed this entire scenario on the flight out, or even before that, hoping Tara would fall in with their plan. “Not without express permission from your father, you can’t,” she said.

  Both girls groaned tragically.

  “He’ll never let us,” Erin said. “Not even when we’re fifteen. He says it’s too ‘come-hither,’ whatever that means.”

  “His call,” Tara said, with bright finality, busy thinking of ways to skirt the probable next question, which would be something along the lines of, What does come-hither mean, anyway? “Are you hungry?”

  “Why do grown-ups always ask that?” Erin reflected.

  “We were in first class,” Elle added. “Every time the flight attendants came down the aisle, they shoved food at us. I may explode.”

  “Okay,” Tara said. “Well, then. We’ll just head straight for home.”

  “I want to meet your dog,” Erin said, sounding both solemn and formal. “Dad won’t let us have one in the penthouse. He says the rugs are too expensive for wholesale ruination.”

  “For the time being,” Tara replied, watching the highway ahead as it unrolled like a gray ribbon, twisting toward the mountain-spiked blue horizon, “you can share mine.”

  “Like Dad ever bought anything wholesale,” Elle scoffed quietly.

  Erin rolled her eyes at Tara, but allowed the remark to pass unchallenged. Then, looking more serious, she smiled over at Tara. “Thanks,” she said. “That’s nice of you, offering to let your dog be ours, too, at least for a little while.” She considered. “What about horses? Do you have any of those?”

  “Just chickens,” Tara replied. “Sorry.”

  “Chickens?” Elle asked, interested.

  Tara had told her about the hens and roosters via email, but a conversational opening was a conversational opening.

  “How many?”

  “Dozens,” Tara answered. Since she’d never been able to bring herself to kill one for the stew pot or the frying pan, the birds were proliferating.

  “That’s a lot of eggs,” Elle said.

  “And drumsticks,” Erin added. “Yum.”

  “Southern fried,” Elle dreamed aloud. “With mashed potatoes and gravy.”

  Tara bit her lower lip, and both girls instantly picked up on her hesitation.

  “What?” they asked in chorus.

  Tara merely shook her head, signaling to change lanes. She liked fried chicken as well as the next person, but when she indulged, which wasn’t often, she generally bought a few choice pieces from the deli section at the supermarket or ordered it at the Butter Biscuit Café. She was basically an impostor, since she lied by omission and let people think she was a country type like them. If Boone Taylor ever found out about this fraud, God forbid, he’d smirk and make snide comments.

  Something about city slickers trying to go country, probably.

  “They have names,” she explained lamely, after a few moments of fast thinking. “The chickens, I mean. They’re like—pets.” To her mind, the Tuesday night special at the Butter Biscuit was one thing, and plunging a fork into Doris or Harriet or Clementine was quite another. She had considered serving Boris up with dumplings a time or two when she’d wanted to sleep in past sunrise and he’d crowed anyway, but nothing had ever come of the idea.

  The girls were quiet for a while. Then they bu
rst out giggling.

  Tara thought she caught a note of relief in their amusement, though, and she relaxed.

  After that, everybody lapsed into benign silence—Erin continued to text, chuckling to herself every once in a while, and Elle plugged a pair of earbuds into her phone and settled back to listen to music.

  Eventually, both girls fell asleep—they’d gotten up early to catch their flight and changed planes not once but twice along the way, after all, and who knew how much rest they’d gotten the night before. They would have been excited about the trip ahead then, but now they didn’t have to rush.

  It wasn’t until Tara had driven through Parable proper and turned onto the bumpy dirt road that led to her farm that Elle and Erin awakened, blinking and sleepy and curious.

  Chickens scattered everywhere as Tara parked the SUV, and even over the squawking and flapping of wings she could hear Lucy barking a welcome from just inside the front door.

  She smiled.

  “Let’s get the bags later,” she said as the girls leaped out of the vehicle and turned in circles, looking around them, taking in everything in great, visual gulps. “Lucy might turn inside out if she has to stay shut up alone for another minute.”

  Erin hurried through the gate in the white picket fence surrounding Tara’s front yard, partly to get away from the chickens, Tara figured, and Elle followed.

  Reaching the porch, Tara opened the screen door, turned her key in the lock and cautiously stepped back, grinning a warning at the twins, who were still on the walk.

  “Heads up,” she warned. “Here comes Lucy!”

  Lucy shot through the opening like a fur-covered missile, paused only briefly to nuzzle Tara in one knee, and bounded toward the girls before Tara could catch hold of her collar and gently restrain her.

  “She won’t hurt you,” she said, but the assurance proved unnecessary, because Elle and Erin were as pleased to make Lucy’s acquaintance as she was theirs. The three of them went into a rollicking huddle, like long-lost friends finally reunited.