by Joanna Sims
With Nick a few feet behind her, always thoughtful and giving her some space, Dallas walked up the stairs to the trailer. Opening that door felt like an admission that Davy was truly gone. It was easy for her to just pretend that her father was holed up in this trailer, padding himself from the world with his magazines and newspapers and model cars.
Dallas’s hand was still on the door handle for a couple of long minutes before she finally built the guts to turn the knob. When she opened the door, she was slapped in the face with a strong smell of paint and glue and mildew. There was so much dust in the air she could see the particles floating in front of her. She sneezed once, twice, three times in a row.
“God bless you,” Nick said from his spot behind her.
Dallas sniffed several times loudly. “Wooo! It’s dusty in there.”
“We’ll get through it.” It seemed that he wanted to reassure her, to ease her embarrassment at the condition of her father’s living space, and she appreciated his kindness. She’d come to rely on that kindness in a way that was not typical. Nick Brand had managed to slip into the tiniest crack in her armor. He hadn’t penetrated her well-constructed armor, but he’d gotten further than most men.
Dallas untied the bandanna from around her neck and tied it over her nose and mouth before she stepped into the trailer. Everywhere she looked, there were piles and piles of papers and magazines. Her father had been a curious man—he read magazines like the Smithsonian and National Geographic. Davy Dalton also had decades of back issues of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. Her father had enjoyed being a rodeo man, but there was a dream he had that only his closest family and friends knew about: he had wanted to be an archaeologist from the time he was a boy. If you could get him talking, Davy could talk for hours about prehistoric man or the when and how of the construction of the pyramids. He was a walking archaeology encyclopedia.
“This is your call.” Nick was standing next to her now.
“I’d like to just bulldoze the place,” Dallas admitted.
It was hurtful—a mental pain that manifested as actual pain in her body—to imagine her dear father living in such a tiny, cramped space. There was only a very narrow aisle leading to the front of the trailer where the kitchen was located and the back of the trailer where Davy spent most of his time building models of antique trucks.
They wouldn’t be able to walk straight through; they would have to turn sideways and scooch both ways.
“But I can’t,” Dallas continued without looking at Nick. “This was Davy’s bank.”
She looked up at Nick then, caught, temporarily, in those clear, striking, Brand-blue eyes.
“What do you mean?” the city boy asked her.
Dallas gestured to the stacks of papers and magazines. “Davy hid his money here. And anything else he wanted to keep safe. I have no idea how much he squirreled away over the years.”
Nick didn’t respond to this news—he quietly looked around the space and appeared to be taking inventory and trying to gauge the work ahead.
“I can do this by myself.” Dallas wanted to let the man off the hook. “Why don’t you go visit your sisters or your aunt while I get this done?”
“No,” Nick said with his hands resting on his hips. “I finish what I start.”
Nick looked at her with that steady, calm, you-can-count-on-me look that she had come to expect. He didn’t get upset or frustrated—he just picked a spot on the horizon and worked toward reaching it. It was an admirable trait and not one often found in the men she encountered who spent their lives chasing the rodeo.
One by one, they started thumbing through each magazine and newspaper, collecting money and legal documents, love letters to and from her mother, and pictures. It took them all day to clear one side of the trailer; by the end of the second day, they had managed to search through the rest of the piles.
“Twelve thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars.” Nick was sitting at the kitchen table counting the money they had found.
“Lord Almighty, Pop!” Dallas said, shocked, from her slumped position on the couch they had uncovered earlier that day.
She felt drained—physically and emotionally.
Nick sat down next to her on the couch and held out the thick stack of money. “I’d consider this to be part of your inheritance.”
Dallas pushed the money away. “Give it to your uncle. He stopped chargin’ Davy rent years ago. It’s only fair.”
“Half to you and half to your brother. You’re entitled,” Nick tried again.
“My brother wouldn’t take a dime of Davy’s money if he were dyin’.”
Nick seemed to think about her response for a moment and then he counted some money out of the pile and held out the smaller of the stacks to her.
“Half for hiring some muscle to haul off this trailer and the trucks,” he said. “Half to get you back to barrel racing.”
Nick had been training to be a lawyer and he was going to be damn good at his job. He knew the magic words to get at her weak spot—barrel racing. She craved the competition. She was addicted to the nerves and the smells and the noise. She wanted her life back, and six thousand dollars would keep her afloat until she could get back to winning.
“You’re sure it’s mine?” She didn’t take the money right away.
“I’m sure.” Nick reached out for her hand and put the stack of money in it and closed her fingers over the money. “It’s yours.”
* * *
Dallas had decided to burn her father’s stockpile of newspapers and magazines. They hauled them to the burn pile and Nick realized that when it came time to light the match, it was going to be one heck of a bonfire.
“That’s the last of it.” Nick took his cowboy hat, Davy’s old hat, off his head and wiped the sweat from his brow.
Dallas had been a trouper throughout the entire cleanup effort. She had matched him, hour for hour, never breaking. She was tougher than any woman he’d ever met, without a doubt. There were rare moments when he saw that their work in the trailer had touched her; he had found a picture of her as a young girl, sitting on a black-and-white pinto pony, with her father standing next to her holding a trophy that was bigger than she was at the time. Dallas’s eyes turned glassy with emotion when she took the picture from him and stared at it. But she didn’t cry. He thought she might, but she didn’t. She had tucked that picture into her back pocket and then kept right on working.
Dallas stood beside him—he’d become accustomed to the scent of her body when she’d been working all day. It was strange that he wasn’t repelled by the way she smelled when she sweated. But he wasn’t.
“We’ll burn it tonight,” Dallas said.
“All right.”
“And you’ve already arranged to have the trucks and the trailer towed, sold or scrapped?”
“Luke gave me the name of a friend of his who could haul them off—Billy Whiteside?”
Dallas nodded that she recognized the name.
“He’s coming out tomorrow to take a look and give me an estimate.”
“Then we’ll be done.”
Nick cranked his neck around to look behind him. He couldn’t believe how much work they had managed to do in such a short amount of time. He’d never worked this hard, not that he’d admit it to Dallas. He had only thought he knew what hard work was when he was out on his sailboat. This was a whole different level of labor, and it wasn’t the level of labor he intended to acclimate to. His muscles were sore and stiff; dirt was ground into his hands so deep that they were gritty no matter how many times he washed them. He was tired of sleeping on a lumpy mattress that had an odor that he was unable to recognize, and he wasn’t so sure he wanted to recognize it.
It was time to go home.
Nick could think of only one thing he wanted to
do now: jump into the lake. Of all the things he had been exposed to while in Montana, most of them involving some sort of manual labor on his part, the lake was one of his pleasures. He rarely missed an opportunity to reward himself from a job well done by rinsing off the day’s grime in the clear, fresh water of Sweet William Lake.
He looked over at his companion. “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“I’m already there.”
Nick took a minute to change into his cutoff shorts and then they walked together, side by side, not too close, and not too far away, to their mutual swimming hole. Like Dallas, Nick had grown to love this spot. The lake was fed by the melted snow that filtered down from the mountains once spring had sprung. The water was so clear that you could see to the rocks and sand at the bottom of the lake. He wore his very expensive cutoff jeans when he swam, and even though he would have preferred just to buy a bathing suit and save his designer-label jeans, he’d grown fond of the memory of Dallas lopping off his jeans to make a cowboy bathing suit.
At the lakeside now, they both started to strip off their boots, socks and shirts. Dallas always wore her modest bathing suit beneath her clothing because she always planned to swim at some point in the day. He tried not to be obvious, but he wanted to watch her disrobe.
Dallas had to recognize the interest and appreciation in his eyes when he looked at her, but she never tried to “sex it up” when she stripped off her clothes down to her bathing suit. She might have been surprised to know that for him, the fact that she didn’t try to be sexy only made her sexier in his mind. Even though he had less to take off, he was always last to get undressed. This was by design. He loved to watch Dallas take her first dive off the boulder into the water. The tone of the tightly compacted muscles in her legs, the golden hue of the skin on her shoulders and arms—the wild waves of her long dark hair. She was, to his eye, a thing of beauty. A sight to behold.
She stood on the boulder, her back straight, her arms up next to her ears. She bent her knees a little and then sprang forward in a perfect arc into the air. Dallas cut through the surface of the smooth lake, making a small splash. Nick’s favorite moment in this ritual was next. Dallas completely disappeared beneath the water and then a moment later she reappeared like a shot, straight up into the air, the water on her body shimmering in the sunlight.
“Are you comin’ in?” Dallas called to him after she pushed the tangle of wet hair away from her face so she could open her eyes.
Nick waved his hand to indicate that he was soon to follow. He picked his way over to the boulder; he climbed on top of the hot surface of the boulder, and it registered in his brain that his feet had toughened in the short amount of time he’d been walking barefoot in Montana, because the hot rock of the boulder didn’t burn the bottom of his feet quite as much as it had done in the beginning.
He gave a warning rebel yell, which was his usual. “Incoming!”
He had loved cannonballs since he was a kid and swimming in this lake reminded him of when he was a teenager visiting Montana for what turned out to be the last time. That was the visit before his grandfather had died; that was his last visit to Bent Tree for two decades.
Dallas swam away from the center of the lake so he could perform his cannonball without landing right on top of her.
He executed what he considered to be one of his biggest cannonball successes, but he waited until Dallas judged it.
When he came up to the surface, he wiped the water off his face and sought out the cowgirl. On the bank of the lake, Dallas was holding up her arms and displaying ten fingers.
“Ten!” she shouted loudly.
Nick hit the water with his hands. “I knew it was my best. I felt it!”
They took turns diving off the boulder—they swam laps, they floated. They allowed themselves the luxury of relaxing now that the bulk of their job was completed and behind them. Now drying off on the boulder, sitting close, but as always not too close, Nick was flat on his back, hands behind his head, eyes closed and soaking up the midafternoon sun.
“Life is good,” he murmured tiredly.
“Uh-huh.”
“How soon do you think you’ll be heading out after we’re done?”
“Um. There’s a pro-sanctioned rodeo in Livingston—if I can catch that one, I will. Then I’ll head over to Wolfpoint, Montana. After that—I don’t know—I could catch another in Montana, but I might head out to Colorado.”
Nick opened his eyes and looked over at the woman sitting cross-legged next to him. She had her eyes open and she was staring straight ahead to the mountains in the distance.
“Wherever the wind blows?” he asked her.
She turned her face toward him and gave him the faintest of smiles. “Uh-uh.”
Nick couldn’t imagine living his life like that anymore; he’d lived that way in his twenties, but he wouldn’t want to live like that again. Basically, untethered. He liked having a place to go to work—he liked having his condo in a building that had concierge. He liked having a schedule and consistency. The kind of life Dallas chose to live, while it sounded free and loose, wasn’t the way of life he wanted anymore. She seemed to thrive on it.
When it was time to leave, Nick offered his hand to Dallas out of habit to help her down from the boulder. Normally, she ignored that hand. Today, for the first time, she took it and jumped lightly to the ground.
“I want to thank you,” Dallas said after she got dressed. “You being here made all this a lot easier on me.”
Nick smiled down at her. “I was happy to do it, Dallas. I was glad to help you. I was glad to honor the memory of Davy Dalton.”
On a whim, Nick leaned down and plucked a small bundle of Sweet William from the ground and handed them to Dallas. “For you.”
Nick was relieved when the prickly cowgirl accepted his offer of friendship in the form of her favorite wildflowers. Dallas smiled that little smile again, so faint it was hard to catch, as she brought the bundle of Sweet William up to her nose. They walked back to the homestead, and it seemed a quieter walk, perhaps because they both knew that this would be one of their last swims together in the lake. Nick didn’t want to read too much into Dallas’s actions, because after all, when would he see her again? He waited for her to throw those flowers away along the path back to the homestead. Yet she didn’t. And the fact that she didn’t throw those flowers away meant more to him than it probably should have. That much he did know.
Chapter Six
The trailer was hauled away first. And then, one by one, each of Davy’s antique trucks was pulled onto a flatbed to be taken away. Of all the things that seemed to impact Dallas the most, watching those trucks being dislodged from their resting place brought her to tears. It hit her out of the blue—she had already cried for her father in private. In her mind, that should have sufficed. In her experience, tears were never a solution to any of her problems.
“Are you okay?” Nick asked her.
Dallas rubbed the tears from her eyes and off her cheeks; she pinched her nose to stop the tears, but they came, unchecked, anyway. She wanted to tell Nick that she was fine, but she couldn’t seem to get the words out.
Nick put one arm around the back of her shoulders and the other arm around the front of her body. He locked his fingers together and hugged her into his body. It felt good to have someone to hug when she was saying a final goodbye to her father. It felt good to have a friend like Nick who had never expected anything from her—he had only offered her help without ever asking for something in return. So, in that specific moment in time, she gladly accepted the comfort he was offering because she knew that it came without any strings attached.
Together, they watched as the last, the best, of Davy’s antique trucks was pulled onto the flatbed.
“That’s the one that breaks my heart,” Nick said quietly
about the last truck.
“That was Pop’s favorite.” Dallas signaled that she wanted to be let go and Nick’s arms immediately fell away. “It makes me feel...”
Nick looked at her, waiting for her next words. But she still couldn’t put words to how all this made her feel. The feeling that was scratching its way to the top through the layer of sorrow? Fury. She was furious with her father for never restoring the truck like he promised he would. She was furious with her father for letting that beautiful antique turn into a barely recognizable hunk of junk that had to be pulled out of the weeds with a heavy chain and a crank. How could he have wasted his life? How could he have put all his time and energy into collecting those stupid papers and magazines?
She would never truly understand it—not as long as she lived. Dallas tucked her hands into the back pockets of her jeans.
“Well,” she said to her city boy. “That’s that.”
“That’s that,” Nick answered with his eyes still on the flatbed of 1950s trucks being hauled away.
Dallas held out her hand to Nick. “Again—I can’t thank you enough.”
Nick noticed her offered hand after the trucks disappeared from sight. He frowned at her, his arms stretched out in question. “Really? A handshake?”
Dallas’s smile was a little wider, a little more genuine when she titled her head back so she could see his eyes beyond the rim of her cowgirl hat.
Nick did take her hand, but he used it to pull her into his arms. He gave her a real bear hug: strong, tight and full of feeling.
After the hug, respectful of her space as he always was, Nick stepped back and gave her some room.
“When do you head back home?” she asked him as they walked slowly to his rental car already packed with his belongings.
“Saturday.”
That was four days away and then Nick Brand would be going back to his life and she would already have returned to hers. She had the distinct feeling that waking up tomorrow without Nick would be more impactful than she was willing to acknowledge. She had become accustomed to having him around. Nick had found a spot inside of her heart.