She blushed, looking chagrined. “It’s silly, but I wanted to know all about you, who you were, what your life in this community was like before Gabe, how you and Gabe came to be together. There was something I liked right off about San Celina and about your family.” She smiled at me. “I envied you your life once I looked into it. You have a wonderful family.”
“I do,” I said. “Why the phony identity?”
“What phony identity?” Gabe asked.
Lin and I looked at each other and smiled.
“I’ll explain later,” I told Gabe.
“Honestly, I didn’t need to do it, but I had this crazy idea that I’d be recognized, so I wanted a cover of some kind. I realized, of course, that all I had to do was avoid Gabe. No one else knew me here. Avoiding him was easy enough to do since he was so completely absorbed in the sniper investigation he was rarely in the same place as you.”
She pushed her barely eaten pasta around on her plate. “I have a few other people on my list, but I don’t want to continue. I don’t need to continue. I want you to be Tessa’s legal guardians. I know it’s asking the moon and stars and . . .”
I squeezed Gabe’s hand. He squeezed back in silent agreement.
“Of course we will,” I said.
“It would be an honor,” Gabe added.
She looked directly at me. “You know the moment I knew you’d be the right one to ask?”
I shook my head.
“When you covered that little girl’s body with your own when we thought the sniper had attacked again.”
“What?” Gabe said, turning to me. “What is she talking about?”
“The Memory Festival,” I said. “It was firecrackers. But everyone thought it was the sniper. A little girl got away from her mother, and I went after her. What’s ironic was I was standing right next to the real sniper when that happened.”
“Life is strange,” Lin said.
“That,” Gabe replied, “is the truth.”
EPILOGUE
Eleven days later
Roundup
“PASTOR MAC’S GETTING READY TO BLESS THE HERD AND THE workers before we start,” Dove said, looking up at me. “You and Bonnie will have to vaccinate. My fingers are hurtin’ too much this morning. Darn arthur-itis.”
I sat astride Trixie next to the sun-faded RV we’d used for the last twenty years during roundup as a combination office, women’s bathroom, prep kitchen and gossip central. Most of our herd was in the corrals waiting to be sorted, vaccinated, castrated, branded and tagged. The calves were big this year and a little wild. It would make for an interesting day.
“No problem,” I said.
Pressing the vaccination needle’s sticky plunger hundreds of times was tiring even for young fingers. No doubt I would be munching an extra-strength aspirin and Tylenol sandwich myself tonight. “But only if you save me a piece of red velvet cake.” Though she always made three of them, if you didn’t nab a piece right away, you were out of luck.
“Already set you a piece aside. But there’s plenty this year. We have five cakes now that Garnet’s helping. And her red velvet is much better than mine.”
I rested one hand on my saddle horn and resisted a smart-aleck comment. This detente between Dove and her sister still occasionally caught me by surprise, but I was not about to do anything to quell it.
“You know I’m partial to yours, Dove.” My gramma didn’t raise no dummy. The wise comment earned me a satisfied smile from her and probably a second piece of cake. “Tell Daddy I’ll be there in a little bit. That speckle-faced cow that he likes so much is still hiding. He wants me to find her.”
Trixie tip-tapped nervously beneath me. She and I had just ridden down from hills thick with rosy pink wild hollyhocks and dusty yellow clusters of footsteps of spring, a wildflower so appropriately named you had to smile when you heard it. Pollen coated everything with a fine, buttery dust, making the air thick, like breathing through a yellow fog. Aunt Garnet was handing out decongestant and antihistamine tablets like a Saturday night drug dealer trying to hook new customers.
For about twenty of us, the day had started before sunrise, driving cattle out of the valleys and hilltops where they’d been hanging out with their new calves. One of the riders this year was Daddy’s new lady friend, Dot, whom he officially introduced to the family last night at dinner.
“She’ll be riding with us tomorrow,” he’d said last night. He took off his white straw cowboy hat, holding it in front of him while he made his announcement. “We’re . . . courting.” He said the words with as much dignity as he could muster.
His ears had flushed a deep merlot when Sam let out a loud, enthusiastic, “Whoo-hoo, Ben! You hound dog.” We all laughed when Daddy smacked Sam with his hat.
“I’m looking forward to riding with you,” I said to Dot after dinner when she offered to go out to the barn with me to fetch more blackberries from our extra freezer.
“I care about your daddy.” Her words were clipped, no-nonsense, her small pointed chin level and firm. “I’m not after anything that belongs to you. And I’m not . . .” She left the sentence open, but we both knew what she meant. She wouldn’t try to take my mama’s place.
I smiled at her and handed her a frozen package of blackberries. “Daddy has been alone for way too long. I’m happy for him and for you.”
It was the truth. She seemed like the exact right person for my dad. Not flashy, an earthy, somewhat bawdy sense of humor and she loved cattle ranching. In fact, Dot reminded me more than a little of Dove.
Later, when I was alone in the kitchen with Dove and Aunt Garnet, I said, “See, everything worked out with Daddy. You didn’t need to do all that manipulating. He already had a girlfriend.”
“Yes, dear, we know,” Aunt Garnet replied primly, sprinkling roasted almonds over the individual dishes of pound cake, blackberries and homemade vanilla bean ice cream.
There was something about the way she said the words that made me suspicious. “What do you mean?”
Dove and Aunt Garnet exchanged a look, then burst into laughter, sounding like two teenage girls rather than two women way past the age of qualifying for Medicare.
“We knew,” Dove said. “All along.”
“You knew? About Daddy and Dot?”
Dove waved an impatient hand at me. “Oh, for cryin’ in a bucket. We knew two minutes after they started dating. When your daddy got back from Reno last October he went over to Penney’s, bought himself four new shirts and changed his brand of cologne. He might just as well have taken out a billboard on Interstate 101. My boy was in love.”
“I never noticed any new shirts,” I said. “He doesn’t use Old Spice anymore?” For some reason, that made me a little sad.
“We do his laundry,” Aunt Garnet said. “He can’t hide from us.”
“Polo by Ralph Lauren,” Dove said. “But only when he’s going to see Dot. Old Spice is still for everyday.”
“All those other women you introduced him to . . .” I began.
“Just a way to out him,” Dove said. “He would have snuck around forever if we hadn’t stepped in. He needed some encouragement. Dot’s a sweet lady, and we figured she wasn’t going to push him.”
“Whereas we had no compunction about shoving him right over the love cliff,” Aunt Garnet said, sounding more and more like Dove the longer she lived here. Or maybe they just started sounding more like each other.
“So we pushed!” Dove said, her voice gleeful. “I’m thinking a summer wedding would be right nice.”
“We could get Sam to build a gazebo over by the oak tree in the front pasture,” Aunt Garnet said.
“Good idea, Sis!” They gave each other satisfied smiles.
You didn’t stand a chance, Daddy, I thought. None of us does. Heaven help anyone who ever went up against these sisters. Team tagging, they could rule the world.
“Honey bun,” Dove said, bringing me back to the present. “Turn around and look up.” She pointed to a small r
ise behind us. About a quarter mile away, there stood Daddy’s speckle-faced cow calmly gazing down on us, her white-faced calf glued to her side.
“Well, she’s one sly mama. We’ve been looking for her for over three hours.”
“Smart,” Dove said. “And probably stubborn.”
I laughed. “Must be a Ramsey.”
Dove chuckled and squeezed my shin. “I’ll tell Ben you’ll fetch her down. Be careful now.”
I turned Trixie around and headed up the small hill to persuade Miss Speckled Face and her baby to join the party. Mac’s voice grew softer, though I could still make out his words. Like many of us, Pastor Mac was raised back in the day in churches that couldn’t afford fancy PA systems. He had developed a Broadway-worthy speaking voice that came in especially handy during roundup. “Bless and keep everyone to your loving care, Father. Grant mercy and safety upon all your living creatures . . .”
Bless the beasts and the children, I couldn’t help adding.
When I reached the wayward cow, I waited a moment, allowing her to enjoy a last moment of freedom, though by evening she’d be back out here grazing this thick, lush grass. A rainy winter had turned the grassy hills so green and plentiful that everyone would have to buy less hay this year. A blessing for all ranchers.
I turned Trixie back to face the corrals. From my perch, the sound of people, cattle, dogs and horses was a faint, pleasant buzz. We were working three hundred head this year. About fifty family members, friends and neighbors had come to the roundup to help, visit, take photos and enjoy the barbecue at the end of the day. Dozens of horse trailers, cars and one-ton pickup trucks were parked haphazardly in front of the corrals where we’d driven the last of the cattle minutes earlier. Kids ran and screamed with the sheer joy of freedom from constant parental supervision and the delicious feel of the cool, sunny day. It seemed only yesterday that I was one of them, darting under the fences, looking for snakes and grabbing a cold soda from the never-ending supply in the ice-filled aluminum tubs.
Men joked and slapped each other with their work-stained caps and straw cowboy hats. Women organized and rearranged and counted—plates, cups, cookies, brownies, sandwiches, soda cans, bowls of potato and macaroni salad, bags of chips, racks of ribs, dozens of tri-tip steaks and ears of corn. Dogs barked and calves bawled, panicked by their first temporary separation from their mamas. It was a cacophony of sound and activity as familiar to me as the Mother Goose nursery rhymes I’d learned in school.
Next to me, the speckle-faced rebel cow chewed contentedly, her curly-faced calf rubbing its nose against her side like a child nuzzling a favorite blanket. Even at this distance, I could pick out people I loved—Gabe, Maggie and her sister, Katsy, on horseback, already sorting cattle; Emory and Daddy checking out the chutes with Sam and Hud; Señor Aragon and Ramon working on their portable grill, getting ready to make their famous tacos; Garnet’s and Dove’s heads bent over the long table filled with covered dishes, cake plates, Tupperware containers and huge metal coolers filled with iced tea, lemonade and water. Dot moving back and forth from the RV, setting condiments on the table, fitting in as if she’d been there for years. And, sitting under the shade of a huge oak tree, two new visitors who were experiencing their very first roundup, Lin Snider and her daughter, Tessa.
Lin had left to go back to Washington the day after our dinner at Daniello’s when she asked Gabe and me to be Tessa’s legal guardians. Gabe and I discussed her and Tessa long into that night. We sat at the kitchen table facing each other.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” he said.
“Yep,” I said. “Are you?”
“I am.”
It was probably the most solemn vows we’d made to each other since we’d gotten married.
“One more thing,” I said to Gabe that night. “I think we need to convince Lin to move down here as soon as she can. Tessa will need time to adjust to her new home. It’s going to be hard. And Lin will need people to help her, too, as her condition advances. We need to plan for those things.”
He took both my hands in his and brought them up to his lips. His thick mustache tickled my cold knuckles. “I love you.”
I smiled. “Back atcha, Friday.”
It took me a few days, but I finally convinced Lin that we really, really wanted her to live in San Celina and that it would be no trouble at all moving her and Tessa down here.
“Tessa needs to get acquainted with all of us,” I said. “I’ve got a big family and lots of friends.”
She was hesitant, afraid to be a burden.
“We have good doctors here and lots of people to help you,” I said, giving her my best pitch. “You don’t need to go through this alone. Moving you and Tessa down here will be a cinch. There’s me and Gabe and Emory and Elvia and her brothers and Hud and Dove and Aunt Garnet and Daddy . . .”
“Stop, stop,” she said over the phone, laughing. “Has anyone ever told you that you are one determined woman when you want something?”
“It’s genetic,” I said. “The Ramsey women want to rule the world. But only because we’d do such a bang-up good job. In our humble opinion, of course.”
She was silent a moment. “Benni . . . I don’t know what to say. Thank you. You are . . . For Tessa . . . It’s a . . .”
“Pshaw,” I said. “Let’s see how grateful you and Tessa are after you’ve lived around my crazy, interfering family for a month.”
From my perch on Trixie, I watched as kids danced around metal tubs of ice-chilled bottles of root beer, cherry Coke, orange and grape soda. Tessa fit right in. She and Lin were accepted and welcomed by our family and our friends, just as I knew they would be. Tessa was dressed like a western princess in new pink cowgirl boots, pink Wranglers, a white Western shirt and a pink cowboy hat. All presents from Aunt Benni and Uncle Gabe courtesy of the fashion department of San Celina Farm Supply.
“I’m a cowgirl now,” she said proudly, pointing to her hat when we dressed for the roundup this weekend. They were staying with Gabe and me, but we’d be moving them down from Washington soon. “I’m gorgeous.”
I laughed, pushing the front rim of her hat down with a finger like my dad used to do to me. “Yes, you are incredibly gorgeous.”
Dove and Aunt Garnet and all their friends had taken Lin and Tessa into their hearts and were busy fixing up a house we’d rented down the street from Gabe and me. The owner of the little Spanish bungalow was an old friend of our family and a veteran himself. He was thrilled to be able to help another veteran. Tessa would live with her mother while we looked into group homes here in San Celina. Elvia and Emory had both offered Tessa part-time jobs. It would be up to Tessa to decide where she wanted to work.
In the circle of webbed lawn chairs, Uncle WW, Beebs and Millee, Jim and Oneeta Cleary, some of the Coffin Star ladies and other older folks sat gabbing. They were likely telling stories of past brandings, reliving that wild ride when they almost wrecked or the year the cattle stampeded because a rattlesnake slithered into the corral. Miguel sat among them this year, still mending from his injuries. He’d be back on horseback next year, no worse for the wear, to hear him tell it. And though I didn’t see him, I knew that Isaac lurked somewhere taking photos. I watched Elvia try to fit one more platter of food on the packed folding tables while Señora Aragon swayed in place, holding Sophie Lou, stopping occasionally to readjust her daisy-shaped sun hat. Next to her, Tessa chattered like a little bird, touching Sophie’s hat every so often, then adjusting her own. There would be a trunk-load of pictures of Sophie at her first roundup and of Tessa too.
After eleven days, the sniper story barely made the newspaper’s third page. Van Baxter had been charged and arraigned with two counts of attempted murder. Amanda told me it would likely take a year before it went to trial.
Gabe assigned Yvette to desk duty until they could figure out what would be the right thing for her to do. She needed her job, but I couldn’t even imagine the humiliation she felt going to work ev
ery day. If it were me, I’d never want to see my colleagues again.
I thought about Yvette a lot and wished I could reach out to her. But the few times I saw her in the office, though I tried to make conversation, she was polite, but distant. I understood a little. Maybe because I saw her at such a vulnerable moment, the last thing she wanted to do was be friends.
“Why do you think Van really did it?” I asked Gabe a few nights ago. “I just can’t believe it was only for the thrill of it. Do you think he wanted attention? Was it because he was angry, jealous of her job, evil, what?”
He shrugged. “I quit wondering why years ago. Why do people shoot innocent employees of companies they have a beef with? Why do people kill their families and then commit suicide? Why do people torture animals for pleasure? I can’t answer any of those questions, Benni. I’m not sure anyone can.”
He was right, of course. Van wasn’t talking to anyone, probably on the advice of his attorney, about why he stalked and shot at police officers. I was sure a doctor like Pete Kaplan might have some ideas. Maybe I’d ask him if I ever got a chance.
The reward money went to Dove and Aunt Garnet, who donated part of it to the historical society, part to a local veterans’ group and the rest they were using to redecorate Lin and Tessa’s new home. The historical society agreed that their part would go, at my suggestion, toward a new exhibit honoring military nurses that I agreed to curate. I prayed and hoped that Lin would be around to see the exhibit when it opened in the fall.
Something about this situation with Lin and Van and Yvette changed Gabe. His shell had cracked. I saw my opening and told him about Dr. Pete. He agreed to see him once, if only to make me feel better. I thanked him and told him I loved him and I’d be there for him no matter what he decided. I trusted that Dr. Pete would be the perfect doctor for him. I was right.
Gabe started seeing Dr. Pete every Sunday afternoon. We paid for the sessions ourselves so no one would know. Since his nightmares hadn’t affected his ability to do his job, Dr. Pete agreed with us that his therapy was something we could keep private. In fact, he told Gabe he had nothing but admiration for him for deciding to get help.
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