Christmas with its festivities, frantic shopping and extra dose of cheer was always especially hard on her. It made her long for what she didn’t have. A family.
Rousing herself, she realized that Miguel was shaking his head.
“Actually,” he told her, “I am talking about Thanksgiving Day. Am I correct to think that you have no plans?”
“I have no plans,” Sam echoed, then regretted it. The last thing she wanted was to have this man feel as if he had to invite her to his family’s gathering. “But don’t worry, I won’t interfere with yours.”
“Excuse me?” he said, exchanging looks with his sons. The word she had used confused him.
Before she could repeat her answer, Mike took over the conversation. “I think my father is trying to tell you that he’d like you to come and have Thanksgiving dinner with us.”
“I am very capable of saying that for myself, Miguel,” Miguel informed his oldest son, then turned to look at Sam, “But yes, I was trying to—how do you say—feel you up for the holidays?”
“Out, Dad, you were trying to feel her out about the holidays,” Mike quickly corrected.
Ray would have beaten him to it, but his youngest brother was laughing so hard at the moment he couldn’t talk.
Miguel threw up his hands. “Up, out, what is the difference?”
“There’s a difference, Dad,” Mike assured him. “Trust me.”
Miguel glanced at his young guest and said with confidence, “She knows what I mean. So, will you do me—will you do us,” he corrected, gesturing around the table at his two sons as well as himself, “the honor of joining us for Thanksgiving dinner—if you have no plans,” he qualified again.
For a moment, Sam seriously thought of coming up with an excuse, saying she’d forgotten that she had promised to meet with some friends over Thanksgiving, but the truth of it was, the prospect of taking that special meal with this family proved to be more than a little tempting. Especially in light of the way she felt about being alone for Thanksgiving.
She could remember the way she felt one year at Thanksgiving when she and her mother were walking past a diner. Looking in, she saw a man sitting alone on a stool at the counter, slowly eating his turkey dinner. She could almost taste it sticking to the roof of his mouth.
She’d felt incredibly sorry for that man in the diner and now, since Danny had died and her mother hadn’t expressed any desire to reconnect with her, she realized that she was that man in the diner.
Except that now she had an option. She didn’t have to be that lonely man at the counter if she didn’t want to be.
“I’d love to join you—if you’re sure that I wouldn’t be putting you out,” she qualified.
Miguel shook his head, puzzled as to where she would get that idea. “I would not be inviting you if I felt you would be putting me ‘out,’ as you say.”
Sam looked at him. Her eyes held Miguel’s and she smiled. “Yes, you would,” she contradicted. “Because you’re a very kind man.”
Ray laughed. “He’s not all that kind,” the young man assured her. “As a matter of fact, there’re times he can be downright hard-nosed about things.”
Mike slanted a glance in his brother’s direction. “And yet, you still continue being the disappointment you are,” Mike deadpanned in a low voice.
Miguel looked up sharply. “Miguel,” the older man’s voice had a warning note in it. A note that said he would not put up with being crossed.
Mike spread his hands wide and was the picture of innocence. “I’m just telling it the way it is, Dad, nothing more.”
Miguel turned toward her, a weary look on his face. “If you wish to turn me down,” Miguel said to her, “because my sons have no manners, I will understand. My heart will be heavy,” he qualified with a sigh, “but I will understand.”
Sam laughed, truly delighted to be part of this warm, friendly group of people, however briefly. Cocking her head, she looked at her host’s expression. “There is no way I could say no to that face,” she told Miguel in all honesty.
The patriarch watched her with the most hopeful pair of eyes she had ever seen. The only eyes that had come remotely close to that look had belonged to a puppy she’d had as a little girl—before he’d run off after she and her mother had moved in the dead of night because they were behind in their rent.
“He’s counting on that, you know,” Mike told her, then went on to attest, “I’ve seen him practicing that face in the mirror.”
Miguel’s eyes narrowed as he glared at his namesake. “I am beginning to think that Samantha is not the only one who is spending too much time by themselves. At least she is reading your honored ancestor’s words. You have no one to communicate with except for the horses and the fence posts,” Miguel lamented, shaking his head sorrowfully at his oldest son.
“You’ve got that right,” Ray declared heartily, pleased to have the focus off him. “Mike’s just a couple of steps removed from being a crazy old hermit,” he confided to Sam.
Miguel seemed pleased that his youngest agreed with him. “Good, you think so, too,” he said to Ray. “Which is why I believe you should trade positions with Miguel for a few weeks,” the older man told Ray.
Ray appeared as if he was about to choke on his dinner. “What?”
“You actually want us to switch jobs?” Mike asked his father.
“Yes,” Miguel said with feeling, obviously glad he was being understood. He pointed to Ray. “You will take Miguel’s place, ride the range, watch over the herd and check for breaks in the fences,” he enumerated, “while Miguel will be here, doing whatever it is you do,” Miguel said to Ray with a vague wave of his hand.
“I get supplies for the ranch,” Ray protested indignantly.
“Yes, and spend all your time doing it,” Miguel reminded him.
To which Ray responded with a somewhat defensive, if careless shrug. “It’s a big ranch. We need a lot of supplies. That takes time to bring back from town. I don’t want to overload the truck. It’s old and it might break down.”
Sam leaned back, smiling as she listened to the interaction between the three men. She had to confess that she was a little surprised that Mike talked as much as he did—and that he had taken as much note of her as he had.
But then, after what had transpired in the study a little while ago, nothing else should surprise her when it came to the tall, handsome rancher.
Sam caught herself looking at Mike far more than she looked at the other two men even though she found all three amusing, interesting and highly likable. But Mike was definitely at the top of the list.
Maybe she had been sequestered in that room a little too much. It wasn’t often that she connected with people the way she had here—and she gave the credit for that entirely to them rather than to herself.
For as long as she could remember, she had always had a hunger to be something more than the person on the outside, looking in, but because of her circumstances, “outside” was where she was most of the time.
At first it had been because she and her mother had lived a partially nomadic life, staying one jump ahead of the bill collector as her mother continued her search for Mr. Right, the man who would ultimately take her away from all this.
The short period she’d spent with Danny had made her think that those days were gone. She had found her own private “inside” where she could stay, safe and warm and happy. But then Danny was killed in a freak accident and she was alone again. It wasn’t long before she found herself reverting back to being the lost person she’d once been.
This, she thought, looking around at the three men at the table, was her fantasy come true. She was part of something while she was here. These men let her in—Miguel and Ray had done it immediately, but even Mike had eventually come around. They behaved as if they
expected her to take part in their lives, not hover on the perimeter, looking in.
That meant the world to her.
Realistically, she knew it couldn’t continue. She knew that she was just a guest, not really a part of this family who seemed to thrive on bedeviling each other. Despite the teasing and at times the sharp words, it was obvious that they all loved one another and that each would defend the others with their last ounce of strength and their last breath no matter what the nature of the fight.
She felt lucky to be here, just observing.
* * *
ONCE DINNER WAS over and she began to rise, Miguel turned quickly to his namesake and said, “Take her out for a walk, Miguel. I believe she needs to smell the night air, to remember that there is a whole world outside of the study and beyond just this house. She has been neglecting it, as well as herself.”
She knew that Miguel meant well, but she couldn’t just drop everything and go for a stroll. If she gave in to indulgences like that, she would wind up falling behind schedule. Stopping for dinner had already taken enough of a chunk out of her evening.
“Miguel—” she began to protest.
But Miguel had already made up his mind to turn a deaf ear to whatever it was she had to say if it was to attempt to change his mind.
“I am paying you little enough as it is to do this big job. I am certainly not paying you enough to be a slave, Samantha.” He winked at her. “Go. Walk outside. Breathe in the night air. Miguel will keep you company. Do this for an old man,” he requested, looking at her with eyes that were supplicating all on their own.
Sam had no choice but to agree.
“I will,” Sam told him with reluctance, feeling guilty and yet enthused at the same time. Then, standing up on her tiptoes, she whispered in the man’s ear, “As long as you tell me who this old man is because I don’t see him in this room.”
Miguel laughed. Taking Sam gently by the arm, the patriarch brought her over to Mike, then elaborately slipped his arm from hers and brought the two of them together.
“Make sure she doesn’t go back to work tonight, Miguel,” he told his son. “She needs to appreciate her surroundings here and now. Life,” Miguel went on to tell the young woman before him, “moves much too fast. Before we know it, many years have just slipped through our fingers. We need to make the most of it now before it is gone.” He gestured toward the sliding glass door that led to the area behind the house. “The night is waiting,” he told Sam.
She wanted to beg off, to tell him that she was getting to the good part of the narrative in the diaries, but she just didn’t have the heart to disappoint Miguel since he seemed so enthusiastic.
“You’re right,” she agreed. “It is.” And with that she and Mike went out through the rear sliding glass door.
Chapter Eleven
Once they were outside, Mike made her an offer that surprised her.
“You know, if you really want to get back to work, we can hurry around to the front of the house and I can sneak you in before Dad hears anything,” Mike told her.
Sam shook her head. “No, maybe your father’s right. Maybe I have gotten a little too caught up in the work. Besides, it is getting kind of late. I might accidentally miss something that’s important if I continue working on the journals tonight.
“I have to admit that your father did surprise me,” she went on to confess, silently adding that it had been a night for surprises all around, starting with Mike and her extremely strong reaction to him.
“He can come on a little strong when he believes something wholeheartedly,” Mike told her. “Especially now.”
“Why especially now?” she asked.
Being on the outside and yearning for connections, she had always had more than her share of natural curiosity about the people she came in contact with. But ever since she’d arrived in Forever, that healthy streak had gone into overdrive.
“Dad had a heart attack earlier this year,” he told her, “right around the beginning of February. I think it’s made him extremely aware of everything, grateful for every small thing that goes right. He’s been into his ‘smell the roses’ phase ever since then.”
“A heart attack?” Sam echoed, horrified and genuinely concerned. “There’s no hospital around here,” she realized. At least, she hadn’t seen one the couple of times Mike had shown her around.
“No, there’s not,” Mike confirmed. “Closest one is in Pine Ridge, about fifty, fifty-two miles away from here,” he judged. “And, not only that, but at the time Dad had his heart attack, the town’s only doctor had taken his first vacation in several years, so he wasn’t even around.”
Though she’d just left the man a couple of minutes ago and he seemed the picture of health, the thought of the man having gone through all that pain and understandable fear appalled her. Her ability to empathize and place herself in other people’s shoes had her feeling extremely vulnerable and fragile. The very thought of what Miguel and his family had endured upset her.
“What did you do?” she asked Mike, her voice dropping down to a whisper.
“Me, personally, nothing,” Mike admitted. He had never felt so helpless in his life—or so worried. He prided himself on being in control of situations and in this one, he clearly was not. He never wanted to be at the mercy of events like that again. “To be honest, I didn’t know what to do in that kind of a situation— although I’ve taken lessons in CPR since then—we all have,” he added. “Dad’s in great health now, but it never hurts to be prepared.”
The minute the doctor came back with his family, Mike had been quick to fill him in, asking the man to give him a few pointers. Daniel Davenport did better than that. He held an informative class for them, wholeheartedly agreeing that knowing the proper application of CPR was a skill that was well worth learning.
“It happened at dinner and all I can say is that it was damn lucky for Dad that Gabe brought his new girlfriend and her mother to dinner that night because it was Val’s mother, some former movie star who Dad had always been sweet on, who wound up saving his life.” He laughed softly. “For months, he’d tell anyone who listened—and a lot of people who didn’t after a while—that Gloria Halladay saved his life.”
Realizing that the name probably meant as little to her as it initially had to him, Mike started to explain, “That’s the name of the—”
“Movie star, yes, I know,” Sam interjected with a nod.
“You know?” Mike questioned, surprised. Not that he’d ever been anything remotely resembling a movie buff, knowing the names of only the biggest stars, and then, less than a handful of those, but from what he’d heard, this particular former actress had never been considered to be a performer of any sort of consequence outside her own family.
Sam nodded in response to his question. Somewhere in the distance, a barn owl asked the eternal question. She smiled, thinking the bird’s “Who?” coincided with her conversation with Mike.
“The one constant thing whenever we moved around was our portable TV—the kind with rabbit ears,” she specified.
“Rabbit ears?” he questioned, confused.
“Antenna,” she explained. “We never had cable anything, even after it was popular. I’d set the TV up first thing whenever we moved into a new apartment and then watched whatever was on. At night, I used to put on old movies to keep me company. The TV’s warm blue glow and whatever program was on with the characters talking to each other filled up the silence in the apartment.”
“Where was your mom?” Mike asked. As a kid, once his siblings began coming along, causing his mother to be busier and busier, caring for the lot of them, he would have killed for some peace and quiet. The grass was always greener, he thought philosophically.
“Working,” Sam answered. “The kind of jobs she got didn’t pay all that much, but th
e bill collectors didn’t care. They still wanted to get paid.” At times, it was hard to believe she’d been that kid. All this felt as if it had happened to someone else eons ago. “I spent a lot of time alone, which meant I spent a lot of time watching TV and I saw a lot of old movies.”
She sounded cheerful as she told him about it, but it wasn’t hard to read between the lines. “Must have been rough for you.”
Sam shrugged away his assessment. “People had it rougher. They still do. And I can’t complain. I survived and made something of myself. That lifestyle probably made me tougher,” she theorized, then stopped abruptly as her conversation replayed itself in her head. “Hey, wait, how did we start talking about me when I was talking about your father?”
Mike smiled even as he moved his wide shoulders in a vague, careless shrug.
“Guess my dad’s not the only one who can turn the tables on people.” That he had turned it on her was a source of pride for him, Mike thought. For a brief moment, his eyes met hers. “Apple doesn’t fall far from the tree?” he hazarded a guess.
Sam could only stare at him, clearly stunned. “Wow.”
“Wow?” he questioned. She nodded in response. “Why ‘wow’?” he asked.
“Because you would be the last person in the whole world I would have guessed capable of uttering that kind of a cliché,” she told him.
Mike shrugged innocently. “Maybe present company’s rubbing off on me,” he told her.
“Are you saying I’m clichéd?”
The way she said it sounded like an insult. He hadn’t meant it that way. It just seemed like an obvious fact to him, but he kept that to himself.
“Let’s just say you’re pretty adept at turning a well-used phrase,” Mike suggested.
“Is that another term for ‘hackneyed’?” she asked.
“No. Hackneyed means trite and well-worn, and you’re neither. Especially not the last word,” he added under his breath.
A Small Town Thanksgiving Page 11