The Other Brother

by Janis Reams Hudson

  But first, she thought as she and her father entered the church, she would pray to become invisible. How was she supposed to sit in church and concentrate on the sermon with Caleb Chisholm just across the aisle?

  She did her best to focus on the minister, her bible, her hymnal, each in turn. She must have managed to keep last night’s kiss from her mind, because lightning did not shoot through the roof of the sanctuary and strike her dead for having lascivious thoughts in church.

  After the final amen was delivered and announcements were made, Melanie managed to fumble long enough with her purse and her bible and trading small talk with the pharmacist seated next to her to allow plenty of time for the Chisholms to get halfway down the aisle before her father finally took her by the arm and dragged her from the pew.

  “What’s the matter with you today?” he grumbled. “You’re slow as molasses.”

  She dragged her feet and slowed even more. “What’s the hurry?”

  “Maybe I’m hungry.”

  That was the other part of their Sunday ritual—dinner out after church at Lucille’s Café on Main. Her father would order the chicken-fried steak, and, because Melanie made pets out of her laying hens and refused to butcher them, she would have fried chicken—someone else’s fried chicken, thank you very much.

  With great relief, or so she told herself, Melanie noted that when she and her father finally exited the church the Chisholms were already pulling out of the parking lot. There were so many of them now that Sloan had a wife and two new stepdaughters that it took them two vehicles to haul everyone.

  At her side she heard her father mutter a curse.

  “What’s the matter with you today?” she demanded, parroting his words. “You’re grumpy as a bear with a sore paw.”

  “I told you,” he said tersely, nudging her none too gently down the church steps. “I’m hungry.”

  “Well, by all means, then,” she said with exaggerated sweetness. “Let’s feed you.”

  The town of Rose Rock had a population of just under two thousand, but it boasted three cafés, a steak house, a pizza parlor, two hamburger joints and a hotdog stand. Nearly every seat in every one of them filled up fast at noon each Sunday.

  If all the churches were to let out at the same time, it would be a disaster. People would be lined up all the way up and down Main waiting for a table. But while the Methodists, the Baptists, the Presbyterians and the First Christians all let out at noon, the Baptists, the Southern Baptists, Church of Christ and the small congregation of Latter-day Saints never let out before twelve-thirty. Melanie didn’t know if that was because they were all so naughty during the week that it took them longer to make up for it, or if their preachers were simply long-winded. In any case, she thought as she and her father stepped through the front door of Lucille’s, it was one very practical reason to be glad she was a Baptist.

  Even then, it was a near thing finding a table, but Melanie spotted one that thankfully was not too close to where the Chisholms had pushed three tables together in the middle of the room. The only drawback was that she would have to pass their table to get to the empty one.

  She was being stupid, she knew, shying away from Caleb this way. They saw each other every Sunday, and usually a time or two more during the week. All she had to do was nod and smile—at the whole family, not just Caleb—and move right along. Simple. Easy. No problem at all.

  Except that just as she was managing it and stepping past their table, her father placed his hand on her shoulder.

  “Hold up a minute,” he told her.

  He stood beside the Chisholms’ table and greeted them, leaving Melanie no choice but to face them.

  “Rose,” Ralph said to the matriarch of the Chisholm clan. “You sure know how to throw a party.”

  “Thank you, Ralph.” Cherokee Rose Chisholm smiled. “It’s not every day one of my grandsons gets married.”

  “Some of us,” he said, casting a dark look at Melanie, “are still waiting for our children to marry and produce grandchildren.”

  Carefully avoiding looking at Caleb, Melanie leaned down and batted her eyes at Justin. “Are you busy tonight? My daddy wants me to get married and have children.”

  Justin screwed up his face in concentration, then smiled. “I’ve got a date tonight, but tomorrow night’s Billy Ray’s birthday, and I’m supposed to pick you up at seven. We wouldn’t be able to get married since we don’t have a license or anything, but we could probably get started on the kids after the party.”

  The adults at the table laughed. Emily, Justin’s new sister-in-law, gave him that frown she used on her daughters when they’d been naughty. “Justin, shame.”

  Melanie quirked her lips and pinched the end of Justin’s nose. “In your dreams, fella.”

  Justin heaved a big sigh. “Yeah, you’re right. Besides, it’d be like kissing my sister.”

  Melanie turned to her father and shrugged. “Sorry, Daddy. Looks like I’ll be staying single a little while longer.”

  Ralph Pruitt huffed out a breath of mock disgust at their play, and at the laughter around the table. “Well, then, the least he can do is give you a ride home. I’ve got an errand to run in the opposite direction, and I need to leave now. Y’all don’t mind, do you?” he asked the table at large.

  “Now wait a min—”

  But Melanie’s protest was cut off by Rose’s voice. “Of course we don’t mind. You know you don’t even have to ask.”

  “Yeah,” Sloan said. “Come on, Mel, pull up a chair.”

  Melanie gaped at her father. He was fobbing her off on the Chisholms like she was a stray dog. An unwanted stray dog, at that. “Daddy…”

  He gave her a peck on the cheek and a pat on the back. “There you go, little girl. I won’t be home till late, so don’t wait up for me. Afternoon, y’all.” He tipped his hat and walked away, leaving Melanie standing there feeling as if she’d just been betrayed.

  “Daddy,” she called after him, but to no avail. Her father walked straight to the door and out without a backward glance.

  Inside, over and around the embarrassment he’d just caused her by foisting her onto the neighbors, fury burned. If he was, indeed, going in the opposite direction from home, that meant he was headed in the general direction of Oklahoma City.

  There were no horses running at Remington Park today, but there were a hundred other places he could go to gamble, not the least of which was any one of several dozen tribal casinos around the state. Damn his hide.

  “Come on,” Sloan told her. “Join us, Mel.”

  She turned to face the table. There was one empty chair. It was between Justin and Caleb. Terrific. But there was no way around it, so she stifled a sigh and sat down.

  “Thanks,” she said to the table at large. “For letting me barge in on your Sunday dinner.”

  “Nonsense,” Rose said matter-of-factly. “If you came through the front door in the middle of the night, you wouldn’t be barging in. Not with us. Hello, Donna,” Rose added to the waitress who came to take their orders. “Melanie has joined us. She’ll be needing something to drink.”

  The meal with the Chisholms was not the ordeal Melanie had feared it would be, seated next to Caleb as she was. He and everyone else treated her as they always had—as one of the family. There was no hint that her father’s behavior had seemed, if not rude, then at least odd. There was no hint from Caleb or anyone that anything momentous had happened on that makeshift dance floor the night before.

  As the meal progressed, Melanie finally began to relax. She had simply been overreacting, that was all. And what a relief it was to realize that. She had kissed a friend as a joke, to rescue him from a potentially sticky situation. That was all there had been to it. Whatever she had thought she’d felt had merely been a trick of her obviously overactive imagination.

  And surely the sly looks that passed between Sloan and Justin had nothing to do with her. Again, only her imagination working overtime.

 
It was not her imagination, however, that had her standing alone with Caleb beside his pickup as the rest of the Chisholms piled into Rose’s SUV and drove away. And those twin smirks from Caleb’s brothers were not her imagination, either.

  “Well,” Caleb said, “that was subtle.”

  “As a Mack truck,” Melanie said in agreement. “I’m sorry you got stuck with taxi duty.”

  “Hey, forget it.” He walked around to the passenger side and unlocked the door for her. “What are friends for?”

  The instant the words were out of his mouth, they both wished he hadn’t said them. Both pretended he hadn’t. Pretended they didn’t recall Melanie uttering those very words on the dance floor the night before, right after…well, right after the big disaster.

  Melanie averted her gaze and jumped into the pickup.

  Caleb silently cursed himself with every step he took around the pickup to the driver’s door. He cursed his brothers. He cursed Ralph Pruitt. He cursed Alyshia Campbell.

  But most of all, he cursed himself, for reminding them both of something that shouldn’t have affected them in the least, but had somehow altered the universe.

  Melanie had been so uncomfortable when her father had stopped her beside their table that she had looked everywhere but at him. But eventually, as the meal progressed, her stiffness had eased. Her smile had come more easily. Her laughter had sounded more natural. She had even managed to look at him a time or two. Out the corner of her eye. When she thought he wasn’t looking.

  Now she was all pokered up again.

  With a heavy sigh, he climbed in behind the wheel and started the engine. He hadn’t a clue what to say to her, but surely at some point during the twenty-minute drive to her house he could come up with something. Something that had nothing to do with his having lain awake last night giving serious thought to figuring out a way to kiss her again.

  The very idea appalled him. He had always valued Melanie’s friendship. He had no intention of ruining that simply because his glands decided to act up. True, lifelong friends were hard to come by.

  Besides which, this particular lifelong friend would likely box his ears if he tried kissing her again.

  He was an imbecile. That was all there was to it. They were friends. Just friends. She hadn’t meant anything by that kiss any more than he had. It had been a joke, that was all. A prank. God knew Mel loved a good prank.

  It was too quiet in the pickup, road and wind noise notwithstanding. Deciding a little music might help break the tension, Caleb reached for the radio knob on his dash.

  Melanie must have had the same idea at the same time; their hands collided over the knob. For a brief instant their fingers ended up entwined. A sharp tingling sensation raced up Caleb’s arm and he jerked.

  Melanie must have felt it, too, he thought, since she jerked away every bit as fast as he did.

  “Sorry,” she muttered, using her other hand to rub her arm, further convincing him she suffered the same sharp tingling sensation.

  At least he wasn’t alone in this, he thought. And he hadn’t been alone in his reaction last night, either. But that didn’t give him any insight into how to deal with the situation. Ignore it? Act like nothing had happened? Say something about it? Kiss her again.

  “Melanie,” he began, with no clue as to what he was going to say next.

  “I thought you were going to turn on the radio.” Her voice was sharp, terse, as she folded her arms across her chest and stared out the windshield.

  “Yeah. Sure.” Okay, he thought. She didn’t want to talk. He turned on the radio. Neither spoke again.

  When Caleb turned off the highway onto the gravel lane that led to Melanie’s house—essentially her driveway, but too long to be called by that name—he had to slow the pickup to a crawl. The gravel had long since disappeared, leaving bare clay, baked in the Oklahoma sun to the consistency of solid granite. The ruts were deep and many. In more than one spot he had to veer to keep from scraping his undercarriage, some of the ruts were so deep.

  What the hell were she and her father thinking, letting this road get in such bad shape? They should have taken the box blade to it before it had completely dried after the last rain and smoothed it out. Then they should have hauled in a load of gravel.

  He glanced over at Melanie, but her shoulders were set so hard against him he figured that if he said anything his voice would just bounce right off her, so he kept his mouth shut and bounced his way toward her house.

  Chapter Two

  It had been the longest ride of Melanie’s life. The only saving grace had been that Caleb didn’t bring up the kiss.

  She didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry. She supposed she was a little of both, she thought as she watched his taillights disappear down the driveway in a cloud of dust. Grateful that she’d escaped having to talk about something that she didn’t understand, something that embarrassed her to the core, and angry with both of them for not bringing it out in the open so they could put themselves and their friendship back on an even keel.

  Shaking her head, Melanie trudged to her bedroom to change into work clothes. Since her father wasn’t home, the remainder of the day’s chores fell to her.

  She didn’t mind the work. In fact, she loved each and every chore—well, okay, maybe she didn’t love each one, but she couldn’t think of a single chore she actually hated. Except on the rare occasion when an animal had to be put down. And housework. She hated anything that hinted of housework.

  Other than that, she didn’t mind the effort it took to keep a ranch running. It was good honest work. It made a person stronger, and not just physically. What she did mind was having to do her father’s share so he could run around losing money all over the damn territory.

  She would start with the most important chores and work her way down until dark. The most important were the mares. There were three of them, and they were her star boarders.

  Well, Melanie thought with a chuckle, they were her only boarders. Their owners paid extra to make sure their beauties were well taken care of, including being stabled each night so they wouldn’t have to spend the nights out in the open.

  If given a choice, nearly all of Pruitt Ranch’s own horses would stand outside in a blizzard and let icicles form on their muzzles before they would willingly step a single hoof inside a barn. PR horses were an independent lot.

  At the back door, in the kitchen, Melanie stomped her feet into her boots and headed out. She juggled the list of chores in her mind. It wasn’t fair to the mares to bring then in from the paddock and lock them up in the barn in the middle of the day just because she wanted to take her list of chores in some particular order.

  But part and parcel with putting them up for the night was cleaning out their stalls, so she started there. After that she drained the water trough in the corral and gave it a good scrubbing. Ever since the West Nile virus made its appearance in Oklahoma she tried not to let water stand in the troughs, or anywhere else, for more than a couple of days. Lord knew there were enough natural breeding places for mosquitoes; she wasn’t about to provide more if she could help it.

  By the time she did a few more chores, drove out to the back pasture and checked on the cattle there, then came back and stabled the mares, it was nearly dark. While she was brushing down the last mare she heard a vehicle rumble up to the barn on the other side of the corral.

  It was her dad. She recognized the sound of his pickup. After the way he’d dumped her at the café earlier, she wasn’t sure she was ready yet to talk to him. She took her time with the last mare.

  Finally, she could delay no longer. In the deep twilight she walked the fifty yards from the barn to the back door and entered the house.

  Her father was on the phone. As she came in, he said, “I told you I’d get you the money.”

  Melanie’s stomach clenched. She froze in the open doorway.

  Her father hung up the phone and turned toward the refrigerator. “What’s for supper?”r />
  For one long moment, Melanie could do no more than gape. When she didn’t answer, her father turned to look at her. She snapped. Somehow, behind her, the door slammed shut.

  “Maybe if you’d eaten dinner after church this afternoon you wouldn’t be hungry.”

  “Hmmph.” He appeared unimpressed with her sudden anger. “You ate, and I’ll bet you’re hungry.”

  “Bet?” It was all she could do to keep from shrieking. “Haven’t you placed enough bets for one day?”

  A flush of guilty red stained his cheeks. He turned back toward the fridge and pulled open the door. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “You don’t, huh?” She jammed the heel of one boot into the bootjack and worked her foot free. “Then who was that on the phone that you were promising money to?”

  His shoulders stiffened, but he didn’t turn to face her. “None of your business.”

  “Oh, it’s my business, all right.” She took off her second boot and stalked across the room to grab his arm and tug him around. “You’ve been taking money out of the ranch account for months like you think we’ve got our own printing press.”

  Melanie stopped and took a deep breath. This was the man who played horsey while she rode his shoulders. The man who taught her to ride a real horse, gave her her first pony, taught her to rope a steer. Taught her to love the land. Taught her what it was to love family.

  “Daddy, I love you, but this has to stop before you bankrupt us.”

  “Aw, don’t give me that,” he said, pained. “It hasn’t been that bad.”

  “Hasn’t been that bad?” Her voice rose in pitch as she waved her arms. “Look around. Do you think we let the hands go three weeks ago because we didn’t need them anymore? Because we like working ourselves half to death and never catching up?”

  “I know you said we were short,” Ralph said, “but that was before we sold the calves. We’re fine now.”

  “We might be,” she said, “if we hadn’t been in the red before the sale, thanks to your gambling and Mama’s credit card charges.”