“I know,” Liz said. She was stroking Annie’s hair. “I know. I never thought it would turn out this way. Not at all. I really didn’t.”
“Oh, Liz, I thought he was someone special. Someone really special. And I thought, maybe, together, we had something special. We were having fun together—in the park and eating hot dogs, and—and—shepherd’s pie—I even met his mother and I walked around the neighborhood where he grew up.” With the memory of Bart’s mother, the home he grew up in, his willingness to share that with her, she cried still more. “And when Lindy went missing, I felt I knew him well enough, and knew enough about his family, what Lindy meant to them, that I thought I did, really truly understand what he was going through, how he was suffering. So I tried to do whatever I could to help. And I thought it was a precious gift I was giving him when I actually found Lindy. I thought he’d be so pleased. And I thought my good luck that had been with me every minute of this trip, was still with me. Like a good angel was dancing me along every step of this fabulous week. I expected he’d be so happy, and so pleased.”
Liz handed her another tissue and she blew her nose, hard. “And instead, he was mad at you.” Liz picked the wet tissues out of Annie’s hand and stuck them deep into a corner of her bag. “Sometimes, I think the male of the species makes no sense at all.”
“Where did it all go so dreadfully—so disastrously—wrong?” Annie wasn’t really talking to Liz. She was her own audience. “How could he get it all so—so—unbalanced!?” Liz handed her another tissue. “I did him this great favor, I was practically a hero, and he acts like he just can’t stand the sight of me. Oh, Liz, what a terrible way to end this adventure. All the air has gone out of my bubble and now I just want to go home.”
“Oh, my poor Annie. It’s all the excitement. This city and the excitement. It’s good we’re leaving tomorrow. We’ll get you back to the real world and everything will settle into its proper place. You just have to make it through tonight.”
“I know. I know.” She raked her hands through her hair. “But oh, Liz, I’m so miserable.”
Chapter Thirty-two
A Word from Mom
A Month Later
The smell of gingerbread baking reached him even before he went up the front steps. It was the first bit of comfort he’d felt for weeks.
There was mail in the mailbox and he took it out as he opened the door.
“Mom? You home?”
Mrs. Hardin came out of the kitchen, stood in the doorway and took a good look at her son.
“You look like hell. What’s going on?”
“I need to talk to someone about—well, about something.”
“Are you in trouble?”
“In a way.”
She looked at him in that brisk way she had, sizing everything up in a single piercing glance.
“Sit down,” she said. “I’ll make coffee.” She went back into the kitchen.
In the living room, Bart dropped into the blue wing chair. His mom was right. He did look like hell. There were dark circles under his eyes and he had lost some weight. He hadn’t shaved for a couple of days, his face was stubbled, his hair was shaggy around his shirt collar and he seemed to have slept in his jeans and white shirt. A half-dead animal washed up on the beach looked in better shape.
His mom came back into the room. A tall-backed Chippendale chair was close to the wing chair, and she sat there, where she could see Bart’s face clearly, lit by the afternoon sun.
“Now tell me. What’s wrong?”
“It’s so stupid, Mom. It’s just so stupid. You remember that girl that came here with me, a few weeks ago?”
“Of course I remember her. Annie. Annie Cornell.” With all the trouble a police officer could get into, girl trouble was probably not so serious. Unless—
“The news was full of her for a few days,” she said. “I’d hoped to see her again before she left. I liked her.”
“I liked her, too.”
“So? So far, I don’t see a problem.”
“Yeah. Well, it didn’t work out.”
“What happened?”
“You saw what happened. She made me look like a jerk!”
“She did? How? I didn’t see how you looked like a jerk.”
“Oh, Mom, not you, too.” Bart’s face flashed his impatience. “Lindy was Dad’s horse. If Lindy had been stolen while Dad was alive, wouldn’t Dad have been the first one to track down the kidnappers? Do you think he’d have let some little slip of a thing—that’s what the captain keeps calling her, a ‘little slip of a thing’—come along and do his job for him? A job he was supposed to be doing?”
“And that’s what this is about?” She was relieved; it could have been something much more serious. “That’s what has you looking like an unmade bed?”
“I can’t help it, Mom. The guys were all razzing me. And the press was all over the unit, like somehow we weren’t doing our job—saying some out-of-town tourist who can’t weigh more than a hundred and ten pounds came along and solved the case and captured the bad guys single-handed.”
“And what did she say about all this?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” He looked away, unwilling to meet his mother’s eyes.
“Did you talk about it?”
“I tried to.”
“And?”
“She called me stupid.”
“She didn’t strike me as the kind of girl who calls people stupid.”
“I was trying to get her to understand.”
“And she didn’t?”
“No. She didn’t understand at all. I tried. But she’s impossible.”
Mrs. Hardin sat quietly for maybe a full minute while Bart glowered at the carpet. She studied him closely. Then she spoke, in that quiet, centered way she had that he’d learned to listen to.
“Bart. I didn’t raise my boy to be a fool. And you never gave me any reason to think you were a fool. Well,”—she smiled, a little indulgently—“maybe there were a few days here and there in your teens—every teenager has some pretty foolish days—but those days don’t count.” Then, more seriously, she said, “No, Bart, I’ve had every reason to be proud of you. Proud when you joined the force. Proud of how you’ve conducted yourself as an officer—and I don’t mean only the special commendations, I mean your behavior day in and day out. I was proud when you made sergeant. I was proud of how you helped me when Dad died, helped me get through those black days, when I felt as though I’d died, too.
“But if ever I saw a man behaving like a fool, I’m seeing it now, Bart. Here, you bring home this really nice girl, a girl who’s smart, sane, well brought up, well educated, independent, and lovely, and I thought, the minute I met her, now here’s a girl who’s good enough for my Bart.
“And then, on top of all that, what does this impossible girl do? She performs an act of bravery and skill that not one person in maybe a million could do, and not only that, she does the entire city of New York a big favor, not to mention the New York Police Department, its mounted unit—and by the way, a huge personal favor for you, too, Bart.
“And how do you say thank you to this very special girl who’s done so much for us all? You get all bent out of shape because she’s the one who did it instead of you. Is that how they trained you? Is that how your dad and I trained you? I’m ashamed of you, Bart. You’ve earned plenty of points for bravery and honorable behavior. Surely you can acknowledge it when someone else earns a few of their own. Surely bravery and skill can be shared. It’s not like you’re the only one who’s supposed to be wonderful. Des Hardin was never like that. And Bart Hardin shouldn’t be, either.”
Bart was silent, his eyes fixed on the photo of his father.
“Well,” his mother said. “I’ve said my piece. You think about it, dear. I have a cake in the oven.” And she stood up and left the room.
He did think about it. “A girl good enough for my Bart.” That’s what she said.
But maybe I’m not good enough
for her.
And with that thought, he remembered Annie’s words: “I don’t know why I bothered to see you today.” And she called him stupid.
Well, not really. She said what I said was stupid. Not the same thing. I don’t even remember what I said. Probably it was stupid. I said a lot of stupid things that day.
He went into the kitchen where his mom was sticking a cake tester into the pan of gingerbread. It needed another five minutes.
“She called me a Caped Crusader, like I was someone in a comic book.”
“Oh, Bart, honey. I think that’s your nicest quality. And I think Annie thinks so, too. She was probably mad. What did you say that made her mad?”
“I can’t remember. Something about her thinking she didn’t need me to take care of her.” He no sooner said that than he realized how condescending that would have been. “Maybe I shouldn’t have said that.”
“You think?”
He turned a chair around and straddled it. He watched his mom as she got out a cake rack. He watched her preparing a frosting for the gingerbread. He watched how she wiped her hands on her apron, took a couple of pot holders off a hook on the wall and got the gingerbread out of the oven. He loved watching his mom in the kitchen.
“I said a lot of dumb stuff that day.”
“A man in love usually does say a lot of dumb stuff.”
Leave it to Mom to put it plain like that. With a single word. That’s all it was. One word. But he couldn’t say it right off. He needed to let it sink in.
And when it did, he gave his mom a straight look, eye to eye. He felt a huge space open up in his chest. About three hundred pounds of misery slid off him, dissolved, melted, disappeared, vanished. He looked at his mother as though beams of light were radiating off her head.
“You’re right, Mom. I am in love with that girl. And I let her get away.”
The look from his mom was like a slow drill, right into his heart. He’d been brought up well and he understood what that look meant.
“I know, Mom. I will make this right.” He stood up. “It’s going to take some work, but I’ll make this right. Beginning right now.”
“Sit down,” she said. “The coffee’s ready. And I’ll cut you a piece of cake.”
Chapter Thirty-three
Home Sweet Home?
Mid-August
It had been an unusually hot summer, and dry. Everyone was being careful about the water supply and by mid-August the predominant color scheme of the terrain was brown and beige. A few summer classes were in session, but mostly things were quiet on campus and there wasn’t much going on in the library. Annie had been moping all summer, and her friends and family assumed that the excitement of the contest, her New York adventure, and the tumultuous festivities that had greeted her return had left her wrung out. There’d been the high school band waiting at the regional airport, with streams of cars and pickups strung out along Brees Road, and horns honking, and invitations to make speeches, and the exhaustion and the culture shock. After the dizzy verticalness of New York, she felt as though she’d landed on a different planet when they descended the steps from the plane onto the unremittingly flat horizon of Laramie’s high plain, thousands of feet above sea level with only an enormous sky above that was empty of everything but clouds and wind.
Only Liz knew the truth, and that meant Craig knew, too, so at home they tiptoed around her misery and offered her only as much comfort as she was willing to accept. In time, they knew, she’d recover and life would go on—not quite as before, but it would go on.
At work, because of the light summer load, she was able to keep up appearances, and now that she was a celebrity, she was kept busy learning how to be gracious even though she wanted to be left alone. With the contest behind her, the gifts handed round, the clothes from Galliard hung in the closet, all the lotions and potions stashed away in various drawers and cabinets or presented to pleased colleagues, friends, and relatives, and the obligations of work at the college and on the ranch enough to fill her days and leave her tired in the evening, she had every reason to put New York and all it meant well behind her.
Which made it hard, perhaps, to understand why she often, quietly, when no one was around, got out the maps of the city and retraced the places she’d been, reviewed the memories that went with each, relived the details of those extraordinary few days. There were people whose names she knew now, people she’d never heard of that spring morning she and Liz had stepped on the plane to Denver. Mitzi, and Marge Webster, Damien and Louis and all the editors around the conference table at Lady Fair, the perfume saleslady at Galliard’s, the mayor at the ribbon-cutting, and even the concierge at the hotel. Though she would never see any of them again, they would remain part of her big adventure.
But there were those other memories, the ones that came with a pang of remorse and loss. There was the jolly guard out in front of Troop B headquarters, and the taxi driver who first drove her there. And Captain Simon and Max and the other officers. And the silly Buljornia plotters. The Irish restaurant and its shepherd’s pie and Katie, the waitress. Even Charlie Wu and Sergei and his hot dog cart in front of the Boathouse. And of course, there was Mrs. Hardin and the clapboard house on Windsor Terrace. Each of these memories, like the thread of a spider’s web, circled around the one person at their center, the one person associated with each, and it was still so painful to think about him. And sometimes, though she’d fight off the urge, though she tried hard to resist, she’d get out her cell phone to look at the pictures they’d taken on their motorcycle tour around the city and her heart would break again.
It was on one of those occasions, an evening when Liz and Craig had gone to a movie with the Zimmers and she had stayed home on the ranch to babysit the boys, after she had Buck and Bran down for the night and she had curled up on the sofa in the front room, alone with a book—and her memories—she gave in once again. She slipped her phone out of her pocket and scrolled to the “New York” album. There they were again, the photos of Bart and her. Pictures at the marina, at Gracie Mansion, at the Dyckman House, photos from Harlem and the Brooklyn Bridge.
But her favorite was the one in Central Park, that Tuesday when she’d gone to meet him at Tavern on the Green. The kids in the playground had been all around him, and he had just slipped off his helmet for a moment and brushed his hand through his hair. The sun highlighted its reddish sandy color that she’d found so appealing and she’d snapped the photo just as he’d started to walk toward her, with the beginning of a welcoming smile. She could stare at that photo for long minutes, for it caught all his easy, virile grace as he came to meet her, and as deeply as it hurt, she was never able to scroll quickly past it. She would have long make-believe conversations with his silent photo and make them come out in various ways—self-serving, self-punishing, even sometimes self-aware. Sometimes his part was angry. Sometimes he was sorry. Sometimes he was silent.
Oh, Bart. Where did we go wrong? I thought we had something good between us, something special.
Tonight, alone in the house, with the boys asleep and nothing to distract her attention, she allowed herself a long, long time with that photo. And she was silent, too.
She wondered if she’d ever get over him. Liz assured her she would. She didn’t think so.
She put the phone back in her pocket.
There was a pile of magazines on the coffee table, copies of FeedLot and PRCA’s Pro Rodeo, a People magazine and Good Housekeeping and Lady Fair (of course), a Globex printout of yesterday’s futures quotes on cattle, a couple of promos from Nutrena and Purina Mills, a newsletter from the Drovers’ Association, and a copy of Beef Magazine. She picked the People magazine out of the pile and leafed through it absentmindedly. She paused at a story about Britain’s royal family. There was a feature on Prince Harry, William’s younger brother, playing polo. A close-up of his face. She decided he looked like Bart—the same crinkly, reddish-sandy-colored hair, the same tall athletic build. The same sweet bo
yish face—with a little mischief in his smile.
“Oh, damn!”
She was seeing Bart everywhere.
“I’m obsessed with that man. And you know, Annie,” she said aloud to herself and to the empty room, “you know he’s long since forgotten you. How can you be so stupid?”
She tossed the magazine back onto the coffee table.
She silenced her phone.
She went to bed and cried herself to sleep.
But of course Bart hadn’t forgotten her. How could he? He was a man in love—and he was a man with a plan. For a couple of months, ever since that visit to his mom, he’d been busy making arrangements. And tomorrow morning he’d be ready to take the last step.
He was smiling when he turned out the light and went to sleep.
With summer’s end, classes would be starting soon and Annie took advantage of a quiet Saturday to be alone in the library to get things ready for the onslaught. A certain amount of lifting and hauling would be needed, so she’d dressed grungy and had snagged her hair up into a pile on top of her head with a pencil twisted through it to hold it in place. She’d had nothing but a Pop-Tart for breakfast; the library cafe would be closed until classes started and she was thinking of having a pizza brought in. Or maybe a sandwich. When the phone rang, she was in the middle of deciding. Sandwich? Or pizza?
“Hey, Annie.” It was Liz. “Whatcha doin’?”
“Just working. Thinking of getting something to eat.”
“Oh.” Liz said nothing for a moment.
“Liz. Why are you calling?”
“Nothing special. Just felt like saying hello. Can’t a sister call and just say hello?”
“You’re up to something. You never call just to chat. What’s up?”
“Nothing at all. Just wondered if you’d be there at the library all afternoon. It’s such a gorgeous day, I thought maybe you’d have gone out, gone for a ride or something.”
Her Winning Ways Page 24