Colorado High

by Joyce C. Ware

  “Ick.”

  “Horses, too, Tessa.” They grinned at each other. “As I was saying, all of a sudden Pop put real names to the people in those faded old photographs. Aunt this and Uncle that, and he starts pointing out little boys in short pants who were his cousins, and girls with pigtails who were the sisters he bought out years ago and hasn’t seen since.

  “He doesn’t know them, Tessa, and God knows he never cared about any of them—why, they don’t even exchange Christmas cards! But now he wonders if they have kids. Kids that would be about my age now. Blood kin.” He hesitated. “He’s never made a will, Tessa. Do you realize what could happen if he died intestate?”

  “Oh Jed,” Tessa breathed. “How could he do that to you?”

  “He figures the uncertainty will keep me tied to him. Never occurred to him it might do the opposite. I told him the head wrangler could manage the spread just fine without me and that he could hire a woman to come and look after him. You should have seen the expression on his face when I said that!” Remembering, Jed shook his head. “So, working on the principle of striking while the iron’s hot, I called his lawyer— our lawyer, actually— day before yesterday.”

  “Owen MacHarg?” Tessa asked. Jed nodded. “Good man, Owen. Only charges me an arm.”

  “He’s known about our situation for years,” Jed said, “so when I told him what was up, he said ‘Godalmighty, pigs can fly after all!’ He drove up from Ouray late that same afternoon. I don’t know how he got the papers ready so fast, but he said it was mostly boiler-plate stuff and that he and his wife always welcomed an excuse to ride up into our valley at that time of day. Like you said, a good man.

  “His wife and his secretary witnessed Pop’s signing of the will, and afterwards, when I walked them out to the car, Owen said he hoped Pop wouldn’t have a change of heart. Then he winked. I’m pretty sure that was his way of telling me he’d let me know if that should happen.”

  “So the bluff worked,” Tessa said. “I never would have thought you— “

  “It wasn’t a bluff, Tessa.”

  “My God, Jed!” she cried, searching his somber eyes. “What would you have done? Everything you’ve worked so hard for all your life is here!”

  He tapped his head. “I can always take what’s up here with me. I don’t believe I’d have much trouble finding myself a good berth. It wouldn’t be like having my own place, but at least I’d feel like a man again.”

  Tessa reached a hand out towards him. “In my eyes you’ve never been less than one . . . more than most, in fact.”

  As he looked into her blue eyes, soft with concern and affection, his earlier hurt and resentment melted away. His arms ached to hold her. “Thanks, Tessa,” he said, taking her hand. “It’s good to hear you say that.”

  “Surely you never doubted it.”

  He gave her a crooked half-smile. He thought of the choice she’d made thirty years ago. “I’m a man beset by doubts,” he said lightly.

  “ ‘Beset by doubts,’ “ Tessa repeated musingly. “That’s the story of my life these last couple of years. God, to be eighteen again! I thought I knew everything. ... I knew I could do anything. The only thing I know now for sure is that I’ve got a yen for one of those brownies you brought home. I can even overlook the fact that Nell made ‘em.”

  Jed grinned, pushed himself off the fence, and turned to stroll alongside her back to the house. “She may have a tongue like an ice pick, Tessa, but she sure has a light touch when it comes to baked goods.”

  “Not like some, huh? That’s right, laugh! You’ve never been on the receiving end of Nell’s nasty little jabs. She practically purrs when she looks at you.”

  “I require more than a talent for brownie-making in a woman, Tessa. Which reminds me, I’m thinking of taking Pop to the 4H barbecue this Saturday. Why don’t you come with us? Once he gets jawing with the other old codgers, we can join Jeannie and Art and the rest of the crowd.”

  “Whoop-te-doo. Pop and his cronies will complain about our generation, ours will moan and wring their hands over the younger one, and the kids themselves will be too hyped on hormones to do anything but breathe hard on each other.”

  “C’mon, Tessa. I don’t recall you ever passing up the barbecue, even those years when Barry was too pissed to get there under his own steam.”

  “Sorry, but Saturday’s the night of Scott Shelby’s housewarming up in Telluride—look, forget what I said. It would have been fun.”

  “Oh sure. Put them on a scale and I can see how they’d weigh out real even.”

  Tessa sighed. “Give me a break, Jed. Scott asked Garland and me two weeks ago . . . this is the first time you’ve so much as mentioned the barbecue.”

  Jed didn’t think he had needed to. Everyone went; it was a Cottonwood tradition. His gaze fell to his toes. They scuffed along in silence.

  “I know!” Tessa said, grabbing his arm. “Why don’t you ask Marion Shelby?”

  Jed stared at her. “Somehow I can’t see her licking barbecue sauce off her fingers.”

  “From what you and Jeannie say, she sounds equal to just about any occasion. Besides, if she’s planning to stick around, run her ranch like an honest-to-God business, folks’ll be interested meeting her.”

  “Well, you’re right about that. I got the feeling she doesn’t know many people here aside from those she has business dealings with.” He chuckled. “She’s not exactly the Sunday-go-to-meeting, shake-hands-with-the-preacher type. Yeah, I might just do that. All she can do is say no.”

  “But if she says yes,” Tessa said, looking up at him through her lashes, “and if you hit if off,” she added, all big blue eyes and tremulous smiles, “you’ll still keep my name on your list, won’t you?”

  Damn you, Tessa.

  Jed, determined not to give her the satisfaction of seeing him teetering off balance, took his time answering. “Probably,” he drawled. “Old habits die hard, you know.” He relished her startled expression. “But I can’t promise which list it’ll be—the short or the long.”

  She didn’t care for that. “Then I’ll just take the rest of my cake home with me . . . Pop won’t like you for that!”

  “I’ll tell him it was your idea.”

  “He won’t believe you.”

  “Oh? How come?”

  “Because I’m on his short list. Always have been.”

  Tessa stuck out her tongue at him and darted away up the path, her litheness giving a lie to her age. She tap-danced up the steps and across the porch, arms extended, a watch-me grin on her face. Showing off, springy as her failed pound cake.

  Damn you, Tessa.

  But this time he smiled.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Thursday night, pleading fatigue, Garland called it a day before she had a chance to get caught up in the TV movie scheduled for nine o’clock. Tessa followed her upstairs to ask her to look at the outfit she planned to wear to Scott’s housewarming.

  “Now, Mom?” she said, pausing before her bedroom door. “I’m really beat. Today was frantic and tomorrow promises to be more of the same. The Chamber’s sound system broke down, and I spent the entire day trying to find a replacement. Besides, I already know what you’ve got in mind—I can’t imagine that seeing the sum of the parts will do anything more than confirm your original concept.”

  “Concept? Wow. No wonder I’m nervous. And here I thought I was just putting a nice shirt together with pants and boots.”

  “Sounds pretty foolproof to me.”

  “The thing is, I feel ready to celebrate, and looking good is part of it.”

  “Considering the price you got for the buckskin colt, you’re due a celebration,” Garland said. “Twenty thousand. That really smokes me out.”

  “He’s worth every penny,” Tessa maintained stoutly. “The bay colt I started working with this week is going to be a winner, too. Even Miguel says so, and you know how cautious he is.”

  Garland laughed. “I never knew a per
son less willing to count unhatched chickens.”

  “Yeah,” Tessa agreed, “and after the hatching, he always looks twice before admitting that’s what they are.” They grinned at each other companionably. “How about tomorrow evening? I just want you to tell me that what I have chosen really does go together. I don’t want to commit some terrible sartorial mistake, not in that crowd anyway.”

  “I think the word sartorial applies to men’s tailoring. Mom.”

  “So? The pants and boots qualify; the only thing that doesn’t is the silk satin shirt, but considering what some men are wearing these days, I guess that could, too. UPS delivered it this morning. Pure luxury. Wait’ll you see it!”

  “I’m afraid tomorrow’s out, too. I won’t be home until late. Why don’t you give Jeannie a call? She has a good eye.”

  “How late is late?”

  “I don’t know. It depends.”

  “On what?”

  Garland twiddled the knob on her bedroom door as if reluctant to pursue the subject.

  “Garland?”

  “If you must know, Scott wants me to take him on a wildflower hunt.”

  “You must be kidding,” Tessa said. “Sounds like something you do with city kids to bring them in touch with the environment. Hands-on, they call it. In my day it was nature study.”

  “This new line of his, Wildings?” Tessa nodded. “It’s one thing to have an idea— realizing it is a lot more complicated.”

  “He’s got designers and an office staff for that, Garland.”

  “I know that, but he wants to choose the flowers himself . . . the shapes, textures, range of colors. Even though the final version of them will be, like, fantasies, he wants them grounded in reality.”

  “Are you planning to look for them with flashlights?”

  “What? Oh, you mean the late part. He’s taking me to dinner at Campagna afterwards.”

  “Sounds Italian. I wouldn’t have figured Scott as the pizza type.”

  “It’s Tuscan Italian, Mom. Not a pizza in sight, or if there is, I can assure you it would be topped with something more interesting than pepperoni.”

  “You used to like pepperoni.”

  “I still do.” A frown creased Garland’s smooth brow. “What’s with you, Mom? You’re the one who pushed this association.”

  “Because of the doors it could open for you. I wasn’t thinking in terms of dates . . . especially dates having anything to do with hands on,” she added in a mutter.

  “Men like Scott Shelby don’t have dates, Mom. Relationships and affairs, yes . . . but dates?”

  Her knowing smile put Tessa’s back up. She knew she was no longer savvy about Scott’s world, but there was no need for Garland to act so damn superior.

  “. . . Tomorrow is strictly business,” her daughter was saying. “After dinner, we’ll go back to my office and draw up a list of the flowers he’s chosen and mark the location of the plants on a topo map for his photographer.”

  “Seems to me it’d be a whole lot easier—not to mention cheaper—to buy one of those big fancy wildflower picture books,” Tessa grumbled. “I trust he’s paying you for your time?”

  “Of course he is.”

  “So, how late is late?”

  “I don’t know,” Garland snapped. She walked into her room and started undressing, effectively ending the conversation.

  Tessa stood in the doorway. Her gaze drifted beyond her daughter’s slim figure, half-hidden now in the deep closet, to the dimness beyond. The room looked much as it always had, except that the posters Garland had tacked up in the late eighties—one of a rock group, U2; the other of Prince, rouged and eyeshadowed— had been replaced by a single larger one. The highlighted hawkish profile of the late Leonard Bernstein, gray hair flying, his arms and baton waving, now dominated the wall over her bed. That’s what college does for a girl, Tessa thought.

  Blue satin award ribbons— the cheap dye long since bleached to a pale streaky tint by the sunlight that flooded the room by day— still hung in a long neat row beneath a bookshelf tightly packed with titles ranging from The Black Stallion to Wuthering Heights, which at fifteen Garland had pronounced the most romantic story in the whole wide world. Tessa smiled wryly. Despite Garland’s breathless description, Heathcliff had sounded to her like a real loser. Sort of like Barry on a grand scale.

  A bright scarf lay across the faded quilt on Garland’s bed. The old patchwork, made from scraps of clothing surviving from her Great-grandmother Hatton’s family trek by wagon from the Missouri River to their Nebraska homestead, had been too narrow for the water-bed Barry surprised Tessa with five years into their marriage. Eight years later, to mark the occasion of the twins’ graduation from cribs in a shared nursery to real beds in rooms of their own, she presented the quilt, along with its story, to Garland. It became her most treasured possession. Determined to arrest its fraying, she insisted on doing the required repairs herself, her chubby fingers plying the needle more dexterously as she grew. Looking at it now, Tessa knew that nothing, not even a loving heart, could stay its increasing fragility.

  The passing years had taken a toll of more than horse show ribbons and treasured quilts. Garland was no longer the university-bound teenager who, when her last duffle had been loaded into the pickup and Gavin had shamed her into leaving her favorite stuffed horse behind, had suddenly panicked and run sobbing back into the house.

  That first semester, Tessa had agonized over the pleading letters and teary phone calls. But for once Barry had been right, even though she suspected his reason for wanting Garland to stick it out had more to do with his relief at having the twins out from underfoot than concern for her character development. Be that as it may, Garland began her second term stoically— departing after the Christmas vacation with hardly more than a martyred sigh— and by the end of the summer, restless and disenchanted by the local teen notions of entertainment, admitted she was looking forward to returning as a sophomore.

  Last summer, Tessa recalled, she left for Boulder and her junior year two weeks early. To settle in, she said. Don’t make such a big deal out of it, Mom. But Tessa had sensed the beginning of the process of making a life of her own as Gavin already had. Consciously or not, Garland, too, was moving on.

  As if on cue, she emerged from the closet wearing a blood red oversized T-shirt that doubled as a nightie. The big black blocky letters marching across Garland’s chest urged Tessa to Remember Tiananmen Square. It didn’t say why. Garland picked up the scarf splashed across the quilt and carefully folded it. Tessa couldn’t remember seeing it before. It looked expensive.

  Had someone given it to her? Was she moving on with someone else?

  “It’s not big enough for two,” Tessa murmured, fingering a corner of the patchwork.

  Garland turned. “Did you say something, Mom?” Her voice was cool.

  “Nothing important, darling. I was just thinking of the tribulation that old quilt has witnessed.”

  Garland draped the scarf over her sunflower-decorated rocker—Tessa recalled them painting them together. The sloppy ones are mine— and folded down the quilt. “Happiness, too, Mom,” she rebuked gently.

  “Yes. Yes, of course. And, darling? I’m sure you’ll have a grand time tomorrow. Scott always did work hard at making things seem special . . . not that he ever let on he was making any particular effort.”

  Garland looked up from setting her Mickey Mouse alarm clock. “He makes me feel special,” she said, smiling, “yet he doesn’t make demands. Boy, I like that in a man.” She yawned. “ ‘Night, Mom.”

  Tessa hesitated. “I guess I won’t see you until Saturday morning then.”

  “You’ll see me at breakfast tomorrow,” Garland said patiently, “unless you’re planning to sleep in.”

  “Sleep in?” Tessa had never “slept in” in her entire life. “What I meant was, I won’t wait up for you tomorrow night.”

  “Glad to hear it, but can’t this wait until morning?”
>
  Tessa’s hands came up. “Absolutely. I just thought I should tell you that, because sometimes I forget you’re not a kid anymore. Maybe not quite a grown woman either, but— “

  “Mom, please?”

  “Okay. Enough said. Sweet dreams, darling.”

  The next morning, after Garland left, Tessa phoned Jeannie.

  “Hey, Tessa!” Art Disbrow’s hearty voice greeted her. “You calling to say you’ve decided to run off with me?”

  “You’ve asked me that every time I’ve called for the last twenty-five years. Suppose I said yes?”

  “Then I’d let you be the one to break the news to Jeannie.”

  “She’d beat me up, Art.”

  “Yeah, I guess she would,” he said smugly. His voice, as always, sounded on the verge of laughter. “Imagine, the two best-lookers in town mixing it up over a fat old geezer like me.”

  “You’re neither fat nor a geezer. Just well-fleshed and mature.”

  “My, my, Miz Wagner honey, how you do go on. You want Jeannie? She’s just about to leave.”

  “If you can catch her, I’d appreciate it.”

  “I’ve never had a problem with the catching, Tessa; getting her to cooperate’s the tricky part. Jeannie?” he bellowed, “pick up the phone, will ya?”

  “Oh shit!” Tessa heard faintly, followed a moment later by “Tessa, that you?”

  “Shit yes, Jeannie.”

  “You weren’t supposed to hear that. What can I do for you?”

  “Look, if you’re in a hurry—“

  “No, it’s okay. The cat had kittens under the kitchen table last night, and believe me, that wasn’t in my game plan. Hey, you want one? They’re real pretty. At least I think they are . . . actually, it’s a little early to tell.”

  “Ask me again in six weeks.” Tessa hesitated. Do I really need Jeannie’s approval? It wasn’t as if she was thinking of wearing an ostrich boa and sequined shoes . . .

  “Tessa? I don’t mean to sound impatient, but- “