Cowboy Sing Me Home

by Harris, Kim Hunt

  “Is Melinda really doing okay? She told me everything looked good.”

  “Sure, she’s good.”

  “And the baby?”

  “Mmmm,” she said again, writing something on his chart. She looked up, her brows raised and a blank smile on her face. “What baby?”

  “Melinda’s baby.”

  “Melinda has a baby? When did that happen?”

  Luke’s world, already off kilter, tilted a little more. His hands clutched the sheets, and his lips went numb as he said, “I mean the baby she’s carrying now. She’s pregnant now.”

  Geralyn shook her head. “Melinda’s not pregnant. I just saw her two days ago and she took a pregnancy test then.”

  Everything in Luke’s body went numb, and the blood thundered in his ears. He must have looked pretty bad, if Geralyn’s expression was any indication. She dropped the clipboard onto the bedside table and gasped.

  “Luke! She told you she was pregnant? And I just – oh my God, I am in so much trouble.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, his mouth dry.

  “No, listen, I’ve just violated hospital policy and all kinds of HIPAA laws, if anyone ever finds out I told you.”

  He didn’t see how anyone would ever know, and he told Geralyn so, his mind on the way Melinda had rambled on about how weak she felt. He’d been sick with worry over the baby, and tried to work up some concern for Melinda, too.

  And she’d been lying the whole time.

  He made the appropriate assurances to Geralyn that no one would ever learn of their conversation, while his mind reeled through a dizzying whirl of thoughts and emotions.

  There was no baby. There never had been.

  He was angry, embarrassed, even, that Melinda had fooled him so easily. Angry for the worry she’d caused him. Relieved that he didn’t have to go through with marrying her.

  But above it all, and deeper than any, running through everything now like a thick brown river, was an overwhelming sense of loss.

  He didn’t have a baby. During the past two days, the knowledge that he had a child had been at the front of his mind. A child growing, getting ready to come in and color his life. A child no bigger than his thumb now, but that would soon be a tow-headed boy with a stickhorse, or a pink-cheeked, ribbon-haired girl. A child that would re-introduce him to the wonder and magic of the world. The comfort and joy he’d derived from this knowledge was so much sweeter for being unexpected. He never expected to have a child. And he never expected to love it before he’d even seen it.

  But he didn’t have a baby, and he never had.

  Geralyn scooted a chair up to the bed and took his hand. “Maybe I’m wrong, Luke. I’ve been working a lot of hours lately. Maybe I got her confused with someone else.”

  “We both know you didn’t.”

  She was silent for a moment, then squeezed his hand. “I’m sorry. But you can try again. Like I said, Melinda’s healthy, there’s no reason – “

  She broke off when she saw the look on his face. She bit her lip, but nodded when he reassured her again that everything was okay, that he wanted to be alone.

  “I don’t know why she lied, Luke,” she said softly before she left. “Sometimes, when a person wants something so bad, and doesn’t know how to get it…”

  He lay looking out the window, thinking about how much it hurt to lose a baby that had never existed. How much more must it hurt, to lose a baby you had seen, and fed and clothed, and held in your arms?

  He had several hours to think about what he was going to say, and how he was going to say it. The medication muddled his mind, and he drifted to sleep, expecting to dream of babies, but dreaming instead of dead trees that talked and the Space Needle, of all things. When he woke, Melinda was there, checking her lipstick in a tiny mirror.

  He’d planned to hurt her, he realized as soon as he saw her. He’d intended to strike back and make her pay.

  But when he saw her, all he felt was pity. She pulled back her lips to check her teeth, then snapped the mirror and dropped it into her purse on the floor, then rose to wander the room, checking to see who’d sent flowers and potted plants.

  Luke watched her chew her thumbnail, look at her watch, cataloging the many contrasts between her and Dusty. Dusty had watched him while she was there. Still, and steady, and focused completely on him. Melinda looked at everything except him.

  Melinda was a girl, and always would be. Dusty was a woman, and always had been.

  He shifted and made enough noise to let her know he was awake, and managed a smile when she turned.

  “Hey you,” she said, coming over to the bed. “How are you feeling?”

  “Not bad, all in all. How about you?”

  “I’m good,” she said, then put her hand on her belly as if she’d just remembered. “Oh. You know. A little queasy still. But that’s to be expected. Mama said she was sick twenty-four hours a day with me.”

  They stared at each other in silence for a moment, then she began to chew her thumb again and rattle on about the flowers by his window.

  Silence between them was never easy, the way it was with him and Dusty. She took a deep breath, and he recognized the signs that she was about to launch into one of her ten-minute monologues about nothing, just to fill the void.

  He cut her off before she got started.

  “I know you’re not pregnant, Melinda.”

  Her eyes widened and she took a step back, her expression telling him everything he needed to know.

  It took her only a moment to recover, but in that time any doubt he had was erased.

  “What kind of drugs are you on, Luke Tanner? Of course I’m pregnant. You should know, you took me to the doctor yourself.”

  He had fully intended to make her squirm. Instead, he took her hand in his. “Why did you lie to me?”

  She snatched her hand back. “I didn’t lie, Luke. I’m pregnant. With your baby. Who told you I lied? Who? That trashy bar crawler?”

  Anger flared, and it must have been all over his face, because she lifted her chin and set her lips, but didn’t go any further down that road.

  “I’m not playing this game with you, Melinda. I’m trained to read body language, you know. I’ve suspected from the beginning that you weren’t really pregnant, but you just gave yourself away when I confronted you.”

  Her face buckled, and she dropped down into the chair beside his bed. He knew tears weren’t far away. “Luke, please. I am…”

  “It’s going to be okay, Melinda. You’ll find somebody. You’re too pretty to have to resort to lying.”

  Tears spilled over and ran down her cheeks, and she snatched a handful of tissue from the box by his bed. “Stop calling me a liar.”

  She was close enough that he could reach out and rub her shoulder. She began to cry in earnest now, bent over in the chair, and he stroked her back and let her cry it out.

  “You don’t know what it’s like. There are no men in this town. Everyone is married and having babies. Everyone except me. We were good together, you know we were. We had fun, and everyone said we made a cute couple. I thought if I left for a while and gave you a chance to miss me, you’d see how much you needed me. But instead I come home to find you’re already sniffing around that blonde witch.”

  She wiped her nose and threw the wadded up tissue in the wastebasket and reached for more. “We would have been just fine if she hadn’t come along. Just fine. But she showed up and Mama said she’d never seen you look at anyone like you looked at her. And I panicked. I knew I had to get you away from her any way I could.”

  “How long were you going to carry out the charade?”

  “Just until we were married. Hopefully I’d get pregnant quick and you’d never have to know,” she said miserably. “But if not, I thought I would just say I had a miscarriage.”

  And put him through that torture, too, he thought. He’d seen Colt and Becca go through that particular hell, too many times.

  She looked up at
him with shining cornflower blue eyes, wide with anticipation, and licked her lips.

  Involuntarily, Luke’s lip curled in disgust. Even now she was trying to play him. He drew his hand back and met her eyes stonily.

  She shrugged slightly, as if to say ‘it was worth a try’ and the hope went out of her eyes.

  “Does your mother know you’re not really pregnant?” Was she going to let her own mother think she’d lost her grandchild?

  “She figured it out, too. I guess I’m not a very good actress. She warned this was just going to turn into a big mess. Is it going to turn into a big mess, Luke?”

  It was messy enough for him now, but she meant was he going to tell everyone she’d lied. “That’s up to you. You can tell people whatever you want. Say it was a false alarm. I’ll go along with whatever, as long as you don’t concoct some story about me beating you up and making you lose the baby. And as long as you stay away from Dusty.”

  She frowned and stood, grabbing her purse and another handful of tissues. “Don’t worry, I’ll stay away from your precious Dusty. I’m going back to my sister’s. I may even stay there. There are a lot more men in Dallas.” She sniffed again and looked down at him, and he wondered what he’d ever seen in her. “Goodbye, Luke. Good luck with…everything.”

  Dusty cursed herself, Luke Tanner, and Wayne all the way to Tumbleweeds to drop off the supplies, where she cursed at Rodney, and continued all the way back into town. She did it again – although under her breath this time – when she walked through the choir room door and was greeted by a dozen middle-aged women equipped with all manner of devices to commit audio torture.

  Louise was showing off her recorder when Dusty came in. She hadn’t picked up any musical ability between the grocery store and the church, Dusty noted, but she had learned to blow from the diaphragm. It wasn’t exactly an improvement.

  Louise saw Dusty and hurried over. “You are a living, breathing doll to help us out like this. We are here and raring to go.”

  “I see that,” Dusty said as she looked around the room. Two women held trombones and seemed to be preparing to share one mouthpiece between them. Luke’s mother had a child size guitar with three strings on it and a picture of David Cassidy painted on the face. The woman who worked at the convenience store had an old set of bells, and she’d brought a tall fuzzy marching band hat with her, which she’d set on a chair waiting for the right moment to put it on, Dusty supposed. All together she counted those instruments, the bass drum from the band director’s wife, an accordion and two trumpets. A baton leaned against the wall, and Dusty decided that if someone decided to start twirling right here in the Baptist Church choir room, she was packing her bags.

  I ought to take this group up to Luke Tanner’s hospital room, she thought grimly as Sue Ellen Buchanan dropped a cymbal on her foot. Let them play him a get-well tune.

  The group quieted slowly and they all turned to look at her. She felt the weight of responsibility on her chest and she nodded, fighting a moment of panic.

  “What do you want us to do first?” Louise asked. “We’ve picked out the four songs we want to learn.”

  Dusty chewed her lip to keep from cursing again. Four songs?!? “That’s great. I am really impressed by your commitment and enthusiasm. I really am. But…”

  The group stared at her, eyebrows raised, waiting for her to dampen their enthusiasm. “But I’m afraid there is just no way I’m going to be able to teach you to play instruments and learn four songs before tonight.”

  “What?” Louise took a step back, her recorder to her heart.

  Oh come on, Dusty thought. She breathed deeply and took a stab at being tactful. “It takes months, sometimes years, to learn to play an instrument. I know you all have more than the average amount of musical talent – I could tell that from the choir rehearsal I heard last week – so I know you’re not a group of amateurs.” Boy, she thought, tact turned into bull with little or no warning. “And I would encourage you to continue with your plan to form a band, to play at next year’s Rain Fest.”

  “But we want to do something now. Tonight.”

  “I know you do. And I have an idea. You have an excellent choir. You already know the songs. Why not just get your choir back together as you originally planned? You’re much more prepared for that.”

  “We don’t have a piano player,” someone at the back of the room said. “Dolores is the only one who can play worth a flip, and she’s next on the quilting list and her daughter’s getting married this fall.”

  “Oh,” Dusty said, as if this made any sense at all. “Well…”

  “What she means is, Dolores is afraid of making Mavis mad, ‘cause Mavis is the head of the quilting club. Dolores won’t play with us because Mavis could blackball her and make sure she doesn’t get her daughter’s quilt in time for her – “

  Dusty held up a hand, not willing to get dragged into any more of the convoluted Aloma society entanglements. “That’s okay, that’s not a problem at all. We have the piano here to practice with, and I have portable keyboards that will work just fine for tonight. I will be happy to stand in for Dolores.”

  “Great idea. Let’s get started.”

  The women stacked their things against the wall and lined up in front of the piano so quickly that Dusty was left standing alone in the middle of the room.

  “Come on,” Louise said. “We’re burning daylight.”

  “Yes, great. Let’s get started.” Feeling a little off-kilter at how easy that had been, Dusty sat at the piano bench.

  Louise pointed to the open hymnal on the stand. “This is the first song we’re gonna do tonight. Keep the tempo up, because the Catholics tend to drag us down.” She looked toward the back of the group. “Don’t y’all take that personal.”

  Then she clapped her bony hands together and counted them down. “One two three four!”

  Dusty jumped in, barely keeping up with the exuberant choir. Once Mavis was out of the way, Dusty thought, they weren’t half bad. They blended well and had a great range. To be from so many different churches, she realized they must have spent a lot of time practicing to work this well together.

  She had expected to do some heavy negotiating to get to this point, and she hadn’t been in the church twenty minutes when it looked like things were going to be just fine. What a relief that it was all going so smoothly, she thought as Louise told her what the next song was.

  She was halfway through the second song when she began to grow suspicious. It really had gone smoothly. A little too smoothly. She didn’t know Louise that well, but she felt sure that the old woman didn’t normally let go of an idea unless there was a crowbar involved.

  Dusty’s suspicions were confirmed when she looked up to see Louise winking at Helen Tanner.

  She finished the song, then closed the lid on the piano. She turned to Louise. “You set me up.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You lied to get me down here, and you had all your friends in on it.”

  “I never lied –”

  “Louise, forget it. She knows.” Helen placed her hand on the piano. “I’m sorry, Dusty. This is my fault. I should never have started this. I knew you were going to figure it out.”

  “I don’t like being lied to, and I don’t like being used.” The fact that Helen Tanner had been the one to do it felt like a bitter betrayal.

  “We weren’t using you. I mean, we never meant to, we just wanted you to be a part of our choir.”

  “If you needed a piano player, all you had to do was ask.”

  “And you would have said no,” Helen said. “You never would have done it. Even Luke said you would turn us down unless we guilted you into it.”

  “Besides, we don’t need a piano player,” Louise said. “Three different women in this room are great piano players, and another one thinks she is. We wanted you to be a part of the group, and we knew this was the only way to get you up here.”

  “Luke s
aid I would do it if I was guilted into it?”

  “I told him we wanted to include you in the choir, and he said you would never do it unless we played on your sympathy. Dusty, don’t be mad. We just…well, I wanted you to be a part of our group. And I didn’t know how else to do it.”

  Dusty told herself she was insulted that they’d lied to her. She told herself she had other things to do besides kill time in the Baptist Church choir room and baby-sit a bunch of old women.

  Any second now, she was going to leave in a huff, as she had every right to do.

  Instead, she sat frozen at the bench, hearing Helen’s words over and over again. “I wanted you to be part of the group.”

  Good grief, Dusty thought as her throat grew tight once again. Was she premenstrual or something? Every time she turned around today, she was fighting back tears. It was irritating as all hell.

  “Come on,” Louise said, thumping her on the shoulder. “Don’t be a sorehead.”

  Dusty scowled at both Helen and Louise. “Don’t lie to me again.”

  “We won’t,” Helen promised. “Just stay.”

  “Of course I’ll stay. I said I’d stay, didn’t I?” She flipped open the hymnal. “Well? Come on. You may sound decent, but you still need the practice.”

  Just to get even, she made them practice the same four songs until Louise’s stomach growling drowned out the music, and the old lady claimed she was about to faint. Dusty was hungry herself, and exhausted from lack of sleep. She stifled a yawn as she told them they were through for the day.

  “Wait!” Helen said. “I forgot – Nelda, grab my camera out of my bag and call Brother Mark.”

  When Brother Mark got there, Helen instructed him to take a picture of them all together to commemorate this special occasion. She wanted Luke to know that some good had come from his getting shot.

  Dusty shook her head and stood to move to the side of the room so they could get their picture.

  Helen grabbed her wrist. “No ma’am. You’re in this, too.”

  “But I’m not really –”

  “Yes, you are. Now face the camera and smile.”