The Love of a Cowboy

by Anna Jeffrey

  At home that evening, she couldn’t remember when she had been so blue. Sitting alone in the house’s quiet, she tried to think of an old school friend she could call up and chatter with about nothing, a human voice. Unfortunately, she had lost touch long ago with all but Piggy.

  Luke eased into her thoughts. Should she call him? Tell him why she had left Callister so suddenly? She no longer had his phone number, having torn it to pieces and flushed it down the toilet back at the cottage.

  Swallowing her pride, she dialed Information, had to ask for Lucas A. McRae, Gerald McRae, then the Double Deuce Ranch before she obtained the listing. She scrawled the ten digits on a notepad and sat there staring at them, her sweating palm on the receiver. Such innocuous things, numbers written in black ink on white paper, but they had the power to devastate her all over again.

  Don’t do this, Dahlia. He broke up with you. Don’t chase after him.

  Ignoring the voice in her head, she jerked the receiver up and keyed in the number. A young, female voice answered. Dahlia hung up, sucking in a breath to calm her trembling stomach. Piggy. Dahlia dialed their old Callister number and learned the phone had been disconnected. Where in the world was Piggy?

  The following morning, finding her dad moved from ICU gave Dahlia a lift. He was awake and lifted one hand when he saw her. Noticing spittle on his chin, she plucked a tissue from a box beside the bed and wiped his mouth. He grunted broken words and fought at her hands.

  An alarm went off in her head. She told him she was going for fresh water and headed for the nurses’ station where she ran into Dr. Webb and released a frantic diatribe. “Dad’s drooling and I don’t think he knows it and he still can’t talk very well. You told me—or at least I thought he would be getting better by now.”

  The doctor looped an arm around her shoulder. “Let’s sit down.” He guided her to a chair and took a seat beside her. “This is a long process, Dahlia. He will get better, but he’s never going to be like he was. You have to face that or you won’t be able to help him. I’m relying on you. But more important, he’s relying on you.”

  “I’m trying,” she said through tears, angry at herself for such an emotional outburst. “I’m honestly trying. It’s just that I’ve never been around anything like this.”

  Good grief. Couldn’t she have a conversation of any kind without blubbering?

  “I understand.” Dr. Webb squeezed her hand. “You mustn’t let yourself get discouraged.” He rose. “Now. I’ve made an appointment with Dr. Colson in Abilene, for . . .”—he reached into his white coat pocket and produced a slip of paper—“for the sixth.”

  She stood, too, and used her forefinger to catch a tear in the corner of one eye. “The neurologist? But that’s more than a week away.”

  “He’ll want to do some tests, I’m sure. Arrange for therapy, probably at West Texas Rehab.”

  “Dad’ll be in the hospital another ten days then?”

  “No. I’ll have to discharge him on Friday.” Dr. Webb scribbled on a chart as he spoke. “You’ll have to take care of him at home.”

  Dahlia blinked. She didn’t have the first clue how to care for someone in her dad’s condition. Every part of her wanted to shrivel into a corner and whimper who, me? But she couldn’t. Just as she had been forced to deal with her husband’s infidelity and death and all that had accompanied that, she had to deal with this now. “Okay,” she said, drawing a deep breath.

  “He’ll need a wheelchair. Dorothy in my office will help you find one. Somebody will have to be with him. Dorothy has the names of some ladies who could stay with him when you can’t.”

  Dahlia nodded like a robot and longed for yesterday when her most onerous challenge had been saving the store’s fresh fruits and vegetables from the oppressive heat.

  “You’re looking a little tired,” Dr. Webb said, his narrowed eyes settling on her face. “Do something for yourself between now and Friday. Take a break.”

  All she could manage was a nod.

  “I’ve known you since you were a little girl, Dahlia. You can do this.”

  “We’ll be okay,” she said with little confidence.

  After the doctor departed, she returned to Dad’s room, placed the pitcher of water on the bedside table and took his hand. “Dr. Webb says you might get out of here Friday.”

  An eyelid fluttered. Dahlia squeezed his hand, waiting for him to speak. “Hot,” he slurred. “Produce.”

  She left the hospital sobbing.

  Chapter 19

  “You can do this, Dahlia.” Dr. Webb spoke as he wrote prescriptions and signed a form dismissing Elton Montgomery from the hospital into Dahlia’s care. “I’ve known you since you were a little girl and I have confidence in you.”

  It was Friday. And Dahlia had been home nine days, a frighteningly short time in which to orient herself into her new role.

  By the time her father had been home twenty-four hours, Dahlia realized the extent of the stroke’s devastation beyond his paralysis. His debilitation extended to areas she had not considered. He seemed childlike, showing petulance over the smallest of things and an anger contradictory to the easy-going man he had always been. Sometimes, when he couldn’t form words, he wept. She had to coax him to eat, but he struggled so, she had to dig deep to find the strength to walk away from taking his spoon and feeding him. Dr. Webb had told her to let him do things independently.

  His mobility was impaired to the extent he needed help in the bathroom. Requiring assistance from her made him cry. Home health aides came the following morning. They showed her how to brush a stroke victim’s teeth and shave him, then how to maneuver him into the bathtub without hurting him. Dahlia looked on in terror as he fought with the aides.

  To add to the confusion, visitors came bearing food, most of which wasn’t on his strict diet and which she didn’t eat herself. It accumulated on one end of the kitchen counter like an offering at a monument.

  They survived the weekend with no major mishaps. Monday began with him messing himself when she failed to get him onto the toilet seat. Attempting to clean him up brought waves of nausea. She broke into trembling and sweating, dashed to the bathroom off her bedroom and threw up. When she recovered, she found him where she had left him, half on, half off the toilet, and sobbing like a child.

  “Oh, Dad,” she said, fighting tears of her own. “I’m sorry I’m so inept.”

  He was a tall man, weighing close to two-hundred, but fitting her shoulder into his armpit as the nurses’ aides had showed her how to do, she levered him off the toilet and wrestled him into the tub. Instead of struggling against her as he had done with the aides, he helped as much as he could, weeping the whole time.

  Dr. Webb’s words became a mantra: You can do this, you can do this, you can do this…

  As she bent over the tub removing his pajamas, the stench overpowered her. Bile boiled up in her throat. What was wrong with her? She couldn’t be sick at a time like this. She dashed away again to her bathroom. Returning with scented bubble bath, she found him lying on his side in the tub, the good side of his face twisted into a grotesque grimace.

  She hadn’t seen him in years without his shirt and never that she could recall without his pants. She was stunned again at his appearance. He looked so old!

  He is old, you ninny! And he’s sick and he needs you.

  Through tears and nausea, she dumped bubble bath under the running water and breathed in the clean fragrance. Then she dug out a fresh wash cloth and bathed him. She had to glance away from his nakedness often. They were both embarrassed.

  With clumsy struggle and help from his functional side, she lifted him out of the tub and dried him. Then she dressed him in clean pajamas and settled him in the wheelchair. He apologized and thanked her again, his words broken and garbled.

  “Please don’t thank me, Dad. I want to take care of you. They don’t teach this in business school, but I’ll get the hang of it.”

  She helped him back into bed
, then called the home health aide and told her she had already bathed him.

  After such a bungling experience, he had to be exhausted. She sure was. She settled into a chair beside his bed and began to read to him from the Fort Worth newspaper. In minutes, he dropped off to sleep.

  Still weak and unsettled, she craved fresh air. She ran a glass of water from the kitchen faucet, then walked out to the back porch for the first time since coming home and wilted onto a plastic patio chair. She hadn’t re-acclimated to the West Texas climate. In no time, sweat drenched her clothing. She glanced at the rusted thermometer hanging on the wall. Over a hundred degrees and it wasn’t yet noon. She heaved a sigh.

  Looking over the backyard, she saw a shambles. Dad’s dying garden took up one corner. Zinnias he had planted under the utility room window lay in withered clumps on the ground. The un-watered Bermuda grass was burned to white by the summer sun.

  Chuck’s words echoed and another charge of guilt struck her. Indeed Dad had been ill all summer. Otherwise, he wouldn’t have neglected the yard and failed to plant flowers. Her mother had loved flowers, had named her only child after one. As a memorial, every summer, Dad filled the yard with vibrant blooms.

  The method Dahlia had crafted for dealing with life’s cruelties was to simply not face them, pretend the bad things were happening to someone else and go back to them later. After the past two weeks, her neatly compartmentalized coping system looked like a hurricane’s aftermath. The cold hard truth refused to be set aside. Her father was no longer the gentle, unselfish man who had guided her through her life. Now that he was a stroke victim and a patient, their roles had reversed. For all the trauma she had faced in her short years, none of it had prepared her for what lay ahead. She wished she smoked. This seemed like a good time for a cigarette.

  She sipped at her water, allowing herself to wallow in self-pity for a while. Then she gritted her teeth and tackled cleaning up the bathroom. At the end of it, she grimly acknowledged she had crossed a threshold. Something within her had hardened.

  Leaving the grocery store in Chuck’s hands for one more day, she stayed home, plowed into rearranging furniture. She made the living room wheelchair-friendly and moved her TV from her bedroom into Dad’s. By nightfall, not only was she hot and tired, she felt as if she were moving through a crazy house, with distorting mirrors and floors structured to mimic vertigo. Her head and body ached. She was cranky, on the verge of tears again. She poured a glass of iced tea, went out to the back porch and sat at the plastic patio table in the humid heat, contemplating the future.

  So much for returning to Dallas. She hadn’t seriously considered it anyway. The memories were still too raw and the fire in her belly had been quenched by all that had happened in the past few years. Besides that, now she could see she had never had the barracuda personality it took to survive in the corporate world. She questioned if she even had what it took to make it in her dad’s mom and pop grocery store.

  Spoiled, she admitted, not like a rich kid who had been given everything money could buy, but her father had always taken care of her in one way or another. After her mother’s unexpected death, he had set aside his own grief to be both father and mother. Without an argument or a grumble, he had paid for her to attend an expensive college which she had thought would launch a stellar career in business. And when she buried Kenneth, he had been there, enduring along with her the condescension of Kenneth’s snobbish parents.

  Not once had he failed her. She owed him.

  “I’ll take care of you, Dad,” she murmured into the night. “I promise, no matter what I have to do, you’ll spend your last days in your own house in Loretta. . . . And somehow, I’ll save the grocery store. I’ll make you proud of me.”

  She didn’t know if it was fatigue or maybe the virus plaguing her, but in the dark, she thought she saw an image of her mother’s smile.

  And from out of the blue, she thought of jewelry—her expensive jewelry—tucked away in her top dresser drawer.

  Cash. At the thought of it, Dahlia met the next morning inspired. She knew of two people in Dallas to contact about the sale of her ring and bracelet. It would take a few days or a week, but she was confident of the outcome. She called and left messages.

  To avoid a repeat of yesterday’s chaos, she had to be better organized. Readying Dad for the day would take extra time. She switched off her alarm before it had a chance to buzz, dragged out of bed and made her way with purpose to the kitchen. She still felt as if she were riding ocean waves in a dinghy, but a slice of toast made her feel better. She hadn’t eaten an adequate meal since her return, she reminded herself.

  A look at the calendar told her she had no time to be sick. Approaching was Labor Day weekend, a holiday important to punching up the Handy Pantry’s sales and it was already Tuesday. She hadn’t so much as thought of it, much less planned for it.

  The big stores in Abilene would already be set for a blow-out food weekend. Stock in, advertising out. She was behind. That meant spending more hours in the grocery store and hiring Maria Sanchez to spend more time with Dad. With what she paid Maria, sales in the store needed to be good.

  And they could be, she knew from experience. The lake people would pour out of Abilene and the Fort Worth/Dallas Metroplex for the long weekend, pulling boats and hauling jet skis. The campgrounds, the lakefront cabins and trailers would fill. Everyone would eat and drink. For the first time since her return to Loretta, she was grateful for the heat. The hotter the temperature, the more customers bought beer, sodas and ice and cooked outside on grills.

  The store’s cash reserve fell in the mere pittance category, just enough to bring in extra drinks and snack foods and more beeves. The Coke distributor agreed to share the expense of a last minute give-away promotion. The Budweiser distributor came through, too, with gimme caps and can holders. She skidded under the wire with an ad in Loretta’s weekly newspaper—a special on prime beef cuts and hamburger meat, Coke and Bud. She had hundreds of flyers printed. In exchange for a case of Pepsi, an employee’s son and his friends placed them under windshield wipers on cars in parking lots and in mail boxes. Her efforts didn’t carry the cutting edge excitement of a big chain media blitz like those she had once orchestrated in Dallas, but fueled by desperation, her adrenaline pumped just as rapidly.

  She and Chuck had worked long hours all week cleaning and sanitizing the meat department for the government inspection, which they had aced. Now they worked equally long hours butchering. The upside, if one could be found, was spending time in the meat cooler. After the pleasant summer temperatures in the mountains, the Texas heat sapped her strength.

  To varying degrees, the dizziness and nausea hung on.

  Thursday brought Dad’s much-anticipated visit to the Abilene neurologist. Except for the challenge of bathing and dressing him and seating him in the Plymouth, the appointment went well. The specialist diagnosed cerebral thrombosis brought on by arteriosclerosis, whatever that meant. He sketched a map-like picture on a prescription pad showing her the location of a clot, bringing to mind vague anatomy drawings from some biology class. He scheduled an MRI and told her daily physical and occupational therapy would begin at once. A daily trip to Abilene from Loretta for therapy? How could she do it?

  At the end of the visit, to her amazement, the doctor wrote out new prescriptions to replace the four hundred dollars’ worth she had just bought.

  That evening, after Dad had eaten and been put to bed, she sat down with her day planner at the kitchen table. The yellow Formica and chrome relic’s home had been one end of the kitchen since before her mother’s death. The whole kitchen was a relic, really. The only amenity Dad had added was a fan mounted over the table, flush against the ten-foot ceiling. In its center, three hooded light bulbs clustered. Only one burned. Since replacing the spent bulbs called for her to drag the stepladder from the garage, she had decided to wait for the demise of the third one before making the effort.

  She mostly avoide
d the kitchen at night, finding ambience depressing. Tonight she ignored the murk and turned the planner pages to the current calendar. The next few months would be hard, but now she could organize. She knew more about the future.

  Or did she?

  Her period was six days late.

  Dear God.

  All the breath whooshed from her lungs and she began to tremble. Like a thunderstorm, the episodes of unrestrained lovemaking with Luke at the mountain hot springs and in his cabin crashed into her thoughts. Those hours now seemed like a fantasy. Had it been only three weeks? It seemed like three months.

  Oh, sure, during sleepless nights she had thought about their carelessness, but there didn’t seem to be an empty niche left in her mind to worry over the consequences. They towered in front of her now, like a granite monolith blocking her path. An animal whine burst from her throat, followed by uncontrollable, hiccupping sobs. She laid her head on her hands and wept over all of it—her beloved father whose existence had been forever altered, the horror of facing a second bankruptcy in her short twenty-nine years and the loss of the love of her life.

  And the real possibility that the latter had made her pregnant.

  Piggy rolled into town late Saturday afternoon. Like a lantern on a dark night, Dahlia welcomed her return. The ebullient redhead teased Dad as she always did, as if everything were normal, and as always, he laughed—the first time since Dahlia had come home.

  After she put him to bed, she and Piggy went to the kitchen. Piggy glanced up at the light fixture. “You out of light bulbs? This place looks like a cave.”

  “I have to get the ladder. Now that you’re here, you can help me.” Dahlia headed for the garage.