by Anna Jeffrey
“Unless I’m dead or disabled, it’s what I do. Every day.”
“I’m kind of a half-assed cook, being a bachelor and hating restaurants like I do. Mom’s got a freezer full of beef. I’d cook up a steak if you wanted to stay and eat. It gets kind of lonesome out here, you know?”
She replied with a long, level look at him with those pretty green eyes, and at that moment, something feral passed between them. He had been given the eye by many women, but this was different. It was like a spark, so sudden and quick, he wondered if he had imagined it. He didn’t know what it was, but he did know he wanted nothing more at this moment than for her to come back for supper.
“You might not want to wait,” she said. “It could be seven o’clock before I get back.”
If that were true, she would be gathering eggs in the dark. And dammit, what if yesterday’s rattlesnake had a brother or a sister? “If it starts to get dark and you’re not back, I’ll get the eggs for you.”
She laughed. “Have you gone crazy? Don’t tell me you’ve gotten to like the chickens and the egg business.”
Her laugh had a musical quality to it, and he liked that. He also liked the bright smile that went with it. Especially so early in the morning. Any woman that cheerful before daylight had to have a strong constitution.
“I’ll see you tonight,” he said, stepping back from the truck, feeling a little unsettled by his own unexpected emotion.
“Right.” She backed the truck in an arc. When she stopped to change gears, he approached the door again. She buzzed down the window. “Be careful,” he said. “I don’t know what Mom would do if you ended up like Lane.”
“I’m always careful. I’m a good driver.”
He watched her drive away and continued to watch until she made a right turn onto the highway. Then he headed for the house. For no reason, he found himself whistling.
Dalton occupied all of Joanna’s brain as she drove toward town. Unshaven and rumpled, he had looked as if he had just crawled out of bed. And of course, he had. That thought traveled straight to the place within her that had been dormant for a very long time. Forget it, she told herself. He’s got someone, and he’s only in town temporarily.
He had been a different man, helping her load up her eggs and teasing her. Then inviting her to eat supper with him. He was nothing if not a puzzle.
It gets kind of lonesome out here, you know?
So he gets lonesome, she thought smugly. Just like everyone else. He was human.
She reached the city limits and passed through town on her way to the Lubbock highway. Hatlow hadn’t yet come alive. She saw activity only at Betty Lou’s Coffee Cup. There, pickups and cars belonging to the usual coffee and breakfast crowd filled the parking lot. Betty Lou’s was the hub of the local small-business community. Every morning, the group traded gossip and transacted business in the country café atmosphere.
Among the vehicles, she saw Jay Huddleston’s big red dually pickup with its white magnetic sign on the doors that said HUDDLESTON WELL SERVICING. Shari would be at home rousing the Huddleston brood and getting them ready for school.
Hatlow hadn’t changed much from its bland appearance of Joanna’s high school days. If anything, it had become more run-down. Featureless two-and three-story buildings of indeterminate age lined both sides of the main street. Square brick boxes with windows. She couldn’t remember when one of them had last received a facelift. The oil bust of the eighties had almost wiped out the town. No one had money for something so frivolous as renovations.
She passed her own white brick building and its pink sign that said JOANNA’S SALON & SUPPLIES, its windows lit and showing off a colorful display of new hair-care products from Redken. As she always did when she saw the business on a quiet morning, she made a silent prayer of thanksgiving that it was still standing. She didn’t expect it not to be, but she still felt grateful. Thank God she had organized the salon and the retail store so well they almost ran themselves, because it seemed that she paid less and less attention to them these days.
Speeding along the highway toward Lubbock, her mind wandered again to her rescuer, Dalton Parker. Be careful. She was touched that he made the effort to caution her, as if he would care if she had an accident.
She thought of the old proverb from somewhere that said if someone saved your life, they were responsible for you forever. Or something like that. She didn’t believe her life had been in danger yesterday, not really. But confronted by a rattlesnake, who knew what would happen? She was just glad he had been there. She had faced challenges, but she had never had to do something so violent as whack a rattlesnake. Firing her shotgun at chicken hawks was different.
She thought of the fence-building project and what her mother had said about Dalton that Sunday following Lane’s accident: Even when he was a little boy, Earl worked him like he was a grown man.
Every muscle and sinew in Joanna’s body could confirm that the man had learned how to work.
Different comments she had heard said about Dalton during the past two weeks came back. Her sister’s words: I could tell he carried a hurt. But it wasn’t caused by some girl.
She thought of what Clova had said that night in the hospital when they waited together to learn Lane’s fate: He don’t care nothin’ ’bout us, anyway, Joanna. And I don’t blame him. Back when it mattered, we didn’t act like we cared much about him.
Now she was more curious than ever to know what Clova had meant. What Joanna had seen of Dalton was inconsistent with the behavior of a man who cared nothing about his mother or brother.
She had not spent all of her adult life in a service business without learning a little about human nature and behavior. It dawned on her now that she might have Dalton Parker figured out. Growing up, he’d had no one. The very person who should have supported him, his mother, had failed him somehow, and he had been hurt profoundly. Joanna believed he had a good heart, but he feared getting hurt again. He had grown a hard edge in self-defense. She had always assumed that Clova adored Dalton, so how had she managed to cut him so deeply? Her own heart softened even more toward both son and mother.
Stop it, her good sense told her. He’s the one person whose problems you don’t need to take on.
Still, Joanna couldn’t stop thinking about him. She couldn’t imagine growing up in a home where parents were cruel to their children. Her father had been a kind and gentle man. And he had been a patient man to have put up with Alvadean Walsh’s eccentricities without quarrel. Clova and her triangular relationship with her deceased husband and her children was becoming a bigger curiosity all the time.
Indeed, Joanna might have Dalton Parker figured out. But now, with a flurry of such unfamiliar emotions, she was no longer sure she understood Joanna Walsh.
Chapter 14
Dalton started his Monday at the Wacker County Courthouse, writing a check that paid the taxes on the Parker ranch. When he had called his business manager in LA last night to arrange for the money to be transferred into his checking account, the guy had given him a stern lecture about paying taxes on real estate he didn’t own. But at the moment, Dalton saw no other choice.
From there he crossed the street to Hatlow Farmers Bank. A plaque beside the front door marked it as a Texas historical building. The bank had been founded in the nineteenth century and the hundred-year-old red limestone building had obviously been maintained to reflect its American Victorian-era history. Dalton delivered a copy of the receipt from the tax assessor’s office showing the taxes paid current on the Parker ranch. The Hispanic employee who took it couldn’t have cared less about a ranch that was as much a Texas historical landmark as the bank. Ironic, he thought.
Leaving the courthouse square and driving along Hatlow’s main street, he saw the aftermath of a collapsed economy. What had once been a thriving Norman Rockwell-ish small town, supported by oil and agriculture, was now a dilapidating shell of buildings and stores with boarded-up windows and locked doors. Mom had t
old him the landscape was the same all over West Texas. Depressing to see the site of his youth in decay.
Before Dalton graduated from high school in 1987, the price of oil had already plummeted. Small oil operators had already started to disappear from the Hatlow business scene. Though he had witnessed the ruinous event at its genesis, he could see that the impact of the economic crash hadn’t fully manifested itself until after his departure.
But more than depressed oil prices affected Hatlow, according to his mother. Cotton farming had changed. Many farmers found it easier and more profitable to let their fields lie fallow in return for government checks. Ranching had fared only slightly better than farming, but most of the cattle operations were still hanging on. The American public could do without American cotton, but they did love their American beef.
Oh, well, he told himself. At least no one had to fear a sniper hidden behind one of the darkened second-floor windows. No suicide bombers would be showing up in the grocery store or the schoolhouse. Not yet.
He soon came to a flower shop located on the outskirts of downtown in a Hatlow version of a strip mall. He ordered a bouquet to be delivered to his mother, folded the receipt for the taxes into a small square and inserted it into a gift card to be attached to the bouquet. He requested that the flowers be delivered today.
When he left the flower shop, he carried a pink four-foot-tall teddy bear wearing a white lacy bow around its neck. It was left over from Valentine’s Day, the shop owner had told him. He still pondered the fact that his mother hadn’t said a damn word about Lane being the father of a small daughter.
These days, the thought of kids, any kids, brought to the front of his mind the hundreds of pathetic small faces he had photographed in the poverty-ridden parts of the world. They all had the same mournful expressions—grim little mouths and haunted eyes too old for their years. A little girl lucky enough to be born in the USA should know that her family included two sides.
Dalton might not dwell on the past, he might not be a sterling example of family togetherness, but that didn’t mean he had given up on the ideal of family unity. He hadn’t forgotten the pain of growing up in a fractured home. Besides that, the Parker clan already had one living bastard. It didn’t need another.
He positioned the teddy bear on the passenger seat. As he climbed into the truck and headed for the edge of town. he could think of no time when a pink teddy bear had been his passenger, or for that matter, when he had bought a stuffed toy of any size or color. He had picked it up purely on impulse.
A visit to the Dairy Queen wasn’t on his agenda for today, but he had the teddy bear and he had to get rid of it.
At the Dairy Queen order counter, a tall brown-haired girl in a pink smock took his order for a burger and fries, trying to be inconspicuous in staring at him and the giant teddy bear crammed under his left arm. She probably thought he was a nut. She called his order in to the kitchen, then turned back to him. “That’ll be six dollars and four cents.”
“I’m looking for Mandy Ferguson,” he said, juggling the teddy bear while digging into his jeans pocket for money.
She smiled and her whole face lit up. “Oh. I’m Mandy.”
She looked fresh and pretty, with long, shining brown hair and the unsullied face of someone no older than twenty-five. He made a mental sigh of relief. At least she wasn’t underage.
“Would you like for me to hold that bear for you?” she asked.
“Would you mind?” He handed her the bear. It was wider than she was. “I’m Dalton Parker,” he said, pulling a ten from his money clip and dropping it on the counter.
As a glimmer of recognition passed through her eyes, a blush stained her cheeks. “Has something happened to Lane?”
“No, nothing new. I just want to talk to you a minute if you’ve got time.”
She handed the bear back to him, opened the cash register drawer and gave him change. “You’re Lane’s big brother, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“What do you want?”
“To talk. Can we find a private place to sit down?”
“I guess so.” She turned and asked a heavyset woman standing at the soft ice cream machine—and obviously eavesdropping—to watch the counter for her. The woman leveled a cold glare at him and Mandy both. Mandy ignored her and rounded the end of the counter. She led the way to a small square table in the back corner of the dining room.
“I wanted to meet you,” Dalton said, setting the bear in a chair. With its fat arms protruding rigidly from its sides, it filled the straight-backed chair and looked as if it was waiting to be picked up and hugged. He took a seat across the table from the girl. The teddy bear stared at both of them with big black button eyes and a smiling snout. “I just found out you and Lane have a little girl.”
She dropped her gaze to her hands. They looked red and chapped.
“It’s okay,” Dalton said. “I mean, I’m not here to pass judgment or anything. I heard that you don’t want any part of my brother, but you know how talk is. You never can tell how much of it’s true. If that’s how you feel, I’d like to hear it from you directly.”
Her head shook slowly. She looked back up at him, a troubled expression showing in her eyes. “I can’t afford Lane.”
Dalton chuckled, hoping to put her at ease. “That might be true of all of us. But that doesn’t tell me much. Did he not want your little girl or what?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“I intend to. Tomorrow, when I see him again.”
Her head shook again and she looked out the large picture window beside them. At what, Dalton couldn’t tell. There wasn’t much to see in the arid landscape, not even bushes or trees.
“I would’ve stuck with him if he’d tried just a little bit. But after I got pregnant, my mom and dad wanted to be sure the baby had a good home. They wanted me to break it off with him. I live at their house and they give me a job, so…” She shrugged and returned her gaze to her hands.
Dalton glanced toward the woman at the soft ice cream machine. Given the evil eye she was casting in his direction, he wondered if she could be this girl’s mother. “You said, ‘tried just a little bit.’ What did you want him to do that he wasn’t doing?”
“I didn’t ask him for much. I just wanted him to be sober. I thought we could make it if he would just be sober.”
The girl’s face might be unblemished, but her eyes appeared to be nursing a great pain. Her wish was no different from what any other woman, or mother, would wish, Dalton supposed. “I see,” he said, trying to hide his unease. He was lousy at conversations like this. He had a rocky record with women, but at least a surprise pregnancy wasn’t part of it.
The heavyset woman brought a brown sack stained with grease and handed it to him, along with another pointed glare. He kept quiet, sliding the hamburger out of the sack and stalling by fiddling with salt and pepper until she returned to her spot behind the counter. “If I said I think things could be different when Lane comes out of the hospital, would it make any difference to you?”
Mandy gave a hint of a smile. “I don’t know. I’m pretty easy when it comes to Lane. I always was. At least, that’s what my dad says. That was part of the problem. Lane could talk me into just about anything.” Her shoulders lifted in a great sigh. “But my mom and dad…I just don’t know.”
“I know he pays child support, but—”
“He wanted to,” she said, straightening into a defensive posture. “I didn’t make him.”
“I’m not questioning that, Mandy. If he has a daughter, he should take care of her. Before he had the wreck, did he see her?”
“Not much. When she was first born, he came around a lot, but most of the time, if my dad was at home…well, Daddy always ran him off.”
Dalton nodded, chewing on a bite of his hamburger and studying her. Hell, she cared about Lane. Anybody could see it. But did she have the courage of her feelings? Could or would she defy her parents? “You
rs is the only kid in our family. I think it would mean a lot to my mom to have a relationship with her granddaughter.”
Dalton had no idea whether his last statement was true. Mom had never worn her emotions on her sleeve. “It could also mean a new life for my brother. He’s gonna get out of ICU this week. Maybe as early as tomorrow. I’d be happy to take you up to visit him if you want to.”
She looked down at her hands again. “I don’t know. My mom and dad—”
“You’re old enough to make your own decision about it. I mean, we’re talking about your daughter’s father and nothing more than a hospital visit.”
She looked out the window again. “Someone told me he’s going to be crippled.”
“That’s what the docs are saying, but it’s too early to know for sure. Having the support of people who care about him will help him.”
“I don’t know. I’d have to think about it.” She glanced toward the heavyset woman who was now standing at the end of the order counter and openly watching them. Pushing back her chair, Mandy started to rise. “I need to get back.”
Dalton got to his feet, too. “I know. I didn’t mean to keep you. This bear’s a present for your daughter. From her uncle.”
The wide smile lit up her face again. “Really? Oh, my gosh. It’s twice as big as she is, but she’ll just love it.”
“Okay if I just leave her sitting there?”
“Yessir. I’ll put it in my car in a minute. It’s so cute.”
He returned her smile. “It is cute. And you don’t have to call me sir. What’d you say your daughter’s name is?”
She was still smiling. “It’s Malaney. Kind of a cross between Lane’s name and mine. Lane and I made it up together.”