To Hope

by Carolyn Brown

  “Mercy!” Jodie said.

  “Yeah,” he agreed. “Let’s go unload my things. I’m staying here until we have to leave for the next rodeo.”

  “Hey, do you think that’s a good idea? You can stay at the ranch. The lodge is full for the next few days but there’re extra bedrooms at the ranch,” she said.

  “No, I’m staying right here. Looks like the electricity is on.” He flipped a light switch on the living room wall.

  “Okay, if you think that’s the best. Here’s the thermostat. What temperature do you want? I hope the heating unit still works. It’s probably not been turned on in years,” she said.

  “Try sixty-eight degrees,” he said.

  She pushed the right buttons and a steady hum started. The curtains began to blow from the warm air flowing from floor vents and the room filled with the smell of hot dust particles.

  “It always smells funny for an hour or so after you turn on the heat in the winter. Dust settles in the vents and the hot air burns them. It’ll be all right in a little while,” Jodie assured him.

  They piled several suitcases, his laptop, and three stuffed garment bags on the sofa in the living room. Jodie wondered why on earth he’d brought so much for a five-day visit but didn’t ask. She was still wandering around in a daze from the day’s events. She couldn’t begin to fathom what he was thinking.

  That he could possibly be living in Murray County permanently was enough to rattle her into a mass of raw nerves. She’d grown to like the man far too much to have him that close. Getting past her feelings would be difficult enough with him seven or eight hours away and never seeing him again.

  “What time is it?” he asked.

  She pointed to an electric clock on the kitchen wall—a funny-looking ceramic duck with eyes that moved back and forth with every tick of the second hand. The cord dropped from the bottom of the clock to a plug near the baseboards.

  “Five already. I won’t have time for a bath before we go to Kay’s for supper. Do you need to go back to the ranch to dress?”

  “In these parts we don’t dress for supper, Jimmy. Kay will probably still be wearing what she had on today only without the flour on her face. Greta might do a little more because she comes from the same kind of people you do,” Jodie said.

  “And what does that mean?” he asked.

  She shook her finger right under his nose. “Hey, don’t you talk to me in that tone. You might want and need a good rousting fight right now and I’m the only one here to give you one, but I’m not going to be your whipping tree, James Moses.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m just plain old Jimmy.”

  “Okay, plain old Jimmy, why don’t you want to be called James Moses today?”

  “Because that’s not my given name. My name is James William after my father. Mother changed it to Moses after we went back to Texas. That was Grandmother’s maiden name and they evidently didn’t want me to have my father’s name. I may legally change it back after I think about it a while.”

  “Don’t let anger make bad choices,” she said.

  “I said I’d think about it,” he snapped.

  “Then do it with a clear mind, not while you are mad at the world and wallowing in forgotten memories. What on Earth happened in San Antonio anyway?”

  “They told me. Very business-like and blunt. Then Mother got angry. I think that’s what triggered my memory. I hadn’t seen her that upset since the day we drove up in the front yard out there. She resented the way of life she’d gotten when she left San Antonio. I know that now. As a little kid though, I only knew she yelled a lot.”

  “It’ll all come back. Think about it though before you go off half cocked and make decisions you’ll regret,” she said.

  He nervously brushed his hair back with his fingertips. What she said made sense. “Let’s go meet my cousin, Kyle, and have supper with the other side of my family. Just when I thought my world was so fixed and boring—”

  “God threw a monkey wrench in it,” she finished the sentence for him.

  “A big one,” he said.

  Supper was rump roast cooked with potatoes and carrots, apple salad, green beans with bacon seasoning, and corn on the cob. The table was set with plain white stoneware dishes and serviceable stainless flatware. Iced tea glasses were pint Mason jars with handles on the sides. Kay sat at one end of the table and her husband, Billy, on the other. Greta and Kyle were on one side. Jodie and Jimmy across from them. Kyle said grace and Kay started passing dishes.

  “I can’t believe that you are Kyle’s cousin. The world is a small place after all, isn’t it? Who would’ve thought it when you drove up in that Mustang to get Jodie?”

  “Not me,” Jimmy said.

  “All children come home eventually, for one reason or the other,” Kay said. “Here, Jimmy, have some corn. We used to have some of those little things that stick in the ends so you can handle it better, but they all got lost. You’ll just have to get your fingers all greasy and use your napkin.”

  “Could you tell me about my father?” Jimmy asked.

  “Sure, what do you want to know?” Billy said.

  Jimmy bit into a hot roll that would rival Mohin’s any day of the week. “Anything.”

  “He was a good man. He just wanted to find his own path. Ratch wanted him to stay on the ranch and follow in his footsteps just the way he’d followed in his father’s. Bud wasn’t satisfied to do that. He wanted to go to college and Ratch wouldn’t have any part of it, not even after Bud got a scholarship to East Central. He said the boy didn’t need any more learning than he could get on the ranch,” Billy said.

  “Ratch was a hard man but an honest one,” Kay said in his defense. “He’d been a young man during the Depression and that always has a bearing on a person. My father wasn’t as tough on us but he had a lot of the same ideas.”

  “So that’s why Daddy ran away?” Jimmy asked.

  Kay nodded. “Finished high school and took off. It was hard on Aunt Novaline. She loved that boy so much, but she held up pretty good. Always expected him to come home and kept things ready if he did. Then Ratch broke his hip and told me to call Bud. We didn’t even know where he was but Ratch did. Said he’d kept track of him the whole time. Good thing by then Aunt Novaline was dead. She’d have shot him right between the eyes for withholding that from her. I made the call and the next day Bud was back at the house. A couple of weeks after that Ratch had the stroke. It affected the other side of his body, the one opposite of the broken hip. He never walked on his own again. Used a wheelchair pretty good up until he died. He talked with a slur but I could understand him.

  “He told me what he wanted done and I did it. He let us lease his land but he refused to sell it to us. Told me once that it was his grandson’s land. He had a picture of you all decked out in jeans and a Western shirt that he kept in his room. I’ve got it amongst his belongings. There’s not many. A shoebox full at the most, but I’ll bring them over to the house tomorrow if you want them.”

  “I would like that,” Jimmy said. He remembered his father taking a picture of him that morning just before he took him over to the Cahill ranch for rodeo day. Someone must have found the film and had it developed.

  “You really going to stay in that old house?” Greta asked.

  “I really am,” Jimmy said.

  “Isn’t it spooky? I mean, your dad died there and there’s all those sad old memories. Why don’t you stay at the lodge?”

  “I need the memories,” he said. “This is a really good supper. Mohin, my grandmother’s chef, would love to compare recipes with you.”

  “You should meet Mohin,” Jodie laughed, lightening the heavy mood. “I thought he was going to be this wizened little old East India man, and he’s a six foot six giant with a rim of red hair around his bald head. He wears jeans and boots and his name is George Mohindovitch.

  Greta giggled. “But Mohin sounds so much more like a fancy chef.”

  “How’d y
ou know?” Jimmy asked.

  “Been there. Done that. Left it all behind. Am not sorry,” she smiled brightly at Kyle.

  He leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Took a while to convince her but she found her broken road.”

  After supper, coffee in the living room and another hour of visiting, Jimmy took Jodie back to the ranch. He walked her to the door and thanked her for being there with him through the day.

  “Hey, you would have done the same for me,” she said.

  “I’m in a confusing state of pure bewilderment,” he admitted. “I’m a writer. I love what I do. I make a decent living but not a filthy rich one. I could have the rich side if I wanted to work in the corporation but I don’t want to work there. I don’t have one single iota of knowledge about a ranch. I don’t need a square mile of land but right now I don’t want to give up one square inch. I’m not sure I can live in that house over there but I have to try for a few days. Everything is a muddle and I can’t explain it to myself, so why am I trying to make you understand?”

  She wrapped her arm around his neck. The soft curls grazing his shirt collar tickled her fingertips. She leaned in and kissed him gently at first, then deepened the kiss. Jolts of tingles raised the hair on her arms and made her heart beat so fast she thought she’d lose her breath.

  “Good night, Jimmy,” she said as she stepped back. “It’ll all work itself out eventually. This mess wasn’t made in twenty-four hours. It won’t get solved in a day either.”

  He turned and waved over his shoulder. If he’d had to say a word after that kiss or be shot, he would have had to drop down on his knees and put his hands behind his head. Great God in heaven, what was he going to do?

  Chapter Thirteen

  A cold north wind played music through the bare tree limbs. Jodie pulled her coat closer to her chest and ran from the car to the house. Roxie met her at the door and the smell of food guided her to the kitchen where the rest of the group milled around as Dee put the finishing touches on supper. Grilled steaks, stuffed twice-cooked potatoes in the shell, homemade bread sliced extra thick, tossed salad, and two pecan pies keeping warm on the back of the stove.

  Roxie’s bright red two-story house located on Buckhorn Corner farther south of Cahill Lodge was as much home to Jodie as her own place. She’d grown up with Dee, Stella, and Roseanna, the whole lot of them playing together in one place or the other while their grandmothers visited about their personal lives and business.

  “Where is he?” Jack asked.

  Jodie looked behind her. Nothing there. “Who?”

  “Don’t give us that innocent look. Where is Jimmy? We’ve all heard about him . . .”

  “. . . and his car,” Kyle said.

  “. . . and how good-looking he is,” Rance joined in.

  “. . . and how he looks at you,” Trey said.

  “I don’t know where Jimmy is. He took me home three nights ago and went to his new ranch. I haven’t seen or heard from him since,” Jodie said. What she didn’t say was that she hadn’t slept in three nights, that every time the phone rang she crossed her fingers hoping it was him, or that she was scared to death she’d lost him with that last kiss.

  Before the conversation went any further, Roxie came into the kitchen with her arm looped through Jimmy’s. “Look who I found about to ring the doorbell. I believe you girls have met Jimmy and you know your cousin, Kyle. These other men are Jack Brewer, who’s married to my granddaughter, Dee.”

  Jack held up the hand that wasn’t holding a wiggling toddler. “Hello.”

  “And that tall fellow over there beside Stella would be Rance Harper,” she said.

  Rance stepped forward and shook Jimmy’s hand.

  “And the last one is Trey Fields, who’s married to Jodie’s sister Roseanna.”

  Trey waved from behind Rosy. “Nice to meet you at last.”

  “My pleasure,” Jimmy said stiffly.

  Dee pulled a pan of fresh hot yeast rolls from the oven and set them on the bar. “Supper is officially ready. Jack, say grace so these folks can eat.”

  Silence filled the room. Jimmy, along with everyone else, bowed his head but he didn’t hear a word Jack said. Instead he stole sideways glances at Jodie. She wore the white cable knit sweater and long denim skirt she’d worn to dinner at Paul’s. Her hair fell forward when she tucked her chin down in reverence so he couldn’t see her pale green eyes. He wished he’d been able to stand closer to her so in that moment when everyone had their eyes shut he could lean over and smell her hair.

  Jack said, “Amen.”

  Jimmy was reminded of the football stadium. Nothing but a few whispers and crying babies when the National Anthem was played, but the minute the last note blasted through the speakers, the crowd went wild. Everyone began to grab plates and talk at once.

  Roxie pushed Jimmy forward. “You better elbow your way in here or this bunch will eat it all up from you.”

  They loaded plates and carried them to an enormous dining room table with enough room for a dinner party twice as big. Roxie presided at the end, leaving no doubt as to who was really queen of the evening. Etta took the other end. No competition. Just two queens in residence. Dee and Jack pulled a high chair from the corner and put it between them. Stella and Rance found places on the same side of the table with Roseanna and Trey moving into place right beside them. That left four places on Roxie’s right. Greta and Kyle filled two, leaving Jimmy and Jodie the others.

  “We’re sorry to hear about your grandfather,” Dee said. “I remember him coming to church when I was a little girl. Couldn’t have been more than five because Roxie says that’s when he went to the nursing home. They sat in the pew in front of us every Sunday. Your grandmother, Miz Novaline, snuck us candy. She called it quiet food and would drop her hand over the pew like she was stretching. When she opened it, there would be a prize. I loved it when she brought sixlets, those little round chocolate things. They were my favorite.”

  “Novaline was a good woman. She loved kids,” Etta said.

  “Thank you.” Jimmy said. He would have loved to ask questions and learn more about his grandparents, but just that much created a lump in his throat that was hard to swallow past. “So tell me Kyle, how did you and Greta meet?” He changed the subject.

  Laughter filled the room. Even Roxie and Etta giggled like school girls.

  “That’s a good dinner story,” Dee said. “Go on Kyle, tell it.”

  “We met first when she dumped a cup of red punch on my best white Western shirt. It was at Rosy and Trey’s wedding last summer. She came down here from Tulsa with her high and mighty ways looking down her nose on me like I was nothing but something that she tracked in from the barnyard soiling her high dollar shoes.”

  Jimmy looked across the table at Greta expecting to see her blushing and angry enough to pour her iced tea on Kyle’s head. She smiled and held up a hand, swallowed and took a turn with the story.

  “You’ve got to realize, Kyle looked down on me just as bad. You should have seen him when I had the wreck and he lost that bull. You would have thought I was the devil reincarnated.”

  Kyle leaned over and kissed her cheek. “You are. See the short story is that we met at the wedding and the next day she was on her way home, driving too fast like she always does and talking on her fancy little cell phone. She dropped the phone, lost control when she tried to pick it up and caused a major wreck. My pickup and cattle trailer were damaged. I lost a bull I’d saved up a year to buy and she was more concerned with breaking the heel of her shoe than showing any remorse for what she’d done.”

  “Oh, honey, I had plenty of remorse afterward,” Greta said. “The judge gave me a choice of six months’ jail time or four months’ community service since it was my sixth offense. And guess who was in charge of taking me to work at the police station and bringing me home afterward, and who had control of my weekends and free time too? None other than Mr. Kyle Parsons. God has a sense of humor, Jimmy. He le
t us fall in love knowing that we were as mismatched as Gabriel and Lucifer.”

  “She’s Lucifer,” Kyle pointed.

  She playfully slapped at him.

  “They’re not a bit more mismatched than Rosy and Trey and that story starts out with your cousin Kyle,” Jodie said.

  “Oh?” Jimmy was enjoying the easy banter.

  “Yes, it does,” Rosy said. “Kyle here told me that I could not, and I repeat could not, all in capital letters, sing at the Arbuckle Ballroom for my sister, here, when she was in Las Vegas riding for the gold buckle. We’d been seeing each other a few weeks and he thought he was going to order me around. That was the end of our dating, let me tell you.”

  “What happened?” Jimmy asked.

  “I sang anyway, and Jodie won the buckle. Never thought of it before this minute. But if you ever ride again in the finals, I’m going to sing at the ballroom. That might have been your good luck charm.”

  “I’ll take all the help I can get,” Jodie said.

  “There’s more,” Trey said. “I was on I-35 when my limo started acting up so my driver pulled off at the next exit which just happened to be where the ballroom is located. There was a service station but it was closed so he drove on over to the ballroom. We went inside to ask if anyone could help us. The bartender had a beef with Rosy and used me to help settle it. Seems she’d been teasing him and winning most of the time so he led me to believe she was a hooker. When I propositioned her I found out about her right hook.” He rubbed his chin. “Being the gentleman that I am, I offered to take her to dinner to make amends. Four weeks later we were married and four years later we divorced.”

  “Then he got himself kidnapped and they sent me down here to this godforsaken place to beg Rosy to go get him. She’s a crackerjack tracker,” Greta said.

  “She rescued me all right and I found out I still loved her. It took me all summer to convince her to believe in me again,” Trey said.