Jimmy wore a black Italian suit with a boxy jacket, a white silk shirt, black tie, and shoes with tassels on them.
Roseanna served as maid of honor. Paul stood beside Jimmy as his best man. The house overflowed with family and friends but from the time Jimmy looked into Jodie’s eyes, there was no one within a hundred miles but the two of them. They said their vows and he placed the gold wedding band on her finger.
“And now you may kiss your bride,” the preacher said.
And he did.
“If that’s any indication of how long this marriage will last, I think we’ll see one of those eternal things,” Roxie said to Jimmy’s grandmother.
“Too bad,” Cathy said just loud enough for Roxie to hear.
Roxie leaned down and whispered in her ear. “Young lady, you need a month in Murray County to adjust your attitude.”
“Forty-eight hours in this godforsaken place is forty-seven too many,” she shot right back.
“Then you go home to Texas but if you cause a bit of trouble between our new married couple you will answer to me, and I don’t care what physical condition you’re in. I’ll kick your tail all the way across these United States and enjoy doing it.”
Before Cathy could say a word, Roxie was headed toward the front of the lodge to kiss the groom and give her best congratulatory hug to the bride.
“How long do we have to stay?” Jimmy whispered out of the corner of his mouth as he graciously shook hands and received hugs.
“Not long,” Jodie answered back.
Cathy rolled her wheelchair to the front of the lobby and extended her hand to Jodie. “You will let him come to San Antonio to see us occasionally?”
Jimmy stooped to hug her. “Does that include an invitation for Jodie as well?”
“Of course not. We’d like some time with you alone,” Cathy said.
Jimmy stood up. “For the first few years you’ll simply have to make time to come see us. We’re going to be busy trying to make a ranch pay for itself and I’m already outlining a new mystery.”
Melanie, Jodie’s older sister, brought a man over to the wheelchair. “Oh, Cathy, I want you to meet my brother-in-law. My husband is Jim and this is his brother, Kent, who is a physical therapist when he’s not busy running an oil company. I know you two will have a lot to talk about.”
Kent shook hands with Cathy and then without asking took the handles of the wheelchair and escorted her out onto the deck.
“Hmmm,” Jodie grinned.
“Poor Kent,” Jimmy chuckled.
It was two hours later when Jodie and Jimmy finally left the reception in a flurry of rice showering down on their heads. The sky looked like someone had spilled yellow, orange, pink, and burgundy paint in a wide splash as the sun set that evening. Jodie leaned across the console in the Mustang and kissed Jimmy on the cheek.
“When we get really rich I want an old 1952 Chevrolet,” she said.
“Why?”
“Because they have bench seats and really wide back seats,” she said.
“Aha, my wife thinks we’ll be young forever. Did I tell you that you are absolutely beautiful tonight? Did I tell you I’m the luckiest man in the world? That I’m glad what I hoped to accomplish didn’t come true?”
“Fifty-two times but I’ll never get tired of hearing that. Did I tell you that you aren’t what I hoped to marry?”
His face fell, and she giggled. “You aren’t my darlin’. You are so much more than my hopes could have imagined.”
“Sit right there,” he said when he stopped the car in front of the ranch house.
He ran around the car and opened the door but before she could step out he scooped her up into his arms and carried her across the yard and the porch. He’d purposely left the door unlocked so it would be easy to open.
He set her down in the living room where a dozen candles flickered and roses were strewn in a pathway leading from the front door to the queen-sized bed awaiting them. He removed her cowboy hat and sent it sailing to the new sofa, made of a soft brown leather that invited them to snuggle down together at the end of a long day. “Welcome home, Mrs. Jodie Crowe.”
She tangled her fingers in those soft blond curls on his shirt collar and pulled his face toward hers. “Welcome home to you, James Moses Crowe,” she said just before her lips found his.
He scooped her up again, pushed a button on a CD player and Rascal Flatts began to sing their song, “Bless the Broken Road.” By the time he laid her ever so gently on a bed scattered with red rose petals, the singer talked about seeing how every sign pointed straight to you and every long lost dream lead me to where you are.
He removed her cowboy boots. “It’s true, isn’t it? The broken road brought me home to you. Do you believe in fairy tales?”
“And they lived happily ever after,” she whispered.
Epilogue
7 years later
Jodie wasn’t ready for her son, Ratch, to go to kindergarten. The first day hadn’t been easy for her even if he did tell her he was a big boy and ready to go off to school. He was all excited about seeing his friends every day: Stella and Rance’s oldest son, Justin; Dee and Jack’s second child, Forrest; Greta and Kyle’s prissy daughter, Emalee; Rosy and Trey’s twins, Van and Marie. He was elated and didn’t even see her wipe away tears as she left him in care of the teacher.
The next day was rodeo day at the Crowe ranch so Jodie didn’t have a problem with tears that day. The whole kindergarten class brought their lunch in paper bags and wore their favorite Western clothes. Ratch wore a rodeo clown outfit. He’d been mutton busting and clowning for two years already and her heart swelled as she helped him put on his baggy pants and painted his face.
Jimmy leaned against the door jamb and watched them getting ready for the big day. That’s all he’d heard about for a week. All of Ratch’s friends were coming and anyone who wanted to could ride the sheep. He’d teach them all about mutton busting and how to hang on for the full eight seconds. He was even going to share his bull-on-a-limb with whoever wanted to ride it. Jodie’s father had given him his favorite toy when he was three years old. An old tractor tire had been cut into the shape of a bull and hung on four ropes from a sturdy tree limb. Ratch had won the gold buckle a hundred times and that poor old tire bull had had the devil kicked out of him almost every day, winter and summer alike.
Jimmy had sold two books a year and it had kept them afloat there at first but in the last two years, Jodie had made the ranch pay for itself. Her Lowline cattle herd was growing and she had a rule. If it wasn’t raised on Crowe ranch it wasn’t used on Crowe ranch. That went for most of their food as well as what she raised for cattle.
He’d wanted to build a new home but she wouldn’t have any part of that idea. She did consent to add a wing to the house to give them a bigger living room and a couple of extra bedrooms to house the growing Crowe family. Three kids in seven years and another on the way.
“So you about ready, Mr. Rodeo Clown?” Jimmy asked.
Ratch adjusted his glasses and winked. “Yes, I am. Turn them muttons loose and I’ll show everybody how to tame ’em.”
“Daddy, how do I look?” Their four-year-old daughter, Novaline, pranced into the room in designer jeans and a T-shirt with a crown made of rhinestones on the front. She wore pink cowboy boots to match her shirt and carried a hat of the same color.
“You look beautiful, Princess, but remember you only get to go to this because you live here. It’s really a party for your brother’s class,” Jimmy reminded her.
“I know but next year I get to go to school and it will be my rodeo day because Momma said so, and I’m going to show them all how to barrel race on my pony,” she said.
He hugged her. “You can do that sweetheart. I hear the bus. Jodie, I’ll get the baby in the stroller.”
“That would be wonderful. Bring her out to the corral. That’s where the games will be all morning,” Jodie said.
Jimmy found Kyle, Trey,
Jack, and Rance all leaning against the corral fence post. Kids were running every which way as the mothers and teachers gave them free rein before organized games started.
Trey and Jimmy looked as out of place as chicken droppings on a birthday cake in dress slacks and three-button polo shirts, but they were just as interested in their little ranch hands as the rest of the family.
“So has Rosy entered Van in the mutton busting at the next rodeo?” Jimmy asked Trey.
“Of course, but I believe Marie will outride him. That girl dipped deeply into the Cahill gene pool. I believe she could ride a bull and declares she’s going to have a buckle like Aunt Jodie’s someday,” Trey said.
“That sounds like Novaline. I’m hoping Rainey, here, is more feminine but I’m not holding my breath,” Jimmy laughed. “Tell me, when you think of the lifestyle you had before all this, do you ever wish for anything different?”
“Not one time. How about you?” Trey asked.
Jimmy slowly shook his head. “Old George Carlin said that some folks get so tied up in making a living they forget to make a life. I feel like I need to drop down on my knees every single day and give thanks for those two days I had with this bunch in kindergarten, and that the good Lord let me remember them. It’s the broken road that led me home to Jodie, as the song says.”
“Something else George Carlin says,” Rance said, “is that we are too guilty of multiplying our possessions and reducing our values. I’m glad Stella made me commit to a lifetime thing and wasn’t willing to just be my fence-hopping mistress. We wouldn’t have these three kids and another on the way if I’d had what I wanted in the beginning.”
“How about you, Jack? You ever look back?”
“Not one time. I’m just grateful Dee came home to me. I missed her like the devil those years she was gone and feel like God has given both of us a second chance these past eight years. I wouldn’t change a minute of it, not even when we argue, which is often and loud.” He stopped long enough to pop the pacifier back into a dark- haired little baby girl’s mouth.
“You don’t have to ask me,” Kyle said. “Greta and I were at cross horns from day one, and I wouldn’t take any of it back. I’d be scared to.” He chuckled as three children gathered around his legs and peered out between the rails of the corral fence. “She’d sue me for child support.”
Cathy rolled her wheelchair across the yard as fast as she could. “Hey, you two, make room for the auntie who needs a front row seat.”
“Where’s Kent?” Trey asked.
“Oh, he’s parking the van. I just made him let me out so I wouldn’t miss anything. Lorraine is right behind us. She’s got Melinda with her,” Cathy said. Married six years now to Kent and a part of the extended Cahill family, she and her husband and daughter, Melinda, lived in Ardmore and ran a small oil company.
A commotion in the middle of the corral took their attention. Jimmy and Jodie’s son, Ratch, was lying on the ground, his glasses knocked off. A child twice his size stood over him, shaking his fist. Before a teacher or mother could get across the corral, Ratch was on his feet and had tackled the child. Novaline, his younger sister, took stock of the situation and came running. She flattened the little boy’s nose and yelled as she knocked him to the ground, “Don’t never ever hit my brother again.”
Ratch sat on him and Novaline continued to slap the boy until he screamed for his mommy to come rescue him.
Jodie looked across at Jimmy who was laughing so hard that tears ran down his cheeks into the deep dimples she loved so much. How could he laugh when his son was in the middle of his very first fight? It wasn’t funny.
Junior’s mother came running from the sidelines. “Get those hoodlums off my son. Why did they hit him? He didn’t do anything.”
Rosy hung on to Marie’s shirt collar to keep her out of the fray. “Girl, you stay right here. Ratch and Novaline can take care of themselves.”
“And that goes for you, too, Emalee. Jodie will take care of it,” Stella said.
“He hit my brother and called him four eyes and he knocked his glasses off.” Novaline came out of the fighting mass telling everything in a four-year-old lisp.
Junior’s mother grabbed him by the shirt collar. “You did what? I’ve told you not to make fun of other children. Do you want to sit on the hot bus while the other children are having a good time?”
Junior shook his head. “No, Momma.”
“Then you apologize to this little boy, and don’t you ever pick on a child who wears glasses again.”
Junior glared at both Crowe children and apologized but Jodie had no doubt there would be more battles in the future.
“Everything all right?” Rosy asked when the fracas was over.
“For today. I think he’s probably enough like his father that he’ll live to fight again but hopefully he’ll think twice before he picks on the Crowe kids again,” Jodie said.
“Who is that kid anyway?” Jimmy wiped at his eyes.
“That would be Joel Curtis’s son,” Kyle answered.
Jimmy shook his head and laughed even harder.
“What’s so funny? Trey asked.
“History doth repeat itself,” he answered.
To Hope Page 19