Between Heaven and Texas

by Marie Bostwick

  “Yeah, I took a look. Think it just needs new spark plugs.”

  L. J. glanced up expectantly. “Well?”

  “I’m driving to town to pick some up right now.”

  L. J. sniffed as if to let Graydon know it was about time and tossed a grocery circular into a wastepaper basket. Graydon settled his battered black Stetson onto his head, the last remnant of his days in Texas, and grabbed the keys to the truck from a hook by the back door.

  “Hey, Bebee. You got a letter here.” L. J. squinted at the postmark before holding it out to Graydon. “Looks to be from your brother and sister-in-law.”

  Graydon took the envelope and shoved it in his shirt pocket before heading out the door. He didn’t have to look at the return address to know L. J. was right. Donny and Mary Dell were the only people who sent him letters and then only once or twice a year—a card at Christmas and again on his birthday. Graydon never wrote back.

  He liked his brother, and he liked Mary Dell too. But he didn’t want to talk to them any more than he had to or be reminded of things he’d rather forget. Even though they weren’t identical twins and Mary Dell had six inches on her sister, she reminded him too much of Lydia Dale; the facial resemblance was strong. The year Mary Dell started putting pictures of her and Donny on their family Christmas cards was the year Graydon started throwing them away, usually without even opening the envelope.

  Graydon hadn’t seen his brother since Donny drove up from Texas about three years back. Things got out of hand. Graydon felt bad about the fight, about blacking his brother’s eye and splitting his lip, but he had asked for it, butting into things that were none of his business. It was a shame they’d had to part that way, but Graydon figured it was for the best. Up until then, Donny just hadn’t taken the hint. If his brother wasn’t married to Mary Dell and living in Too Much, it might have been different, but as it was . . .

  After the fight, Donny let him be, sending only those two cards during the year, and Graydon was pretty sure that Mary Dell was the one who actually sent them. But it wasn’t Christmas, and his birthday wasn’t for another three months. Why were they writing now?

  Graydon closed the door of the truck, pulled the envelope out of his pocket, and opened it.

  The card was decorated with a drawing of a stork wearing a delivery cap and holding the ties of a blue bundle in its beak and the words “It’s A Boy!”

  Inside, written in a loopy lady script he figured belonged to Mary Dell, he found a listing of his new nephew’s birth statistics and a picture of a baby boy with dark hair and almond-shaped eyes. The card didn’t say anything about the baby having Down syndrome, but the people who ran the liquor store in town had a five-year-old daughter, Jenny, with Down’s, so Graydon recognized the facial characteristics. She was a sweet little girl. Graydon figured this little guy would be too, but it must have been a shock for Donny, at least at first.

  Strange to think that his baby brother was a father. Even stranger to think that Donny hadn’t told him the baby was coming. Of course, he’d made it clear that he wanted nothing to do with Donny or his family . . . still. A baby boy. His nephew.

  Graydon read the note again and smiled to himself. Howard Hobart Bebee. Huh. So they’d named him after the old man. Graydon wondered if his father knew about that. Probably not. Hell, Graydon didn’t even know if his father was still alive—though he supposed he must be. If Howard Bebee had exited this earth, surely there’d have been some sort of cosmic event to announce the news . . . rock faces would have split or meteors fallen from the sky . . . something. His daddy had been a force of nature, as outsized in personality as he’d been in body, a hard-drinking and hard-living grizzly of a man, idolized by his sons and just about everyone who knew him, who had made a small fortune wildcatting oil, then lost even more than that and disappeared. As a boy, Graydon had worshipped his father, but he got over it pretty quick. Donny never did. But then, Donny had been so little when Howard ran out on them. He hadn’t lain awake in bed listening to their mother’s tears coming from the next room or understood how worried and exhausted she was, working three jobs to support them. Over his mother’s protests, Graydon left school as soon as he was able and got a job at the stockyard. It still wasn’t easy, but they got by. Grace Bebee had never said a word against Howard in front of the children, not to her dying day. It just wasn’t in her nature. Graydon never said anything against his father either, never corrected or amended the stories Grace told about Big Howard’s adventures as a wildcatter or tried to offer his little brother a different version of the family history than his mother’s. It wasn’t his place. But he knew what he knew.

  He laid the birth announcement on the seat but held the baby picture carefully between his fingers so he wouldn’t leave prints on the photo.

  “Isn’t he something? Look at all that hair.” He shook his head. “So Donny’s a daddy. And I’m an uncle. Damn.” He pulled his wallet from the back pocket of his jeans and slipped the photograph carefully inside.

  Graydon drove to town and picked up spark plugs. Next he drove to the Rexall, picked out a card that said, “A Baby Boy Is a Gift from Above,” slipped a ten-dollar bill inside, signed it, stamped it, mailed it, and drove back to the farm.

  CHAPTER 22

  Mary Dell’s face fell. “Yes, sir. I understand. But if you hear anything, you’ll let me know right away, won’t you? Thank you, Sheriff. I appreciate it.”

  Mary Dell hung up the phone and looked at Lydia Dale, who was sitting on a quilt on the living room floor between Rob Lee and Howard, shaking a ring of brightly colored plastic keys above the babies’ heads. Rob Lee watched the keys with an alert expression, while Howard’s gaze floated around the room, glancing at his aunt only occasionally.

  “He says they can’t put in a missing persons report yet. He says it’s too soon.” She smacked her hand against the telephone and let out an exasperated growl. “This is so ridiculous! Of course he’s a missing person! Donny wouldn’t just up and leave!”

  “Well . . . the sheriff might have a point. It’s only been one night.”

  “Two.”

  “Still. I’m sure he’ll turn up soon.”

  Mary Dell sat down cross-legged on the quilt and stuck her finger into the center of Howard’s little hand. The baby gripped hold of it, a skill he’d only recently mastered. Two days ago, Mary Dell would have grinned at his accomplishment and, in spite of what she’d told Silky about talking to him like a grown-up, cooed and burbled and told him what a good bubba-boo he was, yes, he was. Now the most she managed was a distracted half smile.

  “I don’t know what else to do, sis. I’ve called every hospital and sheriff’s department from Dallas to Houston. Daddy said that Donny came over during the day and asked if he could take care of the stock because he had to drive over to World of Wheels to get new tires for the truck.”

  “Did you call the tire place?”

  Mary Dell nodded. “They didn’t sell any tires to Donny Bebee or anybody in a white truck with a gun rack and red stripe on the side. Those tires only had six thousand miles on them. Why would he tell Daddy he was buying new ones? Clyde Pickens was the last person who saw him. Donny returned the backhoe that night, just like he told me he was going to. That’s how I heard about Georgeann.”

  Howard began to fuss, and his little mouth quivered. Before he could work himself up into a full-fledged wail, Mary Dell scooped him into her lap, pulled her blouse up and her brassiere down, and fed him. Howard latched onto her nipple and began sucking, his little hands kneading the globe of her breast.

  “Why didn’t he tell me about Georgeann? He loved that horse. He was twelve years old when he got her. She was with him all during his rodeo days. It must have about broken his heart to put her down. Why didn’t he tell me about that? Do you think that’s why he’s run off? Because of Georgeann? Think maybe he’s just gone off to brood for a couple days?”

  Lydia Dale put the plastic keys in Rob Lee’s palm. His finger
s curled around the red ring and held on for a moment, then dropped the toy on the quilt. Lydia Dale picked it up and repeated the procedure.

  “Could be,” she said, though her expression was doubtful.

  Lydia Dale knew Donny set a great store on Georgeann, but she couldn’t see him disappearing over the death of a horse. Lydia Dale’s guess was that this had something to do with Howard’s birth.

  Donny hadn’t been himself since learning his son had Down syndrome. Every time she saw him, Lydia Dale thought of a helium balloon that was leaking gas—soft, deflated, bobbing low to the ground and looking a little lost. In the circumstances, it was a normal enough response. The news had to have come as a terrible shock. How could it not? She was sure her sister felt the same way, at least at first, but Mary Dell had worked through the shock quickly, in ways that her husband couldn’t.

  Donny wasn’t good at talking about his feelings. Maybe that was something that ran all through the family; Graydon had been just the same. For as long as she lived, Lydia Dale would never be able to forget the last time she’d seen him.

  A tangle of bureaucratic red tape had prevented them from learning that Graydon was not dead and had been released from a Vietnamese POW camp until he was already on his way home. No one had been able to warn him about Lydia Dale’s marriage to Jack Benny.

  Lydia Dale was coming out of the Tidee-Mart carrying two sacks of groceries when she saw him driving down Main Street in a rented red convertible. Seeing her, he hit the brakes as hard as he could, making them squeal, and jumped out of the car just as Lydia Dale put the grocery sacks into the trunk, revealing her pregnant belly.

  Graydon’s face froze. His smile shattered into a million pieces, small and sharp, like shards of broken glass. It hurt her heart to see him that way. If she’d known Graydon was alive, she would never have married Jack Benny.

  How could she have known? But she felt guilty just the same. The look on Graydon’s face made her feel guilty and disloyal and so overwhelmed by the enormity of her mistake that for a moment she thought she might actually be sick. She tried to speak to him, to explain, but he wouldn’t even look at her. He got back into the car without saying a word, drove off, and never returned to Too Much.

  Maybe it ran in the family. Maybe Donny, likewise faced with a situation he could not change and could not talk about, had done the same thing, retreated. Maybe he’d gone off alone. Maybe not. It was hard to know what a man was thinking or feeling, especially if he wouldn’t talk to you. They were more complicated than they appeared at first glance, these Bebee boys.

  But Mary Dell was a true Tudmore, cut out of the same cloth as Grandma Silky, sturdy denim or maybe a heavy wool, something plain but strong, hard to cut through, slow to fade, made to last. Yes, that was her sister all over.

  When Mary Dell made up her mind to be happy, she was. End of story. She was like one of those inflatable clowns with the weighted bottoms, the kind little boys use to practice boxing. She could roll with the punches, bounce back from any blow and, having righted herself, keep smiling, going on as if nothing had happened. This was Mary Dell’s greatest strength, but in this instance, Lydia Dale thought it might also be a weakness.

  After the initial shock of the diagnosis, Mary Dell saw Howard as the answer to her prayers, a gift from God. Once she’d made up her mind about that, she couldn’t understand that anybody else might not feel the same way or take longer to reach the same conclusion. All she had wanted was a healthy and happy baby, and that’s what she’d gotten. She understood the responsibility and challenges that lay before her, but that didn’t stop her from being thrilled by this miracle child.

  Lydia Dale couldn’t help feeling that she was right. Howard was a pretty baby, so sweet. And considering all the problems and complications that could accompany a diagnosis of Down syndrome, he was remarkably, almost miraculously, healthy. Of course Mary Dell was concerned about how to care for Howard and help him learn, but Lydia Dale knew her sister would figure it out. She was completely focused on her child. So much so that she hadn’t noticed Donny was suffering and needed comfort.

  Lydia Dale knew he’d harbored a secret seed of bitterness about what had happened between her and Graydon, but Donny had always been good to her. How many brothers-in-law would have done what he did? Continued to send checks long after her husband had stopped working at the ranch?

  Lydia Dale didn’t like to imagine anything but the best about her brother-in-law, but her guess was that Donny, confused, suffering, and in need of comfort, had found it. Lydia Dale picked up Rob Lee, laid him against her shoulder, and pulled back the elastic of his tiny blue jeans, checking his diaper, not because she thought it was dirty but because she didn’t want to look her sister in the face just then.

  “Did you go up to the Ice House and ask if anybody knew anything? Or if they thought he might be, you know . . . staying with anybody he’d met there?”

  Mary Dell frowned, unlatched Howard from the breast, and put him up on her shoulder to burp him. “Donny has not run off with some floozy he met at the Ice House. He’s not like that.”

  Lydia Dale shrugged and laid Rob Lee back on the quilt. She understood the subtext of Mary Dell’s comment, the implication that Lydia Dale’s husband—ex-husband—was “like that,” but she took no offense. Jack Benny was a louse, and everybody knew it. Donny wasn’t a louse, furthest thing from it, everybody knew that too. Donny Bebee was a good man, but he was still a man, a man under extraordinary pressure. And under the right circumstances . . .

  Lydia Dale was trying to think of a gentle way to explain that to her sister, but Mary Dell beat her to the punch.

  “Besides,” she said as she rubbed her hand in circles over Howard’s back, “I already went down to the Ice House and asked. Donny had been going there, every night for about a week. But he never drank much, and he didn’t talk to anybody. The bartender said that one night a lady sat down on the stool next to him and asked if he wanted to buy her a drink. Donny didn’t say anything, didn’t even look at her, just propped his elbow up on the bar so she could see his wedding ring. The gal went off in a huff and Donny sat there nursing his beer until closing time. When he left, he left alone. Every night.

  “I don’t know where Donny is or why he left, but I know as sure as anything that it wasn’t because of another woman. He couldn’t do something like that. It’s just not in him.”

  “Well, then, what do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. I wish I did,” Mary Dell said quietly as she laid Howard back down on the quilt and looked into his beautiful, drowsy eyes. She pushed herself up on her hands and knees and bent down to kiss the baby on his forehead before climbing to her feet.

  “Would you keep an eye on him for a minute? I need to call the sheriff’s office again. I forgot to tell them the license plate number on the truck.”

  CHAPTER 23

  For a few days, Mary Dell was convinced that Donny’s disappearance was the result of an accident or even foul play. By the time his letter arrived, she had begun to suspect otherwise.

  If he had been killed in a car accident, or stopped to pay for a fill-up at precisely the moment a hooded gunman had picked to rob the mini-mart and so been shot in the shoulder or taken hostage, or contracted a case of amnesia while on his way to World of Wheels, she’d have heard something by now. Someone would have spotted him somewhere, or seen his truck ditched by the side of a road, or discovered a peacock-blue cowboy shirt with gold stitching on the collar and cuffs and bloodstains on the sleeve stuffed in a trash can in an alley behind a barroom, wouldn’t they? There was only one logical explanation: Donny’s disappearance was not an accident. The reason no one could find him was because he didn’t want to be found.

  Mary Dell knew he wasn’t coming back. Even so, when the letter arrived, it was hard to open the envelope, hard to read words written by a man whose handwriting she knew as well as her own but whose outlook on the world and response to it was so foreign and
confusing that she wondered if she’d ever really known him at all.

  Later she would succeed in being grateful for the knowledge that he was safe. She loved him enough for that. But when she opened and read the first lines of the letter he had written and dropped into a mailbox near Midland, Mary Dell was overcome by the thought that it would have been less painful to believe he had perished by accident or violence than to know he had left by choice.

  . . . You are so strong, Mary Dell. That’s one of the things I’ve always admired about you. You’ll do a better job of raising Howard on your own than with me there, getting in the way. I know you might not believe that right now, but it’s true, and in time you’ll see I was right. I don’ t expect you to forgive me for going away or understand why I can’ t stay, but try to believe me when I tell you I can’ t. It’s not because there’s anything wrong with you, honey—there’s not a woman on the face of God’s green earth who can hold a candle to you—it must be something wrong with me, I guess. Maybe the Tudmores aren’t the only family with a Fatal Flaw.

  I only took what money was in my wallet, and I left my credit card in the bottom of my sock drawer. You should have enough money in the bank for now. A man paid me $40 to help him stack a load of hay this week, so here’s $25 for you and Howard. I know it’s not much, but I’ll send more when I get myself settled somewhere.

  Kiss Howard for me. I love you, Mary Dell. I’m sorry.

  Donny

  When she finished reading, Mary Dell laid her head on the table and sobbed herself dry. She loved him enough for that too.

  CHAPTER 24

  For the first time in her life, Mary Dell was depressed. Not just sad, or blue, or wistful, not filled with regret or the fury of a woman scorned, but truly depressed.