by Lynn Shurr
“I realize how you felt about using all the embryos since I’m Catholic, too.” She placed a tentative hand on his bicep.
Joe took a step back and let his eyes wander anywhere but on her. “Howdy sure did a great job of keeping this barn clean. You can’t even smell the manure.”
“Knox Polk helped him and me and all the kids. He didn’t do it single-handedly.”
“Well, he didn’t have to do it at all. He has his own ranch inherited from his grandfather in Oklahoma to take care of and stayed here as a favor to me.”
“So now he can go there. Joe, you know Nell didn’t want to get pregnant again.”
“She did it for me.”
“Reluctantly. I’m used to big families. I want one of my own.”
She moved closer again. The tension in the air upset Lazy Boy who tossed his big head up and down, sending his unshorn chestnut mane and forelock flying. Usually docile if headstrong, still the stallion could be unpredictable, especially around mares in heat. Only Joe rode him, and he hadn’t gotten much exercise while his master made babies in Arizona. Howdy had permission to take the animal out, but he’d said “no” to riding a valuable stud and instead displaced a resentful Dean on Drummer Boy and relegated the boy back to a pony. The cowboy kicker hadn’t made any friends there. Why did Howdy have come to mind now, now when she finally had a chance alone with Joe—no Nell, no kids, no Nadine?
“Joe, you must know how I feel about you. I’d lie in the hay with you right now if you wanted. I haven’t been with any other man since Bijou. You are all I want, a strong man who loves children and would never fail me.”
Joe, as nervous as his favorite mount, shook his head and made that problematic black curl he so despised drift across his forehead. Cassie moved her hand to bush it back into place, but he shied before she touched him. She swore his nostrils flared and his eyes widened like a wild mustang cornered in a box canyon.
“Cassie, you’re a great girl, but I’m married to Nell. We got three more babies on the way. Would you really want a man who cheated on his pregnant wife, who failed her? I said my vows with Nell, twice, both in and out of the Church. When a Billodeaux says his vows, that’s it. I’m done foolin’ around.”
“But I’m younger than Nell. I’m prettier and better built and just as smart.”
“Not in my eyes. Look, I think you need to go back to grad school and stay there for a while until you cool off. You can call Tommy and Skype with him, but I don’t want you around here upsetting Nell. The babies are due in October. Let’s say we’ll see you again for Thanksgiving.”
“But that’s ten months away!”
“Sounds about right to me. Stay away from me until you leave.”
He was gone, turning on a dime, out the far end of the barn, escaping from the pocket to run free. Lazy Boy snapped at her, something he’d never done in all the time she’d spent at Lorena Ranch. Cassie drew back and let her tears come. She heard a creaking of the hayloft ladder, the thud of a body jumping the last few rungs, and tried to stop her shoulders from heaving. There Howdy stood, the last person on earth she wanted to see right now.
“Ouch. That must have hurt,” he said, not grinning now.
“You eavesdropped!” she accused, using anger to quell her anguish.
“I couldn’t hardly help it. This is an old barn even if Joe refurbished it, and the cracks between the boards are fairly wide. I went up to the loft to throw down some hay for Lazy Boy. I guess I was standing right above you when you made a fool of yourself. Everybody but you knows Nell and Joe are forever. Why, the team gets that and steers the groupies away from him because he doesn’t want to be bothered.”
“I bet even the groupies don’t want you,” she lashed out, determined to wound someone else.
He smiled, not a grin, but small and rueful. “A few have come my way, but they aren’t the kind of woman I want. A gal who has been with a lot of men, not my type.”
Cassie raised her chin and pulled back her shoulders to show off her chest. “You think I’m attractive, don’t you?”
“Sure. Beautiful, actually.”
“Okay, then. Right here, right now, up in the loft. Show me how much you want me.”
“No. Thank you, ma’am.”
“What! You moon around me for a month, and now it’s ‘no thanks’. I can’t believe I’ve been turned down by a kicker! You are gay, aren’t you?”
Temper replaced humiliation in her voice. She kicked at the barn floor and sent a cloud of chaff swirling into his face. Howdy didn’t flinch, didn’t move one muscle. He stood his ground and met her infuriated blue eyes.
“Nope. You know I’m not. If you’d made me that offer last week, I guess I would have taken you up on it, but I don’t want to be Joe Dean Billodeaux’s temporary replacement.”
“Oh, God! No one wants me.” Her hands covered her face. She rocked back and forth as she cried like those sad, motherless little monkeys they studied in her psych classes. She knew how pathetic she must look, but she felt much worse.
Howdy approached her carefully, shyly. “If you need a shoulder to cry on though, I’m here for you.” He opened his arms, and she entered their shelter. His good, blue chambray shirt grew wet with her tears, soaked clear through to his v-necked undershirt, but he didn’t let her go. He kept patting her back and rocking her gently.
“There, there, Cassie. Everything will be fine and dandy soon. You’ll see. I’m leaving here, too, going back to my place in New Orleans. I’ll miss seeing you every day even if Joe doesn’t. Anytime you want to talk, you call me,” he said so slowly, so gently, his words barely registered over her sobs.
Finally, she pulled herself together and stepped back. He let his arms fall, making no attempt to keep her. “Thank you. Sorry I made a mess of your shirt.”
He glanced down at the pale blue chambray, not only drenched with tears but smeared with eye makeup and a splotch of peach lipstick. “Don’t matter. Grandpa always said men had flat chests just so they could hold women closer when they needed comfort. Besides, Brian made me buy a whole bunch of these before I came here. Cowboy chic he called it.”
A smile wobbled across her lips, swollen from being bitten to stop the trembling. “I think I would have liked your grandpa.”
“Most people did.”
“I might even like Brian Lightfoot if I knew him.”
“Sure, if you love gay guys. We can set something up if you get lonely. He is good company.”
“Maybe. I should pack and say good-bye to Tommy, try to explain I won’t be around for a long time, and that it isn’t his fault.”
“Right. You should do that. I need to get my things together, too. Say, wait a minute.” Howdy delved into the hip pocket of those snug jeans and took out a piece of folded paper so soft around edges it looked as if he’d been carrying it around quite a while, maybe as long as a month. “Here’s my phone number. Use it whenever you want to talk.”
Cassie accepted his offering. A day ago, she would have thrown it away, but now she put it in her own back pocket. “Thanks, I might do that. See you around, Howdy.”
Hoping her despair didn’t show, she sashayed out of the barn and into exile from Joe Dean Billodeaux.
Extremely agitated, Brian Lightfoot paced before Howdy like a sleek, black leopard seeking escape from a trap. “I cannot believe it! After all my hard work, you made a friend of a woman you had the hots for.”
“What do you mean?” Howdy had an imported beer in hand and his booted feet hooked around the rungs of Brian’s chrome barstool.
“You told her to call if she wanted to talk. You offered to introduce her to your gay friend. That’s what girls do with their gal pals, not a guy they intend to take to bed.”
“She offered to do that—in the hay, I mean. I turned her down. You can’t take advantage of a woman when she’s that broken up over another man.”
“Men can and do. But not you. You are hopeless.”
Howdy set the beer down carefully on
the coaster provided. “Sorry I disappointed you. Guess I’ll go to my own place now. Just thought you’d want to hear what happened at the ranch.”
“Don’t go away angry. Yes, I can tell you are. You simply stuff it down inside like some kind of John Wayne hero. Not good. You should vent once in a while. Maybe we can salvage this. Let me think.”
Brian took a sip of his sparkling water. Hydrating today and avoiding alcohol, he claimed, for the sake of his skin and internal organs. “I have it. You call this Cassie. You invite her to meet moi.” He patted his own chest.
“An evening of fine dining and good wine ensues. Later, jazz in a moody bar, more liquor. I see someone I fancy and slip away. You tell her sincerely—and I know you can do sincere—how beautiful she is, how Joe Dean doesn’t know what he threw away, how you wish you had taken up her offer in the barn, but sensitive guy that you are, didn’t want to take advantage of her at a low moment. Never fear, I won’t coming knocking on your apartment door later that evening because you will be involved, deeply involved.” Brian finished with a flourish of manicured fingernails coated with a clear varnish.
Howdy raised the beer to his lips and mumbled around the neck. “Only one problem. I don’t have her number.”
“Say what?”
“She didn’t give me her number.”
“Well.” Brian poised his hands on his muscular hips. “Given the circumstances, I think Joe Dean will share that information with you. He’s been trying to set you up with Cassie for months. If not, there’s always the internet.”
“I think she only has a cell and maybe stays with her parents when she’s not bugging Joe and Nell. Besides, she’s not over Joe. I should give her time.”
“Strike now, I tell you, while she’s feeling down and wants revenge on he who scorned her.”
“That wouldn’t be right. I’ll wait and hope she’ll come to me. Yeah, that’s what I’ll do.”
To Brian’s astonishment, Howdy’s patience paid off. Cassie did call to cry on his shoulder about her exile from Lorena Ranch.
“There, there, there,” he said softly because when you wanted to train a filly to trust you, you spoke quietly and made no sudden moves. Brian might know about fast women and party boys, but his experience didn’t run to taming a woman for the long run. Brian found his escorts wild and left them that way.
Howdy suggested they all go out to a place of Brian’s choice, get a good meal and take in a little jazz afterward one Saturday night. Even when Brian left them alone in a dark club with a sultry singer on the bandstand, he made no moves. He might not be the best dresser or adept at flirting, but he had a plan now and would stick with it until she was ready to be mounted. When she gave him the right signs, he’d know, but would still go slow, nice and easy, because that’s what Cassie needed after being abused by a man like Bijou.
TEN
Tommy sat apart from the crowd of Billodeauxs celebrating Good Friday with a crawfish boil at MawMaw Nadine’s house. The holiday came late this year, falling at the end of April and delaying Easter a good long time. Joe tried to keep an eye on his adopted son, his twin daughters, and Dean, who had gone off with some of the older boys into the cane fields to hunt for toads and snakes. Hell, with Nell lying down in his sisters’ old bedroom because the smell of beer and crawfish made her nauseous, he needed eyes in the back of his head to watch them all. If he’d allowed Cassie to attend, that would have been a help, but he couldn’t permit anymore incidents with her, not with Nell in a delicate condition and a pretty bad mood.
He had invited Howdy, but the boy had other plans. Too bad since Tommy could have shown off his kicking skills to the other kids instead of brooding over there on the edge of the deep drainage ditch by the side of the road where the winner of the live crawfish race had been freed moments ago. Wasn’t Tom’s crawfish. Dean’s choice, a huge mossy-backed creature with pinchers nearly big as a lobster, backed from the circle first. While his uncles paid off their small bets, the rest of the crustaceans, tossed back into a sack, prepared to meet their fate around dinnertime in a tall, aluminum pot boiling over a gas flame.
He’d told his red-haired son, “You can’t win them all. Get over it,” but sensed something else bothered the boy. Probably some idiot had pointed out his red hair or mentioned about Tommy being adopted. The kid was sensitive about that even though Joe said over and over he had to get tough and ignore trash talk. Nell would have scolded the ignorant sonnabitches, gone for their throats in fact, but she couldn’t handle a fight right now.
Tommy knew all about where he came from because Nell always told the truth when asked. As soon as the boy could understand, she’d explained the terms “birth mother” and “adopted child”. Mama Cassie carried Tommy in her belly, but although she loved him very much, she was too young to give him a good home. So, Daddy and Mama had chosen him as their wonderful adopted son. Being a psychologist, Nell excelled at stuff like this.
His “birth father” was a Billodeaux, a cousin of his dad’s who looked sort of like Joe. Tommy understood about cousins, the children of your aunts and uncles. His cousin, Randi, about the same age as Tom, had dark bobbing curls, but everyone remembered she’d been bald as a baby. Randi hated being reminded of that, just as he couldn’t stand having his red hair and freckles pointed out by strangers, so everyone had something they didn’t like about themselves. At least, he did have the same dark chocolate brown eyes as the rest of them, inherited from his birth dad who lived in Mexico and could not come to see him because he had done some bad things—to put it mildly. Nell glossed over that, never giving any details, simply saying the man had to live in exile which meant he could never come home again, even to see his “natural” son. But not to worry. Tommy was his own person and would not have the same problems.
They had a special family, she explained, with Daddy Joe being Dean’s real father but Mama Nell being his adoptive mother since Dean’s birth mother had died. She’d grown his twin sisters in her own belly, but they came from people eggs donated by his Aunt Emily who also lived in exile, but voluntarily. That meant she could come home if she wanted, but didn’t.
“Is that why you call Jude and Annie your “little chicks” all the time? Did it hurt to have eggs shoved into your belly?” the boy asked, making Joe laugh.
Nell kept a straight face. “No, Tommy. I am growing our new babies the same way but they won’t come out for a long time yet.” She let the child feel her baby bump. He’d found all this knowledge fascinating enough to try and share it at first grade Show-and-Tell, but Sr. Ursula told him to sit down immediately. Later, she called Nell about Tom’s sharing precocious knowledge. Joe stayed out of it, especially when Nell started talking about the repression of Catholicism with the nun. He’d convinced her to send Dean and Tom to parochial school, the same he’d attended, mostly to please his mother, but no way would he get between her and a Sister.
Okay, his little girls played hopscotch in the driveway on a grid drawn in chalk by older female cousins. They weren’t very good at it yet, but their tiny feet fit easily in all the boxes so they seldom crossed a line. Lots of the Billodeaux teenage cousins did some babysitting, and they cheered the tykes on encouragingly. Joe wished Tom had gone into the cane fields with Dean and the others boys so he had only the two to watch.
The kids knew enough to avoid cottonmouths. They’d look for the little hog-nosed snakes, totally harmless reptiles the kids called puff adders. He’d had one as a child, but Nell didn’t care for snakes and made the boys release any they caught. She said they were too young for a puppy, too, when he’d wanted to get a dog for the family last Christmas. He would not press the issue this year either, not with three new babies in the house. Tommy kicked so hard at the side of the ditch that dirt gave way and plopped into the muddy water filling its depths. He need to learn to get over his mad by himself, Joe figured, and let him alone.
His sister Lizzie’s husband pressed an icy beer from the cooler into his hand, and a rin
g of men formed around him encouraging him to tell one of his Super Bowl stories. He finished his brew in one long swallow and used the bottle to illustrate the play. Cocking back his famous throwing arm, he launched the bottle deep into the cane field. The remaining amber drops glittered from the neck as it began its descent. His daughters squealed and left their game. Encouraged by their uncles, they raced down a cane row to see how far the glass missile had gone and if it busted on landing. Joe went to the edge of the field and told them to stay in plain sight, not to get lost in there. They were a problem that way, always climbing trees too high up because they were tiny and light or going into the tall cane and then not being able to see their way out and having to be rescued. The cane was still spring short, so he really didn’t have to fuss at them this time.
He seldom worried about the boys that way. If Tom or Dean climbed too high, why they’d just jump down and risk a broken leg because they were boys. Boys didn’t cry for help in a cane field. They always found their way home eventually. They manned up, got tough, did what had to be done like their father on the gridiron. Boys—so much easier to raise.
ELEVEN
While all eyes—even those of the aunts and babies sitting in the shade—watched the sailing beer bottle, Tommy jumped the ditch and headed out along the narrow dirt edge beside the hardtop road. He got as far as a bend that hid him from the gathering when a double cab, silver pickup truck with a year’s worth of mud caked on its sides glided up and crossed to his side of the road. The driver rolled down a window and leaned out. A purple LSU cap pulled low shaded his face. Several big rings on the man’s fingers flashed in the sun.
“Hey, kid, you know how to get to the Joe Dean Billodeaux place?”
Cautiously, Tommy moved across a culvert the tractors used as a bridge in order to get farther away from the truck. Someone had told him about kidnappers and other bad people who stole children. Probably Nell or the nuns said never to talk to strangers, and the kid wasn’t dumb. He could make a dash into the field if he needed to escape and stayed far enough away that he felt safe enough to answer politely.